The Obama administration had already started reappraising the wisdom of trying to unilaterally keep engagement functional when along came Trump and his posse of China hawks (such as Peter Navarro, Steve Bannon, and Michael Pillsbury) who had long warned that an increasingly aggressive, autocratic, and well-armed China was both inevitable and a threat to U.S. national interests.

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.

Michael Pillsbury, a sometime advisor to Trump on China, told Foreign Policy he firmly believes that the president is not in favor of a complete divorce from China, and that Trump still wants a trade deal.