Trump faces Xi as strains with allies complicate U.S. pressure on China

For decades, one of the U.S.’s biggest advantages over China has been its network of allies and partners. When the U.S. restricted technology or imposed sanctions, bringing major economies in Europe and Asia along made those measures harder for Beijing to evade.

China still lacks anything comparable: The Lowy Institute, an independent Australian foreign-policy think tank, scored the U.S. defense networks at 81.4 on a scale of 100, versus 18.9 for China in 2025. But Beijing does not need U.S. allies to switch sides to erode that advantage. It only needs them to become less willing to move with Washington, Hass and other China experts said.

“When democratic countries don’t have public support for a counterpart, it raises the cost for leaders to align with the United States,” Hass told CNBC. “It lowers the cost for leaders to defy the United States.”

Trump has taken a sledgehammer to relationships with allies. He’s clashed with NATO over defense spending, threatened to reduce the U.S. troop presence in much of Europe while announcing plans Tuesday to add troops in Greenland after threatening to take over the island and imposed tariffs on the U.S.’s northern neighbor Canada.

“Although our biggest economic complaints regarding China’s economy are shared by many of our allies and partners, the current U.S. approach is to attack all of those countries … instead of forming a common front,” said Melanie Hart, senior director of the Atlantic Council’s Global China Hub.

Meanwhile, public confidence in the U.S. as a reliable partner has fallen. In Canada, the share of people who described the U.S. as a reliable partner fell from 83% in 2022 to 35% this year, according to Pew Research Center in June. In Germany, the share who said Washington considers other countries’ interests when making foreign policy fell from 60% in 2023 to 23%.

Canada this month was invited to be the first “associate member” of the European Union as Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government seeks deeper defense ties with Europe and less reliance on the U.S.

Foreign allies “worry that as soon as they make a deal with us, Washington will undercut them in some way that they will then regret,” Hart told CNBC.

China has sought to capitalize on that opening, not necessarily by persuading countries to choose Beijing over Washington, but by making the choice less binary.

India offers one example.

The country remains a U.S. security partner and a strategic competitor of China, with troops from both countries still deployed along their disputed Himalayan border. Yet Xi visited India this month for the first time in seven years as the two countries took what Tanvi Madan, a senior fellow at Brookings, called “baby steps” toward stabilizing relations.

Bilateral trade reached a record $155.6 billion in 2025, according to Chinese data, and Xi and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi agreed to strengthen business and transport links despite unresolved security disputes.

“Uncertainty over Trump’s approach to Beijing and strains in India’s own relationship with the U.S. have given India another reason to keep relations with China on steadier ground,” Madan told CNBC. “Even a tactical détente between the U.S., India and China can have downstream impacts on India’s strategic environment.”

Article source: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/09/23/trump-xi-china-summit-allies.html