The United States’ Approach to China’s Nuclear Weapons during Donald Trump’s Presidency
The United States’ Approach to China’s Nuclear Weapons during Donald Trump’s Presidency

Summary/Abstract: While China’s rise has been drawing the attention of scholars in the last two decades, Chinese leader Xi Jinping took the issue to a new level by putting great emphasis on Beijing’s military power, thereby increasing threat perceptions of China in Washington. Those perceptions were reflected in the Donald Trump Administration's U.S. National Security Strategy. The paper analyzes the U.S. approach to the deadliest part of the PRC’s military arsenal, namely its nuclear forces, during Donald Trump’s presidency (2017–2021) within the broader context of the U.S. policy of containment of China. The given study uses the process-tracing and the official documents analysis methods and relies upon reports and papers produced by the U.S. Department of Defense and the U.S. Intelligence Community as well as on news articles. First, the paper explores the role of nuclear weapons in international politics; it briefly presents the evolution of China’s nuclear strategy. Then, it discusses the policy of containment of China. Finally, the analysis leads to the conclusion that, in the Trump years, China’s nuclear expansion in terms of nuclear warheads as well as nuclear delivery vehicles was a source of great concern for the United States and contributed to increasing perceptions of China’s nuclear weapons as a threat in Washington. From the U.S. perspective, “the nuclear dragon” was rising in the Indo-Pacific, with its growing interests and opposition towards the preeminence of the United States in the given region, but most importantly, this has happened undetected, as part of hidden plans to develop its own nuclear arsenal.

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