A Great Wall Around China

Overlooked by critics, the Trump administration is quietly building a containment architecture on trade.

Tariffs on Chinese goods are not effective if those goods can still enter the United States under another label. If a product made in China can be rerouted through a third country, lightly transformed, stamped “Made in Malaysia,” and sent into the U.S. market, then even the highest tariffs will not have the intended effect.

Jamieson Greer understood that problem before he had the power to directly address it. In May 2024, he testified before the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission. He was a private sector trade attorney at the time but had previously served as chief of staff to U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer during President Donald Trump’s first term, where he helped design and execute the Section 301 investigation into China’s intellectual property practices. That investigation led to tariffs on Chinese goods that today range from 7.5% to 100%, depending on the product category, and remain in full effect. In his testimony, Greer warned that the Section 301 tariffs “may need to be modified to prevent third-country workarounds by extending the effect of the measures to imports from Chinese headquartered companies or adjusting the rule of origin for goods subject to the Section 301 tariffs.” He urged Congress to limit preferential duty treatment for goods with Chinese content or produced by Chinese-owned companies.

Almost two years later, the New York Times profiled Greer—now serving in the same cabinet post once held by his former boss—as “the quiet architect of Trump’s global trade war.” What the profile did not fully explore was what the architect had been building: not just a set of bilateral deals on tariffs and market access, but a China containment architecture embedded in the administration’s so-called Agreements on Reciprocal Trade.

High tariffs on China have reduced bilateral trade flows. The U.S. goods deficit with China fell by nearly a third in 2025, while China’s share of U.S. imports has fallen to roughly the same level as before it joined the World Trade Organization in 2001. But China’s overall trade surplus—a consequence of its external imbalances driven by weak domestic demand and export-oriented industrial policy—has not shrunk; it has instead been rerouted. China recorded a historic $1.19 trillion trade surplus last year, with exports surging into Southeast Asia, Europe, Latin America, and Africa. That diversion—which has intensified during the first quarter of 2026—is pressuring third countries to choose whether to absorb China’s overcapacity at the expense of their own industrial bases or to join the United States in strengthening their trade defenses against it.

A tariff barrier, however, is only effective if other countries help reinforce the perimeter. Most commentary on the U.S.-China trading relationship focuses on the headline drama: tariff hikes, retaliation, ceasefires, and summits. Less attention has gone to the quieter construction of that perimeter, embedded in the nine Agreements on Reciprocal Trade that USTR has finalized with Malaysia, Cambodia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Argentina, Bangladesh, Taiwan, Indonesia, and Ecuador,and which will likely feature in agreements to come.

While it doesn’t grab headlines, the agreements contain a set of commitments that amount to a China containment strategy. None explicitly names China, but the provisions are clearly designed to address it. Though the wording and strength vary from one agreement to another, the provisions all serve three strategic functions: blocking Chinese goods from reaching the U.S. market through third countries, requiring partners to align with U.S. restrictions on China, and penalizing partners who undermine the architecture.

The first function—blocking the goods—is the most intuitive. Across the agreements, partner countries undertake anti-transshipment obligations—rules meant to stop goods from being routed through a third country in order to evade tariffs—and commit to cooperate with the United States on tariff evasion. They also include rules-of-origin provisions, the legal tests for where a product counts as having been made, that allow either party to deny benefits when third countries are effectively trying to pass through the bilateral relationship.

The upshot is straightforward: if Chinese goods are rerouted through, say, Cambodia or Ecuador to avoid U.S. tariffs, these provisions give the United States a legal basis to close that channel. The agreements also obligate partners to address the unfair practices of “companies owned or controlled by third countries,” a formulation that describes the mechanics of Chinese state-backed overcapacity without naming it directly.

The second function—aligning the partners—is the most consequential. The agreements contain “complementary actions” clauses requiring partners, when notified by the United States, to “adopt or maintain a measure with equivalent restrictive effect” as U.S. import restrictions on third countries. In effect, this means that if the United States restricts Chinese goods for economic or national security reasons, partner countries may be expected to impose comparable restrictions of their own.

The agreements also require partners to align with U.S. export controls on sensitive technologies and to ensure that their companies “do not backfill or undermine these controls.” This is designed to prevent partner countries from becoming alternative suppliers of goods that China can no longer obtain from the United States. Several agreements go further, requiring partners to use only telecom and infrastructure suppliers that do not compromise security, effectively excluding China’s Huawei and ZTE.

The third function—enforcing the perimeter—is the most blunt. The agreements include guardrails that allow the United States to terminate them if a partner enters a preferential trade agreement with a country that “jeopardizes essential U.S. interests.” In practice, that means that if a signatory later signs a free trade agreement with China, the United States can walk away.

None of this matters, however, if the United States is unable or unwilling to enforce the provisions. Monitoring compliance will require sustained attention and real administrative capacity, because trade agreements are not self-executing and depend on administering agencies having the institutional capacity to investigate violations and bring enforcement action. Enforcement will also require spending political capital—not only in bilateral relationships with partners who may resist, but also in the face of potential retaliation from China.

But the Trump administration has not left itself without leverage. After the Supreme Court invalidated the tariffs imposed under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act in late February, USTR launched two sweeping Section 301 investigations: one targeting structural excess capacity across 16 economies, including five signatories of Agreements on Reciprocal Trade, and another targeting failures to ban forced-labor imports across 60 economies, including all nine of the signatories. These investigations can provide a more durable basis for the administration’s tariff regime, and USTR can use their findings to weigh against commitments partners have made in their agreements. Partners who fulfill those commitments have a path to favorable treatment; those who do not may face new tariffs.

Properly understood, the Trump administration’s Agreements on Reciprocal Trade are a network of enforceable commitments designed to ensure that China’s overcapacity cannot use third countries as waystations to the U.S. market or undermine the bilateral trading relationships these agreements establish. The architecture that Greer described in his 2024 congressional testimony—before he had the authority to build it—is now being assembled, agreement by agreement, in the text itself.