The Giant Is Now Awake: America is fully aware of China's ambitions. But now what?

• Author: Ullmann, Owen

During these times of bitter partisan polarization, Washington's political and policy communities are rallying around a rare consensus viewpoint about the biggest international threat confronting the United States: China.

From the far left to far right, politicians and experts see China rising as a global menace to U.S. economic and foreign policy interests. The days when the Clinton, Bush, and Obama Administrations dealt with China as a sometimes-cooperative competitor are gone. That approach has been replaced with Cold War-style assessments of China as a dangerous rival that is expanding its military reach and plotting to leapfrog the United States as the world's pre-eminent economic superpower within a generation.

Beyond sharing that concern, Washington hands are all over the place when it comes to finding effective strategies to deal with the expanding Asian power. Some are pushing for short-term deals that result in greater Chinese purchases of U.S. goods. Others are focused on broader agreements that aim to curb Chinese intellectual property theft, unfair trading practices-such as government-owned or subsidized enterprises, currency manipulation, and dumping-and investments in technology that threaten American national security.

Several approaches advocate tough bilateral negotiations, while a number of experts are convinced that only multilateral talks pitting China against a broad American-led alliance can succeed. Then there are more radical proposals, such as a foreign investment tax aimed at devaluing the dollar to reduce America's chronic trade surplus with China and the rest of the world.

Yet there's scant evidence that China is interested in any deal that favors U.S. interests at its expense, a point President Donald Trump admitted on July 30, as his negotiators held inconclusive trade talks in Shanghai.

Trump has taken an erratic on-again, off-again tough-guy approach toward China: leveling tariffs and threatening more, but then postponing them; predicting a breakthrough in talks, then lowering expectations; lauding Chinese President Xi Jinping as a friend, then assailing China's trade practices.

"... [T]hey always change the deal in the end to their benefit," Trump tweeted. "They should probably wait out our Election to see if we get one of the Democrat stiffs like Sleepy Joe [Biden]. Then they could make a GREAT deal, like in past 30 years, and continue to ripoff the USA, even bigger and better than ever before."

"The problem with them waiting, however, is that if & when I win, the deal that they get will be much tougher than what we are negotiating now...or no deal at all. We have all the cards, our past leaders never got it!" Two days after that tweet, he announced 10 percent tariffs on $300 billion of Chinese goods effective September 1.

In fact, despite Trump's boast and new tariff threat, China is...