The Americans came on strong. Defense Secretary Mark Esper warned America's allies at the Munich Security Conference that it was time to "wake up" to the Chinese threat. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo declared that the West was "winning" the conflict with China. And a senior Trump administration official said Europe was "missing the point" if it did not see China through an "us against them" lens.

The Europeans also heard from a Republican member of the U.S. Congress that the raging coronavirus was an "opportunity" to turn the Chinese people against their government. And they listened as Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi described the Chinese telecommunications group Huawei as an "insidious form of aggression."

But most of these warnings fell on deaf ears at the three-day gathering, which ended Sunday and, as it does each year, brought leaders, diplomats, and the world's top foreign-policy thinkers to a crammed hotel in the Bavarian capital for frank debates about global challenges. What all the panels, breakfast meetings, and side discussions about China revealed most was that Washington and Europe are speaking a completely different language when it comes to China. And so long as they do, developing a trans-Atlantic agenda to respond to China's rise will be very difficult, perhaps impossible.

In the coming months, U.S. President Donald Trump could single-handedly torpedo prospects for such cooperation if he follows through on his long-standing threat to impose tariffs on European cars. This goes to the heart of another major obstacle to a common agenda: the vanishing sense in Europe that it can rely on what the U.S. administration says and does.

Trans-Atlantic trust has steadily eroded since Trump came into office and pulled the United States out of the Paris climate accord and Iran nuclear deal. His decision last October to abruptly withdraw U.S. troops from Syria without alerting allies first deeply unsettled European capitals. And his repeated assertions that Europe is far worse than China are hard to reconcile with Pompeo's reassurances that all is well in the West and Esper's demands that Europe join forces with the United States against China.

In Munich, the sense of U.S. policy disarray was reinforced when U.S. officials effectively admitted that they had been bluffing with their repeated threats to rein in intelligence sharing with Britain and other European countries that choose Huawei for their 5G networks. Implausibly, they also denied ever having issued such threats. "We've learned that you can't believe everything, or possibly anything, they say," a European diplomat said.

The hosts listened to the U.S. warnings about China politely. But even the conference host, Wolfgang Ischinger, a veteran German diplomat, couldn't help but push back against the American torrent, reminding the audience gathered in the Bayerischer Hof that China was in the midst of tackling the coronavirus, an epidemic of historic proportions, with implications for the entire world.

"I think China deserves some compassion, cooperation, some words of support, and encouragement rather than only criticism," he said.

German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier kicked off the conference by lumping the United States together with China and Russia as major challenges for Europe. "Our closest ally, the United States of America, under the current administration, rejects the very concept of the international community," he said.

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[...]

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