Chinese leaders in the last few decades have worked on two assumptions. The first was that the United States would never walk away from the global, rules- and treaty-based system it had spent time constructing since the Second World War. The second was that China’s internal challenges would always be a priority for the country and that the outside world just needed to be predictable and stable for it to focus on this. Both assumptions were undermined in 2018, the first perhaps fatally. Trump has proved willing to ratchet up the amount of goods being targeted and to place pressure on others to also review their relationship with China.
