Chaos Under Heaven

The heart of the book is a fight among Americans. Rogin maps Washington into rough camps, and watching them collide is where his reporting earns its keep. On one side stood what he calls the hawks — figures like trade adviser Peter Navarro and, at times, national-security officials who saw China as a strategic rival that engagement had failed to change. On the other stood the dealmakers, led in spirit by Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and by Kushner, who wanted a trade agreement and worried that the hawks would blow up the global economy to make a point.

Between them sat everyone else, drifting according to the news cycle. Rogin shows how the two camps did not just disagree on tactics; they wanted different worlds. The dealmakers still believed a stable commercial relationship was possible and desirable. The hawks had concluded that the relationship itself was the problem — that every deal simply bought Beijing more time to catch up in the technologies that would decide military and economic supremacy. These were not shades of the same view. They were rival theories of the century.

The abstractions became concrete on three fronts: trade, technology, and finally disease. The trade war arrived first, in waves of tariffs that Trump imposed and Beijing answered, each side betting the other would blink. Rogin treats the tariffs less as economics than as theater and leverage — a blunt instrument the president reached for because it was one of the few levers he could pull without waiting for anyone's permission. A partial deal was eventually signed in early 2020, but by then the ground had already shifted.

The technology fight, Rogin argues, mattered more and will last longer. The campaign against Huawei — the pressure on allies to bar it from their 5G networks, the effort to cut it off from American chips — was where the rivalry turned genuinely structural. This was not about the trade balance. It was about who would build the digital infrastructure of the coming decades, and whether that infrastructure would answer to Washington or to Beijing. Rogin frames it as the first real front of a contest over the commanding heights of the twenty-first-century economy.

Step back from the leaks and the summit dinners and Rogin's larger claim comes into focus: the Trump years did not create the rivalry, they revealed it. For roughly forty years, American policy toward China had rested on a bipartisan bet — that commerce and contact would nudge Beijing toward liberalization, that a richer China would become a freer and more cooperative one. Rogin's book is, at bottom, the story of how that bet quietly went bust, and how a chaotic administration happened to be holding the cards when the losses came due.

What replaced the old consensus was not a plan so much as a mood: a broad, cross-party conviction in Washington that China under Xi was a systemic rival, not a partner-in-waiting. Rogin is clear-eyed that this shift outran any single president. The Huawei restrictions, the harder line on Beijing's conduct in Hong Kong and Xinjiang, the framing of the relationship as strategic competition — these did not vanish when the administration changed. They were inherited, and largely kept.

Rogin ends more or less where the story left him: with two governments locked in a competition neither fully chose and neither can easily exit. The chocolate-cake summit at Mar-a-Lago now reads like a relic from an era that was already ending as it happened — the last time the leaders of the two powers could sit down and plausibly pretend the relationship was a friendship with a few disputes attached. By the close of the book, the disputes have become the relationship.