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Why do it in a roundabout manner ? The cold-war with China is in full swing. It's 10 years too late for appearances.
Has that ever been true? Vietnam, Afghanistan & Iraq were net negatives for the US. The country has a storied tradition of wasting money in ways that 'adults' would deem unwise.
Same here. Trump (and those who he listens to) is a tactical genius and strategic buffoon. He's good at bullying as a means of getting small wins. But, he lacks the patience for grand games. His evaluation of the world is simple and myopic.
<semi_rant_begins>
China's rise and its inevitable challenge to America's supremacy had kicked off by 1978. Their current momentum has been half-a-century in the making. It took the half-century before that for America to build Pax-Americana into what it is (was?) today. Even at full-throttle it will take America ~2 decades to craft a new public image of itself. Trump wants to draw new cards. But, the old cards were good, and it may take a few draws before America finds itself with good cards again. In the short term., change will likely be for the worst And if the cards don't work out, the long term might be doomed as well.
Think about it, 2015 America was in a great place. The first world wanted nothing to do with China. There was balance.
Western Europe, Japan, SK & America were aligned in keeping China at arms lengths from their markets. BRICS nations were seen as long-term possible contenders to the first world. South Africa is aligned with the west. India didn't get along with China. Brazil's location makes it naturally align with America. Russia allied with China, but had delusions of grandeur that kept it from ever being subservient.
In this world, even if China had won, who would be in its umbrella ? Iran, Pakistan, Russia, SEA, Africa & some South American countries ? That's the grand alliance ? What did America have to fear ? Between South Asia, Poland, Turkey & HispanAmerica.... the 1st world had enough mid-industrialization partners for outsourcing low-margin industries. If robotics automation stayed on track, the 1st world's requirement for offshore labor would've ended right as these aforementioned nations became too expensive for outsourcing. Biden ran a cluster-fuck of a govt. But, the pre-2016 neolib consensus seemed to be doing just fine.
In 2025, I'm not so sure.
Will Europe, Canada & HispanAmerican nations seek opportunistic short-term deals elsewhere, instead of operating within America's umbrella ? China has a lot of money to throw around. Canada could solve its housing problem if it formally allowed Chinese nationals to park money here. Europe could make their money go further if they opened up to Chinese shopping portals like Temu and embraced Chinese electronics (Huawei, Xiaomi). Chinese belt-and-road style loans might start looking tempting to feudal countries if their elites weren't America educated (and therefore America aligned). Small nations would get on their knees and suck Xi off if China offered to divert the fire-hose of Chinese tourists to their nations. India could adopt a China-style make-everything-in-house strategy going forward. It wouldn't take it to first-world-dom, but it could operate within its means. India is poor, but 1.5 billion is a lot of consumers.
America dominates many sectors, but it is especially powerful in Tech and Entertainment. Guess what, both sectors are trivial to disrupt. Semi conductors, Pharmaceuticals and Heavy engineering take decades to build excellence in. But tech and entertainment can be disrupted overnight.
It would take less than 2 years for China to offer full replacements for O365, AWS and Windows. They already have competent alternatives for Facebook, Google, Tesla & Apple ready to go. Where would that leave the magnificent 7? With NeZha 2 & BlackMyth, they're already showing technical excellence in entertainment. Yes, America tells better stories, but that's only because American stories resonate. If Trump continues being a bully, will anyone want to see the next Rocky 4 or Captain America ?
I still don't get what was so broken about America that Elon & Trump needed to turn everything on its head.
<\semi_rant_ends>
I agree! But surely the writing was on the wall. In 2015, the economy of China grew 7%. In fact, it grew at least 6% every year from 1991–2019.
There's no counterfactual where the 2015 consensus stays in place forever. China is a country with 4 times the population of the US and a higher IQ. It's rise was inevitable once it adopted free market capitalism. And there's an easy path for them to double or triple their GDP from here, simply by catching up to Americans standards.
Short of a pre-emptive nuclear strike, there's nothing American could have done to keep China down.
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The problem is the sheer size of China. They are bigger than the US and EU combined, by a considerable margin. They are bigger than the entire Western camp in terms of population.
They produce half the world's steel. Their manufacturing is about as large as the next ten countries combined. They've been marching up the value chain, pushing into phones, cars, drones, semiconductors, biotech, everything...
Who needs allies when your economy is so big it has its own gravity well? BRICS is mostly for show, Russia and China are the ones that matter.
It goes to show the ridiculous short-termism and arrogance of Western leaders that nothing was done about this danger back when China was weak. We had Bill Clinton's 'the internet will make them democratic' theory in the 1990s that somehow lasted up until about 2012-14. It's totally unbelievable how stupid and confident they were. Nobody had ever seen the internet make any country democratic in the 1990s, it was an entirely untested theory! But that was the strategy, they literally telegraphed their subversive plan to Chinese leaders in their speeches.
Since then our leaders have been falling into this nightmare as they realize they lack the mental or kinetic power to realize their delusional aims. Joe Biden's hilarious 1990s joke about Russia and China cooperating turned into reality: https://x.com/SonjaEnde/status/1649318054969462788
This is what's so broken about America and the West generally, the people manning the wheel are so hopelessly stupid and confused that they do everything wrong. The EU has wrecked European industry with climatism and regulation, Britain is in a continuous crisis. And Trump certainly isn't helping. It's not written in the Art of War 'when facing a strong enemy, raise tariffs and enter disputes with your closest allies'. It makes zero sense. But he's doing it anyway.
The West is stupid and weak, or at least Americans, because we have rarely been challenged by a near peer country in anything of note. We’re used to being a giant in the room and really don’t have a “lived experience” of being the one on the receiving end, or even not being dominant. It’s easy to spot once you see it: Europe and North America believe they can bring millions of unreformed Muslim fanatics in a refugees and nothing will happen, they believe that Russia will collapse in the first week of the Ukraine war because of course they will. And because of this assumption that because we’re dominant now, we will always be dominant.
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This gets me every time. Imagine being so confidently wrong. Did he even think about this issue at all, or did he just read a Thomas Friedman book or hear a Tony Robbins speech and decide this was the path?
And that's why I can't take Bryan Caplan or Matthew Iglesias seriously. They want to import 1 billion third worlders into America. Like, dude, what if you're wrong? You can't take this back. You ruined America forever. On a theory.
The precautionary principle is overly applied to well understood domains like climate change and nuclear power.
But it's under-applied to chaotic domains like politics.
Chesterton's Fence is a good heuristic for this. It's probably a bad idea to completely rearrange the demographics of your country on the off chance that "nah... it will be fine!", but does that mean it's a good idea to take action NOW! to avert climate catastrophe? It might be (probably depends on the action), but it's far less clear than the other scenario.
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This is all downstream from the fact that the west shipped their entire means of production to China. That was stupid to the point of being suicidal. The only reason things seemed better in 2015 was because Western Civilization E. Coyote was still sprinting on thin air and hadn’t yet looked down and noticed that he was about to plunge headlong into the gorge. A three year lead on chip production was never going to make up for that, even putting aside the facts that the American academic-technological complex is overly reliant on foreign brain power and riddled with Chinese spies. Biden and the EU’s only proposed solution was to start a massive industrial war to try and claw it all back, which they would never be able to win because they don’t have an industrial base to fight it with.
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I'm baffled by perceptions of China and Chinese products in the West. There seem to be two camps:
Normie camp. China is the new evil empire. They spy on everyone and steal everything. Everything they make is fake and falls apart (Temu, electronics). Their "technical excellence" is just aping stuff America could do effortlessly a decade or more ago (lunar lander, Nei Zha 2, Black Myth Wukong) or it's kabuki theater (Deepseek is stolen tech and/or is a facade to hide massive investment and manpower to make it look like China is catching up). They cheat their allies on the global stage (crappy infrastructure built in Africa in exchange for minerals).
Contrarian camp. China is the new techno-cyberpunk future of the human race. Drone swarms shaped like dragons. Everything on your smartphone. Technical excellence matching that of America but at less cost (Nei Zha, BM:W, Deepseek). Futuristic Chinese cities. Transhumanism unfettered by Christian hangups. They offer their allies purely aboveboard transactional deals with no moralizing strings attached.
I even see it on this forum. My info is a bit dated now, but I used to be heavily interested in China and hooked in to Chinese culture and politics. My takeaway from my time over there living with and working alongside Chinese people was that China could never truly be a more attractive partner than America on the world stage because their core civilizational ideas are just not attractive or reassuring to non-Chinese. Most Americans see themselves as part of a universal brotherhood of nations due to America's enlightenment roots, but China see itself as the "middle kingdom" that should rightfully be at the center of Asia, and ideally the world. It is a civilization founded on ethnic chauvinism and an inward orientation. Barbarians ways are not to be understood or mimicked save for instrumentally in order to gain some advantage that furthers the Chinese race. Deals with other nations are entered into not out of any sort of altruism or common ground, but as purely transactional interactions, and deals only need to be honored so far as they continue to benefit China and the Chinese -- as soon as all the juice has been squeezed, the contract can be shredded and discarded, and former partners can simply be gaslit about the prior agreement.
The obvious counterpoint is that America's foreign policy establishment is just as ruthless and amoral, and perhaps even moreso since they distract from their misdeeds with platitudes about universalism and human rights. I think this is a fair point, but I would counter that the American establishment does actually have some true believers and that it is at least somewhat constrained by what the American voting public can stomach. China has no such checks. I would also counter that America's amoral foreign policy is a deviation from its core civilizational values, one from which (hopefully) it is beginning to course correct, while the ethnic chauvinism of China is core to its civilization self-identity and is thus much more deeply ingrained and less likely to change. I think we may see a few countries defect toward China, but I wager after a decade they will learn their lesson and either return to the American fold or take some sort of third-worldist position.
While I agree with your view, the other counterpoint is that they don't have to be attractive to non-Chinese. They just need to be attractive to those who rule the non-Chinese.
Many countries would prefer having purely transactional interactions. A standard Chinese strategy is to loan money to countries that don't like the strings the IMF attach to their loans. Of course, China has its own reasons for offering those loans and will happily snap up the collateral.
The populace are not and have not ever been much of a concern in places where they lack power.
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Now where have I seen that... I'm pretty sure it had something to with hats making something great...
This is de facto US foreign policy for the next four years or possibly longer.
Why would they when the Trump administration is doing their utmost to let everyone know that US is not interested in anything other than at best a transactional relationship (with a sideline of threatening to just take what they want)? An alliance requires trust. "I've just altered the deal. Pray I don't alter it again." isn't exactly the type of message to inspire anything like that.
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China has technical excellence and no taste. (at least in the way that the west can appreciate)
Black Myth Wukong & NeZha 2 were major points of contention because people couldn't decide if they were sufficient indicators of taste. The arguments scissored on if you believe taste is universal or cultural. IE. Should Chinese expression of taste be understandable from a western lens ?
Which was the crux of my original post. An America that believes in so called 'American values' is irresistible. Trump's America is not that. Trump's America is not an attractive place. (specifically this 2nd iteration).
The possibilities for what voting Americans can stomach has expanded toa point of discomfort with Trump's return to power. Perceptions matter. China's boogeyman status is based on perceptions / propaganda (whataboutism around Tiananmen) and so is America's 'prosperity for all' free world order. I agree with your impression of China. But, nations can be oddly shortsighted when China comes knocking with a wad of cash in tow.
This is a good summation of China today, I'm going to steal this.
Re. your last paragraph, I still think that MAGA has yet to prove that it's a paradigm shift rather than simply a temporary setback in Enlightenment Cthulu's endless leftward journey. Fat stacks of Chinese cash may inducen strategic myopia in weakly aligned nations, but if MAGA turns out to be a half-decade long fad, America and its core values will still offer the more attractive and reassuring bargain.
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