It certainly feels like America (and allies) must adjust to a multi-polarity new world order. Where nuclear armed rivals vie for regional dominance.
This is really bad for Europe and Japan - who accepted American protection and stunted their own abilities. With America First isolationism in vogue - it emboldens China and Russia to feast on the soft underbelly of these prey - specially as the North melts and frozen goldmines like Greenland and Canada become very attractive.
We’re facing 3 major civilizational threats at once: a geopolitical realignment + AI + climate melting opening up new prizes for conquest. The next fight for world dominance will look very different from the last one.
Add the profound global demographic transformation driven by the global collapse in fertility and the very different levels from which it is collapsing -- with the result that the next generation of young people around the world will look a lot different from the last generation, and will live in different places -- and you've got a full complement of four horsemen for the coming apocalypse.
While you don't mention him, I feel like this article could have been written specifically for Noah Smith. I'm a big Noah Smith fan in general, and I've found his warnings (e.g. https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/sizing-up-the-new-axis) about the rise of Chinese industrial power vis a vis the U.S. eye opening and persuasive; but also irresponsible because I've felt like his framing and recommendations, were they to be acted upon by policy makers using his language, would dramatically increase the dangers of a Thucydides Trap (a term I hadn't known before but will now use going forward; thank you Graham) war.
Meanwhile, the question I've been asking myself as I contemplate what our policy toward China should be is "what would Jean Monnet do?" Monnet is known for being the "father of the European Union", but what I'm not sure people know is that the raison d'etre for his work was less about building up Europe and more about preventing another war between Germany and its neighbors by creating a web of both institutional and personal relationships that would make such a war unimaginable.
Now creating a “union” between the U.S. and China similar to the European Union is certainly not going to happen, but when I ask myself what Jean Monnet would do in this situation, a few ideas come to mind:
- Seeking out challenges (moving away from fossil fuels, climate engineering, preventing pandemics, space exploration, helping Africa build its infrastructure) where the U.S. can partner with China for the good of the world and creating joint institutions where Americans and Chinese are literally working together on these challenges.
- Not only reversing the decreases since COVID, but dramatically increasing the number of Americans studying and working in China and the number of Chinese studying and working in the U.S.
- Making our rhetoric about China more about collaboration and less about confrontation and being sure to couple any criticisms of China with statements of respect about Chinese’s history as a great nation and its contributions to the world.
Ultimately, it’s about clearly choosing this option--“Could we forge a partnership with China, given our mutual interest in so many areas, even at the risk of becoming a junior partner”--from your list of possible approaches near the end of your American Conservative article and doing everything we can to put institutional muscle behind that choice.
I think the prospect of a partnership with China -- along the lines of Britain's 20th century partnership with America -- is no longer realistic, if it ever was.
Certainly, the U.S.-China relationship, even were China to become a liberal democracy, is never going to be anything like the relationship between Britain and the U.S. We have a shared language, culture, and history with the British that will always make our relationship with them fundamentally different. But that doesn't mean we can't partner with China in some areas (even with China under the rule of the CCP).
The main point I was trying to make in the back and forth with Vieux Carre below is that I think the Chinese people have a bifurcated relationship with the CCP. On the one hand, there is a lot of resentment about the privileges that party members enjoy and the strictures of living under an authoritarian regime. At the same time, there is also pride in both China's history and its current place in the world, as well as deep resentment toward the West and its historical treatment of China; and as the rulers of China, the CCP both benefits from this pride and can take advantage of this resentment.
While I believe that the U.S. should do more to restore its industrial capabilities and modernize its military, I don't want to see the U.S. embark on a huge military build up and to start spending more than 5% of the budget on the military. Nor do I think it would be useful for the U.S. to adopt a strategy of containment toward China and to begin seeing international relations generally as a zero sum game where countries are asked to choose between aligning with us or China.
China may be a rival, but it is not our enemy, and there is no reason it needs to become one. But that could happen. Ultimately, it is a decision made by people. The question is whether you can create institutions and an environment that makes it more likely that that China will view the United States as a rival and partner rather than an enemy. The genius of Jean Monnet is that he understood this better than anyone and worked tirelessly and ultimately effectively (though there were many setback along the way) to build these institutions and environment to help Europeans view each other in this way. We need similar energy and vision for our relationship with China. To be clear, that doesn't mean trying to replicate the institutions Monnet helped create for Europe. But it does mean thinking in the way Monnet did about how you create institutions that help people decide that the interests of their country are ultimately best served through partnerships rather than war.
I can’t imagine a nation conceived in liberty wanting a close partnership with a regime that seems so contemptuous of individual freedoms. The CCP is an enemy of free people everywhere. Those aren’t people you make nice with.
I would certainly agree that a nation conceived in liberty, or any nation for that matter, should be critical of the Chinese Communist Party. And nowhere do I suggest that we shouldn't. When I call for us to "couple any criticisms of China with statements of respect about Chinese’s history as a great nation and its contributions to the world," the implication there is that we are going to criticize. And we should.
But what's critical when criticizing is that we need to clearly draw a distinction between the Party and the Chinese people as a whole. I'm married to a second generation Chinese woman, and while the family is fiercely critical of the Chinese party, one thing I was surprised at is how easily criticisms that one might think are criticisms of the Chinese Party are perceived as criticisms of China in general. Even among my wife's family, half of which fled to Taiwan in the 1940s and half of which suffered immensely during the Cultural Revolution (and almost all of who have come here and are now proud Americans), tend to bristle at many criticisms of China (at least when they come from non-Chinese). And I can only imagine at how much more strongly folks living in Chinese react. The legacy of colonialism and how it shapes how people in former colonies view rhetoric around freedom from the West should not be underestimated.
So I absolutely do believe that our rhetoric needs to always make the distinction between the Community Party and the Chinese people clear. And I also think that we absolutely need to partner with China where we can, in ways that have Chinese and American citizens working together to creates bonds of community that help reenforce the idea that ultimately our people have common interests which outweigh any rivalries.
Plus, there are no good other options. Certainly we don't want military conflict. And neither, I would argue, is containment a good alternative. Containment ultimately worked as a strategy with the Soviet Union, in part because most of the SSRs thought of themselves as being colonies of Russia and in part because the Soviet economy was such a disaster that it could not compete with the West. But neither of these factors are true for China.
The Chinese are people just like anyone else, but that’s pretty much irrelevant since they don’t get to make decisions about how their country is run. How we see the Chinese people or refer to them isn’t really going to change anything because winning their hearts and minds would only make a difference insofar as it might lead them to overthrow the CCP.
I don’t think there is much a free nation can do with a country run by tyrants except encourage them to overthrow tyranny and fight the tyrants like hell any chance we get.
I understand how folks thought that trading with China would make them liberalize but that seems to have failed. I thought it would work too, I’ll be honest. But now the trade they have grown wealthy from allows them to export their authoritarian ideas and state gangsterism. All of us in the West with rooms full of stuff made in China bear a partial responsibility for that. We owe it to the world to fight and win against the CCP, not make room for them.
The conversation about China would absolutely change if all of a sudden the hundreds of millions of people there were given the vote and the opportunity to speak for themselves. We might still disagree about the way the world should run, but at least it would be a legitimate government we could respect.
The Chinese people don't make decisions about who governs them, but the Chinese government is definitely constrained by what they believe the general population is willing to tolerate/support. A war with America (triggered presumably by an American response to an invasion or blockade of Taiwan or some other Chinese military action) is far more likely to happen in a world where anti-American sentiment is already virulent.
Meanwhile, when you write "We owe it to the world to fight and win against the CCP, not make room for them", I think you're living in the distant past. In World War I and II and the Cold War, we prevailed because we had a vastly bigger economic, industrial (and therefore military) capacity that eventually made the difference.
But today the Chinese economy is already bigger than ours. Their industrial capacity is much bigger. Their technological development is as advanced or better than ours in most areas related to warfare. And they have 4x our population! America cannot win a conventional war with China today (and is even less likely to be able to do so in the near future) and a non-conventional war would obviously be worse than disastrous for everyone. So until the CCP is no longer in power, we're going to have make room for them, even if we may wish that were not the case.
However, America does have one big advantage vis a vis the CCP over the long term: the fact that our government (at least comparatively) is considered legitimate. So in the medium to long term, I think the CCP does eventually get replaced. What I'm calling for is the strategy that I think is both most likely to make that happen eventually while also avoiding war.
Good analysis, raises a lot of good questions. The only thing I'll really argue with directly:
>an illiberal China would inevitably hamstring its own rise—because an authoritarian political system could not foster sufficient technological and economic innovation
I see the point, but economic growth in China has declined a lot, especially under Xi's more authoritarian regime, which seems to have been directly responsible for hamstringing some of China's growth. I was struck by the updated projections that China would NEVER overtake the US in nominal GDP, compared to earlier predictions saying this might have happened as soon as the 2020s. The main reason China remains a threat is its huge labor force, which is an advantage in the process of evaporating (and notably, that labor force advantage is declining more rapidly than China's population itself).
Though China's looming relative decline isn't entirely a good thing. I'm not sure how much I like the Thucydides Trap framework, but I do think there's an especially acute danger when a rising power finds that its moment in the sun is going to be brief and that it has a limited window to lock in geopolitical gains. E.g., the World Wars happened at least in part because Germany was momentarily the prime power on the European continent, but both the US and Russia were rising faster than it and there was no better time for Germany to strike than the present.
We're not in that window quite yet -- China's economy and military are still both improving faster than America's. But it seems like that window is within sight, and that will be the moment of maximum danger.
Yes, you are correct that China's economy has slowed a great deal. Then there's demography: if China can't raise its fertility rate to somewhere close to replacement level, the prospect of anything like Chinese hegemony is pretty close to impossible. I wrote about that here: https://gideons.substack.com/p/is-chinese-hegemony-plausible
But yes, you are also right that this means we may be approaching an incredibly dangerous inflection point. If China feels they have a short window to achieve their aims before they themselves begin to decline (and/or before India begins to surpass them), that increases their incentive to act now, even in very risky ways. That's pretty much the position Germany was in on the eve of World War I: cast China as Germany, the USA as Britain, and India as Russia, which Germany saw surging and industrializing.
The only thing I would stress is that the aggregate size of the economy isn't that easy to measure accurately and isn't necessarily the most important number to pay attention to. China is already the overwhelmingly dominant global manufacturing power. They also are clearly operating at the technological frontier. And they have a much larger population than we do. Regardless of whether America remains richer, that means China should naturally become much more powerful on any important dimension, and very soon, and that it will be hard for America to catch up once it happens.
Fantastic stuff. Being from Texas and trying to maintain the tenuous strands of adult friendship with men who view the world with blinders on - men who respect “strong leaders” but can’t do much more than bluster about the consequence of said strength or leadership - they are the necessary audience for these pieces. I would send it to them, but I know they won’t read it.
Good overview. A key tell during both the Trump 1 and Biden admin is how little support there appears to be for ramping up %GDP military spending as dramatically as Senator Roger Wicker has suggested. In the first term Trump years, you had some increase coupled with Trump's foreign policy approach. In the Biden years, you had an ever so slight *cut* this metric while moving through one-off aid package votes to Ukraine, Israel, and to a lesser extent Taiwan. Respectable elements of Congress aren't putting their money where their mouth is, and perhaps Trump 2 will fix this.
The US has the luxury of staying out of the trap, but only if it can be satisfied with supremacy in just one hemisphere. The increasingly frantic efforts of the US to hold on to global hegemony have drawn together awkward alliances on the Eurasian continent that would not hold up otherwise. American retreat from Eurasia would lock the powers on that continent into competition, leaving America the enviable role of patient kingmaker in-waiting.
That's the optimistic case for withdrawal, yes. There are more pessimistic possibilities, though. Moreover, the leadership of the U.S. doesn't have an absolutely free hand in pursuing such a policy. The geopolitical and economic consequences of retreat could easily result in the election of a president and a party determined to reverse those consequences -- by force if necessary.
Yes. Here’s what I see in the coming years/decades (I bet you agree):
1) The Great North Expansion: as it melts, population migration from the arid south. Agriculture, fresh water, oil, metals, new living space, economic boom. AI + quantum chip factories pop up in cold climate.
2) US takes Greenland: Trump uses NATO participation as leverage
3) China takes Taiwan: peacefully - like Hong Kong - after a rapid offshoring of critical chip production
4) Economic Destruction: AI descends on western white collar work like a plague of locusts. In two years. Eating jobs in every sector and function from coding to law to insurance to marketing to medicine. Trillionaires will become the new billionaires.
5) Revolution: our tax codes and politics won’t act fast enough to cushion the job losses of this “elite” white collar work while mortgages are still due. The Luigi Mangione (rich elite Leftist) populist revolt will vastly intensify and threaten violence on the ultra rich in their Palm Beach, Aspen enclaves. Social stability will collapse.
6) Birth Rates Crater: only on the Left. 4B feminists forsake toxic men and left-leaning men are without partners. They turn, en mass, to AI romance and sex robots to fill the void. Meanwhile, conservative men and women reproduce at same levels and the next generation are conservative as a result. Woke dies in the barren wombs of angry feminists.
These are but a few of the rapid, inevitable consequences of the “The Four Headed Monster” we now face:
1) Geopolitical Realignment
2) Western Social Polarization
3) AI
4) Rapid Global Warming
I see the (near) future with great dread and hope we have a few wise leaders to see us through.
Yes. Here’s what I see in the coming years/decades (I bet you agree):
1) The Great North Expansion: as it melts, population migration from the arid south. Agriculture, fresh water, oil, metals, new living space, economic boom. AI + quantum chip factories poo up in cold climate.
2) US takes Greenland: Trump uses NATO participation as leverage
3) China takes Taiwan: peacefully - like Hong Kong - after a rapid offshoring of critical chip production
4) Economic Destruction: AI descends on western white collar work like a plague of locusts. In two years. Eating jobs in every sector and function from coding to law to insurance to marketing to medicine. Trillionaires will become the new billionaires.
5) Revolution: our tax codes and politics won’t act fast enough to cushion the job losses of this “elite” white collar work while mortgages are still due. The Luigi Mangione (rich elite Leftist) populist revolt will vastly intensify and threaten violence on the ultra rich in their Palm Beach, Aspen enclaves. Social stability will collapse.
6) Birth Rates Crater: only on the Left. 4B feminists forsake toxic men and left-leaning men are without partners. They turn, en mass, to AI romance and sex robots to fill the void. Meanwhile, conservative men and women reproduce at same levels and the next generation are conservative as a result. Woke dies in the barren wombs of angry feminists.
These are but a few of the rapid, inevitable consequences of the “The Four Headed Monster” we now face:
1) Geopolitical Realignment
2) Western Social Polarization
3) AI
4) Rapid Global Warming
I see the (near) future with great dread and hope we have a few wise leaders to see us through.
Great piece! Thank you.
It certainly feels like America (and allies) must adjust to a multi-polarity new world order. Where nuclear armed rivals vie for regional dominance.
This is really bad for Europe and Japan - who accepted American protection and stunted their own abilities. With America First isolationism in vogue - it emboldens China and Russia to feast on the soft underbelly of these prey - specially as the North melts and frozen goldmines like Greenland and Canada become very attractive.
We’re facing 3 major civilizational threats at once: a geopolitical realignment + AI + climate melting opening up new prizes for conquest. The next fight for world dominance will look very different from the last one.
Add the profound global demographic transformation driven by the global collapse in fertility and the very different levels from which it is collapsing -- with the result that the next generation of young people around the world will look a lot different from the last generation, and will live in different places -- and you've got a full complement of four horsemen for the coming apocalypse.
Thank you for this piece!
While you don't mention him, I feel like this article could have been written specifically for Noah Smith. I'm a big Noah Smith fan in general, and I've found his warnings (e.g. https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/sizing-up-the-new-axis) about the rise of Chinese industrial power vis a vis the U.S. eye opening and persuasive; but also irresponsible because I've felt like his framing and recommendations, were they to be acted upon by policy makers using his language, would dramatically increase the dangers of a Thucydides Trap (a term I hadn't known before but will now use going forward; thank you Graham) war.
Meanwhile, the question I've been asking myself as I contemplate what our policy toward China should be is "what would Jean Monnet do?" Monnet is known for being the "father of the European Union", but what I'm not sure people know is that the raison d'etre for his work was less about building up Europe and more about preventing another war between Germany and its neighbors by creating a web of both institutional and personal relationships that would make such a war unimaginable.
Now creating a “union” between the U.S. and China similar to the European Union is certainly not going to happen, but when I ask myself what Jean Monnet would do in this situation, a few ideas come to mind:
- Seeking out challenges (moving away from fossil fuels, climate engineering, preventing pandemics, space exploration, helping Africa build its infrastructure) where the U.S. can partner with China for the good of the world and creating joint institutions where Americans and Chinese are literally working together on these challenges.
- Not only reversing the decreases since COVID, but dramatically increasing the number of Americans studying and working in China and the number of Chinese studying and working in the U.S.
- Making our rhetoric about China more about collaboration and less about confrontation and being sure to couple any criticisms of China with statements of respect about Chinese’s history as a great nation and its contributions to the world.
Ultimately, it’s about clearly choosing this option--“Could we forge a partnership with China, given our mutual interest in so many areas, even at the risk of becoming a junior partner”--from your list of possible approaches near the end of your American Conservative article and doing everything we can to put institutional muscle behind that choice.
I think the prospect of a partnership with China -- along the lines of Britain's 20th century partnership with America -- is no longer realistic, if it ever was.
Certainly, the U.S.-China relationship, even were China to become a liberal democracy, is never going to be anything like the relationship between Britain and the U.S. We have a shared language, culture, and history with the British that will always make our relationship with them fundamentally different. But that doesn't mean we can't partner with China in some areas (even with China under the rule of the CCP).
The main point I was trying to make in the back and forth with Vieux Carre below is that I think the Chinese people have a bifurcated relationship with the CCP. On the one hand, there is a lot of resentment about the privileges that party members enjoy and the strictures of living under an authoritarian regime. At the same time, there is also pride in both China's history and its current place in the world, as well as deep resentment toward the West and its historical treatment of China; and as the rulers of China, the CCP both benefits from this pride and can take advantage of this resentment.
While I believe that the U.S. should do more to restore its industrial capabilities and modernize its military, I don't want to see the U.S. embark on a huge military build up and to start spending more than 5% of the budget on the military. Nor do I think it would be useful for the U.S. to adopt a strategy of containment toward China and to begin seeing international relations generally as a zero sum game where countries are asked to choose between aligning with us or China.
China may be a rival, but it is not our enemy, and there is no reason it needs to become one. But that could happen. Ultimately, it is a decision made by people. The question is whether you can create institutions and an environment that makes it more likely that that China will view the United States as a rival and partner rather than an enemy. The genius of Jean Monnet is that he understood this better than anyone and worked tirelessly and ultimately effectively (though there were many setback along the way) to build these institutions and environment to help Europeans view each other in this way. We need similar energy and vision for our relationship with China. To be clear, that doesn't mean trying to replicate the institutions Monnet helped create for Europe. But it does mean thinking in the way Monnet did about how you create institutions that help people decide that the interests of their country are ultimately best served through partnerships rather than war.
I can’t imagine a nation conceived in liberty wanting a close partnership with a regime that seems so contemptuous of individual freedoms. The CCP is an enemy of free people everywhere. Those aren’t people you make nice with.
I would certainly agree that a nation conceived in liberty, or any nation for that matter, should be critical of the Chinese Communist Party. And nowhere do I suggest that we shouldn't. When I call for us to "couple any criticisms of China with statements of respect about Chinese’s history as a great nation and its contributions to the world," the implication there is that we are going to criticize. And we should.
But what's critical when criticizing is that we need to clearly draw a distinction between the Party and the Chinese people as a whole. I'm married to a second generation Chinese woman, and while the family is fiercely critical of the Chinese party, one thing I was surprised at is how easily criticisms that one might think are criticisms of the Chinese Party are perceived as criticisms of China in general. Even among my wife's family, half of which fled to Taiwan in the 1940s and half of which suffered immensely during the Cultural Revolution (and almost all of who have come here and are now proud Americans), tend to bristle at many criticisms of China (at least when they come from non-Chinese). And I can only imagine at how much more strongly folks living in Chinese react. The legacy of colonialism and how it shapes how people in former colonies view rhetoric around freedom from the West should not be underestimated.
So I absolutely do believe that our rhetoric needs to always make the distinction between the Community Party and the Chinese people clear. And I also think that we absolutely need to partner with China where we can, in ways that have Chinese and American citizens working together to creates bonds of community that help reenforce the idea that ultimately our people have common interests which outweigh any rivalries.
Plus, there are no good other options. Certainly we don't want military conflict. And neither, I would argue, is containment a good alternative. Containment ultimately worked as a strategy with the Soviet Union, in part because most of the SSRs thought of themselves as being colonies of Russia and in part because the Soviet economy was such a disaster that it could not compete with the West. But neither of these factors are true for China.
The Chinese are people just like anyone else, but that’s pretty much irrelevant since they don’t get to make decisions about how their country is run. How we see the Chinese people or refer to them isn’t really going to change anything because winning their hearts and minds would only make a difference insofar as it might lead them to overthrow the CCP.
I don’t think there is much a free nation can do with a country run by tyrants except encourage them to overthrow tyranny and fight the tyrants like hell any chance we get.
I understand how folks thought that trading with China would make them liberalize but that seems to have failed. I thought it would work too, I’ll be honest. But now the trade they have grown wealthy from allows them to export their authoritarian ideas and state gangsterism. All of us in the West with rooms full of stuff made in China bear a partial responsibility for that. We owe it to the world to fight and win against the CCP, not make room for them.
The conversation about China would absolutely change if all of a sudden the hundreds of millions of people there were given the vote and the opportunity to speak for themselves. We might still disagree about the way the world should run, but at least it would be a legitimate government we could respect.
The Chinese people don't make decisions about who governs them, but the Chinese government is definitely constrained by what they believe the general population is willing to tolerate/support. A war with America (triggered presumably by an American response to an invasion or blockade of Taiwan or some other Chinese military action) is far more likely to happen in a world where anti-American sentiment is already virulent.
Meanwhile, when you write "We owe it to the world to fight and win against the CCP, not make room for them", I think you're living in the distant past. In World War I and II and the Cold War, we prevailed because we had a vastly bigger economic, industrial (and therefore military) capacity that eventually made the difference.
But today the Chinese economy is already bigger than ours. Their industrial capacity is much bigger. Their technological development is as advanced or better than ours in most areas related to warfare. And they have 4x our population! America cannot win a conventional war with China today (and is even less likely to be able to do so in the near future) and a non-conventional war would obviously be worse than disastrous for everyone. So until the CCP is no longer in power, we're going to have make room for them, even if we may wish that were not the case.
However, America does have one big advantage vis a vis the CCP over the long term: the fact that our government (at least comparatively) is considered legitimate. So in the medium to long term, I think the CCP does eventually get replaced. What I'm calling for is the strategy that I think is both most likely to make that happen eventually while also avoiding war.
Good analysis, raises a lot of good questions. The only thing I'll really argue with directly:
>an illiberal China would inevitably hamstring its own rise—because an authoritarian political system could not foster sufficient technological and economic innovation
I see the point, but economic growth in China has declined a lot, especially under Xi's more authoritarian regime, which seems to have been directly responsible for hamstringing some of China's growth. I was struck by the updated projections that China would NEVER overtake the US in nominal GDP, compared to earlier predictions saying this might have happened as soon as the 2020s. The main reason China remains a threat is its huge labor force, which is an advantage in the process of evaporating (and notably, that labor force advantage is declining more rapidly than China's population itself).
Though China's looming relative decline isn't entirely a good thing. I'm not sure how much I like the Thucydides Trap framework, but I do think there's an especially acute danger when a rising power finds that its moment in the sun is going to be brief and that it has a limited window to lock in geopolitical gains. E.g., the World Wars happened at least in part because Germany was momentarily the prime power on the European continent, but both the US and Russia were rising faster than it and there was no better time for Germany to strike than the present.
We're not in that window quite yet -- China's economy and military are still both improving faster than America's. But it seems like that window is within sight, and that will be the moment of maximum danger.
Yes, you are correct that China's economy has slowed a great deal. Then there's demography: if China can't raise its fertility rate to somewhere close to replacement level, the prospect of anything like Chinese hegemony is pretty close to impossible. I wrote about that here: https://gideons.substack.com/p/is-chinese-hegemony-plausible
But yes, you are also right that this means we may be approaching an incredibly dangerous inflection point. If China feels they have a short window to achieve their aims before they themselves begin to decline (and/or before India begins to surpass them), that increases their incentive to act now, even in very risky ways. That's pretty much the position Germany was in on the eve of World War I: cast China as Germany, the USA as Britain, and India as Russia, which Germany saw surging and industrializing.
The only thing I would stress is that the aggregate size of the economy isn't that easy to measure accurately and isn't necessarily the most important number to pay attention to. China is already the overwhelmingly dominant global manufacturing power. They also are clearly operating at the technological frontier. And they have a much larger population than we do. Regardless of whether America remains richer, that means China should naturally become much more powerful on any important dimension, and very soon, and that it will be hard for America to catch up once it happens.
Fantastic stuff. Being from Texas and trying to maintain the tenuous strands of adult friendship with men who view the world with blinders on - men who respect “strong leaders” but can’t do much more than bluster about the consequence of said strength or leadership - they are the necessary audience for these pieces. I would send it to them, but I know they won’t read it.
Good overview. A key tell during both the Trump 1 and Biden admin is how little support there appears to be for ramping up %GDP military spending as dramatically as Senator Roger Wicker has suggested. In the first term Trump years, you had some increase coupled with Trump's foreign policy approach. In the Biden years, you had an ever so slight *cut* this metric while moving through one-off aid package votes to Ukraine, Israel, and to a lesser extent Taiwan. Respectable elements of Congress aren't putting their money where their mouth is, and perhaps Trump 2 will fix this.
Substantive comment to come but just wanted to point out that I think you accidentally dropped the word "never" in this sentence:
"We got to see where precisely Trump was headed (assuming he even knew) ..."
Feel free to delete this comment once it's no longer relevant.
Thank you. A necessary "never" was indeed omitted. I'm keeping this comment to remind myself to edit better in the future.
The US has the luxury of staying out of the trap, but only if it can be satisfied with supremacy in just one hemisphere. The increasingly frantic efforts of the US to hold on to global hegemony have drawn together awkward alliances on the Eurasian continent that would not hold up otherwise. American retreat from Eurasia would lock the powers on that continent into competition, leaving America the enviable role of patient kingmaker in-waiting.
That's the optimistic case for withdrawal, yes. There are more pessimistic possibilities, though. Moreover, the leadership of the U.S. doesn't have an absolutely free hand in pursuing such a policy. The geopolitical and economic consequences of retreat could easily result in the election of a president and a party determined to reverse those consequences -- by force if necessary.
Yes. Here’s what I see in the coming years/decades (I bet you agree):
1) The Great North Expansion: as it melts, population migration from the arid south. Agriculture, fresh water, oil, metals, new living space, economic boom. AI + quantum chip factories pop up in cold climate.
2) US takes Greenland: Trump uses NATO participation as leverage
3) China takes Taiwan: peacefully - like Hong Kong - after a rapid offshoring of critical chip production
4) Economic Destruction: AI descends on western white collar work like a plague of locusts. In two years. Eating jobs in every sector and function from coding to law to insurance to marketing to medicine. Trillionaires will become the new billionaires.
5) Revolution: our tax codes and politics won’t act fast enough to cushion the job losses of this “elite” white collar work while mortgages are still due. The Luigi Mangione (rich elite Leftist) populist revolt will vastly intensify and threaten violence on the ultra rich in their Palm Beach, Aspen enclaves. Social stability will collapse.
6) Birth Rates Crater: only on the Left. 4B feminists forsake toxic men and left-leaning men are without partners. They turn, en mass, to AI romance and sex robots to fill the void. Meanwhile, conservative men and women reproduce at same levels and the next generation are conservative as a result. Woke dies in the barren wombs of angry feminists.
These are but a few of the rapid, inevitable consequences of the “The Four Headed Monster” we now face:
1) Geopolitical Realignment
2) Western Social Polarization
3) AI
4) Rapid Global Warming
I see the (near) future with great dread and hope we have a few wise leaders to see us through.
Yes. Here’s what I see in the coming years/decades (I bet you agree):
1) The Great North Expansion: as it melts, population migration from the arid south. Agriculture, fresh water, oil, metals, new living space, economic boom. AI + quantum chip factories poo up in cold climate.
2) US takes Greenland: Trump uses NATO participation as leverage
3) China takes Taiwan: peacefully - like Hong Kong - after a rapid offshoring of critical chip production
4) Economic Destruction: AI descends on western white collar work like a plague of locusts. In two years. Eating jobs in every sector and function from coding to law to insurance to marketing to medicine. Trillionaires will become the new billionaires.
5) Revolution: our tax codes and politics won’t act fast enough to cushion the job losses of this “elite” white collar work while mortgages are still due. The Luigi Mangione (rich elite Leftist) populist revolt will vastly intensify and threaten violence on the ultra rich in their Palm Beach, Aspen enclaves. Social stability will collapse.
6) Birth Rates Crater: only on the Left. 4B feminists forsake toxic men and left-leaning men are without partners. They turn, en mass, to AI romance and sex robots to fill the void. Meanwhile, conservative men and women reproduce at same levels and the next generation are conservative as a result. Woke dies in the barren wombs of angry feminists.
These are but a few of the rapid, inevitable consequences of the “The Four Headed Monster” we now face:
1) Geopolitical Realignment
2) Western Social Polarization
3) AI
4) Rapid Global Warming
I see the (near) future with great dread and hope we have a few wise leaders to see us through.