Trump Leans Closer to Decoupling From China Than to 'Small Yard, High Fence,' Former Officials Say

Both Everett Eissenstat, who served in the first Trump administration’s National Economic Council, and Peter Harrell, a former Biden administration National Security Council official, said they expect Trump to impose broader export controls than Biden did. Harrell specifically said he doesn’t think Trump will continue Biden’s small-yard, high-fence strategy -- the notion of placing strict controls around a small set of advanced technologies.

“I don't think that's the vision they have right now,” Harrell said during a recent event hosted by the University of Virginia's Miller Center. “When I talk to the people I know in the Trump administration, they actually see a more expansive” approach to export restrictions, he said, and embrace the idea that “we should be cutting off quite a bit more.”

Harrell also said Trump officials are more open to the idea of decoupling from Beijing, and that could translate into more restrictive export control policies. “Many of them say, actually, this idea that the goal should be select areas of decoupling, of maintaining our edge, is the wrong goal,” he said. “We should actually have a much more expansive goal of decoupling across the board and ideally tipping China into recession and decline.”

Eissenstat said “there's a lot of validity to that,” but he also noted that it may be too early to tell whether Trump seeks to significantly broaden U.S. export controls or other restrictions against China. “We'll have to see what the export control policy is,” he said. “There's definitely a school of thought that any investment in Chinese technology is bad investment for the United States from a national security perspective. I think that's probably the dominant thread. But we'll see.”

The Bureau of Industry and Security is currently being led by two Trump-appointed officials who contributed to Project 2025 -- the conservation blueprint for federal government that calls on the U.S. to consider decoupling from China (see 2502280006). But industry officials and policy analysts have said it’s difficult to predict how Trump may use export controls, foreign investment reviews and other trade tools, especially if he offers concessions as part of a broader trade deal with Beijing (see 2502120019).

But “at the end of the day,” Eissenstat said he wouldn’t be surprised if Trump “is more restrictive, and with an effort to not just maintain control of the technology, but to diminish the ability of China to grow and compete against the United States.”

Michael Froman, former U.S. trade representative in the Obama administration, said one of the pressing questions surrounding U.S.-China technology competition is how much the U.S. departs from the small-yard, high-fence approach. “How do you take this forward?” Froman said during the event. “Like, what are the limiting principles or the guardrails? What should be inside the fence and what shouldn't be inside the fence?”

Harrell noted that the strategy proved “hard” for the Biden administration, partly because “there was never any clear vision about what the end of this was.” He said the yard of technologies the U.S. sought to restrict kept getting bigger.

“As we got into more and more intense competition with China because of geopolitical pressures, there was this relentless pressure to control more,” Harrell said, “and without this clear vision of what the end state is, the yard expanded, and it became an issue with our allies and partners as well.”

On a trip to Brussels while working for the administration, Harrell said an EU official showed him a picture of a European chateau with acres of yard land.

“And he said, this is the Biden administration's yard, isn't it?” Harrell said. “I think that sort of illustrates the strategic challenge the administration faced.”