But the days in which the Middle East dominated American foreign policy…are thankfully over.
National Security Strategy of the United States of America, November 2025
Released by the Trump administration last December, Washington’s most recent National Security Strategy was a break from traditional U.S. foreign policy in its open promotion of America First policies and dominance in the Western Hemisphere. But as the war in Iran tests these proclamations in real time, how is China perceiving U.S. security priorities? How has the framing of U.S.-China competition changed over time, and how do present-day energy security and data infrastructure imperatives complicate the picture? The Carter Center spoke with Dr. Sun Chenghao to understand the intricacies of U.S.-China competition and its impacts on the rest of the world, contextualized by war in Iran and the energy crisis.
Dr. Sun Chenghao is a fellow, associate professor, and head of the U.S.-Europe program at the Center for International Security and Strategy (CISS) at Tsinghua University in Beijing, as well as a member of Munich Young Leaders with the Munich Security Conference and fellow at Arms Control Negotiation Academy. He previously served as a visiting scholar at Yale Law School and visiting fellow at the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue. He has co-authored dozens of reports and books, most recently Profound Changes Unseen in a Century and the U.S.-Europe Alliance published by Popular Science Press in 2023. Dr. Sun is the Top 1% Highly Cited Scholar (2024 & 2025) in China according to China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI). He is also the founder of the newsletter ChinAffairsplus.
Isobel Li: I saw that you wrote an analysis of the 2025 National Security Strategy, which was released by the Trump administration last December. What are the most notable elements or themes in the document?
Sun Chenghao: I think what strikes me most is that it is not simply another America First document. It is really an attempt to redefine what national security means for the United States, because the strategy argues very clearly that past U.S. policy overextended itself and took on too many global burdens and became disconnected from domestic strength and sovereignty. So this is not just about foreign policy priorities, it is about restructuring the relationship between domestic order, economic power, and external strategy. So I would like to highlight four particularly notable themes from the document.
First of all, the document places domestic order at the center of national security in much more explicit way than previous strategies. Border control, migration, drug flows, and internal cohesion are treated not as secondary domestic issues, but as strategic priorities. That is important because it shows that the NSS is not built around maintaining a liberal international order in a traditional sense. It starts from the idea that national security begins at home. From a Chinese perspective, this is one of the clearest signs that Washington is redefining security in more sovereignist and nationalist terms.
Second, the strategy makes economic security the organizing principle of competition, especially competition with China. The document repeatedly emphasizes trade imbalances, supply chains, industry capacity, technology, and production. In other words, the key arena is not only military rivalry or ideological confrontation with China, it is who controls the material and technological foundations of power. This suggests that under Trump the second, China-U.S. competition is being framed even more directly through economics, industry, and technology.
Thirdly, the document also signals a more transactional approach to alliances, especially in Europe. For example, it calls for burden sharing and burden shifting, and it makes clear that U.S. support should not be unconditional. But what is notable is that this is not just about asking allies to spend more on defense. The document also implies a broader political redefinition of the alliance relationship. So also from a Chinese perspective, this suggests that Trump’s alliance policy is not only cost-cutting, it is also about renegotiating the political basis of U.S. leadership.
Last but not least, the NSS still treats the Indo-Pacific as the decisive long-term theater, but it does so in a more selective and instrumental way than some people expected. It emphasizes deterrence, the Taiwan question, supply chains, and the strategic competition with China, but it does not frame the competition as a fully comprehensive ideological struggle. I can say that the difference has been noticed in Chinese policy circles. So some Chinese scholars see this as evidence that Washington is not abandoning competition, but narrowing it around the economic, technological core of power and a few critical geopolitical flashpoints.
IL: Although the NSS cannot be taken as a binding guarantee for how the U.S. will act internationally, I am curious if the Iran war has affected Chinese interpretations of U.S. security strategy.
SC: From the Chinese perspective, I would say yes, the Iran war has affected Chinese interpretations of the U.S. strategy, but not in a way that fundamentally overturns earlier interpretations of the U.S. The war has of course reinforced one of the main Chinese conclusions about the 2025 NSS, namely that it should not be read as a rigid guide to day-to-day U.S. diplomacy. The document clearly suggested that the Middle East should no longer dominate American strategic attention, but the war has shown how quickly that assumption can be disrupted.
I think Iran will highlight some broader points. Number one, it confirms that a Trump-era strategy is highly personalized and flexible. The NSS matters, but presidential instinct, crisis politics, and perceived bargaining opportunities can very quickly reshape actual policy. That is consistent with what many Chinese scholars already believed, that is, under Trump, written strategy documents are useful but they do not fully capture how U.S. foreign policy is actually made. Second, the war reminds Chinese analysts that the U.S. still faces the old problem of strategic distraction. Even if Washington wants to prioritize China and the Indo-Pacific region, crisis in the Middle East can still absorb military resources, diplomatic attention, and also maybe political bandwidth. So from Beijing’s point of view, this is another reminder that the U.S. is still a global power with global liabilities, not a state that can simply pivot at will. Thirdly, however, I do not think Chinese analysts will conclude that the U.S. has abandoned its broader strategic shift. Instead, many would probably say that the Iran war reveals a deeper contradiction inside Trump’s worldview. On the one hand, he wants retrenchment, burden shifting, and reducing long-term commitments. On the other hand, he also appears to believe that forceful coercive actions can quickly restore order, but in reality, coercion can create the very instability that drags the U.S. back in. The war does not invalidate the NSS, it exposes the tension inside it.
IL: You wrote that the U.S. framing of competition has pivoted towards economic power. From the perspective of Chinese national policy or Chinese scholars, how has the framing of competition changed as well?
SC: That is a very important question because I think one of the biggest misunderstandings in Washington is the assumption that China has always framed competition with the U.S. in the same way. In reality, the framing has changed quite significantly over time. China’s framing has shifted from trying to avoid competition as the defining logic of the relationship to increasingly accepting U.S. long term competition strategy as a structural reality. But China still tries to prevent that competition from becoming a total confrontation.
In the earlier period, especially from the reform and opening up era through much of the post-Cold War period, the dominant “competition” framing was still one of development first— integration into the international economy or international system and maintaining a relatively stable external environment even when there were major crises, for example, after the Taiwan Strait crisis, the embassy bombing in Belgrade, or the EP-3 incident. The broader policy instinct in Beijing was still to prevent those shocks from redefining the entire relationship. The Chinese strategic mindset was still shaped by a fairly basic assumption that China needed time, stability, and access to the global system in order to continue its modernization, so the emphasis was less on competing with the U.S. and more on avoiding premature strategic conflict.
That began to change more clearly in the late 2010s, especially after the Trump administration’s first term. I think many in China saw that period as a turning point. The trade war, technology restrictions, and the broader shift in Washington towards openly framing China as a so-called strategic competitor convinced a growing number of Chinese policymakers and scholars that the U.S. approach was no longer about limited friction within engagements, but about a more durable, competitive structure. At that point, China’s framing started to evolve. Instead of assuming that competition could be avoided if China remained sufficiently cautious, the thinking increasingly became “competition is here, whether China likes it or not.” But even then, the Chinese framing was still not identical to the American one in U.S. policy discourse where strategic competition often became the master concept that organized almost everything— trade, technology, alliances, military posture, ideology, even academic exchange. In China, the official framing has usually been more cautious and more layered. Beijing has generally tried to avoid fully legitimizing the term strategic competition as the sole definition of the bilateral relationship, because from the Chinese perspective, once competition becomes the only accepted frame, it becomes much easier for the relationship to slide into so-called zero sum confrontation.
Over time, China’s national framing has moved towards something more like this: “Competition is real, it is long-term, and it is structural, but it should still be managed and prevented from dominating every domain.” I think that is where we are now and in recent years, especially under the pressure of export controls like semiconductor restrictions and what Beijing sees as growing U.S. efforts at technological and industry containment, China’s policy framing has become much more centered on resilience, self-reliance, and strategic endurance. That is a major change and the focus is no longer simply on participating in globalization like during the post-Cold War era, it is increasingly on surviving and adapting to the conditions of external pressure.
IL: Middle powers such as ASEAN adopt various hedging strategies to manage risks associated with U.S.-China competition. Is the war in Iran increasing the difficulty of this posture, for example with the closure of the Strait of Hormuz creating an international energy crisis disproportionately felt by oil import-reliant Asian economies?
SC: The war in Iran is making hedging more difficult for many middle powers in Asia, but not because it suddenly eliminates their strategic agency, but rather it changes the cost structure of hedging. For the past several years, many middle powers, especially in Southeast Asia but also more broadly in Asia, have tried to avoid being pulled into a rigid binary choice between China and the U.S. Their basic strategy has been to preserve room for maneuver, like deepening economic ties with China, maintaining security relations with the U.S., and avoiding letting either side fully define their strategic options. So in that sense, hedging meant selective alignment without total commitment. The Iran war does not make that logic disappear, but it makes it much harder to sustain because it links China-U.S. competition to a third domain that is immediately material and politically costly, that is, energy security.
That means a great deal for Asia. For example, the Strait of Hormuz is one of the world’s most important energy chokepoints. I checked the data: the IEA, the International Energy Agency, notes that in 2025, nearly 20 million barrels per day of oil and oil products moved through the Strait, and roughly 8% of that was destined for Asia. China and India alone accounted for about 44% of crude exports transiting the Strait, while Japan and South Korea are also heavily dependent on those flows. That means the Iran war introduces a new layer of pressure on Asian middle powers because their hedging strategies were designed for a world in which strategic rivalry was serious but still somewhat separated. They could separate trade from security or economics from geopolitics, at least to some extent. But an energy shock of this kind makes separation much harder.
I would say there are maybe three ways this increases the difficulty of hedging. First, it raises the pressure for short-term strategic alignment. When energy prices spike, shipping routes are disrupted and inflation risks rise. Governments have less room to think in long-term abstract terms about so-called strategic autonomy because they have to focus on immediate stability, like securing the fuel supplies, managing domestic prices, or preventing industry disruptions. So in those moments, the question becomes less about how do we preserve maximum flexibility, and more about who can actually help us right now. That naturally creates pressure to rely more heavily either towards U.S.-led security arrangements or towards China-led economic and supply chain solutions. In other words, crisis conditions compress strategic ambiguity or autonomy.
Second, the Iran war exposes the limits of relying on functional separation, the idea that our country can work with China economically and with the U.S. strategically while keeping those tracks relatively distinct, a formula that has been central to ASEAN-style hedging. When an external war triggers an energy shock or shipping disruption or financial volatility, I think those policy domains become more tightly connected. Energy, maritime security or inflation, naval presence, sanctions, and supply chains all begin to overlap. So middle powers are forced into a more integrated strategic environment, which is exactly what hedging tries to avoid.
Thirdly, which is especially important, the war reinforces a broader perception in Asia that the international system is becoming less predictable and less separated overall. This is not just about Iran, it is about the cumulative effect of multiple overlapping crises— the war in Ukraine, supply chain securitization, technology controls, and now Middle East conflict feeding directly into Asian economic vulnerability for many Asian states. The concern is not simply which side we should choose, it is that the external environment is becoming structurally more volatile and therefore harder to hedge against in the first place.
Having said that, I do not think the conclusion is that hedging is ending. The more accurate conclusion is that hedging is becoming more expensive, more issue-specific, and less comfortable.
IL: Pivoting back to the 2025 NSS, the United States stated that they want to refocus on the Western Hemisphere, which coincides with China’s ambition for Global South cooperation in Latin America and the Caribbean. How does this change the geographies and intricacies of U.S.-China interaction in LAC states?
SC: This is a very important shift. If we take the latest version of the NSS seriously, one of its most notable features is the renewed emphasis on the Western Hemisphere as a broader strategic space tied to migration, economic resilience, supply chains, and geopolitical influence. At the same time, you’re right that China has clearly deepened its engagement with Latin America and the Caribbean through trade, infrastructure, finance, development cooperation, and increasingly what Beijing would describe as Global South partnership. So what we are seeing is not simply China entering America’s backyard, which is the old Cold War-style framing. We are seeing that Latin America and the Caribbean are becoming a more active arena, where the changing priorities of both China and the U.S. now overlap much more directly, and I think that changes both the geography and the logic of China-U.S. interaction. Broader global rivalry now becomes translated into very concrete questions like, who builds infrastructure? Who controls logistics nodes? Who shapes digital ecosystems and who provides development financing? Or who dominates critical mineral supply chains and who offers political partnership without too many conditions? That is important because for a long time many people still treated China-U.S. competition as mainly concentrated in East Asia, but increasingly the competition is also about who has influence over the connective tissue of globalization like ports, energy, mining, telecommunications, industry, supply chains, and development governance. Latin America is central to many of those questions.
From the Chinese perspective, engagement with Latin America is usually not framed as a military or ideological project. It is framed as part of so-called “South-South cooperation” or “development partnership” and diversification of China’s global economic ties. Beijing has repeatedly emphasized cooperation in infrastructure, energy transition, grid development, digital economy, and also political coordination with developing countries. So in Chinese discourse, Latin American countries are important not only economically but also symbolically as part of a broader effort to show that China is not isolated and that it can still build international coalitions and partnerships outside the Western Alliance system. But from Washington’s point of view, especially under the logic of the 2025 NSS document, this same process is increasingly seen through a strategic lens. The U.S. now tends to view Chinese economic presence in the Western Hemisphere as something that could affect resilience, political influence, supply chains, and even strategic access over time. That is why the Western Hemisphere is becoming more central in American strategic thinking again.
China-U.S. interaction in Latin America is becoming less about isolated bilateral projects and more about embedded strategic ecosystems. And competition in Latin American countries is likely to be more indirect, more negotiated, and more state-contingent than in East Asia. Many Latin American and Caribbean states are trying to do something very similar to what Southeast Asian countries have done— maintaining diversified relations, extracting benefits from both sides, and avoiding being forced into rigid alignment. That means the intricacy of China-U.S. interaction in the region lies partly in the fact that Latin American countries are also strategic actors trying to maximize room for maneuver. And this is where things get interesting, because unlike in some Asian security settings, the key battleground in Latin America is often not military posture first. It is governance, development, and infrastructure choice that makes the competition both less visible and in some ways more durable.
The China-U.S. dynamic in Latin America has increasingly intersected with the broader politics of the Global South, which matters because many countries in Latin America do not interpret the world primarily through a China-U.S. rivalry lens. They often see themselves as responding to long-standing development challenges, debt constraints, industry dependency, climate vulnerability, and also unequal integration into the global economy. So when China presents itself as a partner for development or industry, that message can resonate not necessarily because countries want to align with China strategically, but because they want alternatives. From a Chinese scholar’s perspective, I will say the future of China-U.S. interaction in this region will likely be shaped by competitive coexistence under conditions of local bargaining.
IL: The war in Iran has sharpened the focus on Latin America’s energy resources. How do you see the U.S. and China calibrating their regional strategies in response to the ongoing energy crisis?
SC: Yes, the war in Iran has made Latin America’s energy relevance much more visible. But I would frame it carefully. This is not just about oil, it is about how a Middle East shock is pushing both the U.S. and China to see Latin America less as a secondary diplomatic space and more as a part of a broader energy security and resilience map. In other words, the region matters not only because it has hydrocarbons but also because it has LNG potentials, biofuels, electricity, interconnection opportunities, and the critical minerals that matter for the energy transition. So the strategic value of Latin America is broadening and I think Washington and Beijing will calibrate their regional strategies in quite different ways.
From the U.S. side, the likely response might be a stronger emphasis on hemispheric resilience and trusted supply chains. The Iran war and instability around the Strait remind Washington that global energy security is still vulnerable to distant chokepoints, even if the U.S. itself is less dependent on Middle Eastern oil than many Asian economies, because the U.S. still cares deeply about global price shocks, domestic inflation, shipping disruption, and strategic vulnerability. That is why Latin America becomes more important not only as an energy source, but as part of a more secure regional economic space. The U.S. will likely focus on several things. First, it will try to strengthen regional energy and industry supply chains, not only in oil and gas, but also in copper and other materials linked to energy security and industry competitiveness. Second, Washington will probably place more emphasis on infrastructure security like ports, LNG facilities, grids, pipelines, and logistics. In the context of the Iran war, energy infrastructure is once again seen as a strategic issue. Third, the U.S. will increasingly view Latin American energy cooperation through a competition lens. In other words, the question will not only be whether a project is commercially useful, but also who finances it and who builds it, and whether it expands Chinese influence in the hemisphere.
China, from my perspective, will calibrate differently. Beijing is unlikely to frame its regional strategy primarily in military or security terms. Instead, China will respond by what we might call geoeconomic diversification. The Iran war is a reminder for China that overreliance on any single external energy corridor is risky. So from Beijing’s perspective, Latin America matters as part of a broader effort to diversify supply, reduce vulnerability, and build a more resilient portfolio of long-term partnerships. So I would highlight some features of China’s approach. First, China will likely prioritize long-term access. That means stable purchasing relationships, upstream investments, infrastructure and financing arrangements that help secure future access. Second, Beijing will likely define energy cooperation in broader terms than the U.S. often does. For China, Latin America is not only about fossil fuels, it is increasingly about green industry chains— copper batteries, grid equipment, renewables, and electric mobility. And in that sense, China may actually see the energy transition side of this crisis as well one its advantages. Third, I think China will probably continue to present its regional engagement through the language of “development partnership” and “South-South cooperation” rather than strategic rivalry, which matters politically in Latin America where many governments do not want to be treated merely as geopolitical instruments. Last but not least, Beijing will likely prefer quiet entrenchment. In other words, China will probably try to deepen its regional footprint without making it look like a direct geopolitical challenge to the United States.
IL: With this idea of building up energy infrastructure in the digital age, data center infrastructure is now another critical strategic asset that also presents major security vulnerabilities. How is China thinking about domestic data infrastructure resilience?
SC: In earlier stages, data infrastructure in China was mainly discussed in terms of the digital economy like platforms, e-commerce, smart governance, or smart cities. But in recent years, especially under intensified China-U.S. competition, technology restrictions, and the rapid rise of AI technologies, the framing has shifted quite significantly. Today, data infrastructure is increasingly understood in China as something that sits at the intersection of economic development, state capacity, and national security. So China is now thinking about data infrastructure through the idea that security is a precondition for development, and resilience is a precondition for security.
And there are three key aspects to this. First, China increasingly treats data as a strategic resource, not just an information flow. This is a major conceptual change. Data is no longer seen only as supporting digital services. It is now seen as a foundational input for industry upgrading, AI development, logistics, finance, and governance. As a result, data infrastructure including data centers, cloud systems, cross-regional data networks, and computing capacity is increasingly viewed as critical infrastructure similar to energy or transport. That is why China has invested heavily in what it calls new infrastructure, including large-scale computing networks and projects designed to distribute data processing capacity across regions.
Second, China defines data infrastructure risks in systemic terms, not just cybersecurity terms. In many discussions, data risk is mainly about hacking or cyberattacks. China certainly cares about that, but its perspective is broader. From a Chinese policy standpoint, vulnerability can come from dependence on foreign technology, supply chain disruptions, concentration of data or computing power, or even the risk that a digital system could amplify social instability if disrupted. That is why China has emphasized data security laws, critical information infrastructure protection, and stronger governance over digital platforms and algorithms. The goal is reducing structural vulnerability.
Third, in the AI era, data infrastructure resilience is increasingly tied to long-term strategic competition. As AI becomes central to economic and security competition, data and compute are part of national capability. So resilience now includes questions like, can key sectors keep operating under disruption? Can data flow securely across regions? And how dependent is the system on foreign inputs? From this perspective, resilience is not only about protection, it is about continuity of competition. This also helps explain a feature of China’s approach that sometimes looks contradictory from the outside. On one hand, China is building larger and more advanced digital systems. On the other hand, it is strengthening regulation and state oversight. But from Beijing’s perspective, these two things are connected. The concern is that digital expansion without control creates vulnerability, while control without capacity limits development. For the Chinese government, the objective now is to pursue both at the same time.
IL: On the U.S. side, how is technological advancement and a focus on what you’ve described as the “tech-industrial complex” reshaping competition with China?
SC: The key point is that the U.S. is no longer competing with China in technology simply through firms, markets or or innovation ecosystems alone. What is increasingly emerging is what I describe as a techno-political complex, a structure in which state power, technological capital, industry policy, and national security institutions are becoming much more tightly integrated. And that matters because it changes not just the intensity of competition with China, but its basic logic. In earlier periods, there was still a widespread assumption that tech competition would remain largely market-driven; governments might regulate at the margins, but firms, capital, and innovation networks would do most of the work. That is no longer the case. In the U.S., sectors including semiconductors, AI, cloud infrastructure, and advanced manufacturing are increasingly treated as strategic capability domains. So when I use the term techno-political complex, I mean that technology has become a central arena where the state’s capital industry production and security strategy are increasingly fused.
This is making the competition much more systemic and durable. If competition were only about tariffs or trade disputes, in theory it could be adjusted relatively quickly, but once technology, industry policy, export controls, finance, and national security institutions are all linked together, the competition becomes much harder to reverse. That is one of the most important changes of recent years. The U.S. is no longer only reacting to specific Chinese behavior. It is increasingly trying to restructure the strategic environment so that China faces long term constraints in key technological and industry domains. This shifts the competition towards control over bottlenecks and enabling infrastructures. The contest has become about who controls the chokepoints, such as advanced chips, AI training infrastructure, critical software layers, and the rules and standards around them— so the U.S. is not only trying to outperform China, it is also trying to shape the architecture of technological dependence itself. From a Chinese perspective, that is a major shift because it means the challenge is no longer simply catching up, it is also whether China can continue to function, scale and innovate under conditions of externally-imposed constraints.
The techno-political complex is making competition much harder to separate from national security. In the past, there was at least some meaningful distinction between commercial competition and security competition. Today, that boundary is much weaker. AI, semiconductors, cloud computing, advanced manufacturing, and even data infrastructure are all increasingly understood as having strategic or dual-use significance. The more that sectors become treated as security relevant, the more that forms of interdependence start to look like vulnerability. That has a profound effect on China-U.S. relations. And from the Chinese side, this has reinforced a growing belief that the U.S. is no longer trying to compete with China within globalization, but rather is trying to reengineer globalization itself in ways that preserve U.S. technological primacy and strategic leverage. Whether or not Washington would describe its own strategy that way, that is a very important Chinese perception because it shapes how China responds. And China’s response has already become quite clear— more emphasis on self-reliance, industry upgrading, innovation, and supply chain security. So in a paradoxical way, the rise of the U.S. techno-political complex is not only increasing pressure on China, but it is also accelerating China’s own shift towards a more security-driven model of technological development.