Trump-Xi summit: The ‘China threat’ and America’s real war

This week, Chinese President Xi Jinping arrives in Washington for his first state visit to the American capital since 2015, and the pre-visit coverage has followed a familiar script. American commentary is once again rehearsing the “China threat” narrative: Taiwan, the trade truce set to expire in November, artificial intelligence competition, and — new this cycle — Beijing’s economic support for Iran and Russia, which one hawkish outlet, World Tribune, described Xi as being “at war with America on two fronts”. Another newspaper, The New York Times, published an op-ed titled “America Is Blundering Toward War With China”, listing US misunderstandings of and misguided policies towards China since 1949.  

The focus and framing are not accidental. It resurrects a decades-old genre of threat inflation at the precise moment American foreign policy has produced a far more immediate and self-inflicted crisis: a shooting war with Iran that Washington — acting as Israel’s proxy — chose, that most Americans oppose, and whose end remains elusive.

China’s alleged war with America on two fronts — and the prospect of an even more destructive conflict in the future — without any actual fighting or bombing stands in sharp contrast to Israel’s multiple invasions and destruction, and what many have described as genocide, often with US participation, support or financing, in Gaza, Iran, Lebanon and Syria.  

The two stories on threats and wars associated with China and Israel are being told on separate tracks, and that separation does real political work. China is treated as a rival to be managed, contained and negotiated with through ordinary diplomatic channels — a problem “over there”. America’s involvement in Israel’s wars, by contrast, is treated as a commitment that is far less open to examination — one that is difficult to question, debate or attach political cost to. 

It is worth being precise about what is being compared: not “China” against “Israel” as nations, but two very different frameworks Washington uses to manage its foreign entanglements — one openly contested, one largely insulated from contest. When the two are held side by side, the asymmetry is striking.

Rivalry without war, alliance through war?

The Xi-Trump summit follows real, hardheaded business: an extension of the trade truce, tension over export controls and Taiwan, and quiet arms-control contacts, conducted through diplomatic channels between two nuclear powers that have not fought each other since the Korean War, more than 70 years ago. Whatever one thinks of Chinese policy on Taiwan, human rights or industrial espionage, the US-China relationship is being managed as a rivalry between competitors — with summits, hotlines, trade negotiators and other diplomatic mechanisms, rather than through the personal and private channels, direct combat, fallen soldiers and ever-increasing military budgets that characterise the US-Israel relationship.

Israel’s war against Iran in February 2026 has strained American munitions stockpiles, destroyed American military bases in the Middle East, and killed dozens of American patriots. While at the United Nations (UN) General Assembly this week, US President Donald Trump claimed, “From the first day I entered the political arena, I have been unwavering — I will never allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon.” What he did not mention was that, even before his presidency, he received millions of dollars in political support from Israeli American businesswoman Miriam Adelson. The president openly tying its timeline to domestic electoral considerations only underscores how far this has drifted from a reasoned national-interest calculation. 

In other words, the war against Iran is not America’s war; it is a war of Israeli-American political donors and their homeland, Israel. This is not a rivalry being managed. It is a war being fought on Israel’s behalf that most of the country did not choose and cannot end. 

The “China threat” genre serves a function: it gives Washington an external adversary to rally around at the exact moment a harder question — why the US keeps being drawn into Middle Eastern wars, and in whose interest — goes largely unexamined. China has not drawn American soldiers into a shooting war in 70 years. Israel’s wars, by contrast, have repeatedly drawn in American weapons, funding and now direct American military strikes: 1967, 1973, the 1982 and 2006 Lebanon wars, the repeated Gaza operations of 2008-2009, 2014 and 2023-2025, and now the 2026 war with Iran, in which the US did not merely arm Israel but directly fought for Israel.

The economic, human and political cost of the current wars has fallen overwhelmingly on people in the US, Gaza, Lebanon and now Iran; international bodies, UN investigators and legal scholars have applied the language of war crimes and, in some assessments, genocide to the Gaza campaign. In the US foreign policy community, a dozen State Department, Defense Department, Interior Department and Education Department officials publicly resigned over US support for the Gaza campaign between late 2023 and mid-2024 — Josh Paul, Annelle Sheline, Hala Rharrit, Tariq Habash, Stacy Gilbert and Lily Greenberg Call among them, a wave of protest resignations without recent precedent inside the foreign-policy bureaucracy. Sheline has said colleagues who shared her objections but could not afford to resign asked her to “speak out” on their behalf. 

Outside the government, campus protests, state-level primary fights, and a war-weary electorate heading into the midterms have all been shaped by the same underlying grievance: that US Middle East policy answers to a logic voters did not sign off on, and that a majority now says was the wrong call.

The real question, given that most Americans oppose the war against Iran, is why and how the Trump administration continues to send weapons to Israel and maintain its threats against Iran. Pew Research Center found in March 2026 that 59% of Americans considered the decision to use military force against Iran wrong, while 61% disapproved of Trump’s handling of the conflict. The relevant comparison, therefore, is not simply between China and Israel as abstract foreign-policy subjects. It is between two relationships that Washington discusses and manages through markedly different political frameworks.

A thought experiment

Consider the counterfactual. Suppose a Chinese American businessperson — a US citizen doing nothing illegal — wrote a US$100 million check to a pro-Trump super PAC (as Andelson did), or a “China Democracy Project” spent US$100 million supporting or opposing members of Congress according to their China policy. Would the political interpretation be the same as it would be for a large pro-Israel donor? 

Now consider a counterfactual comparison between the Epstein files and a hypothetical “Zhang files”: suppose Chinese intelligence had been found holding compromising material on the same roster of American officials and financiers named in the Epstein files. Congress passed the Epstein Files Transparency Act in November 2025, requiring the Department of Justice (DOJ) to release covered records, and by 30 January 2026, the department had released more than 3 million additional pages, bringing the total to nearly 3.5 million pages, along with thousands of videos and hundreds of thousands of images. In the hypothetical “Zhang files” scenario, the China-linked intelligence angle could plausibly trigger classified briefings, congressional investigations, heightened intelligence scrutiny, and even a new form of McCarthyism. The contrast with the Epstein files is revealing.

Last but not least is the question of foreign flags in US government spaces: if the Israeli flag can be displayed outside congressional offices, how would the media and analysts react if the Chinese flag were displayed there? In 2025, Philadelphia officials raised the Chinese national flag over City Hall to commemorate the 76th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China, prompting bipartisan criticism from members of Congress — some of whom may themselves display the Israeli flag in their offices.

Unequal suspicion: two prosecutorial records

That gap also appears in the government’s treatment of China-linked academic and so-called espionage cases. Between 2018 and 2022, the DOJ’s “China Initiative“ pursued numerous cases involving scientists and academics of Chinese descent. Independent analyses found that a large share of the academic cases involved allegations such as undisclosed affiliations, grant information, or other disclosure violations rather than espionage. The frequently cited figure that roughly 90% of defendants were ethnically Chinese comes from outside analysis of the cases rather than from a DOJ determination. The important, documented point is that several high-profile academic prosecutions collapsed, including cases involving Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Gang Chen and University of Tennessee professor Anming Hu. 

The comparison becomes clearer when set against Jonathan Pollard, a US Navy analyst convicted in 1987 of espionage for Israel. Pollard served 30 years, and the Trump administration ended his remaining parole restrictions in 2020, allowing him to relocate to Israel.  In 2005, two AIPAC lobbyists, Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman, were charged under the Espionage Act in connection with classified Iran-policy information obtained from a Pentagon official. Prosecutors dropped the case in 2009 after years of litigation.

The comparison is that media coverage, policy analysis and institutional treatment of China-linked academic and espionage cases have often been exaggerated or, in some instances, based on allegations that were later dropped or disproven, while convicted spies who acted on behalf of Israel have, in some cases, been released or had their cases dropped. Part of the reason comparisons like these are difficult to make publicly is that criticism of Israel can quickly become entangled with accusations of antisemitism, while criticising or attacking China is not only legal but also often treated as politically acceptable or even desirable.

Blaming China will not cover Israel’s liability

None of this means concerns about China are manufactured — competition over Taiwan, technology, trade and rare earths is real, and Xi’s visit reflects genuine, difficult issues that deserve serious coverage. But the proportion and timing of that coverage matter. A rivalry seven decades removed from actual war between the two countries is treated as the paramount, ever-expanding threat to American national security, while a live proxy war — one the administration itself chose, that has degraded US military stockpiles and killed and displaced enormous numbers of people, and that most Americans say was the wrong call — gets absorbed into the background as an unfortunate but unquestionable given.

That asymmetry is not an accident of news cycles. It runs through campaign finance, prosecutions, government disclosure, and the very boundaries of acceptable political speech. American national interest should not be organised around which relationship a domestic lobby can insulate from scrutiny, and it should certainly not require the US to function as another country’s proxy in a war it did not choose and that most of its own citizens oppose. 

If US support for Israel’s wars were simply a rational, popular, well-examined national interest, it would not need the “China threat” as a diversion; it would stand on its own the way China policy does, openly and without penalty for the people who ask hard questions about it. Xi’s visit will pass, the trade truce will likely be extended, and the “China threat” commentary will move to the next flashpoint. The Iran war, and its cost to American strength and cohesion, will still be here. 

Blaming China for America’s anxieties does not make that cost disappear. It only delays the reckoning with whose war this actually is, and why Washington keeps fighting it. Making America independent again from foreign lobbying — especially Israeli lobbying — may be essential to protecting American taxpayers and US national interests.

Related: What is the worst acceptable outcome for Trump and Xi? | How Trump’s Iran war boosted Beijing