White House hawks like Peter Navarro, Trump’s director of trade and manufacturing policy, and Michael Pillsbury, the director for Chinese strategy at the Hudson Institute, were briefly triumphant over Trump’s hard-line take, but it seems unlikely that their vision of a permanent U.S.-China rift is one Trump shares.
“Think of Pillsbury as our time’s Paul Revere,” proposes Gordon G. Chang, jaunty author of The Coming Collapse of China (2001). Or think of guys like Chang and Pillsbury as no more than restless enablers of an unnerving run of China hysteria.