A Reverse Trump
Foreign Affairs published a groundbreaking essay " Underestimating China: Why America Needs a New Strategy of Allied Scale to Offset Beijing’s Enduring Advantages", by Kurt M. Campbell and Rush Doshi
Success in great-power competition requires rigorous and unsentimental net assessment. Yet the American estimation of China has lurched from one extreme to the other…
While the world is grappling with the scope and likely impact of President Donald Trump's MAGA fired global round of customs tariffs which emanated from the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025, Campbell and Doshi propose a radically different strategy for America and the collective West (Putin's definition).
They see the US as a relatively small and vulnerable opponent of the giant China which is about to dominate the world due to its huge advantage in numbers and scale.
Accounting for purchasing power and local prices using the World Bank’s methodology, although imperfect, reveals instead that China’s economy surpassed the U.S. economy about a decade ago and is 25 percent larger today: roughly $30 trillion to the United States’ $24 trillion. This purchasing power adjustment captures the real cost of the determinants of national power, including infrastructure investment, weapons systems, manufactured goods, and government personnel—key factors in sustaining long-term strategic advantage
Americans tend to underestimate China's power by using the same traditional statistical methodology which had led Europeans to underestimate Russia's power.
The current Ukraine war proved an ugly surprise, and the current war of tariffs between the US and China is likely to yield similar surprises. The US is in danger of losing its status as the global hegemon. China's advantage of sheer scale also shows in the field of armaments:
On critical metrics, China has already outmatched the United States. Economically, it boasts twice the manufacturing capacity. Technologically, it dominates everything from electric vehicles to fourth-generation nuclear reactors and now produces more active patents and top-cited scientific publications annually. Militarily, it features the world’s largest navy, bolstered by shipbuilding capacity 200 times as large as that of the United States; vastly greater missile stocks; and the world’s most advanced hypersonic capabilities—all results of the fastest military modernization in history. Even if China’s growth slows and its system falters, it will remain formidable strategically.
In this dire situation, what should America do? Should it accept its fate of sliding down the ladder, losing its supremacy and becoming number two on the global scale, pushed around by dictatorships such as China, Russia and Iran?
No, the authors believe. However, they cautiously avoid to indicate the first step of what is required: getting rid of Donald Trump, his MAGA circus and trying to repair -- as far as possible -- the damage done by four years of slash and burn Trumpism.
Their recipe for survival contrasts with MAGA: seeking to establish a coalition of the collective West based on closer than ever cooperation and burden sharing. America should integrate the collective West as a loose association somewhere between a Commonwealth and a Common Market. This association would be more powerful than China:
Together, Australia, Canada, India, Japan, Korea, Mexico, New Zealand, the United States, and the European Union have a combined economy of $60 trillion to China’s $18 trillion, an amount more than three times as large as China’s at market exchange rates and still more than twice as large adjusting for purchasing power. It would account for roughly half of all global manufacturing (to China’s roughly one-third)
To achieve scale, Washington must transform its alliance architecture from a collection of managed relationships to a platform for integrated and pooled capacity building across the military, economic, and technological domains. In practical terms, that might mean Japan and Korea help build American ships and Taiwan builds American semiconductor plants while the United States shares its best military technology with allies, and all come together to pool their markets behind a shared tariff or regulatory wall erected against China.
A bold new vision. Even if the US would change tack and repel Trumpism it would be difficult to overcome the destruction caused by MAGA. America's reputation as a reliable ally and reasonable global power is in tatters. Any post-Trump administration will face an uphill battle trying to revive the old image and restore the confidence basic to a powerful association of the collective West that the US needs to save itself from losing its global pre-eminence to China.
Heinrich von Loesch.