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news analysis
Trump administration officials are getting a second chance to try to sever ties with China by starting a trade war, imposing export controls and revoking student visas.
Published May 29, 2025Updated May 30, 2025, 11:13 a.m. ET
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The Trump administration has threatened to revoke the visas of many of the 277,000 or so Chinese students in the United States and to subject future applicants from China, including Hong Kong, to extra scrutiny.
Cargo ships laden with goods from China stopped coming into American ports earlier this spring as President Trump escalated his trade war against Beijing.
And the Trump administration is suspending sales of some critical U.S. technologies to China, including those related to jet engines, semiconductors and certain chemicals and machinery.
Taken together, the actions by the Trump administration amount to an aggressive campaign to “decouple” the United States from China, as it seeks to break the close commercial ties between the world’s two largest economies and toss away what had been the anchor of the relations between the nations for decades.
Aggressive decoupling would bolster American security, from the perspective of Mr. Trump and his aides. And it would also accelerate a trend toward each power being entrenched in its own regional sphere of influence.
Officials in the first Trump administration spoke of the need to decouple from China, with the view that economic and educational ties across many fields equated to a national security threat. But while the efforts reframed the relationship as one of competition rather than cooperation, the volume of trade remained high, even through the pandemic.
