https://chasfreeman.net/how-competitive-is-the-u-s-with-china/
查斯·弗里曼 2025年4月18日和19日
致波士顿社区教会和东湾和平公民的讲话
马萨诸塞州波士顿和罗德岛州布里斯托尔 2025年4月18日和19日
我们美国人把未来押注在与中国的竞争上。赢得这场竞争的关键在于国内经济和技术的革新，以及增强海外影响力。到目前为止，证据表明我们两者都没有实现，但我们刚刚与中国开始了一场永无休止的经济战争。正在发生的事情让我想起一句谚语：“神欲毁灭，必先使其疯狂。”
我们的国家现在轻视公共服务。它正在用链锯摧毁它的机构。这种自我破坏削弱了我们的国家能力，降低了我们的态势感知能力，模糊了我们的决策，降低了基本的政府服务，并加剧而非缓解了民众的不满。这些趋势促使对手利用美国的衰落。它们也使我们失去了盟友和朋友的尊重与支持。
长期以来，我们美国人一直否认我们面临的诸多国内外问题。如今，这些问题明显恶化。潜意识里，我们似乎理解这一点，但却把责任推卸给所有人，而不是我们自己。我们的盟友和朋友看到我们混乱地发出威胁、征收关税、觊觎领土。他们认为，我们的掠夺性行为是我们对很大程度上是我们自己造成的挑战做出的非理性且不连贯的回应。
近30%的美国人选择唐纳德·J·特朗普作为我们的总统，希望他能“让美国再次伟大”。但他和他那些未经选举的亿万富翁伙伴、一群评论员以及网络恶棍们所做的，非但不能纠正拜登政府笨手笨脚的遗产，反而损害了我们的长期竞争力和海外地位。
让我来数一数：
我们的盟友。我们正在惊扰和疏远那些历史上对我们最友好、最忠诚的国家。我们威胁加拿大进行恶意收购；我们威胁要从丹麦手中夺取格陵兰岛（就像加拿大一样，加拿大是北约盟友）。民意调查显示，许多盟友现在把我们视为威胁，而不是伙伴或保护者。当我们把自己与全球贸易隔绝开来时，我们对待他们并不比对待敌人好。在一个关系日益松散的世界里，这几乎注定了其中一些国家会试图将他们的命运与我们分开。
我们的朋友。我们正以经济战和军事打击的威胁欺凌墨西哥。对从墨西哥进口的产品征收关税将使其进一步贫困化。失去生计的墨西哥人将逃离自己的国家，绝望地在我们国家寻求更好的生活。军事威胁更有可能将墨西哥推向对手的怀抱，而非确保其合作。我们已将巴拿马从一个可靠的朋友和其运营的运河的管理者变成了我们武装部队潜在侵略的可怕目标。通过疏远邻国，我们正在将我们曾经在西半球安全的势力范围向其以外的大国开放。
我们的道德立场。以色列对巴勒斯坦人进行的肆无忌惮的歼灭战已经取代了欧洲犹太人大屠杀，成为全球邪恶的缩影。我们是以色列种族灭绝、虐待狂、土地掠夺和其他战争罪行的无耻帮凶。
我们作为仁慈国际行为者的声誉。我们已经终止了对人道主义和发展援助的支持。曾经依附于我们和我们所宣称的价值观的国家现在认为我们既不道德又无情地自私。他们正在寻找其他的灵感和支持来源。他们会发现我们的对手渴望提供这两者。中国和俄罗斯领导了最近曼德勒地震后的救援工作。我们缺席了。
我们作为一个光荣、守法国家的地位。我们因不尊重《联合国宪章》及相关条约和公约、以站不住脚的借口入侵其他国家、不惜牺牲盟友和朋友的利益扩张领土、无原则地背弃庄严承诺以及惩罚那些试图执行国际法的人而臭名昭著。现在其他人把我们的行为视为黑手党老大，而不是国际社会负责任的成员。
我们在全球问题上的领导地位。我们退出了越来越多的国际规则制定机构，并且缺席了越来越多的多边会议。我们放弃了外交和军备控制作为加强全球稳定与和平的手段。我们的政府不再参与全球减缓或缓解气候变化的努力。
我们的研发能力。美国大学长期以来一直是全球最强大的人才聚集地。联邦政府削减研发支持，并限制签证,现在，美国的目标明确地是削弱其文化影响力。美国的学术霸权正在消亡。
我们的经济和技术竞争力。保护主义明确承认，我们当前经济结构中的许多要素已无法抵御外国竞争。我们禁止其他地方的技术创新进入我们市场的新习惯更是有害。这补贴并维持了缺乏竞争力的落后状态。（以钢铁行业、电动汽车、TikTok、DeepSeek、太阳能电池板、风能和电信为例。）通过拒绝享受他人知识进步带来的好处，我们选择了一条必然导致技术劣势的道路。
我们领先公司的市场。拒绝美国IT公司进入其最大的海外市场中国，剥夺了它们保持领先于中国和其他竞争对手所需的收入。
俗话说，当变革之风吹起时，有人筑墙，有人造风车。美国不注重自我提升和抓住机遇，而是选择在国际上炫耀我们日渐衰落的影响力。我们依赖强硬的经济、金融或军事胁迫来迫使其他国家就范。这绝非与中国或任何其他崛起或复兴的大国竞争的良方，也绝非“为我们自己和子孙后代确保自由的福祉”的良方。
与此同时，尽管面临重重困难和不少错误政策，中国仍在继续强势发展。当我们把别人当作替罪羊并欺负他人时，中国人却一心一意地专注于提升自身的经济、科技实力。他们准备好、愿意并且能够与我们正在疏远的外国伙伴接触。中国经历了几个世纪的低迷，但它已经回归——并且正在重拾其千年来世界最大经济体的地位。[幻灯片2]
中国的经济增速有所放缓，但其增速仍然是美国的两倍。按购买力平价计算——这避免了美元高估造成的严重扭曲——中国经济规模已比美国经济规模大三分之一。[幻灯片3] 中国生产了全球超过三分之一的制成品。[幻灯片4] 中国是世界最大的贸易国，也是100多个国家的主要贸易伙伴。全球超过四分之一的STEM（科学、技术、工程和数学）从业人员是中国人，而且这一比例还在不断增长。目前，全球近一半的专利申请来自中国。[幻灯片5]
美国的出口管制、制裁以及其他旨在阻碍或扭转中国进步的举措显然并未奏效。这些举措的主要效果是促使中国加倍努力实现自给自足，加大对科技的投入，进一步提高其本已强大的教育水平，并探索应对美国金融霸权的方法。最新的“自然指数”将哈佛大学评为自然科学和健康科学领域世界第一，麻省理工学院位列第十。中国大学则占据第二至第九位。[1]
中国对我们全球领先地位的挑战来自经济、科学和技术层面。我国沿海没有中国军舰或轰炸机。中国不主张对我国提出任何领土主张。但是，根据我们高度军事化的外交方针，我们对中国复兴的回应几乎完全是军事性的。我们在中国周围设立了针对中国的军事基地。[幻灯片6] 我们每天在其海岸和岛屿堡垒进行三到四次积极巡逻。
75年前，我们进行了军事干预，将中国内战的失败方与中国其他地区隔离开来，以保护失败方。自那时起，台湾问题就成了中美之间潜在的战争借口。我们拒绝透露是否会使用武力来对抗北京收复台湾的企图。但中国人却认为我们会这么做。他们正在采取相应的行动。
其结果是中美紧张局势升级，军备竞赛也随之加剧，而我们的军事指挥官认为我们正在走向失败。当然，我们无法确定这是否只是他们惯用的夸大威胁手段，目的是进一步增加预算，并满足他们退役后期望加入的军工复合体。
尽管如此，中国的军事创新确实令人印象深刻。
拥有庞大的高精度导弹库，其中一些能够远距离打击海军舰艇，另一些是高超音速导弹，还有许多是公路机动导弹。
拥有迄今为止世界规模最大的海军，包括性能日益强大的飞机和航母，以及潜艇、世界一流的无人机、创新型登陆艇、远程舰对舰导弹和电磁炮。
拥有世界第三大空军，包括第五代和原型“第六代”飞机。先进的防空、电子战以及网络攻击能力。
任何中美战争的初始战场都将在中国，包括台湾及其近海。中国将在自家门口作战，拥有极短的通信线路和补给线。美国将向距离我国西海岸超过7000英里的战场投射兵力。中国将享有采取防御态势的诸多优势。从北京的角度来看，这场战争将是为了收复中国领土并保卫其免受外来攻击——而这些事情中国人比美国人更关心。
多项兵棋推演预测，中美因台开战可能使双方损失大部分海军和飞机。中国拥有更新舰艇和飞机的工业升级能力，而我们没有。如此大规模的损失不仅会使其失去在亚太地区长达80年的主导地位，还将削弱美国作为全球强国的地位。
一场围绕台湾政治地位的战争，其必然结果将是摧毁台湾的民主、繁荣和工业基础。台湾先进电子工业的毁灭将对世界经济造成巨大的附带损害。即使战争没有升级到核战争（双方都认为有这种可能），也不会有赢家。
尽管如此，美国目前在太平洋和南亚的政策重点是准备与中国进行跨太平洋战争，并说服美国在该地区的盟友允许美国使用其领土上的军事基地对抗中国。作为回应，中国正在准备与美国开战。
美国和中国的国防预算结构差异巨大，难以进行比较。两国都省去了大量的军事相关支出，并将其纳入其他预算。然而，总体而言，中国目前的国防支出似乎不到其GDP的2%，而仅美国国防部的预算就约占GDP的3.6%。如果将美国军事相关支出纳入其他部门和机构的预算，美国军事支出总额将达到美国GDP的约5.4%。
这种支出水平的差异反映了许多因素，其中最重要的因素是中国人民解放军专注于维护中国本土及周边地区的安全，而美国的军事力量结构旨在通过将美国力量投射到世界各个角落来维护美国的全球主导地位，而不是保卫美国本土。我们的“国防部”名称不实。实际上，它是一个“进攻部门”。如果美国人的关注点真的仅限于保卫自己，我们的支出就会少得多。我们还会将外交视为一种更经济、更可靠的方式，可以结交更多朋友，减少敌人。
当然，国防预算并不能决定战争的结果。但热情的平衡往往可以，正如我们阻止越南统一或平定阿富汗的努力失败所提醒我们的那样。如果美国与中国民族主义因台湾问题展开血腥交锋，那么狂热的天平将大大有利于中国。军事平衡也将日益有利于中国。双方准备战争的程度越高，战争爆发的可能性就越大。
美国的政策已经从支持和平解决台北与北京之间的分歧，转变为事实上支持台湾无限期地脱离中国大陆。这种做法拒绝外交手段，完全依赖军事姿态对抗中国。这直接挑战了中国的主权、领土完整、国家安全以及自尊心。
中国认为，美国对乌克兰战争的政策演变与美国对乌克兰战争的政策演变有着令人不安的相似之处。美国的目标并非促进乌克兰的福祉或国内安宁——更不是拯救乌克兰人的生命——而是反击、“孤立和削弱俄罗斯”。
同样，在台湾问题上，美国似乎更关心的不是台湾及其居民，而是向中国表明谁才是真正的主人，削弱中国，并遏制其在海外的影响力。中国反对战略性地利用台湾来对抗自身，就像俄罗斯反对将乌克兰纳入敌对联盟，或美国反对苏联在古巴岛上的威胁性存在一样。
俄罗斯在乌克兰的“特别军事行动”一直受到谨慎的限制。这似乎表明超级大国可以在不诉诸核武器的情况下进行代理人战争。但围绕台湾的战争并非在朝鲜、越南或乌克兰等第三国进行的代理人战争，而是在公认的中国领土——台湾和中国大陆——上，美中两国军队直接进行的战争。这样的战争不可能也不会是“有限的”。
中国人必然会以反击我们来回应美国对其部分领土的破坏。双方都可能试图使用核武器来使对方丧失能力
美国目前正在进行一项大规模的核力量现代化计划，其明确目的是在与中国的战争中取得胜利。
美国仍然是唯一一个对其他国家使用过核武器的国家。美国的核理论明确授权对敌人进行先发制人的核打击，无论其是否拥有核武器。过去，我国政府至少三次威胁要对中国发动核攻击。我们从未保证过不会再次这样做。
此事以及中美因台海爆发战争的可能性日益增加，促使中国核战略发生了变化。长期以来，中国满足于最低限度的核能力——一种能够通过对敌人造成足够打击，使其三思而后行，以应对核攻击的核打击，使其在使用核武器攻击中国任何地区之前三思而行。但现在，中国正在拥抱“相互确保摧毁”的理念，并正在打造一支核力量，如果美国使用核武器攻击美国，这支力量足以摧毁美国。
一场不仅无法取胜，而且可能危及生死的战争显然不应该打。我们的外交重点应该确保它永远不会发生。因此，像我们目前的政策那样，不依赖外交手段、全程军事部署的美国对华政策毫无意义。
中国的军事态势是防御性的。我们的军队就在中国的面前。而中国人民解放军却不在我们的面前。除非我们迫使它以牙还牙，否则它不会出现在我们的海岸或西半球。我们目前的政策最终可能会促使中国也这么做。
这凸显了美国人应对中国重返千年财富和强国的荒谬性。中国对美国全球主导地位和亚太地区主导地位的衰落，其根源在于其日益增长的科学、技术和经济活力。 [幻灯片 7] 即使中华人民共和国如今已建立了强大的自卫能力，它也并非军事力量。
与苏联不同，中国不会占领其他国家，也不会试图将其威权主义意识形态强加于其他国家或我们。与纳粹德国不同，中国并非寻求“生存空间”。与日本帝国或欧洲帝国主义不同，中国不追求对外国自然资源或劳动力的军事殖民控制。中国也不寻求复制过去帝国的市场偏好和重商主义。
这些类比是错误的。但源于对美国衰落的焦虑的群体思维，已将这些类比以及缺乏证据的推测转化为公认的“公理”，不断被重申，不容置疑。我们目前的对华政策建立在基于推测的“政治正确”假设之上，而非它们所歪曲的现实。这些假设教条主义、妄想且危险，并且伴随着高昂的机会成本。
这种情况下的讽刺之处比比皆是。
我们美国人指责中国试图用自己的世界秩序取代美国主导的世界秩序。但中国对战后世界秩序的核心理念——自由贸易和多边主义——的坚持远胜于我们现在。中国已融入该秩序，并利用其规则推进中国利益。与我们不同，中国没有退出世界贸易组织（WTO），没有发动贸易保护主义战，也没有谴责国际法院（ICJ）等国际机构履行职责。中国参与创建的新机构，例如亚洲基础设施开发银行，是对世界银行等布雷顿森林体系机构的补充，并借鉴了它们的规则。它们补充而非取代了既有的世界秩序。中国是《联合国宪章》及其旨在规范的威斯特伐利亚秩序的最坚定支持者之一。
我们指责中国“侵略”。中国确实捍卫了其长期以来对近海岛屿、岛礁和渔场的主权，对抗其他声索国，以及与印度存在争议的边界。但它并没有像我们一样对其他国家发动全面战争、入侵、肢解或占领。它并不寻求吞并这些领土或占领其他国家的运河。与我们不同，中国没有支持以色列等其他国家发动歼灭战和领土扩张战争。相反，它积极充当和平缔造者和调解人，尤其是在沙特阿拉伯和伊朗之间。
我们指责中国试图阻挠我们“孤立和削弱”俄罗斯的行动。但中国既不承认克里米亚和其他俄语州脱离乌克兰，也不承认北约强行将科索沃从塞尔维亚分离。中国继续与乌克兰和俄罗斯进行贸易。如果中国肯定不是“与我们同在”，那它就不一定是“与我们为敌”。
我们指责中国“恶意行为”。实际上，这似乎意味着，我们国际影响力的任何削弱，无论发生在何处，都
始终是中国经济发展的最大贡献者。中国已成为亚洲、非洲和拉丁美洲国家经济发展的最大贡献者。它现在或许会试图填补我们突然拥抱保护主义和恶意停止对外援助所造成的真空，也或许不会。其他国家正准备要求它这样做。我们将拭目以待，看看它会如何回应。
中国及其政治体制有很多值得批评的地方。中国的问题也远不止于此。但解决这些问题的是中国人，而不是我们。在这种背景下，试图通过镜像来描绘一幅世界大多数人认为更能描述我们的中国画像，不仅是错误的政策依据，而且会适得其反。
将中国描述为对我们当前内部混乱和颓废、财政匮乏、寡头和富豪统治的经济、自满的优越感、沙文主义外交政策、剥夺就业机会的金融资本主义以及崩溃的教育水平的“系统性挑战”是完全正确的。但对美国人来说，关键问题是该如何应对这些事情。中国体制的许多方面或许值得我们借鉴，但我们现在正在不经意间效仿的威权主义和对法治的漠视，不应成为其中之一。
我们不能重复“遏制”战略，该战略曾成功孤立了苏联，直至其因自身缺陷而屈服。试图对中国采取这种战略，只会让我们孤立贫困，而不是让中国陷入困境。中国的表现远超我们。它面临着诸多挑战，但社会稳定，经济高效，科技实力不断增强，创新意识日益增强，国际参与度也不断提升。我们或许会对全球化发出咆哮，但全球化仍在继续，即使没有我们。中国既是全球化的中心，也是全球化的主要受益者。
试图通过切断与中国乃至世界的联系来维护我们的全球主导地位和亚太霸权，是在逃避改革我们体系、使其更具竞争力的迫切需要。专注于限制中国而不是齐心协力，必然会付出巨大的机会成本。
我们依赖信贷展期和金字塔式的债务，却拒绝接受来自中国的投资。中国资本雄厚，准备资助我们破败的基础设施建设，在美国建立新工厂，并帮助扩大美国农业生产，以确保我们和其本国人民的粮食供应。中国拥有我们实现电力化所需的可再生能源技术，但我们似乎执意阻挠或禁止我们的公司进口或采用这些技术。我们的经济是互补的，正如我们相互依存关系充分证明的那样。我们需要与中国重新建立联系。
在这方面，谩骂并不能取代外交对话。它会疏远我们，却无法说服我们。特朗普政府至少有一件事非常正确。美国的安全并非依赖于强迫外国人认同我们的价值观。我们可以通过摒弃那种不切实际地强迫他人认同我们日益不切实际的自我形象的思维模式，从而“让美国真正地再次伟大”。相反，我们应该努力理解其他民族——包括中国人，尊重他们的本质和身份，并尽最大努力利用他们的繁荣和技术进步来提升我们自身的繁荣和技术进步。
How Competitive is the U.S. with China?
https://chasfreeman.net/how-competitive-is-the-u-s-with-china/
Chas Freeman April 18 & 19, 2025
Remarks to the Boston Community Church & East Bay Citizens for Peace
Boston, Massachusetts & Bristol, Rhode Island April 18 & 19, 2025
We Americans have bet our future on competition with China. The keys to winning this competition are domestic economic and technological renewal as well as enhanced influence abroad. So far, the evidence suggests that we are achieving neither, yet we have just started an economic forever war with China. What is happening reminds me of the saying: QUOS DEUS VULT PERDERE, PRIUS DEMENTAT. “Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.”
Our country now disparages public service. It is taking a chain saw to its institutions. Such self-sabotage weakens our state capacity, reduces our situational awareness, clouds our decision making, degrades essential government services, and fuels rather than alleviates popular discontent. These trends invite adversaries to exploit American decline. They also cost us the respect and support of allies and friends.
We Americans have long been in denial about our many domestic and foreign problems. They are now visibly getting worse. Subconsciously, we appear to understand this, but we blame it on everyone but ourselves. Our allies and friends see us chaotically making threats, imposing tariffs, and coveting territory. They view our predatory behavior as an irrational and incoherent response by us to challenges that are largely of our own making.
Just short of 30 percent of Americans chose Donald J. Trump as our president in the hope that he would “make America great again.” But what he and his unelected billionaire buddies, band of talking heads, and digital delinquents are doing is not correcting the bumbling Biden administration’s legacy but undermining both our long-term competitiveness and our standing abroad.
Let me count the ways:
Meanwhile, despite many difficulties and not a few mistaken policies, China continues to power ahead. While we scapegoat and bully others, the Chinese remain single-mindedly focused on enhancing their economic, scientific, and technological prowess. They are ready, willing, and able to reach out to the foreign partners we are alienating. China had a couple of bad centuries, but it is back – and in the process of resuming its millennial position as the world’s largest economy. [slide 2]
China’s growth has slowed, but it is still growing twice as fast as the United States. In purchasing power terms – which avoid the significant distortions imposed by an overvalued U.S. dollar – the Chinese economy is already one-third larger than ours. [slide 3] China produces more than one third of the world’s manufactures. [slide 4] It is the world’s largest trading nation and the principal trading partner of more than 100 countries. Over one-fourth of the world’s STEM workers are Chinese. That proportion is growing. Nearly half of the world’s patent applications now originate in China. [slide 5]
U.S. export controls, sanctions, and other efforts to hamstring or reverse Chinese advances are demonstrably not working. Their main effects have been to stimulate China to redouble its efforts to become self-sufficient, to boost its commitment to science and technology, to further improve its already formidable educational standards, and to explore ways to counter U.S. financial hegemony. The latest “Nature Index” rates Harvard as the world’s number one university in natural and health sciences, with MIT in tenth place. Chinese universities hold places two through nine.[1]
China’s challenges to our global preeminence are economic, scientific, and technological. There are no Chinese warships or bombers off our coasts. China espouses no territorial claims against us. But, in accordance with our heavily militarized approach to foreign affairs, our response to China’s resurgence is almost entirely military. We have ringed China with bases aimed at it. [slide 6] We conduct three or four aggressive patrols of its coasts and island bastions daily.
Seventy-five years ago, we intervened militarily to protect the losing side of the Chinese civil war by separating it and Taiwan from the rest of China. Since then, the Taiwan issue has been an embryonic Sino-American casus belli. We refuse to say whether we would use force to counter an attempt by Beijing to recover it. But the Chinese assume we would. They are acting accordingly.
The result is escalating Sino-American tension and an arms race that our military commanders suggest we are in the process of losing. Of course, we can’t be sure this isn’t just their usual use of threat inflation to further inflate their budgets and gratify the military-industrial complex they expect to join upon retirement.
Still, Chinese military innovations are indeed impressive.
Multiple wargames predict that a US-China war over Taiwan could cost both sides the bulk of their navies and aircraft. China has the industrial surge capacity to replace its ships and aircraft, but we do not. Losses on the scale predicted would cripple the United States as a global power, not just cost it its eight-decade-old dominance of Pacific Asia.
The one certain outcome of a war over the political status of Taiwan would be the destruction of its democracy as well as its prosperity and industrial base. The ruin of Taiwan’s advanced electronic industries would ensure huge collateral damage to the world economy. Such a war would have no winners even if it did not escalate to the nuclear level (which both sides assume it could).
Notwithstanding this, the focus of U.S. policy in Pacific and South Asia at present is on preparing for a trans-Pacific war with China and on persuading U.S. allies in the region to let Americans use bases on their territory against China. In response, China is preparing for war with America.
The U.S. and China’s defense budgets are structured so differently that it is hard to compare them. Both omit significant amounts of military-related spending and cover them in other budgets. All in all, however, China now appears to be spending less than 2 percent of its GDP on national defense, while the U.S. defense department’s budget alone is about 3.6 percent of GDP. Including U.S. military-related spending in other departments’ and agencies’ budgets brings total U.S. military spending to about 5.4 percent of U.S. GDP.
The disparity in spending levels reflects many factors, not least of which is the People’s Liberation Army’s exclusive focus on the security of the Chinese homeland and adjacent areas versus a U.S. military force structure designed to preserve U.S. global primacy by projecting American power to every corner of the world rather than to defend the American homeland. Our “defense department” is misnamed. In reality, it is an “offense department.” If Americans’ concern were truly limited to defending ourselves, we would spend a lot less. We would also consider diplomacy as a cheaper and more reliable way to make more friends and fewer enemies.
Of course, defense budgets do not decide the outcome of warfare. But the balance of fervor often does, as the failure of our effort to prevent the unification of Vietnam or to pacify Afghanistan should remind us. In a bloody American rendezvous with Chinese nationalism over Taiwan, the balance of fervor would strongly favor China. So, increasingly, would the military balance. The more both sides prepare for war, the more likely it becomes.
U.S. policy has shifted from favoring a peaceful settlement of the divisions between Taipei and Beijing to de facto support for Taiwan’s indefinite separation from the China mainland. This approach rejects diplomacy to rely entirely on military posturing against China. It is a direct challenge to China’s sovereignty, territorial integrity, and national security as well as to its amour-propre.
China sees unsettling analogies to the evolution of U.S. policy toward the war in Ukraine. The U.S. objective has not been to promote Ukraine’s wellbeing or its domestic tranquility – still less to save Ukrainian lives – but to counter, “isolate, and weaken Russia.”
Similarly, in the case of Taiwan, the U.S. seems less concerned about Taiwan and its inhabitants than about showing China who’s boss, weakening it, and containing its influence abroad. China is as opposed to the strategic use of Taiwan against it as Russia has been to the incorporation of Ukraine into an alliance hostile to it, or as the United States was to a menacing Soviet presence on the island of Cuba.
Russia’s “special military operation” in Ukraine has been carefully limited. It may seem to demonstrate that superpowers can conduct a proxy war without resorting to nuclear weapons. But a war over Taiwan would not be a proxy war fought in a third country like Korea, Vietnam, or Ukraine but a war conducted directly between U.S. and Chinese forces on territory universally acknowledged to be Chinese – Taiwan and the China mainland. Such a war could not and would not be “limited.”
The Chinese would inevitably respond to U.S. devastation of parts of their homeland by counterattacking ours. Each side would be tempted to employ nuclear weapons to incapacitate the other. The United States is currently engaged in a massive program of nuclear force modernization aimed explicitly at prevailing in a war with China.
The United States remains the only country to have used nuclear weapons against another people. U.S. nuclear doctrine explicitly authorizes a nuclear first strike on enemies, whether nuclear-armed or not. In the past, on at least three occasions, our government has threatened to launch a nuclear attack on China. We have provided no assurance that we will not do so again.
This and the mounting likelihood of a Sino-American war over Taiwan have catalyzed a change in Chinese nuclear strategy. China was long content with a minimal nuclear capability – a force de frappe – one able to respond to a nuclear attack by taking enough of a bite out of the enemy to cause it to think twice about using nuclear weapons to attack any part of China. But China is now embracing “mutually assured destruction” and building a nuclear force that could destroy the United States, if Americans use nuclear weapons to attack it.
A war that not only cannot be won but that also risks becoming existential should obviously never be fought. Our diplomacy should focus on ensuring that it never is. A diplomacy-free, all-military-all-the-time U.S. policy toward China like our current policy therefore makes no sense.
China’s military posture is defensive. Our military is in China’s face. The People’s Liberation Army is not in ours. It will not appear off our coasts or in our hemisphere unless we drive it to reciprocate our threatening presence on its borders. Our current policies risk convincing China eventually to do just that.
This underscores the absurdity of how Americans are dealing with China’s return to its millennial wealth and power. China’s eclipse of U.S. global primacy and dominance of Pacific Asia is grounded in its growing scientific, technological, and economic dynamism. [slide 7] It is not military, even if the People’s Republic has now built a formidable capacity to defend itself.
Unlike the Soviet Union, China does not occupy other countries or seek to impose its authoritarian ideology on them or us. Unlike Nazi Germany, China is not in search of “Lebensraum.” Unlike Imperial Japan or European imperialists, China does not pursue military-colonial control of foreign natural resources or labor. Nor does China seek to replicate the imperial market preferences and mercantilism of past empires.
These analogies are false. But groupthink born of anxieties about American decline has transformed them and evidence-free conjectures into accepted “axioms” that are constantly reiterated and that cannot be questioned. Our present China policies are based on “politically correct” assumptions born of conjectures rather than the realities they misdescribe. They are dogmatic, delusional, and dangerous. And they come with high opportunity costs.
The ironies in this situation abound.
We Americans accuse China of seeking to replace the US-sponsored world order with its own. But China is far more committed to the post-war order’s core ideas of free trade and multilateralism than we now are. It has integrated itself into that order and used its rules to advance Chinese interests. Unlike us, China has not withdrawn from the World Trade Organization (WTO), launched protectionist trade wars, or condemned international institutions like the World Court (ICJ) for doing their job. The new institutions China has helped create, like the Asian Infrastructure Development Bank, complement Bretton Woods institutions like the World Bank and mirror their rules. They supplement rather than replace the pre-existing world order. China is among the staunchest supporters of the United Nations Charter and the Westphalian order it is meant to regulate.
We accuse China of “aggression.” China has indeed defended its longstanding claims to islets, reefs, and fishing grounds against other claimants in its near seas and its disputed border with India, but it has not made all-out war on, invaded, dismembered, or occupied other countries as we have. It does not seek to annex the territories or take possession of the canals in other countries. Unlike us, China has not backed others, like Israel, in wars of annihilation and territorial aggrandizement. Instead, it has made itself available as a peacemaker and mediator, most notably between Saudi Arabia and Iran.
We accuse China of attempting to thwart our campaign to “isolate and weaken” Russia. But China has not recognized the separation of Crimea and other Russian-speaking oblasts from Ukraine any more than it has recognized NATO’s forced separation of Kosovo from Serbia. China continues to trade with both Ukraine and Russia. If China is definitely not “with us,” it is not necessarily “against us.”
We accuse China of “malign behavior.” In practice, this seems to mean any reduction in our international influence, wherever it occurs, whatever the cause. China has emerged as the largest contributor to the economic development of countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. It may or may not now attempt to fill the vacuum that our sudden embrace of protectionism and our mean-spirited cessation of foreign assistance have created. Other countries are poised to ask it to do so. We shall see how it responds.
There are lots of things to criticize about China and its political system. China also has more than its fair share of problems. But it is for Chinese, not us, to deal with them. In this context, mirror-imaging to produce a portrait of China that much of the world would say better describes us is not just a faulty basis for policy but counterproductive.
It is entirely correct to describe China as a “systemic challenge” to our current internal disorder and decadence, fiscal improvidence, oligopoly- and plutocracy-dominated economy, complacent sense of superiority, jingoistic foreign policy, job-stripping financial capitalism, and collapsing educational standards. But the operative question for Americans is what to do about these things. There are many elements of the Chinese system from which we might usefully draw inspiration, but China’s authoritarianism and disrespect for the rule of law, which we are now inadvertently emulating, should not be among them.
We cannot replay the strategy of “containment” that successfully isolated the Soviet Union until it succumbed to its own defects. Attempting to do so with China will isolate and impoverish us rather than the Chinese. China is outperforming us. It faces many challenges, but it is socially stable, economically productive, ever more scientifically and technologically capable, increasingly innovative, and internationally engaged. We may snarl at globalization, but it is continuing without us. And China remains both at its center and a major beneficiary of it.
Attempting to perpetuate our global primacy and Pacific-Asian hegemony by cutting ourselves off from China and the world is an evasion of the pressing need to reform our system to make it more competitive. Focusing on hamstringing China rather than getting our own act together entails huge opportunity costs.
We live on credit rollovers and pyramiding debt, yet we refuse to accept investment from China, which is capital rich and prepared to finance improvements in our failing infrastructure, establish new factories here, and help expand U.S. agricultural production to assure food supplies for its own population as well as ours. China has the renewable energy technologies we need to go electric, but we seem determined to obstruct or ban our companies from importing or adopting them. Our economies are complementary, as their interdependence has amply demonstrated. We need a reset with China.
In this connection, diatribe is no substitute for diplomatic dialogue. It alienates and does not persuade. The Trump administration has at least one thing very right. U.S. security does not depend on coercing foreigners into conformity with our values. We could “make America [truly] great again” by moving away from a mindset that quixotically insists on compelling others to conform to our increasingly unrealistic self-image. Instead, we should seek to understand other peoples – including the Chinese, respect them for who and what they are, and do our best to leverage their prosperity and technological advances to enhance our own.
[1] https://www.nature.com/nature-index/research-leaders/2024/institution/academic/all/all
Boston, Massachusetts & Bristol, Rhode Island April 18 & 19, 2025
We Americans have bet our future on competition with China. The keys to winning this competition are domestic economic and technological renewal as well as enhanced influence abroad. So far, the evidence suggests that we are achieving neither, yet we have just started an economic forever war with China. What is happening reminds me of the saying: QUOS DEUS VULT PERDERE, PRIUS DEMENTAT. “Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.”
Our country now disparages public service. It is taking a chain saw to its institutions. Such self-sabotage weakens our state capacity, reduces our situational awareness, clouds our decision making, degrades essential government services, and fuels rather than alleviates popular discontent. These trends invite adversaries to exploit American decline. They also cost us the respect and support of allies and friends.
We Americans have long been in denial about our many domestic and foreign problems. They are now visibly getting worse. Subconsciously, we appear to understand this, but we blame it on everyone but ourselves. Our allies and friends see us chaotically making threats, imposing tariffs, and coveting territory. They view our predatory behavior as an irrational and incoherent response by us to challenges that are largely of our own making.
Just short of 30 percent of Americans chose Donald J. Trump as our president in the hope that he would “make America great again.” But what he and his unelected billionaire buddies, band of talking heads, and digital delinquents are doing is not correcting the bumbling Biden administration’s legacy but undermining both our long-term competitiveness and our standing abroad.
Let me count the ways:
- Our alliances. We are alarming and alienating those countries historically most friendly and loyal to us. We menace Canada with hostile takeover We threaten to seize Greenland from Denmark (like Canada, a NATO ally). Polls show that many allies now regard us as a threat rather than a partner or protector. As we shut ourselves off from global trade, we treat them no better than our foes. In a world of loosening relationships, this all but guarantees that some of them will seek to separate their fates from ours.
- Our friends. We are bullying Mexico with threats of economic warfare and military attack. Tariffs on imports from Mexico would further impoverish it. Deprived of their livelihood, more Mexicans will flee their country in a desperate search for a better life in ours. Military threats are more likely to drive Mexico into the arms of our adversaries than to secure its cooperation. We have transformed Panamá from a reliable friend and manager of the canal it operates into a fearful target of potential aggression by our armed forces. By alienating neighbors, we are opening our formerly secure sphere of influence in the Western Hemisphere to inroads by great powers beyond it.
- Our moral standing. Israel’s cynical war of annihilation against the Palestinians has supplanted the European Jewish Holocaust as the global epitome of evil. We are shameless accomplices in Israel’s genocide, sadism, land grabs, and other war crimes.
- Our reputation as a beneficent international actor. We have ended our support for humanitarian and development assistance. Countries that once clung to us and our professed values now see us as both amoral and heartlessly selfish. They are looking for alternative sources of inspiration and support. They will find our adversaries eager to supply both. China and Russia led the relief effort that followed the recent earthquake in Mandalay. We were absent.
- Our stature as an honorable, law-abiding nation. We have become infamous for our disrespect of the UN Charter and related treaties and conventions, our invasions of other countries on flimsy pretexts, our pursuit of territorial aggrandizement at the expense of both allies and friends, our unprincipled abandonment of solemnly contracted commitments, and our punishment of those attempting to enforce international law. Others now see our behavior as that of a Mafia don, not a responsible member of the international community.
- Our leadership on planetwide problems. We have withdrawn from an increasing number of international rule-setting bodies and are absent from ever more multilateral meetings. We have abandoned both diplomacy and arms control as means by which to bolster global stability and peace. Our government is no longer part of the global effort to retard or mitigate climate change.
- Our research and development capabilities. U.S. universities have long been the world’s most powerful magnets for global talent. Cuts in federal support for R&D and visa restrictions now aim explicitly to debase their cultural influence. American academic hegemony is on the way out.
- Our economic and technological competitiveness. Protectionism is an explicit admission that many elements of our economy as currently structured can no longer stand up to foreign competition. Our new habit of banning technological innovations made elsewhere from our market is even more damaging. This subsidizes and preserves uncompetitive backwardness. (Consider the steel industry, electric vehicles, TikTok, DeepSeek, solar panels, wind power, and telecommunications as examples.) By denying ourselves the benefits of intellectual advances by others, we have chosen a path that leads inexorably to technological inferiority.
- Our leading companies’ markets. Denying U.S. IT companies access to China, their largest overseas market, deprives them of the revenue they need to stay ahead of their Chinese and other competitors.
Meanwhile, despite many difficulties and not a few mistaken policies, China continues to power ahead. While we scapegoat and bully others, the Chinese remain single-mindedly focused on enhancing their economic, scientific, and technological prowess. They are ready, willing, and able to reach out to the foreign partners we are alienating. China had a couple of bad centuries, but it is back – and in the process of resuming its millennial position as the world’s largest economy. [slide 2]
China’s growth has slowed, but it is still growing twice as fast as the United States. In purchasing power terms – which avoid the significant distortions imposed by an overvalued U.S. dollar – the Chinese economy is already one-third larger than ours. [slide 3] China produces more than one third of the world’s manufactures. [slide 4] It is the world’s largest trading nation and the principal trading partner of more than 100 countries. Over one-fourth of the world’s STEM workers are Chinese. That proportion is growing. Nearly half of the world’s patent applications now originate in China. [slide 5]
U.S. export controls, sanctions, and other efforts to hamstring or reverse Chinese advances are demonstrably not working. Their main effects have been to stimulate China to redouble its efforts to become self-sufficient, to boost its commitment to science and technology, to further improve its already formidable educational standards, and to explore ways to counter U.S. financial hegemony. The latest “Nature Index” rates Harvard as the world’s number one university in natural and health sciences, with MIT in tenth place. Chinese universities hold places two through nine.[1]
China’s challenges to our global preeminence are economic, scientific, and technological. There are no Chinese warships or bombers off our coasts. China espouses no territorial claims against us. But, in accordance with our heavily militarized approach to foreign affairs, our response to China’s resurgence is almost entirely military. We have ringed China with bases aimed at it. [slide 6] We conduct three or four aggressive patrols of its coasts and island bastions daily.
Seventy-five years ago, we intervened militarily to protect the losing side of the Chinese civil war by separating it and Taiwan from the rest of China. Since then, the Taiwan issue has been an embryonic Sino-American casus belli. We refuse to say whether we would use force to counter an attempt by Beijing to recover it. But the Chinese assume we would. They are acting accordingly.
The result is escalating Sino-American tension and an arms race that our military commanders suggest we are in the process of losing. Of course, we can’t be sure this isn’t just their usual use of threat inflation to further inflate their budgets and gratify the military-industrial complex they expect to join upon retirement.
Still, Chinese military innovations are indeed impressive.
- A huge arsenal of very accurate missiles, including some capable of striking naval vessels at long distances, others that are hypersonic, and many that are road mobile.
- By far the world’s largest navy, including ever more capable aircraft and carriers for them as well as submarines, world-beating drones, innovative landing craft, long-range ship-to-ship missiles, and rail guns.
- The world’s third largest air force, including both fifth generation and prototype “sixth generation” aircraft. Advanced air defenses and electronic warfare as well as cyber-attack capabilities.
Multiple wargames predict that a US-China war over Taiwan could cost both sides the bulk of their navies and aircraft. China has the industrial surge capacity to replace its ships and aircraft, but we do not. Losses on the scale predicted would cripple the United States as a global power, not just cost it its eight-decade-old dominance of Pacific Asia.
The one certain outcome of a war over the political status of Taiwan would be the destruction of its democracy as well as its prosperity and industrial base. The ruin of Taiwan’s advanced electronic industries would ensure huge collateral damage to the world economy. Such a war would have no winners even if it did not escalate to the nuclear level (which both sides assume it could).
Notwithstanding this, the focus of U.S. policy in Pacific and South Asia at present is on preparing for a trans-Pacific war with China and on persuading U.S. allies in the region to let Americans use bases on their territory against China. In response, China is preparing for war with America.
The U.S. and China’s defense budgets are structured so differently that it is hard to compare them. Both omit significant amounts of military-related spending and cover them in other budgets. All in all, however, China now appears to be spending less than 2 percent of its GDP on national defense, while the U.S. defense department’s budget alone is about 3.6 percent of GDP. Including U.S. military-related spending in other departments’ and agencies’ budgets brings total U.S. military spending to about 5.4 percent of U.S. GDP.
The disparity in spending levels reflects many factors, not least of which is the People’s Liberation Army’s exclusive focus on the security of the Chinese homeland and adjacent areas versus a U.S. military force structure designed to preserve U.S. global primacy by projecting American power to every corner of the world rather than to defend the American homeland. Our “defense department” is misnamed. In reality, it is an “offense department.” If Americans’ concern were truly limited to defending ourselves, we would spend a lot less. We would also consider diplomacy as a cheaper and more reliable way to make more friends and fewer enemies.
Of course, defense budgets do not decide the outcome of warfare. But the balance of fervor often does, as the failure of our effort to prevent the unification of Vietnam or to pacify Afghanistan should remind us. In a bloody American rendezvous with Chinese nationalism over Taiwan, the balance of fervor would strongly favor China. So, increasingly, would the military balance. The more both sides prepare for war, the more likely it becomes.
U.S. policy has shifted from favoring a peaceful settlement of the divisions between Taipei and Beijing to de facto support for Taiwan’s indefinite separation from the China mainland. This approach rejects diplomacy to rely entirely on military posturing against China. It is a direct challenge to China’s sovereignty, territorial integrity, and national security as well as to its amour-propre.
China sees unsettling analogies to the evolution of U.S. policy toward the war in Ukraine. The U.S. objective has not been to promote Ukraine’s wellbeing or its domestic tranquility – still less to save Ukrainian lives – but to counter, “isolate, and weaken Russia.”
Similarly, in the case of Taiwan, the U.S. seems less concerned about Taiwan and its inhabitants than about showing China who’s boss, weakening it, and containing its influence abroad. China is as opposed to the strategic use of Taiwan against it as Russia has been to the incorporation of Ukraine into an alliance hostile to it, or as the United States was to a menacing Soviet presence on the island of Cuba.
Russia’s “special military operation” in Ukraine has been carefully limited. It may seem to demonstrate that superpowers can conduct a proxy war without resorting to nuclear weapons. But a war over Taiwan would not be a proxy war fought in a third country like Korea, Vietnam, or Ukraine but a war conducted directly between U.S. and Chinese forces on territory universally acknowledged to be Chinese – Taiwan and the China mainland. Such a war could not and would not be “limited.”
The Chinese would inevitably respond to U.S. devastation of parts of their homeland by counterattacking ours. Each side would be tempted to employ nuclear weapons to incapacitate the other. The United States is currently engaged in a massive program of nuclear force modernization aimed explicitly at prevailing in a war with China.
The United States remains the only country to have used nuclear weapons against another people. U.S. nuclear doctrine explicitly authorizes a nuclear first strike on enemies, whether nuclear-armed or not. In the past, on at least three occasions, our government has threatened to launch a nuclear attack on China. We have provided no assurance that we will not do so again.
This and the mounting likelihood of a Sino-American war over Taiwan have catalyzed a change in Chinese nuclear strategy. China was long content with a minimal nuclear capability – a force de frappe – one able to respond to a nuclear attack by taking enough of a bite out of the enemy to cause it to think twice about using nuclear weapons to attack any part of China. But China is now embracing “mutually assured destruction” and building a nuclear force that could destroy the United States, if Americans use nuclear weapons to attack it.
A war that not only cannot be won but that also risks becoming existential should obviously never be fought. Our diplomacy should focus on ensuring that it never is. A diplomacy-free, all-military-all-the-time U.S. policy toward China like our current policy therefore makes no sense.
China’s military posture is defensive. Our military is in China’s face. The People’s Liberation Army is not in ours. It will not appear off our coasts or in our hemisphere unless we drive it to reciprocate our threatening presence on its borders. Our current policies risk convincing China eventually to do just that.
This underscores the absurdity of how Americans are dealing with China’s return to its millennial wealth and power. China’s eclipse of U.S. global primacy and dominance of Pacific Asia is grounded in its growing scientific, technological, and economic dynamism. [slide 7] It is not military, even if the People’s Republic has now built a formidable capacity to defend itself.
Unlike the Soviet Union, China does not occupy other countries or seek to impose its authoritarian ideology on them or us. Unlike Nazi Germany, China is not in search of “Lebensraum.” Unlike Imperial Japan or European imperialists, China does not pursue military-colonial control of foreign natural resources or labor. Nor does China seek to replicate the imperial market preferences and mercantilism of past empires.
These analogies are false. But groupthink born of anxieties about American decline has transformed them and evidence-free conjectures into accepted “axioms” that are constantly reiterated and that cannot be questioned. Our present China policies are based on “politically correct” assumptions born of conjectures rather than the realities they misdescribe. They are dogmatic, delusional, and dangerous. And they come with high opportunity costs.
The ironies in this situation abound.
We Americans accuse China of seeking to replace the US-sponsored world order with its own. But China is far more committed to the post-war order’s core ideas of free trade and multilateralism than we now are. It has integrated itself into that order and used its rules to advance Chinese interests. Unlike us, China has not withdrawn from the World Trade Organization (WTO), launched protectionist trade wars, or condemned international institutions like the World Court (ICJ) for doing their job. The new institutions China has helped create, like the Asian Infrastructure Development Bank, complement Bretton Woods institutions like the World Bank and mirror their rules. They supplement rather than replace the pre-existing world order. China is among the staunchest supporters of the United Nations Charter and the Westphalian order it is meant to regulate.
We accuse China of “aggression.” China has indeed defended its longstanding claims to islets, reefs, and fishing grounds against other claimants in its near seas and its disputed border with India, but it has not made all-out war on, invaded, dismembered, or occupied other countries as we have. It does not seek to annex the territories or take possession of the canals in other countries. Unlike us, China has not backed others, like Israel, in wars of annihilation and territorial aggrandizement. Instead, it has made itself available as a peacemaker and mediator, most notably between Saudi Arabia and Iran.
We accuse China of attempting to thwart our campaign to “isolate and weaken” Russia. But China has not recognized the separation of Crimea and other Russian-speaking oblasts from Ukraine any more than it has recognized NATO’s forced separation of Kosovo from Serbia. China continues to trade with both Ukraine and Russia. If China is definitely not “with us,” it is not necessarily “against us.”
We accuse China of “malign behavior.” In practice, this seems to mean any reduction in our international influence, wherever it occurs, whatever the cause. China has emerged as the largest contributor to the economic development of countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. It may or may not now attempt to fill the vacuum that our sudden embrace of protectionism and our mean-spirited cessation of foreign assistance have created. Other countries are poised to ask it to do so. We shall see how it responds.
There are lots of things to criticize about China and its political system. China also has more than its fair share of problems. But it is for Chinese, not us, to deal with them. In this context, mirror-imaging to produce a portrait of China that much of the world would say better describes us is not just a faulty basis for policy but counterproductive.
It is entirely correct to describe China as a “systemic challenge” to our current internal disorder and decadence, fiscal improvidence, oligopoly- and plutocracy-dominated economy, complacent sense of superiority, jingoistic foreign policy, job-stripping financial capitalism, and collapsing educational standards. But the operative question for Americans is what to do about these things. There are many elements of the Chinese system from which we might usefully draw inspiration, but China’s authoritarianism and disrespect for the rule of law, which we are now inadvertently emulating, should not be among them.
We cannot replay the strategy of “containment” that successfully isolated the Soviet Union until it succumbed to its own defects. Attempting to do so with China will isolate and impoverish us rather than the Chinese. China is outperforming us. It faces many challenges, but it is socially stable, economically productive, ever more scientifically and technologically capable, increasingly innovative, and internationally engaged. We may snarl at globalization, but it is continuing without us. And China remains both at its center and a major beneficiary of it.
Attempting to perpetuate our global primacy and Pacific-Asian hegemony by cutting ourselves off from China and the world is an evasion of the pressing need to reform our system to make it more competitive. Focusing on hamstringing China rather than getting our own act together entails huge opportunity costs.
We live on credit rollovers and pyramiding debt, yet we refuse to accept investment from China, which is capital rich and prepared to finance improvements in our failing infrastructure, establish new factories here, and help expand U.S. agricultural production to assure food supplies for its own population as well as ours. China has the renewable energy technologies we need to go electric, but we seem determined to obstruct or ban our companies from importing or adopting them. Our economies are complementary, as their interdependence has amply demonstrated. We need a reset with China.
In this connection, diatribe is no substitute for diplomatic dialogue. It alienates and does not persuade. The Trump administration has at least one thing very right. U.S. security does not depend on coercing foreigners into conformity with our values. We could “make America [truly] great again” by moving away from a mindset that quixotically insists on compelling others to conform to our increasingly unrealistic self-image. Instead, we should seek to understand other peoples – including the Chinese, respect them for who and what they are, and do our best to leverage their prosperity and technological advances to enhance our own.
[1] https://www.nature.com/nature-index/research-leaders/2024/institution/academic/all/all
