By Peter Rodgers – Geopolitical Monitor
Foreign policy runs on narratives, institutions, and power. What is unusual about the current moment is how visibly a single leader’s governing style has bent those three at once. Since January 20, 2025, President Donald Trump has doubled down on short-term deal-making and suspicion of multilateral bodies—pulling funding or initiating withdrawals from UN agencies and the WHO, imposing sweeping “reciprocal” tariffs, and tightening export controls. The cumulative effect has been to drain US symbolic capital as a predictable steward of global rules. Into that vacuum, China has continued to advance a networked alternative—less a new pyramid with Beijing at the top than a web of forums, swaps, corridors, and standards that convert problem-solving into legitimacy.
Trump’s second-term playbook has been explicit. In April, the White House declared a national emergency on trade and set a 10% baseline tariff on almost all imports, alongside higher country-specific rates for large US trade-deficit partners—measures he framed as “reciprocal.” The administration has since tinkered with timing and carve-outs, but the direction of travel is unchanged: higher barriers, fewer exceptions (including curbs on the de minimis small-parcel exemption), and discretionary pauses as leverage. At the same time, the Commerce Department adopted a “50 percent rule” that automatically drags subsidiaries of Entity List firms under export controls, closing circumvention channels in chips and other dual-use tech. The message to allies and rivals alike is that Washington will use tariffs and controls as routine policy instruments, not last-resort tools.
Institutionally, Trump has moved to re-exit or defund UN organs (from WHO to UNESCO) and to review US participation in a wide swath of international organizations. The immediate budgetary impact is narrow; the reputational effect is broad. Partners now hedge more aggressively, designing “Plan B” channels for funding, standards, and dispute resolution that do not presume US leadership or even US participation.
Beijing did not rush to proclaim hegemony. It kept building out a polycentric architecture. Consider the Shanghai Cooperation Organization: at the September 2025 Tianjin summit, leaders approved a 2026–2035 strategy, advanced plans for an SCO development bank, and inaugurated new security centers. Whatever one thinks of SCO performance, the forum now reliably convenes Eurasian states for practical coordination on security and connectivity, and it is expanding its partnership circle.
Or take BRICS, which has expanded to eleven members, adding Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE since 2024. The point is not that BRICS is replacing the IMF or G7; rather, it offers convening power for energy, payments, and standards work that resonates across the Global South—especially as US policy turns more transactional.
Most consequential is the quiet construction of “parallel plumbing.” The euro–renminbi swap line between the ECB and the PBOC was rolled over again in September (RMB 350 bn/€45 bn). CIPS—the PRC’s cross-border payment system—handled roughly RMB 175 trillion in 2024, with volumes and participants still rising in 2025. And despite market volatility and tariffs, the RMB remains one of the top global payment currencies by value. These are not dethroning the dollar; they do, however, raise the exit costs of a single-channel world.
The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has simultaneously pruned and thickened. Italy formally left in 2023, and Panama exited in early 2025 under US pressure—useful reminders that BRI membership is not irrevocable. Yet elsewhere it keeps moving: Colombia signed a BRI cooperation plan in May, and the September Belt and Road Summit in Hong Kong logged new MOUs and corporate deals. The pattern is iterative: some nodes detach, others deepen.
Security signaling has tracked this network logic. China has sustained joint exercises with Russia (most recently in August near Vladivostok) while the SCO pledged expanded counterterrorism coordination. In parallel, Washington is rewriting drone-export rules to claw back market share from non-MTCR suppliers, a reminder that the “bloc” competition now runs through technology regimes as much as through troop deployments.
Why have many states leaned toward Beijing’s narrative of “pragmatic multilateralism”? Four reasons still hold. First, perceived continuity at China’s top contrasts with visible US policy whiplash across administrations. Second, tangibility: roads, grids, and fiber are concrete. Third, negotiation space: alternatives to dollar channels and sanction exposure, however partial, raise bargaining power. Fourth, coherence: while Washington wields tariffs and exit threats, Beijing offers packages that blend finance, logistics, and political non-interference. None of this makes China’s offer costless. Slower Chinese growth, deflationary pressures, and property-sector drag limit the resources Beijing can deploy; RMB’s payments share, while significant, remains under 3%. But for many governments juggling urgent development needs and political risk, the balance of friction often favors China’s “works-first” approach.
Structurally, the story is not US collapse but monopoly erosion. The emerging order is polycentric and issue-based: security through SCO-style coordination; economy through swaps, CIPS rails, and bilateral deals; technology through export-control cat-and-mouse and standards clubs; culture through multiple, localized narratives. For middle powers, this increases maneuvering room—if they invest in institutional capacity to manage a more complex menu of ties.
For Washington, the challenge is not raw power but predictability and rule-making legitimacy. Leadership requires both might and credible, long-horizon commitments. Tariffs as first resort and serial withdrawals from global bodies push partners to hedge. The repair kit is familiar: anchor alliances, fund public goods, and accept some constraints in order to regain voice over rules. For Beijing, the tests are also clear: manage neighbors’ security anxieties without drifting into coercion; upgrade transparency to blunt “debt-trap” critiques; and accept genuine co-ownership in emerging institutions.
Seen pragmatically, the dynamic endures: Trump closes doors; China opens windows. The more Washington treats multilateralism as a tactical prop and the international economy as a tariff battlefield, the more states will diversify into Beijing-enabled pathways. Legitimacy gravitates toward the architecture that solves more problems with less drama. If China sustains patience and iterative delivery—and if the United States keeps choosing transaction over institution—the future will look less like a new empire and more like a dense skyline of bridges, each tying a few blocks together, none owned by a single city.
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