Provoking your enemies, alienating your friends and actively sabotaging your own defenses is no one’s idea of a sound national security plan. And yet, this is the playbook that President Trump has apparently followed over the first 100 days of his second term. You can see it most clearly in the global fight he kicked off with China. He’s been scrapping for this showdown since before he entered politics, so you’d think that before taking on such a global powerhouse, he’d strengthen every alliance, game out every possible countermeasure and get his leadership team in peak condition. The mouthiest barroom brawler knows not to pick a fight and then turn his back, but that’s what the president is doing. He promised to “make America safe again,” but instead of building up the nation’s defenses, he’s dismantling them at precisely the moment they are most needed.

激怒敌人、疏远朋友、主动破坏自身的国防，这绝不是任何人心目中理想的国家安全战略。但这显然是特朗普总统在第二任期前100天里所遵循的游戏规则。这一点在他与中国展开的全球斗争中体现得淋漓尽致。他在进入政坛之前就一直在为这场对决做铺垫，因此人们本以为，在与这样一个全球强国对决之前，他会巩固所有联盟，就各种可能的反制措施制定预案，并让自己的领导团队处于最佳状态。就连最爱在酒吧挑事的人都知道，挑了架不能转身不管，但总统现在就在这么做。他承诺要“让美国再次安全”，但他非但没有加强国家防御，反而在最需要的时候将其拆除。

The president has a former weekend Fox News host at the Department of Defense, and aides have complained that there is “total chaos at the Pentagon.” He’s got a Trump donor with no military experience as the secretary of the Navy and picked for director of National Intelligence someone with a tendency to repeat authoritarian talking points. The national security adviser uses a commercial messaging app to share sensitive information about U.S. airstrikes with people he can’t necessarily identify. Earlier this month the president sacked the military’s well-regarded cyberwar chief after a conspiracy theorist told him to, and his administration leaked word of plans to cut the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency by 40 percent. Next up appears to be an evisceration of the State Department, particularly the bureau that has challenged some of the worst abuses of hostile authoritarian states. And of course Mr. Trump has done everything possible to infuriate NATO, America’s primary alliance of mutual military support.

总统让一位前福克斯周末新闻主持人担任国防部长，他的助手抱怨说五角大楼“完全是一团乱”。他让一个毫无军事经验的竞选捐款人担任海军部长，还选择了一个经常重复威权主义言论的人出任国家情报局局长。国家安全顾问使用商业消息应用向身份不明的人分享有关美军空袭的敏感信息。本月早些时候，在一位阴谋论者的建议下，总统解雇了备受赞誉的军方网络战负责人，而他的政府随后泄露了计划削减网络安全与基础设施安全局40%预算的消息。接下来他似乎要对国务院动刀，尤其是那个向敌对威权国家严重侵犯人权行为发起挑战的部门。至于北约——美国的主要军事同盟——特朗普当然也是尽一切可能地激怒它。

This approach would be perilous at any time, but it’s particularly wrongheaded at the very moment Mr. Trump is kicking off a global battle with Xi Jinping’s government in China. Officially the fight is about tariffs, but for Beijing, international trade is never just business. China in years past has sent out waves of hack attacks on Western corporations to develop its manufacturing base and kneecapped a South Korean conglomerate to keep Seoul from adopting U.S. missile defenses. It appears to have harvested data from the popular shopping site Temu and fed it to a state-backed propaganda unit. Its hackers penetrated U.S. telecommunications networks. And all that was before Mr. Trump announced he was imposing sky-high tariffs on most of that nation’s goods. “They use diplomatic coercion, economic coercion, cyberattacks, lawfare, in extreme cases military or paramilitary threats, all to achieve a goal,” Bethany Allen, the Taiwan-based author of “Beijing Rules: How China Weaponized Its Economy to Confront the World,” told me. In this fight, she asked, “Why would they not do the same?”

这种做法在任何时候都是危险的，在特朗普与习近平政府展开全球斗争之际则尤其错误。表面上看，这场对抗是围绕关税展开的，但对北京来说，国际贸易从来不仅仅是商业行为。过去几年，中国曾对西方企业发起多轮网络攻击，以发展本国制造业，还打压了一家韩国大企业，目的是阻止首尔部署美国的导弹防御系统。它似乎还从热门购物网站Temu获取用户数据，并将这些信息提供给一个由国家支持的宣传机构。中国的黑客还曾渗透进美国的电信网络。而这一切都发生在特朗普宣布对中国大部分商品征收高额关税之前。“他们使用外交胁迫、经济胁迫、网络攻击、法律战，甚至在极端情况下动用军事或准军事威胁——一切都是为了实现他们的目标，”《北京规则：中国如何将经济武器化以对抗世界》(Beijing Rules: How China Weaponized Its Economy to Confront the World)一书的作者、常驻台湾的贝书颖(Bethany Allen)告诉我。在这场博弈中，她问道，“他们又有什么理由不采取同样的做法呢？”

Or as Matt Pottinger, Mr. Trump’s deputy national adviser during his first term, recently wrote with a colleague in The Free Press, “While Trump has (again) become the protagonist in a trade war with China, Xi is focused on the broader battle for global power.”

或者正如特朗普第一任期内的副国家顾问马特·波廷格最近与一位同事在《The Free Press》撰文所言：“虽然特朗普（再次）成为与中国贸易战的主角，但习近平关注的是更广泛的全球权力之争。”

Mr. Xi’s appetite for revenge is relentless. Dissidents who fled to America after the Tiananmen Square crackdown in 1989 are still being stalked more than 30 years later, and Beijing has set up a network of secretive police stations from Sydney, Australia, to Lower Manhattan and hired former local cops to surveil enemies abroad.

习近平对报复的渴望从未停止。1989年天安门镇压后逃到美国的异见人士即使在30多年后仍持续遭到跟踪。北京甚至在从澳大利亚悉尼到纽约下曼哈顿的多个地方设立了秘密警察哨站，并雇佣当地前警察在海外监视他们的敌人。

Yet Mr. Trump’s Justice Department broke up its task force on covert foreign influence, despite a series of busts of unregistered Chinese operatives and propagandists working throughout the United States. It paused the enforcement of foreign bribery laws and tried to freeze investigations into, among other things, possible Chinese attempts to influence the mayor of New York. Team Trump deep-sixed efforts to counter Chinese and other foreign propaganda, despite its increasingly sophisticated efforts to interfere in America’s politics. It tried to pull the plug on Radio Free Asia and its sister networks, which for decades have provided nearly 60 million people with a powerful alternative to authoritarian propaganda like China’s.

然而，尽管在美国境内查获了一系列未注册的中国特工和宣传人员，特朗普政府的司法部仍然解散了负责打击外国隐秘影响力的特别工作组。它暂停了对外国贿赂法律的执行，并试图叫停多项调查，包括对中国可能试图影响纽约市长的行动的调查。尽管中国等国家在干预美国政治方面手段日益高明，特朗普政府却终止了对抗中国及其他外国宣传攻势的相关努力。他们还试图关闭自由亚洲电台及其姊妹媒体——这些机构几十年来为近6000万人提供了有力的声音，与中国等国的专制宣传分庭抗礼。

Steve Tsang, a prominent authority on Beijing’s geopolitics, told me Mr. Trump has already “done more damage to American capacities to confront China than anybody has ever imagined possible.”

北京地缘政治问题的权威专家曾锐生告诉我，特朗普已经“对美国应对中国的能力造成了超出任何人想象的破坏”。

The Trump administration didn’t just undermine defenses against Chinese spywork and influence-peddling. It betrayed dissident groups, which have been a thorn in the Xi government’s side, as well as the people uncovering Beijing’s most closely guarded trade secrets.

特朗普政府不仅削弱了对中国间谍活动和影响力渗透的防线，还背叛了那些一直是习近平政府眼中钉的异见团体，也背叛了揭露北京保守最严密的秘密的人。

Take the case of China Labor Watch, which has spent the past quarter-century quietly assembling a network of investigators. They exposed horrific working conditions — pregnant women assembling Barbies for less than two dollars per hour, coffee harvesters expected to work 12-hour days for three months straight. Those investigations had real impact: Disney and Samsung suspended or cut ties with Chinese suppliers following the China Labor Watch reports, and some Chinese products lost access to the U.S. market. And it was a bargain for the United States, which got all that impact from about $700,000 a year from the National Endowment for Democracy. The funding was frozen without warning.

以中国劳工观察为例，该组织在过去25年里悄然建立了一个调查员网络。他们揭露了令人震惊的工作条件——组装芭比娃娃的孕妇时薪不到两美元，咖啡采摘工被要求连续三个月每天工作12小时。这些调查产生了实际影响：在中国劳工观察的报告发布后，迪士尼和三星暂停或切断了与中国供应商的关系，一些中国产品也失去了进入美国市场的机会。而对于美国来说，这笔投资无疑是物超所值，因为这些都是通过每年仅约70万美元的民主基金会资金实现的。但这笔资金却毫无预兆地被冻结了。

The endowment sued the Trump administration after a couple of months, and regained much of its funding. But by then China Labor Watch had lost many of the sources it spent years cultivating. “Cutting this support is like withdrawing the forward outposts of U.S. influence,” Li Qiang, the group’s leader, wrote to me last week. “Every time groups like ours are defunded, it marks not just a retreat of U.S. leadership on human rights, but an acceleration of China’s success in the global battle over values and accountability.”

几个月后，基金会起诉了特朗普政府，并重新获得了大部分资金。但到那时，中国劳工观察已经失去了它多年来培养的许多消息来源。“切断这种支持就像是撤回了美国影响力的前哨，”该组织的负责人李强上周写信对我说。“每一次像我们这样的团体被切断资金，不仅标志着美国在人权问题上的领导地位退缩，也加速了中国在全球价值观和问责制斗争中的成功。”

MAGA world insists that Mr. Trump’s moving-target approach to tariff negotiations is “three-dimensional chess.” His bullying approach to diplomacy may hurt some allies’ feelings, his supporters say, but it will bring some of America’s most lethal adversaries to the negotiating table. That might sound persuasive if Mr. Trump weren’t already signaling that he’s ready to back down to Mr. Xi in this trade fight.

“让美国恢复伟大荣光”阵营坚持认为，特朗普在关税谈判中难以捉摸的策略是在下一盘“三维国际象棋”。特朗普的支持者说，他恃强凌弱的外交手段可能会伤害到一些盟友的感情，但这将迫使一些美国最强大的对手走到谈判桌前。如果不是特朗普已经显露出要在这场贸易斗争中准备向习近平低头的迹象，这种说法听起来或许会更有说服力。

Beijing is capitalizing on the mess. “When the White House established the Department of Government Efficiency, few could have predicted just how efficiently it would expose the rot at the heart of the U.S. government,” read a recent editorial in the state-backed People’s Daily Online. The U.S. National Counterintelligence and Security Center warned earlier this month that China’s security services were contacting federal workers who’ve been laid off to try to lure them to Beijing’s side. Same goes for once-valued sources overseas. Mr. Li of China Labor Watch showed me a LinkedIn message from someone he understood to be an agent of the Chinese government, dangling the idea of an alternate funding source. He declined it. Other groups may not be able to afford to.

北京正在利用这一混乱局面。“当白宫设立政府效率部时，几乎没有人能预见到它会如此高效地暴露出美国政府核心的腐败，”《人民日报》网络版的最近一篇社论写道。本月早些时候，美国国家反情报与安全中心警告称，中国的安全部门正在联系那些被解雇的联邦工作人员，试图将他们拉拢到北京一方。曾经被重视的海外线人也面临同样的情况。中国劳工观察的李强给我看了一条来自他认为是中国政府特工的LinkedIn消息，提出可以提供替代资金来源。他拒绝了这一提议，其他团体可能无力拒绝。

A showdown with China was one of the most consistent promises Mr. Trump made to the American people. His voters knew this was the war he wanted. But how many of them could have guessed that he’d wage it in China’s favor?

与中国对决是特朗普一直以来对美国人民许下的承诺之一。他的选民知道这是他想要的战争。但有多少人能猜到他会发动一场对中国有利的战争呢？