Sun Tzu wrote that “fighting and winning all your battles is not the height of skill; subduing the enemy without fighting is the height of skill”. That maxim offers perhaps the clearest lens to interpret the logic of American grand strategy under US President Donald Trump.
What many dismiss as inconsistency may conceal a patient strategic deception. The aim is not direct confrontation, but the quiet reshaping of the global economy in support of long-term US power.
The US wants to improve its relative position vis-a-vis China for the long game. At the centre lies what might be called positional power – control over the critical nodes through which global economic systems operate. It’s about dominance of computational power (semiconductors), resource power (rare earths, energy) and connectivity power (shipping and maritime chokepoints).
China spent three decades accumulating precisely this kind of power. It dominates large segments of global industrial production, critical mineral processing and shipbuilding. Before the Xi-Trump meeting in South Korea, Beijing showed its positional power through retaliatory rare earths restrictions. With US industry on the brink, Trump accepted a trade ceasefire.
Yet the American response since then may be less reactive than is often assumed. Recent US military interventions can be interpreted as part of a broader geopolitical repositioning that bears down on China’s vulnerabilities. Indeed, the logic of hemispheric consolidation and resource security appears in the US’ 2025 National Security Strategy.
Venezuela matters not only because it has provided discounted heavy crude to China (around 4 per cent of Chinese seaborne oil imports) but because it serves as a signal to the western hemisphere that China will not intervene to protect countries facing US ultimatums. Panama matters because maritime chokepoints remain central to global trade. Greenland matters because the Arctic routes connecting the Pacific and Atlantic may become increasingly significant as polar access expands. Iran matters because the Strait of Hormuz remains a structural vulnerability of the Chinese economy.
