For decades, the United States and China have each played important roles in Afghanistan. However, their involvement has taken extremely different forms, reflecting disparities in interest, power, geography, and strategy. Directly or indirectly, the US–China bilateral relationship has also affected American and Chinese calculations and activities in Afghanistan. This chapter explores the period from the Obama administration to the present, a period that witnessed both the intensification of competition between Washington and Beijing, as well as the dramatic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan and its aftermath.¹The author would like to thank Andrew Small, Elizabeth Threlkeld, and Yun Sun for their insightful comments that helped to strengthen the chapter.

Historically, U.S. involvement in Afghanistan was deep but episodic. Extreme U.S. interest and intervention — following the Soviet invasion and the 9/11 terrorist attacks — was followed by equally extreme disinterest and withdrawal during the 1990s and after 2021. Only a distant superpower could imagine itself so capable of coming and going from Afghanistan.

China, on the other hand, is Afghanistan’s neighbor and thus more immediately affected by its upheavals. Like the United States, China perceived the Soviet invasion and rise of the Taliban as threatening to its security, but Beijing’s policies were more restrained. This is explained in part by China’s prioritization of other international interests, its general policy of avoiding costly intervention in other countries, and above all — at least until recently — its relatively weaker capacity for bold initiatives beyond its borders.

Indeed, Washington’s and Beijing’s approaches to Afghanistan are the products of their specific — and divergent — concerns, priorities, and capabilities. Still, it is worth considering how, if at all, the evolving character of the US–China relationship has also influenced the conflict in Afghanistan, if only to better appreciate the worldwide implications of great power competition between Washington and Beijing.

All things equal, we would anticipate that US–China cooperation in Afghanistan could contribute to greater security, political stability, and economic development, while US–China competition and tensions would jeopardize those same outcomes. A review of the history from the Obama administration to the present provides a useful test of these assumptions, given that US–China relations became increasingly and openly competitive during that era.

This study considers four periods from the early 2000s to the present, each defined by important developments in US–China relations or on the ground in Afghanistan. The first period starts after 9/11 but emphasizes the first half of the Obama administration when top U.S. officials attempted cooperative ventures with their Chinese counterparts in Afghanistan. The second begins in the late stages of the Obama administration and runs through the Trump and early Biden administrations, when competition between the United States and China intensified. The third starts with the negotiated withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan and runs through the immediate aftermath of the evacuation in 2021. The final period runs from the Taliban’s return to Kabul until the end of the Biden administration.

This chapter concludes with a short review of the situation during Trump’s second term, followed by a summary assessment of how best to understand the implications of US–China relations for Afghanistan’s war from 9/11 to the present.

Period 1: From 9/11 to Obama’s Second term

From the time of the 2001 U.S. invasion of Afghanistan through at least the first half of the Obama administration, neither the United States nor China defined their relationship as one of “great power competition.” Many U.S. policymakers held on to the hope that engagement with China would gradually and inexorably deliver a stable modus vivendi with Beijing transforming into a “responsible stakeholder” in the international system.²Robert B. Zoellick, “Whither China: From Membership to Responsibility?” (speech, New York, NY, September 21, 2005), U.S. Department of State, https://2001-2009.state.gov/s/d/former/zoellick/rem/53682.htm.

Still, the period also witnessed a gradual if officially unspoken erosion in US–China relations. China’s rising power and America’s strategic response loomed just off-stage as Washington directed its immediate attention to the invasion of Afghanistan, the Global War on Terrorism, and the Iraq war.

That reality was captured in Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s widely cited 2011 essay in Foreign Policy magazine, “America’s Pacific Century,” which offered a vision for how the United States should “pivot” its attentions to Asia as it drew down its forces from wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.³Hillary Clinton, “America’s Pacific Century,” Foreign Policy, October 11, 2011, https://foreignpolicy.com/2011/10/11/americas-pacific-century/. Clinton expressed a desire to “build trust” with China “to address critical regional and global security issues.” A product of its times, Clinton’s approach clearly aimed to make the United States a more capable counterweight to China in Asia without outwardly accepting the inevitability of US–China strategic competition or conflict.  

U.S. policies in Afghanistan during this period yo-yoed under Obama’s watch, with an early military surge that reached a high of over 100,000 troops in the summer of 2010, followed by a drawdown which left fewer than 10,000 troops by the end of his term. In addition to Washington’s redoubled counterinsurgency campaign directed against the Taliban, U.S. ambitions for Afghanistan waxed to include efforts to build the Afghan state’s governing capacity and to develop its economy. All the while, Washington launched counter-terror operations supercharged by a massively expanded drone campaign to decimate Al Qaeda and its supporting networks in Afghanistan and parts of Pakistan.

Clinton was not alone among Obama-era officials who hoped that Afghanistan might be an arena for pursuing common interests with China, especially combatting terrorism, stabilizing the Afghan state, and growing Afghanistan’s economy. In addition to believing that cooperation with China would improve outcomes on the ground in Afghanistan, some U.S. policymakers also optimistically believed that US–China cooperation over mutual interests in Afghanistan could, over time, foster broader cooperation between Washington and Beijing. As Clinton wrote, “This is why I have met so frequently — often in informal settings — with my Chinese counterparts, State Councilor Dai Bingguo and Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi, for candid discussions about important challenges like North Korea, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, and developments in the South China Sea.”⁴Clinton, “America’s Pacific Century.”

Routine diplomatic outreach to China on Afghanistan at working and cabinet levels became a norm during the Obama administration.⁵Kerry Dumbaugh, “U.S. Strategy in Afghanistan-Pakistan: Chinese Views and Interests,” Center for Naval Analyses, September 2010, https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/html/tr/ADA530728/index.html, 5. Washington spearheaded initiatives to encourage China’s involvement in regional economic connectivity, Afghan capacity building, and multilateral diplomatic initiatives. U.S. officials also believed that China’s shared interest in combatting Islamist extremism and terrorism should incentivize Beijing to pressure neighboring Pakistan to play a more helpful role in the conflict, even if many doubted Islamabad could ever be convinced to eliminate entirely the safe havens and funding streams that kept the insurgency in business.⁶Vanda Felbab-Brown, “A Bri(dge) Too Far: The Unfulfilled Promise and Limitations of China’s Involvement in Afghanistan,” Brookings Institution, June 2020, https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/fp_20200615_china_afghanistan_felbab_brown.pdf.

For its part, although Chinese leader Jiang Zemin immediately promised to support U.S. counterterrorism activities in a call with President George W. Bush shortly after 9/11, China only grudgingly came to terms with the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan.⁷“U.S.-China Counterterrorism Cooperation: Issues for U.S. Policy,” Congressional Research Service, July 15, 2010, https://www.everycrsreport.com/files/20100715_RL33001_b6a3bc61b40d5ae265bdd06c57f36b5991d8f715.pdf. Beijing was in no position to challenge the U.S. intervention, but  initially feared it could serve as a permanent beachhead for U.S. power on China’s western flank and refused to engage in cooperative ventures with the NATO-led coalition.⁸Barnett R. Rubin, “Chinese Peacemaking Efforts in Afghanistan,” Stimson Center, September 23, 2024, https://www.stimson.org/2024/chinese-peacemaking-efforts-in-afghanistan/. It is important to recall that the first year of the George W. Bush administration featured a tense US–China standoff over the EP-3 incident, when a U.S. reconnaissance plane collided with a Chinese fighter jet. Prior to the 9/11 shock, U.S. national security policymakers were increasingly focused on China as a potential “peer competitor,” and Beijing was generally skeptical of U.S. intentions.⁹William S. Cohen, Annual Report to the President and the Congress (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Defense, 2001), https://history.defense.gov/Portals/70/Documents/annual_reports/2001_DoD_AR.pdf. Reflecting its lingering skepticism, in 2005 China — through the Shanghai Cooperation Organization — publicly urged the U.S.-led coalition to set a deadline for departure from Afghanistan.¹⁰Sergei Blagov, “Shanghai Cooperation Organization Summit Suggests New Russia-China Links,” Jamestown, July 6, 2005, https://jamestown.org/shanghai-cooperation-organization-summit-suggests-new-russia-china-links/.

However, especially after China had witnessed the limitations of Obama’s  18-month military surge (announced in December 2009), Beijing feared the United States would leave the country more unstable and terrorist-infested than ever. That concern made Beijing relatively more receptive to Washington’s diplomatic outreach, if still wary.

One of the most tangible consequences of China’s receptivity to working with the United States in Afghanistan was the 2012 creation of a joint US–China training program for Afghan diplomats.¹¹U.S. Department of State, “United States-China Cooperation in Afghanistan,” media note, May 17, 2012, https://2009-2017.state.gov/r/pa/prs/ps/2012/05/190207.htm. Reflecting on the project, China’s ambassador to the United States, Cui Tiankai, said, “The China-U.S. joint training program for the Afghan diplomats has enhanced the mutual understanding among China, U.S. and Afghanistan, shows the international community’s support and commitment to Afghanistan’s peace and reconstruction. It is a good model for China-U.S. cooperation in the third country.”¹²Embassy of the People’s Republic of China in the United States of America, “Ambassador Cui Tiankai Attended the Opening Ceremony of China-US Joint Training Program for Afghan Diplomats,” embassy highlights, September 9, 2015, https://us.china-embassy.gov.cn/eng/sgzc/201509/t20150910_4901023.htm.

Yet throughout this period, China still defined its interests in Afghanistan narrowly and never considered a major strategic shift in terms of its on-ground involvement inside Afghanistan or its relations with Pakistan. Beijing’s highest profile efforts were economic. It signed deals for major investments in the Mes Aynak copper mine (2007) and the Amu Darya oil fields (2011). However, progress on the ground was extremely limited and the ventures were never significant enough to lead Beijing to seek a different — more intense — engagement with Kabul, to place more of its own security forces on the ground, or to provide other forms of meaningful support to coalition or Afghan security operations. Countervailing Chinese interests, especially its desire to avoid risks to its own security forces, were far more powerful.

Starting in 2009, China began to have heightened anxieties about the security situation in Afghanistan, but here too the issue focused on China-specific concerns: rising violence in its western province of Xinjiang and its feared connections to Islamist groups based in Afghanistan and Central Asia like the East Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM) and later ISIS. To insulate itself from these threats, which became more acute as the United States began its post-surge military drawdown after December 2011, Beijing started to seek direct counterterror cooperation with Kabul, exemplified by a 2012 visit to Kabul by Zhou Yongkang, a member of the Standing Committee of the Politburo responsible for internal security.¹³Feng Zhang, “Amity, Security, Influence: Explaining China’s Policy Toward Afghanistan, 1949–2024,” Journal of Contemporary China (March 2025): https://doi.org/10.1080/10670564.2025.2471924. But China never attempted to use its leverage in Afghanistan or Pakistan to assist wider efforts at counterinsurgency in support of U.S. war aims.

In short, during this period, even though the United States and China generally avoided open disputes over Afghanistan, their aims never really aligned. Even during the early Obama administration when Beijing reciprocated Washington’s diplomatic outreach and permitted small-scale cooperative ventures like the joint Afghan diplomatic training program, China’s post-9/11 wariness about U.S. motivations in Afghanistan never entirely abated. Although “Great Power Competition” was not yet a part of Washington’s official lexicon, the underlying conditions of US–China relations clearly limited the nature of their cooperation.

Yet US–China frictions during this period should be viewed in appropriate context. They are best understood as contributing rather than decisive factors in the many setbacks and failures that defined the first decade of the war. US–China disagreement was neither the main cause nor the principal impediment to peace. Even if Washington and Beijing had worked together, they faced a Taliban insurgency that remained resilient despite massive pressure and losses inflicted by U.S. and coalition forces; a Pakistani state wedded to the pursuit of its own hedging strategy at high risk and cost to its own security; and a deeply flawed Western-backed Afghan government in Kabul. Needless to say, nothing in the way of US–China cooperation ever came close to overcoming these impediments to peace and stability.

Period 2: From Late Obama through Trump 1.0

Between 2014 and 2021, U.S. relations with China and policy on Afghanistan each changed markedly. At the same time, Beijing’s policies also changed. Less immediately clear, however, is how these changes were interconnected.

The Obama administration’s studied effort to avoid a “Thucydides Trap” with China eventually gave way in the face of increasing U.S. frustration over Chinese activities, including cyberattacks, industrial espionage, trade, island building in the South China Sea, and political repression in Hong Kong, among other disputes.¹⁴Graham Allison, “The Thucydides Trap,” Foreign Policy, June 9, 2017, https://foreignpolicy.com/2017/06/09/the-thucydides-trap/. By the 2016 election between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, it appeared that no matter who won, Washington was poised to take a tougher line with Beijing.

Although Trump initially opened the door to improved US–China relations, welcoming President Xi Jinping to Mar-a-Lago in early April 2017, his administration quickly built the policy and institutional frameworks for Great Power Competition, articulated in its National Security Strategy and National Defense Strategy.¹⁵National Security Strategy of the United States of America, December 2017, https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/NSS-Final-12-18-2017-0905.pdf; Summary of the National Defense Strategy of the United States of America, https://media.defense.gov/2020/May/18/2002302061/-1/-1/1/2018-NATIONAL-DEFENSE-STRATEGY-SUMMARY.PDF. This was followed by an escalating trade war, increasingly strident critiques of the Chinese Communist Party, and — especially after the Covid-19 outbreak — an aggressive diplomatic campaign that included tit-for-tat closures of consulates and expulsions of journalists. In its final days, the administration imposed new sanctions and restrictions on trade and investment, announced the end of engagement with China, and, as a parting shot, revoked its listing of ETIM as a terrorist group and declared that China was committing crimes against humanity and genocide in Xinjiang.

Beijing could easily perceive a hardening of U.S. policy dating back to the Obama era. Although they might not have anticipated the Trump administration’s exact lines of attack — specifically, its tough rhetoric and fixation on tariffs — Chinese leaders had long expected the United States to adopt some type of containment strategy, which is how they interpreted Washington’s moves.¹⁶Aaron L. Friedberg, Getting China Wrong (Medford, MA: Polity, 2022), 147. Several years earlier, Xi Jinping’s China, of course, adopted a more ambitious foreign policy, launching the Belt and Road Initiative in 2013. By 2017, Beijing declared that the world was experiencing “great changes unseen in a century,” by which China’s leaders meant a fundamental shift in the global order defined by the relative decline of the United States and the rise of China.

In a nutshell, China was not about to back down from strategic competition with the United States, so it tended to adopt a tit-for-tat response to Washington’s actions on trade, diplomatic actions, and rhetoric.¹⁷Ryan Hass, “How China is Responding to Escalating Strategic Competition with the U.S.,” China Leadership Monitor, no. 67 (Spring 2021), https://www.prcleader.org/post/how-china-is-responding-to-escalating-strategic-competition-with-the-u-s. As relations with the United States turned ever more hostile, Beijing grew less restrained in its handling of both domestic and foreign policies. Greater repression at home in Xinjiang and Hong Kong were paired with riskier moves abroad like the 2020 border skirmish with India. China’s “Wolf Warrior” diplomacy spiked during this period.¹⁸Joanna Nawrotkiewicz, “Understanding Chinese ‘Wolf Warrior Diplomacy,’” National Bureau of Asian Research, October 22, 2021, https://www.nbr.org/publication/understanding-chinese-wolf-warrior-diplomacy/.

Washington’s approach to Afghanistan also took a dramatic turn. By the end of the Obama administration, the policy shifted from counterinsurgency and state capacity building to fraught peace negotiations punctuated by continued counterterror operations.

The principal drivers of U.S. policy changes in Afghanistan were no secret. The United States had tired of a long and costly war. But it had failed to quell the Taliban insurgency by military means or major investments in Afghanistan’s civilian and military institutions. Having achieved many of its narrow counterterror objectives against the al-Qaeda perpetrators of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the time had come to cut a deal.

The Obama administration undoubtedly also considered its looming competition with China as it debated the wisdom of remaining heavily engaged in the “forever wars” of Afghanistan and Iraq. In other words, a logic of resource prioritization connected Obama’s decisions in Afghanistan with a grand strategy intended to place a greater emphasis on East Asia and competition with China in particular.

Although the Trump administration initially expanded the pace and ferocity of its military strikes against the Taliban, it soon focused greater attention on a diplomatic process intended to facilitate a U.S. military exit and a reconciliation agreement between the Taliban and Afghan government, which would preclude the resurgence of international terrorism in Afghanistan.¹⁹U.S. Department of Defense, Enhancing Security and Stability in Afghanistan (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Defense, 2020), https://media.defense.gov/2020/Jul/01/2002348001/-1/-1/1/enhancing_security_and_stability_in_afghanistan.pdf. Trump’s motives for exit were only slightly different from those of his predecessor. His critique of the Afghanistan war during the 2016 presidential campaign — which he portrayed as a “big fat mistake” and waste of national resources — emphasized the need to prioritize immediate U.S. domestic needs, not overseas wars.

President Trump did not tie his Afghanistan strategy to competition with China.²⁰Michael Grunwald, “Trump Goes Code Pink on George W. Bush,” Politico, February 14, 2016, https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/02/trump-code-pink-bush-iraq-9-11-213630/. Neither the administration’s 2017 Afghanistan strategy nor the National Security Strategy explicitly drew connections between Afghanistan and competition with China; instead, they focused on meeting the persistent challenge of terrorism and staving off instability in Afghanistan and its region. Both Trump’s initial “mini-surge” and his subsequent emphasis on negotiations with the Taliban reflected efforts at solving the U.S. problem in Afghanistan within a political and strategic context that precluded a massive new surge or an immediate withdrawal.

In short, the U.S. strategy for Afghanistan needed to change. And as the Obama and Trump administrations sought a way out of the war, neither initially let geopolitical competition with China get in the way. Neither perceived China as a reason to stay in the war or as the primary reason to get out.

Initially, neither Obama nor Trump even saw souring relations with Beijing as a fundamental impediment to diplomatic outreach on Afghanistan. To the contrary, the late Obama era witnessed some of the most intense US–China diplomatic choreography to date. From 2014, when Beijing appointed a special representative for Afghanistan, Sun Yuxi, Washington and Beijing worked together and in parallel on a series of diplomatic efforts to bring credible Taliban interlocutors to talks with the Afghan government. China’s primary role, from the U.S. perspective, was to encourage Pakistan’s facilitation of the process. Above all, that meant using Pakistan’s considerable leverage to get the Taliban to the negotiation table.²¹Barnett R. Rubin, “Chinese Peacemaking Efforts in Afghanistan,” Stimson Center, September 23, 2024, https://www.stimson.org/2024/chinese-peacemaking-efforts-in-afghanistan/.

In July 2015, these preparatory efforts bore fruit in Pakistan-hosted talks in Murree, northeast of Islamabad. Chinese, U.S., Pakistani, Afghan, and Taliban representatives were all present. Although that minor diplomatic breakthrough did not deliver substantive progress, the next year it led to the formation of the Quadrilateral Coordination Group, comprised of the same members.

Progress along this specific diplomatic track was disrupted in May 2016 when U.S. forces killed Taliban leader Mullah Mansour. But Washington continued to seek diplomatic coordination with China after Trump’s election. Despite the overall tenor of sharpened competition with Beijing, Amb. Khalilzad’s team continued its outreach to Chinese counterparts, perceiving Beijing’s policies as important to the ultimate success of negotiations with the Taliban and not necessarily at odds with American interests.²²Felbab-Brown, “A Bri(dge) Too Far,” 5. Simultaneously, however, other administration policies — such as the removal of ETIM from the State Department’s list of foreign terrorist organizations — put competition with China ahead of cooperation with China in Afghanistan.

For its part, China’s policies in Afghanistan also shifted during the late Obama and Trump administrations. Above all, Beijing expanded its security and diplomatic activities to counter possible threats directed at it by Uyghur militants. A worrisome increase in Uyghur terrorist attacks inside China, including high-profile incidents in 2013 (in Tiananmen Square) and 2014 (Kunming train station), led Beijing to pursue more intensive counterterror cooperation with Afghanistan and Tajikistan, especially to stem cross-border movements from Badakhshan province into China along the Wakhan Corridor.²³Zhang, “Amity, Security, Influence.”

In 2016, after a visit to Kabul by Fang Fenghui, chief of the Joint Staff of the Central Military Commission, China helped establish the Quadrilateral Cooperation and Coordination Mechanism with Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Tajikistan to bolster counterterrorism efforts. China supported Tajikistan’s security forces and even built its own paramilitary base inside Tajikistan.²⁴Gerry Shih, “In Central Asia’s Forbidding Highlands, a Quiet Newcomer: Chinese Troops,” Washington Post, February 28, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/in-central-asias-forbidding-highlands-a-quiet-newcomer-chinese-troops/2019/02/18/78d4a8d0-1e62-11e9-a759-2b8541bbbe20_story.html. People’s Armed Police conducted patrols with Afghan forces inside Badakhshan; helped build an Afghan mountain brigade; and provided financial assistance, training, and weapons to the Afghan security forces intended to improve their counterterror capabilities.²⁵Zhang, “Amity, Security, Influence.”

On the diplomatic front, China continued to work with and through Pakistan to advance its security interests with the Taliban. China never pressured Islamabad to turn against the Taliban (as Washington would have liked). Instead, China perceived that the Taliban would remain a relevant player in Afghanistan, regardless of whether it ever reconquered the entire country, so Beijing used its ties with Pakistan to cultivate relations with Taliban insurgent leaders as a way to establish terms for defending China’s security.

Starting as early as 2014, China attempted — with Pakistan’s assistance — to facilitate talks between Kabul and the Taliban.²⁶Andrew Small, “China’s Foreign Policy Comes of Age,” The New York Times, March 26, 2015; Margherita Stancati, “Afghan Peace Envoy Met Taliban in Secret China Talks,” Wall Street Journal, May 24, 2015, https://www.wsj.com/articles/afghan-peace-envoy-met-taliban-in-secret-china-talks-1432486585. As noted above, China encouraged and participated in the leadup to the 2015 Murree talks with the United States during the Obama administration, and then continued its diplomatic outreach, including through participation in subsequent Russian-led talks.²⁷Barnett R. Rubin, “Chinese Peacemaking Efforts in Afghanistan,” Stimson Center, September 23, 2024, https://www.stimson.org/2024/chinese-peacemaking-efforts-in-afghanistan/. By 2019, Beijing openly hosted Taliban deputy Abdul Ghani Baradar for consultations.

As this period wore on, China’s heightened competition with the United States manifested in Beijing’s increasingly public criticism of the U.S.-led coalition in Afghanistan.²⁸Bloomberg News, “Welcome to Wolf-Warrior Diplomacy,” Bloomberg December 3, 2020, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2020-12-04/welcome-to-wolf-warrior-diplomacy. Although this rhetorical point scoring was not the core feature of China’s policy, China’s sharpening geopolitical competition with the United States gave Beijing no incentive to do Washington any favors.

In the economic development sector, although Beijing discussed the prospect of extending its China-Pakistan Economic Corridor from Pakistan into Afghanistan to knit Afghanistan into China’s vaunted Belt and Road Initiative, that vision never materialized. Prior Chinese investments in Afghanistan largely remained on pause.²⁹Yun Sun, “China’s Strategic Assessment of Afghanistan,” War on the Rocks, April 8, 2020, https://warontherocks.com/2020/04/chinas-strategic-assessment-of-afghanistan/.

In sum, China’s policies undoubtedly frustrated the United States. Even when Beijing helped to facilitate peace negotiations, it refused to place pressure on Pakistan to squeeze the Taliban. It continued to offer only limited support to stabilize the Afghan government and economy, and it (increasingly openly) met with Taliban leaders. From Washington’s perspective, Beijing did far too little to advance Afghanistan’s peace, prosperity, or security. Yet from Beijing’s point of view, China’s actions were merely pragmatic responses to what it perceived as a failing U.S. war strategy in Afghanistan and the need to defend its own security against Uyghur terrorist groups.

During this period the space for US–China cooperation in Afghanistan waxed with the narrow (yet important) work of opening negotiations with the Taliban, then waned as US–China competition and rhetorical sparring heated up. Still, it is worth noting that even China’s most unhelpful actions only undermined U.S. policy in Afghanistan in ways that marginally shifted the trajectory of the war. The conflict had already turned against the United States without China’s help. The Taliban, Pakistan, and deficiencies of the Kabul government saw to that. Nor is it likely that a closer and more cooperative US–China relationship, had it existed, would have reversed the tide in Afghanistan by that belated point in the conflict.

Period 3: Biden’s Withdrawal and Immediate Aftermath

Entering office in January 2021, President Biden was clearly intent on distancing many of his policies from those of his predecessor. But Biden chose the stay the course with respect to China and Afghanistan. This meant doubling-down on geopolitical competition with China and completing a negotiated military withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Biden’s views on China were evident from his first major foreign policy speech, in which he vowed to “take on directly the challenges posed by our prosperity, security, and democratic values by our most serious competitor, China.”³⁰Joseph R. Biden, “Remarks by President Biden on America’s Place in the World,” (speech, Washington, D.C., February 4, 2021), White House, https://bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2021/02/04/remarks-by-president-biden-on-americas-place-in-the-world/. Biden’s team retained Trump-era tariffs but aimed to rebuild strained alliances, cultivate and deepen strategic partnerships, and re-establish Washington’s international standing in ways that would, over time, create a favorable and sustainable balance of power with China.³¹Bonnie S. Glaser and Hannah Price, “Continuity Prevails in Biden’s First 100 Days,” Comparative Connections 23, no. 1 (May 2021), https://cc.pacforum.org/2021/05/continuity-prevails-in-bidens-first-100-days/. Right out of the gate, the administration signaled its toughness by sanctioning twenty-four Chinese officials who had been involved in the crackdown on Hong Kong’s political activists.³²Alexander Ward, The Internationalists: The Fight to Restore American Foreign Policy After Trump (New York, NY: Portfolio, 2024), 42-43.

Not surprisingly, the first high-level meetings between U.S. and Chinese leaders (in Alaska, March 18-19, 2021) were acrimonious, at least in public. China’s senior-most foreign policy official, Yang Jiechi, traded barbs with Secretary of State Antony Blinken. Both sides aimed to project strength.³³“US and China Trade Angry Words at High-Level Alaska Talks,” BBC, March 19, 2021, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-56452471. China clearly anticipated continuing challenges with the Biden administration. When Washington proposed that it would be wise to seek “guardrails” in the bilateral competition to reduce the chances of unnecessarily dangerous conflict, Beijing countered that the United States should relent on core issues like Hong Kong, Taiwan, Xinjiang, tariffs, and sanctions before China would enter new cooperative ventures.³⁴Patricia M. Kim, “Working Toward Responsible Competition with China,” Brookings Institution, October 8, 2021, https://www.brookings.edu/articles/working-toward-responsible-competition-with-china/.

While Washington and Beijing continued to sound each other out, the Biden administration launched an urgent review of its Afghanistan policy. In many ways, a U.S. military withdrawal might have seemed a foregone conclusion. On the presidential campaign trail, Biden made no secret of his preference to end U.S. involvement in Afghanistan’s war. And by the time he entered the White House, the Trump administration had already accepted a deal with the Taliban to withdraw U.S. troops by May 1, 2021. Even so, the final decisions about whether and how the United States would actually leave Afghanistan remained unsettled.

In the monthslong policy debate that ensued, Biden’s cabinet considered a full range of options, including rejecting or renegotiating the Trump administration’s deal with the Taliban. One part of that conversation concerned the opportunity costs associated with remaining in Afghanistan instead of focusing on competition with China (and Russia). Officials also debated whether leaving Afghanistan would show weakness and embolden U.S. adversaries.

To a greater extent than either the Obama or Trump administrations before it, the Biden team assessed Afghanistan policy through a lens of ongoing great power competition. Even so, that assessment did not lead Biden’s policy review to an obvious conclusion. His closest advisers, including Antony Blinken, were not entirely sure how the president would handle the war’s endgame. Many outside observers did not believe that the administration was serious about a full and rapid military pullout. NATO allies pushed hard for a “conditions based” withdrawal rather than a Taliban-imposed deadline, and up until early April 6, 2021, the president had not made a final decision.³⁵Ward, The Internationalists, 76.

When President Biden announced on April 14 that U.S. forces would depart Afghanistan by September 11, 2021 and explained that, “we’ll be much more formidable to our adversaries and competitors over the long term if we fight the battles for the next twenty years, not the last twenty,” his words reflected, in part, his view that the United States needed “to shore up American competitiveness to meet the stiff competition we’re facing from an increasingly assertive China.” That said, like the Obama and Trump administrations, Biden’s team also had to consider facts on the ground in Afghanistan itself, and above all the reality that prospects for victory, or even for ensuring a more favorable deal from the Taliban, looked bleak. As Biden argued, “We cannot continue the cycle of extending or expanding our military presence in Afghanistan, hoping to create ideal conditions for the withdrawal, and expecting a different result.”³⁶Joseph R. Biden, “Remarks by President Biden on the Way Forward in Afghanistan,” (speech, Washington, D.C., April 14, 2021), White House, https://bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2021/04/14/remarks-by-president-biden-on-the-way-forward-in-afghanistan/.

The U.S. choice to withdraw from Afghanistan, contentious at the time, remains a subject of debate. Less debatable, however, is the fact that the Biden administration bungled its implementation of that strategy in ways that turned a defensible strategic move into a debacle. Plans for Afghan forces to hold the line against the Taliban as the U.S. presence dwindled to zero unraveled faster than Washington anticipated. Not only did the country fall to the Taliban, but the ensuing deadly chaos damaged the reputation of the administration and raised questions about American power, capabilities, and commitment to its partners. That hardly played to the U.S. advantage in its global competition with China.

China jumped at the chance to capitalize on Washington’s failure, slamming the missteps of the military withdrawal and, more broadly, observing how Afghanistan exposed the limits of American power and flawed approach to foreign affairs. The violence and uncertainty associated with the U.S. withdrawal created easy targets for China’s public criticism, and Beijing was in a point-scoring mood.

In April 2021, as the situation in Afghanistan deteriorated, China’s foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian offered a characteristically harsh assessment of the U.S. role, stating that, “The two decades of U.S. presence in Afghanistan is two decades of death and displacement of innocent Afghan civilians and two decades of unchecked local drug proliferation. With its irresponsible and hasty withdrawal, the U.S. has left behind a series of grim challenges to the innocent Afghan people, including the drug issue. The U.S. should reflect on its behavior, offer sincere apologies and ample compensations, and strive to undo the harm it has inflicted on the Afghan people with concrete actions.”³⁷Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China, “Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Zhao Lijian’s Regular Press Conference on April 7, 2022,” press conference, April 7, 2022, https://www.fmprc.gov.cn/eng/xw/fyrbt/lxjzh/202405/t20240530_11347258.html.

In August, the always shrill Global Times crowed that the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan was a repeat of Vietnam and with it, “the U.S. is facing the embarrassment of spending 20 years building the Afghan military without any actual effect.” Still worse, “It also proves that Washington is an “unreliable partner” that always abandons its partners or allies to seek self-interest. Those countries that rely on the U.S. for security should understand from the current predicament in Afghanistan that the U.S. only makes false promises and cares about its own interest.”³⁸Qian Feng, “US, Not China, Faces ‘Awkward Reality’ in Afghanistan,” Global Times, August 15, 2021, https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202108/1231515.shtml.

In the weeks after the fall of Kabul, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi observed that “The United States and its allies withdrew from Afghanistan hastily, indicating that the power politics, military intervention and so-called ‘democratic transformation’ promoted by the Western countries led by the United States ended in failure.” He added that, “the United States and its allies are the culprits of the Afghan issue. Over the past 20 years, terrorist forces in Afghanistan have been on the rise instead of being eradicated, and the Afghan people have been stuck in poverty and hardship instead of achieving development and dignity.”³⁹“Wang Yi Attends First Foreign Ministers’ Meeting on the Afghan Issue Among the Neighboring Countries of Afghanistan,” Embassy of the People’s Republic of China in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, September 8, 2021, https://gb.china-embassy.gov.cn/eng/zgyw/202109/t20210909_10235863.htm.

Point scoring aside, Chinese analysts also appreciated that U.S. failure in Afghanistan was not entirely a zero-sum game for China. Beijing faced a more complicated dilemma; although the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan had never been a welcome one from China’s perspective, it did have some stabilizing consequences as well as the important value of turning U.S. attentions and resources away from competition with China. The U.S. withdrawal would leave China with new problems on its doorstep. Reflecting the depth of China’s wariness about U.S. intentions in Afghanistan, some Chinese analysts were not convinced, even until the last moment, that U.S. forces would really depart from Afghanistan. They anticipated that one way or another Washington would use Afghanistan as leverage against China.⁴⁰Yun Sun, “How China Views the U.S. Withdrawal from Afghanistan,” War on the Rocks, May 13, 2021, https://warontherocks.com/2021/05/how-china-views-the-u-s-withdrawal-from-afghanistan/.

Facing these competing concerns and anxieties, China had some important cards to play with the Taliban. In July 2021, Wang Yi hosted Taliban deputy leader Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar in Tianjin for a high-profile summit. The images from that meeting, beamed across the world, granted important legitimacy to the Taliban, and undoubtedly caused heartburn in Kabul and Washington. However, Beijing’s diplomatic gambit was likely less motivated by the ambition to impose China’s will on the Afghan war or to undermine U.S. policy, and more by China’s increasing security concerns in the context of an increasingly dangerous environment.⁴¹Yun Sun, “A Reluctant Embrace: China’s New Relationship with the Taliban,” War on the Rocks, August 10, 2021, https://warontherocks.com/2021/08/a-reluctant-embrace-chinas-new-relationship-with-the-taliban/. In that respect, the meeting held promise: Baradar firmly and publicly repeated a Taliban pledge that Afghanistan’s territory should never be used by forces hostile to China.⁴²Xinhua, “FM Meets with Afghan Taliban’s Political Chief,” State Council of the People’s Republic of China, July 28, 2021, https://english.www.gov.cn/statecouncil/wangyi/202107/28/content_WS61011cfec6d0df57f98ddbb2.html.

The Chinese were not alone in doubting that the U.S. would ever leave Afghanistan. Leaders in Kabul and Islamabad were also incredulous, at least in part because they expected Washington would never leave the country in China’s lap, never permit its global leadership to suffer such a loss. These local perceptions and biases about how the United States would engage in great power competition with China may have worsened the confusion of the failing Afghan government and, at least indirectly, made everyone involved less well prepared for the U.S. military departure as it happened.

Throughout the war’s endgame and immediately thereafter, Beijing never appeared to have seriously considered stepping into the Afghan fray. Contrary to the arguments presented by Zhou Bo, a retired PLA Senior Colonel and frequent commentator in the Western media, in his notable August 20, 2021, op-ed for the New York Times, China did rather little to “step into the void left by the hasty U.S. retreat to seize a golden opportunity.” China never provided security forces, rapid delivery of assistance, or new investments in infrastructure or otherwise, much less the means to help Washington achieve “a soft landing of the Afghan issue.”⁴³Zhou Bo, “In Afghanistan, China Is Ready to Step Into the Void,” New York Times, August 20, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/20/opinion/china-afghanistan-taliban.html.

All told, during this momentous period of the conflict in Afghanistan, the Biden administration justified the U.S. withdrawal as a considered strategy to better focus on new and more important challenges, including great power competition with China. But the Biden administration’s decision was overdetermined; American politics and the ground realities of a “forever war” were crucial factors driving Biden’s choice.

Had the war looked more winnable, staying the course would also have been justifiable as a means to demonstrate U.S. power and credibility on the world stage and thereby better compete with China. Along similar lines, years later President Trump would claim that President Biden should have kept forces stationed at Bagram airbase as a means to surveil Chinese nuclear assets. In other words, the logic of great power competition did not uniformly point to the need for a full, much less a rapid, U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.⁴⁴Natasha Bertrand and Zachary Cohen, “Trump Admin Has Been Quietly Pushing to Retake Afghan Base From the Taliban for Months, Sources Say,” CNN, September 18, 2025, https://www.cnn.com/2025/09/18/politics/trump-bagram-base-taliban-afghanistan. To the contrary, many regional observers believed that Washington’s concerns about Beijing would lead it to hold on in Afghanistan indefinitely.

As it turned out, the precipitous and ill-managed departure cast doubt on Washington’s competence and opened easy avenues for Chinese criticism that served its aim of contesting U.S. leadership in the world. Otherwise, however, Beijing’s response tended to be more risk-averse than ambitious, mainly reflecting its trepidation about the dangerous ground realities in Afghanistan, its self-interested security concerns, and its lingering uncertainty about whether the U.S. departure was real and, if so, likely to be a net benefit to China.

Thus, heightened US–China competition during this period fed perceptions, motivated recriminations, and legitimated policy choices during the endgame of America’s longest war, even if it was never the central or sole driver for decisions made in either Beijing or Washington.

Period 4: Afghanistan Under the Taliban 2.0

For the rest of the Biden administration, competition with China remained a top national security priority, even while Washington simultaneously responded to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and the Hamas terrorist attacks that engulfed Israel and its region in conflict after October 2023.

In May 2022, Secretary of State Blinken offered a comprehensive statement on the administration’s China strategy, observing that “China is the only country with both the intent to reshape the international order and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to do it.” But, as Blinken also explained, “China is also integral to the global economy and to our ability to solve challenges from climate to COVID.  Put simply, the United States and China have to deal with each other for the foreseeable future.”⁴⁵Antony J. Blinken, “Secretary Blinken Speech: The Administration’s Approach to the People’s Republic of China,” (speech, Washington, D.C., May 26, 2022), U.S. Embassy & Consulates in Australia, https://au.usembassy.gov/secretary-blinken-speech-the-administrations-approach-to-the-peoples-republic-of-china/. To address this complex challenge, the United States should invest in ways that strengthen its own capabilities, align with allies and partners, and compete with China in defense of core interests.

For its part, China perceived that the Biden administration was as committed to sharp competition as its predecessor had been, if more inclined to act through predictable, systematic, and comprehensive means. Beijing responded with a mix of competitive initiatives that, in general terms, mirrored Washington’s. Beijing sought to strengthen its domestic economy in ways that would better insulate it from U.S. technology sanctions and expand consumer-led growth; redoubled its leadership in non-Western multilaterals and its global outreach to establish and deepen ties with other nations, especially in the Global South; and continued its military modernization, expansion, and reform.

Bilateral tensions worsened precipitously over Taiwan, especially in late summer 2022 when China responded aggressively to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to the island. And U.S. restrictions on exports to China of high-end semiconductor chips in October of that year highlighted how much strategic competition had displaced purely economic logics of trade and globalization.

Even as US–China relations remained difficult, both sides expressed — and repeatedly demonstrated — an openness to talks on issues of mutual concern like global climate change. Overall, by the end of Biden’s time in office the relationship could be best described as one of “managed competition.”⁴⁶David Shambaugh, “Reviewing U.S.-China Relations During Biden Era: Finding Some Modest Stability,” China-US Focus, November 22, 2024, https://www.chinausfocus.com/foreign-policy/reviewing-us-china-relations-during-biden-era-finding-some-modest-stability.

Afghanistan was not a specific area of formal US–China dialogue, but the two sides routinely tackled the issue in multilateral settings, including the United Nations, and raised specific issues of concern in bilateral meetings as well as through standard diplomatic channels and track 1.5 dialogues. Although American diplomats attended a meeting of the “Extended Troika” hosted by China in the spring of 2022, which included Pakistani and Russian delegations, it ended without agreement on a joint statement, marking the last time the United States participated.⁴⁷“Due to the position of the United States, the Extended Troika Meeting on Afghanistan fails to issue joint statement,” China Daily, April 3, 2022, http://regional.chinadaily.com.cn/amazinghuangshan/2022-04/03/c_794106.htm. 

Central to China’s Afghanistan strategy were several diplomatic initiatives that excluded the United States. Weeks after the Taliban swept into Kabul, China hosted the first in what would become a series of foreign ministers’ meetings among the neighboring countries of Afghanistan, including Pakistan, Iran, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan. China’s subsequent meetings in Tunxi included representatives of the Taliban interim government, and later Iran was added to the mix.⁴⁸Rubin, “Chinese Peacemaking Efforts in Afghanistan.” Afghanistan was a focal topic in SCO meetings in July 2022 and May 2023.

Relieved that its fears of catastrophic instability in Afghanistan, including massive outflows of refugees and a renewed civil war, had so far gone unrealized, China’s aims for these large multilateral forums were relatively limited. Beijing perceived that groups like the SCO offered a means to show Chinese leadership, encourage constructive regional cooperation when possible, and continue to criticize the United States, all without shouldering too much individual responsibility for Afghanistan’s fate.

Consistent with these aims, in April 2023, Beijing released an official document outlining “China’s Position on the Afghan Issue.”⁴⁹“China’s Position on the Afghan Issue,” Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China, April 12, 2023, https://www.fmprc.gov.cn/eng/gjhdq_665435/2675_665437/2676_663356/2677_663358/202304/t20230412_11057785.html#:~:text=8.,supporting%20or%20conniving%20at%20terrorism. By this point, one of Beijing’s core criticisms of the United States was that Washington’s sanctions on the new Taliban regime and its freeze on $7 billion in Afghanistan’s central bank assets obstructed economic development and, by extension, threatened stability. China claimed that by these actions “the U.S., which created the Afghan issue in the first place, is the biggest external factor that hinders substantive improvement in the humanitarian situation in Afghanistan.” 

Such arguments did nothing to sway Washington, where the Biden administration had no interest in letting up pressure on the Taliban government either by releasing funds that could land in the hands of terrorist groups or by granting it the legitimacy of international recognition. Lacking other points of international leverage, frustrated by the Taliban’s rejection of nearly all US demands (on women’s rights and inclusive governance, especially), and still reeling politically from its disastrous military withdrawal, the Biden administration remained locked in its stance until the end of its term.

Recognizing Afghanistan’s continuing humanitarian needs, however, the United States provided nearly $3 billion for humanitarian and development assistance between October 2021 and December 2024.⁵⁰U.S. Library of Congress, Congressional Research Service, Afghanistan: Background and U.S. Policy In Brief, by Clayton Thomas, R45122, March 7, 2025, https://www.congress.gov/crs_external_products/R/PDF/R45122/R45122.67.pdf. In addition, Washington devoted considerable effort to the resettlement of roughly 150,000 Afghans who worked with U.S. forces during the war.

The other main U.S. concern throughout this period was counterterrorism, as the Taliban regime again created a haven for Al Qaeda and struggled to defeat hostile ISIS-K forces that were also a threat to the United States. In July 2022, the United States killed Al Qaeda leader Ayman al Zawahiri in Kabul with a drone strike, a successful operation that also highlighted the persistent nexus between the Taliban and international terrorists. The administration expressed its commitment to maintaining an “over the horizon approach” to counterterrorism in Afghanistan, but there is no evidence that it made headway in coercing or inducing cooperation with the Taliban in these efforts or that the Taliban have lived up to their counterterror commitments negotiated through the end of the first Trump administration.

China shared similar concerns about the evolving ground realities inside Afghanistan. While Beijing publicly castigated the United States, it also blamed the Taliban for intransigence on policies that could have made lifting international sanctions marginally easier, such as denying education to women and girls.⁵¹“Reluctant Critic China Urges Afghan Changes on Women’s Roles,” AP, https://apnews.com/article/china-afghanistan-pakistan-taliban-women-638cee9e2e3c9d552d5e0f29d2b87d9e. Above all, however, Beijing worried about the threat posed by anti-Chinese terrorists like ETIM and ISIS-K. Yet Beijing took a very different approach with the Taliban regime. It was the first country to appoint a new ambassador to Kabul in September 2023, and in January 2024 accepted a Taliban ambassador to China. Although Beijing has not officially “recognized” the Taliban regime, the moves were clearly intended to normalize diplomacy and open channels for counterterror and other forms of bilateral cooperation. In addition, China dangled carrots for the Taliban, stressing its willingness to contribute to Afghanistan’s economic development with new investments.

Beijing was, however, disappointed by how the Taliban managed terrorist threats. Rather than confronting or expelling ETIM, the Taliban relocated the militants away from the border with China. Worse, in December 2022 and January 2023, ISIS-K launched deadly attacks on Chinese workers and a delegation visiting Kabul. As a consequence of these security concerns, and given Afghanistan’s many limitations of physical and institutional infrastructure, China refrained from any major new investments in Afghanistan, despite clear interests in exploiting the country’s resources, including reportedly massive lithium reserves.⁵²Sarah Godek, “China’s Unenthusiastic Economic Engagement with Taliban-Led Afghanistan,” Stimson Center, April 9, 2025, https://www.stimson.org/2025/chinas-unenthusiastic-economic-engagement-with-taliban-led-afghanistan/; Zhang, “Amity, Security, Influence,” 14-15.

Thus, after the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan and throughout the remainder of the Biden administration, Washington and Beijing found themselves frustrated by the Taliban, albeit to different degrees and for different reasons. Given their deepening geopolitical competition, however, there was little prospect that the United States and China would present a unified front in Afghanistan. One could imagine a world in which the two pushed Kabul on their shared concerns with respect to issues like counterterrorism, women’s rights, and economic development. But US–China trust was in too short supply.

Even so, it would also be incorrect to perceive that US–China competition shaped the core pillars of either U.S. or Chinese policies in Afghanistan during this period. Yes, Beijing spared no opportunity to blame Washington for Afghanistan’s sorry state and to pursue an independent — and at times, even exclusive — diplomatic agenda. But overall, China remained cautious in its approach, continued to define its interests narrowly and never seriously attempted to project itself into the power vacuum left by the United States. And, given Taliban intransigence, it is hardly certain that a joint US–China effort would have paid dividends anyway.

Nor did the United States develop its post-withdrawal strategy for Afghanistan as a means to occupy China or even to fuel anti-Chinese terrorism, though some Chinese were suspicious of U.S. motivations.⁵³Feng Zhang, “China’s New Engagement with Afghanistan after the Withdrawal,” LSE Public Policy Review 2, no. 3 (May 2022), https://doi.org/10.31389/lseppr.52. To be sure, Washington had no sympathy for Beijing’s new headaches in Afghanistan and found China’s diatribes on U.S. intervention galling. But U.S. leverage was extremely limited after withdrawing its military. Washington used what policy tools it had — sanctions, non-recognition, and frozen assets — to address more immediate concerns in Afghanistan: terrorism, limiting humanitarian suffering, and promoting human rights. There is no evidence that the United States intentionally worsened the Afghan quagmire to spite China.

Trump 2.0 and New Questions

Since 2021, President Trump has fiercely criticized Biden’s bungled Afghanistan withdrawal. Trump never missed an opportunity to say he would have handled it differently. On his return to office in 2025, Trump continued to hammer this point, and, by mid-spring, he claimed that if he had remained in office in 2021, the United States would have retained control over Bagram airbase even after a withdrawal. In September, he publicly revealed that he was attempting to “get it back,” suggesting that the base was a part of active negotiations with the Taliban.⁵⁴Bertrand and Cohen, “Trump Admin Has Been Quietly Pushing to Retake Afghan Base.” Trump also connected Bagram directly to U.S. competition with China, observing that “one of the reasons we want that base is, as you know, it’s an hour away from where China makes its nuclear weapons.”⁵⁵“Trump suggests U.S. troops could return to Afghan base over China concerns,” NPR, https://www.npr.org/2025/09/18/g-s1-89474/trump-suggests-u-s-troops-could-return-to-afghan-base-over-china-concerns.

There is no publicly available evidence that the Taliban would ever permit any U.S. return to Bagram. To the contrary, representatives of the ruling government have denied Trump’s claims outright.⁵⁶Elian Peltier, “Taliban Rebuffs Trump’s Effort to Regain Air Base in Afghanistan,” New York Times, September 19, 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/19/world/asia/trump-bagram-taliban.html. However, Trump evidently perceives Bagram’s potential strategic utility, both with respect to China and as a means to better confront the threat posed by regional terrorist groups. The operative question, looking to the future, is whether the Trump administration is considering a more thorough revision of U.S. policy in Afghanistan, and if so, how that would be influenced by competition with China.

So far, the other major features of Trump’s Afghanistan strategy have been an initial 2025 reduction of U.S. humanitarian aid, consistent with the elimination of the U.S. Agency for International Development; direct (and fruitful) talks to secure the release of remaining U.S. hostages, including a September 2025 trip by Adam Boehler, the U.S. special envoy for hostage response, and the designation of Afghanistan as a “sponsor of wrongful detention” in March 2026; and the continued application of prior U.S. sanctions, official nonrecognition, and freeze on banking assets.

Yet Washington’s policy on Afghanistan is — like every aspect of Trump’s foreign policy — highly transactional and personalistic. A consistent grand strategy, even with respect to U.S. competition with China, is not its hallmark. Broadly, Trump’s China policy has already swung between early tough talk and trade war escalation to a cordial October summit, framework agreement, and the president’s surprisingly positive references to a possible “G-2” condominium between Washington and Beijing.⁵⁷Trevor Hunnicutt, Laurie Chen and Mei Mei Chu, “Trump-Xi ‘Amazing’ Summit Brings Tactical Truce, Not Major Reset,” Reuters, October 30, 2025,
https://www.reuters.com/world/china/trump-xi-amazing-summit-brings-tactical-truce-not-major-reset-2025-10-30/; Chidanand Rajghatta, “The Return of the G-2 Duopoloy: US, China Embrace Leaves India out in the Cold,” Times of India, November 2, 2025,  https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/us/the-return-of-the-g-2-duopoly-us-china-embrace-leaves-india-out-in-the-cold/articleshow/125036540.cms. Trump’s roller-coaster policy ride on China has moved too rapidly for the U.S. bureaucracy and members of his own Republican party to keep up.⁵⁸Noah Robertson, “GOP Hawks Fell the Whiplash of Trump’s China Policy,” Washington Post, October 25, 2025, https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2025/10/24/xi-jinping-trump-china-summit/. There is no reason to anticipate that it would be synchronized with concrete U.S. actions in Afghanistan.

For its part, China punched back on Trump’s early trade escalation with retaliatory measures of its own, including new tariffs and export controls on rare earth minerals. Over Trump’s first year, Beijing’s moves appeared calibrated to demonstrate that it would not be cowed by U.S. pressure, but also that it would come back to the table when Washington was ready to negotiate for real. Recognizing Trump’s erratic and unpredictable approach, China is not likely to perceive any U.S. posture — tough or friendly — as reliably fixed and will hedge its bets accordingly.

On Afghanistan, China has similarly pushed back against Trump’s provocations. In September 2025, China’s envoy for Afghanistan convened his Russian, Pakistani, and Iranian counterparts on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly meetings in New York to reject Trump’s comments about returning to Bagram airbase.⁵⁹Seong Hyeon Choi, “Beijing Leads Push Against Trump’s Bid to Reclaim Afghanistan’s Bagram Airbase,” South China Morning Post, September 26, 2025, https://www.scmp.com/news/china/military/article/3327030/beijing-leads-push-against-trumps-bid-reclaim-afghanistans-bagram-airbase. Chinese suspicions about U.S. intentions and activities in Afghanistan (not to mention in neighboring Pakistan) spiked during that period.

Yet this has not led China to double down or take other dramatic measures with respect to its own involvement in Afghanistan. Unlike Russia, which in July 2025 dropped its terrorist designation of the Taliban and officially recognized its legitimacy, China has continued to keep some distance from Kabul. China’s investments in Afghanistan only trickle into the country, to the point that Taliban diplomats increasingly seek alternatives, especially in the Gulf.⁶⁰Godek, “China’s Unenthusiastic Economic Engagement with Taliban-Led Afghanistan.” Beijing views the Taliban government as an untrustworthy and ineffective partner that continues to do too little to satisfy China’s counterterror concerns, especially on combatting ETIM fighters. From China’s point of view, this problem is only compounded by U.S. inconsistency and hypocrisy on counterterrorism, as Beijing believes U.S. officials have an entirely too permissive — and likely even supportive — attitude with respect to anti-Chinese separatist groups.

Looking to the future, it is as obvious as ever that while Washington and Beijing claim to share common concerns about threats from Afghanistan, like the resurgence of terrorism and regional instability, practical US–China cooperation remains a distant prospect. If China were to take Trump’s embrace of a G-2 seriously and if his logic of US–China partnership extended to Afghanistan, perhaps a dialogue could take place.⁶¹Richard Weitz, “The Afghan Crisis: Challenges and Opportunities for Sino-U.S. Relations,” China-US Focus, October 24, 2025, https://www.chinausfocus.com/peace-security/the-afghan-crisis-challenges-and-opportunities-for-sino-us-relations. At the moment, however, such prospects look farfetched; reporting from the May 2026 US–China summit in Beijing does not indicate that Afghanistan was even on the agenda.

Thus, US–China competition precludes joint cooperation in Afghanistan and probably reduces the chances that either Washington or Beijing will be satisfied by Kabul’s policy trajectory. Yet as in prior periods, Afghanistan’s relations with the U.S. and China are mainly the consequence of localized factors, not competition between the two great powers. The most important exception to this rule is Trump’s claim about retaking Bagram as a means to better deal with China’s nuclear program, but at this writing it is difficult to take that claim very seriously.

Conclusion

Since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the conflict in Afghanistan has taken place under the broader geopolitical shadow of evolving US–China relations. In the early years of the American intervention, China’s wariness about U.S. intentions in Central Asia led Beijing to keep its distance from the conflict. Later, even at the highpoint of US–China cooperative ventures in Afghanistan during the Obama administration, their strategic impact on the Afghan conflict was only marginal. As US–China relations turned steadily more competitive, meaningful cooperation in Afghanistan went from narrow to practically nonexistent.

Thus, at no point in the past quarter century did Washington and Beijing present a unified front in Afghanistan’s conflict. At most, they held regular diplomatic consultations, pursued small-scale cooperative projects (like training groups of Afghan diplomats), and joined in the opening, ill-fated stages of Pakistani-facilitated negotiations with the Taliban. Most of the time, however, they held differing assessments about whether and how best to deal with the Taliban. At worst, suspicions about the calculating motivations of the other side burst into public recriminations.

Some might imagine that, working hand in hand, China and the United States could have brought the Taliban insurgency to heel or otherwise engineered a better, more stabilizing conclusion to the war. For example, perhaps Beijing could have pushed Pakistan to compel the Taliban to accept a negotiated deal much earlier, as some U.S. policymakers fervently hoped.

Yet that hypothetical scenario underestimates Taliban obduracy. The group never accepted a peace deal that did not effectively deliver a victory. The scenario also overstates the leverage that Pakistan ever would have been willing and able to exercise over the Taliban, under any circumstance. Despite extreme international pressure, Islamabad never did more than bring its favored Taliban representatives to the peace table; it did not force them to make other material concessions.

In other words, any remotely realistic version of US–China cooperation could not have overcome the fundamental challenges of the Afghanistan war. It would have helped, but it would not — in itself — have been sufficient to turn the tide.

In addition, neither U.S. nor Chinese policies in Afghanistan were informed principally by the US–China relationship, no matter how calm or contentious. To the contrary, the major policy decisions by both Washington and Beijing were made with attention to the situation on the ground in Afghanistan. Among the best examples of this was Beijing and Washington’s willingness to work together in the late Obama era on the choreography of talks with the Taliban. That diplomatic process kicked off just as US–China geopolitical competition sharpened. But its failure had everything to do with the fundamental differences between the warring parties and other disruptive events (especially the U.S. assassination of Mullah Mansour), not with frictions between Washington and Beijing.

Similarly, it would be wrong to see China’s reticence to more energetically pursue its investments in Afghanistan’s economy during the U.S. intervention as a nefarious means to undermine the U.S.-backed government in Kabul. It would also be incorrect to see the messy 2021 U.S. departure from Afghanistan as a malign effort to stoke instability and leave a dangerous mess on China’s border. These conspiratorial claims wrongly underestimate how both Washington and Beijing — no matter their own differences — feared the consequences of a destabilized Afghanistan that would once again sink into civil war or offer unmitigated haven to international terrorists.

Another wrongheaded narrative presents Afghanistan as a strategic “prize” to be won by either the United States or China. Some in China long believed that U.S. policymakers would want to keep forces permanently based in Afghanistan as a strategic beachhead in Central Asia, as if that territory would offer Washington some geopolitical or other benefit. This view may have blinded Beijing (and others, like Afghan President Ashraf Ghani) to the possibility that the United States really meant to leave as soon as it could. President Trump’s recent claims about Bagram play into this perspective unhelpfully; the United States has other far less logistically difficult ways to spy on China’s nuclear assets, as any significant military return to Afghanistan would open another can of worms.

Similarly, some in Washington have anticipated that China would sweep in to fill the U.S.-sized vacuum after 2021. But China, happy to take a free ride when U.S. security operations targeted mutually threatening terrorist groups, has never shown an appetite to put a large number of its own troops in harm’s way. To the contrary, Beijing is more inclined to see Afghanistan as a quagmire and graveyard of empires. China’s criticism of U.S. policy failure there does not lead it to want to make similar mistakes.

All of this says a great deal about Afghanistan itself. It has always been the subject, object, and main driving force in shaping U.S. and Chinese policy there. The country is not a plaything or an empty space on some global geopolitical chessboard. Despite their overheated rhetoric, most policymakers in Washington and Beijing are likely to have learned this lesson from hard experience.