This really illustrates how the US just doesn't have the cards to get countries to cut ties with China.
Even Hungary, a small country of less than 10m people which government is extremely close to the Trump administration "rejects US pressure to reduce its Chinese economic ties", with its Economy Minister Marton Nagy saying: “we don’t see an investment potential from the US that would be on par with China.”
That's the thing: pragmatically speaking, the US cannot compensate even small countries for the consequences of cutting ties with China, so there's nothing in it for them.
For instance Hungary is positioning itself to be a major center in Europe for EV batteries, with Chinese battery maker CATL locating its second European battery plant in Debrecen, in the East of the country. How could the US replace China in this role? It's not even a credible player in EV batteries.
There's also a paradox, which I've mentioned a few times, in that many of the "Trump-adjacent" leaders like Orban or Argentina's Milei who pursue change agendas at home counter-intuitively prefer China than the U.S. as an economic partner precisely because it enables their transformative projects: China doesn't interfere in internal affairs and they're extremely predictable and stable.
Trump, on the other hand, while being ideologically similar to Orban and Milei, is not exactly the non-interfering and stable type... As his administration's pressure on Hungary "to reduce its Chinese economic ties" actually demonstrates: China doesn't have these sorts of conditions, asking Hungary to reduce economic ties with the US.
All in all, that's one of the big Trump ironies: his "America first" ideology is pushing his "my country first" ideological brothers to make China their partner of choice. They share Trump's anti-liberal vision of domestic transformation but conclude that China's hands-off approach actually gives them more freedom to pursue it than Trump's volatility would.
...we are no longer in the colonial era where the powerful can dictate their way around, and to expect subservience. Though we see some sort of subservience coming from India and Vietnam, the former is sucking up to US because Modi is of a similar populist mold and has ambitions to wrest US business investments away from China, while Vietnam is most susceptible US exporter country.
