WASHINGTON — The United States and China are escalating a fight over the rules that shape trade, technology and security, while middle powers try to stop the international order from breaking into rival blocs. The struggle is increasingly waged through tariffs, export controls and legal countermeasures that treat the rulebook as leverage rather than a shared constraint, Dec. 27, 2025.
International order turns into a contest of law and leverage
Beijing moved Saturday to harden its trade playbook by passing revisions to its Foreign Trade Law, a package aimed at strengthening China’s ability to respond to economic pressure while updating the framework for digital and green trade, according to Reuters. The revision, set to take effect March 1, 2026, would expand authorities to restrict exports of certain goods and sharpen legal language to justify restrictions in a system where private exporters have become more prominent.
The change is a reminder that battles over the international order are not only rhetorical. They are increasingly written into statutes and enforced at ports. “It’s not totally lawless here. Better to have everything written out in black and white,” a Western trade diplomat told Reuters.
In Washington, the Trump administration is keeping pressure on Beijing’s technology ambitions while signaling it wants room for negotiation. The administration said it plans to impose tariffs on Chinese semiconductor imports but delayed the move until June 2027, as Reuters reported. The U.S. Trade Representative said China’s targeting of the chip industry for “dominance” was “unreasonable,” while China’s embassy warned that to “politicize, instrumentalize and weaponize trade and tech issues” would “benefit no one” and “will eventually backfire.”
Even as governments lean on unilateral tools, they are also trying to turn disagreements into cases that run through institutions instead of escalation cycles. China requested consultations at the World Trade Organization over U.S. “reciprocal tariffs,” formally opening a dispute that argues Washington’s measures breach WTO obligations, according to the WTO’s dispute-settlement notice.
Meanwhile, export controls have become a parallel set of rules for the high-tech economy, shaping what can be sold, where it can be shipped and who can ultimately use it. A Congressional Research Service report on U.S. controls for advanced semiconductors describes how restrictions have broadened beyond direct shipments to include licensing frameworks intended to curb China’s access to advanced chips and AI computing power through third countries, adding friction to global supply chains and raising the costs of compliance for multinational firms.
Middle powers try to keep the international order workable
For many governments outside Washington and Beijing, the priority is preventing a clean break that would force binary choices and deepen economic fragmentation. A Council on Foreign Relations analysis of middle powers argues that countries can act as both challengers and stabilizers inside multilateral institutions — pushing back against great-power dominance while still relying on predictable rules to protect their access to markets, capital and security partnerships. The analysis notes that the United States is slated to host the 2026 G20 summit after several recent G20 chairs from the Global South.
Concerns about the international order’s durability are not new. In 2018, political scientist G. John Ikenberry argued that liberal internationalism faced a deeper threat from fractures inside Western democracies than from rising powers alone, writing in “The end of liberal international order?” In 2020, a CFR policy memo warned that the World Trade Organization’s Appellate Body crisis risked turning disputes into mini trade wars by stripping the system of a functioning appeals stage, as outlined in a CFR memo on the Appellate Body.
What makes this moment a reckoning is that major powers are now rewriting rules as they go — and testing whether the international order can still produce outcomes that look like law, not just raw leverage.
