There’s one thing worse than underestimating the competition.

And that’s overestimating it.

As the Trump administration trudges out of the locker room for its third season, the clock is ticking on its self-imposed March 1 “hard deadline” for China to agree to a new trade deal or face tougher American tariffs.

How will this game of political and economic brinksmanship end? And considering that America’s $20 trillion economy still dwarfs China’s $12 trillion economy, is Trump overwrought, or simply trying to level the playing field to keep China from overtaking the US?

“It is inevitable that China will become the world’s largest economy,” contends Alex Pevzner, founding director of the Chinese Media Center at the College of Management in Rishon L’Tzion. Addressing the foreign press at a Jerusalem news conference last week, Pevzner suggested that China will offer Trump a few concessions before the deadline, but won’t cave. “The strategic competition between the US and China won’t end on March 1, and it’s not going to end in ten years either.”

Israel now finds itself squeezed between two global giants. The Trump administration is pressuring Israel to cancel its recently signed contract with a Chinese company to expand the port of Haifa, Israel’s largest shipping facility. China has partnered with Israel in developing a number of major infrastructure projects, and Chinese companies are world-renowned as port managers. The US, however, fears that China will use the port as a base from which to spy on US naval vessels that periodically dock in Haifa.

The latter concern is exaggerated, said Matan Vilnai, who served both as Israel’s ambassador to China (2011–2016) and as IDF deputy chief of staff. Vilnai told the same news conference that the US Naval Sixth Fleet has a major base in Naples, Italy, a port the Chinese managed until selling its interest two years ago, and that never perturbed America. “Spying today is done through cyberspace. You don’t need to be there to know what’s going on.”

Israel is unlikely to buckle. Jerusalem has charted its own course in relations with Beijing ever since January 1950, when the Israeli government recognized the Communist People’s Republic of China instead of the US-supported nationalist Chinese regime in Formosa (Taiwan). Back then, Israel’s Foreign Minister Moshe Sharrett told Secretary of State Dean Acheson: “We voted for a fact, not for fiction.”

Four years later, when Israel and the US clashed again over China, Walter Bedell Smith, an undersecretary of state for President Eisenhower, resorted to sending a personal telegram to Sharrett explaining America’s obsession with China: “You have to understand that there is no question of political logic here. The issue [of China] is a mental complex that drives people insane.”

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 747)