The Configurational Politics of Trade Measures in Trump’s Foreign Policy: US Political Conditions for Chinese Restraint

Existing research on the Trump administration’s trade policy toward China in international relations has generally drawn on theoretical traditions with different epistemological orientations, offering explanations from multiple perspectives. This theoretical differentiation also reflects the multiple political logics underlying trade policy. The ways in which these logics are combined not only shape the political meaning of US measures, but also constitute an important external environment for China’s assessment of the nature of the dispute and the costs of responding. Explaining the issue through a single theoretical lens therefore risks oversimplification. Although eclecticism provides a way to integrate and weigh different theoretical traditions, remaining at the level of theoretical juxtaposition can blur the boundaries of falsifiability and the causal relationships among mechanisms. This paper introduces a configurational politics perspective and translates eclecticism into a concrete and testable analytical approach, examining which combinations of US political conditions are associated with China’s choice of restraint rather than the immediate use of material countermeasures. The study employs fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) to analyze 20 cases of trade practices across Trump’s two terms in office. The necessity analysis identifies no single US-side factor that is universally necessary for Chinese restraint. The sufficiency analysis identifies three pathways, reflecting different combinations of geopolitical conditions, domestic political mobilization, negotiation practices, and strategic competition discourse. These configurations can be further interpreted as different dispute-bounding mechanisms. When US domestic political mobilization centers on issue-specific adjustments of economic interests and does not turn the dispute into a bilateral strategic challenge that demands a response, or when other disputes with geopolitical implications are managed through institutionalized negotiations, the political necessity for China to undertake immediate material countermeasures is reduced. The discursive construction of China as a strategic competitor is absent in two of the pathways, reflecting the effect of US efforts to limit the strategic implications of the dispute and contain the risk of escalation, while also preserving political space for avoiding a broader escalation of the situation.