Six-Chart Sunday – The “China” Theory of Everything
6 Infographics + 1 Video (Hal Brands on Iran)
It’s easy to overthink things, ascribing complex strategies where none exist. The simplest explanation is usually the best. But for many trying to make sense of Trump 2.0’s aggressive initiatives across so many domains, there is a signal in the noise… an underlying strategic rationale that unifies many, though hardly all, T2 actions: China. Specifically, gaining leverage and reducing vulnerabilities in our global competition with China.
1. The Iran War Military Action
Why did we attack Iran last week, and why now? While “the president and his top aides have offered varying justifications for attacking Iran — from regime change to preemption to eliminating its nuclear program and ballistic missiles,” one reason for the urgency may have been revealed in Reuters’ February scoop: “Iran nears deal to buy supersonic anti-ship missiles from China.” Free Press’ Zineb Riboua makes an forceful case that “The Iran Strike Is All About China.”
“The Iran question was never about Iran. Remove the Islamic Republic from the equation, and China loses its pawns for a Taiwan contingency. Leave it in place, and the Middle East remains what Beijing designed it to be: a second front that Washington can never afford to leave and can never afford to stay in. Trump’s strikes are the first move by an American president who appears to understand that the road to the Pacific runs through Tehran.”
2. The “Donroe Doctrine”
What explains aggressive U.S. military & economic actions in Venezuela, Panama, Cuba and throughout Latin & South America? According to Monica de Bolle of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, “Trump’s latter day Monroe Doctrine is aimed at China.” Specifically, the Trump Administration hopes to counter China’s decades of expanding trade & investment ties, geopolitical alliances & control of infrastructure and resources in the Western Hemisphere. Per CNN:
Over the years in Latin America, Chinese firms have financed or built ports and power stations, bridges and roads, wind and solar farms, metro lines and mines – spurred by spare capital and industrial overcapacity in China, and, in more recent years, the global ambitions of Chinese leader Xi Jinping to expand Beijing’s global sway.
3. The Arctic Agenda
Many dispute “how” the President has gone about advancing Arctic policy, accusing him of bullying & insulting staunch American allies Canada & Denmark over Greenland, military commitments & resource development. But as to the “why,” Miles Yu of the Hudson Institute voices many Western observers’ concerns that seem shared by the Trump Administration: China.
China’s Arctic ambition is no longer a curiosity. It is a disciplined campaign — economic, scientific, diplomatic and informational — aimed at building durable leverage in a region that matters to U.S. homeland defense and NATO’s ability to reinforce Europe.
The question for Washington is not whether China will become an Arctic power (Beijing has already decided it will), but whether the United States and its allies will deny China the quiet “dual-use” footholds that have become a hallmark of the CCP’s global playbook.
4. Tariff Wars & Trade Deals
The allies won the Second World War in large measure thanks to American industrial might. We were the “arsenal of democracy” manufacturing the tanks, planes, munitions and other essential supplies that overwhelmed the axis powers. But modern war simulations consistently find that “the U.S. Is on Track to Lose a War With China.”
Right now, the U.S. has what appears to be the more capable military, and certainly the more battle-tested and technologically advanced one. It might inflict disproportionately higher losses on the Chinese at first. But because of its diminished production capacity, the U.S. would struggle to make up even a small part of the battlefield losses that it would inevitably suffer. China—which is as much the workshop of the world today as the United States was in World War II—could churn out replacement weaponry at an impressively quick pace.
While President Trump has favored tariffs and disapproved of most global trade arrangements (as “unfair” to the U.S.) since the 1980s, his Administration’s current efforts to negotiate new trade deals aim in part to surge foreign direct investment in the U.S. and expand domestic manufacturing capacity. The goal? Re-industrializing America’s defense base to better compete against China, which has taken over as the world’s dominant manufacturing power.
5. The AI Agenda
According to the Trump Administration’s AI Action plan:
“The United States is in a race to achieve global dominance in artificial intelligence (AI). Whoever has the largest AI ecosystem will set global AI standards and reap broad economic and military benefits. Just like we won the space race, it is imperative that the United States and its allies win this race.”
Nearly all observers agree the race for AI dominance is U.S. vs China, and the Trump Administration agenda is overwhelmingly focused on winning that race. Their policies aim to “export the American tech stack” (set global standards for compute, data & models); expand & upgrade American power generation (to meet AI data centers’ immense demands without increasing consumer prices); increase investment in infrastructure (via favorable tax policy & deregulation); and lead in government deployment of AI (e.g. Genesis Mission).
Who’s winning the race? It’s close. Time Magazine offers six graphs that “show where the U.S. is ahead of China, what’s driving that lead—and why it could be tenuous,” but I went with this as my final chart:
6. “Tough Love” for Europe
In his second term, President Trump has demanded NATO allies in Europe spend more on their own defense and trade more favorably with the U.S. America First is surely about prioritizing U.S. interests over all others, allies or rivals. But it’s also at least partly about confronting a rising China, which may require a European revival. As I wrote in While Europe Slept:
When history “ended” with the close of the Cold War, Europe went to sleep. Over the next several decades the EU outsourced its energy production to Russia, its defense to the U.S. and its innovation to regulators in Brussels. Their economy increasingly depends on Chinese manufacturers and American consumers, and today they find themselves unready for the harsh new realities of the 21st century. Are they doomed, or is a Great EUwakening possible?
Secretary Rubio made the President’s goal clear in Munich:
“We do not want our allies to be weak, because that makes us weaker. We want allies who can defend themselves so that no adversary will ever be tempted to test our collective strength.”
Might the “China” Theory of Everything be a Narrative in Search of Reality?
Absolutely! China guru Bill Bishop says: “Arguments that [U.S. action against Iran] is part of some grand strategy about China are post-facto attempts to ascribe much more strategic thought to this campaign than the Trump team has.” Indeed, “China” was not among the “10 rationales” the Administration has offered so far for Operation Epic Fury, per the Atlantic. Industry-supportive AI policies are as much about catalyzing economic growth as competing with China. Same with trade deals to increase FDI. But two things can be true at once. The Trump Administration clearly sees China as America’s main strategic rival today and for the foreseeable future, with Sino-American competition at the heart of most policy considerations now and for the remainder of the President’s second term.
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VIDEO
Geopolitical guru Professor Hal Brands returned this week to discuss Iran — what led to hostilities, how might they end and what it means for geopolitics & businesses.
It is hard to digest another round of hawkish apologetics that sells a “4D chess long term global stability and prosperity strategy that’s in the best interest of common people”, as yet again US and Israel instigated international conflict is taking civilian lives and transferring massive amounts of wealth from working class people. The United States is actively fighting against the indirect results of its own CIA initiatives of prior administrations (I.e. operation Ajax), facing greater violent fundamentalist forces than what may have established in the region organically under Mossadegh should we have left Iran to its own political self-determination. Extreme measures to achieve US global dominance, in the name of global stability, because the American way of life is somehow preeminent, does not appear sustainable. While American domestic quality of life wanes in the face of an affordability crisis among other erosions of civil rights, the façade of a model global empire appears to be one that is overextended and not to the benefit of its citizens. To convince ourselves that China is an existential threat in order to justify every cost incurred by such ruthless imperialism strains credulity. At times it appears as though the western military industrial complex is a hammer looking for a nail, exaggerating images of villain states in excess of their genuine intentions to fear monger manufactured consent for prioritizing the war machine. In this case, the American popular support for more regime change wars is abysmal, and the toll on an already struggling American economy is too obvious to be recharacterized with state propaganda, even though that is what we find ourselves saturated in by corporate talking head reps and state-run media. This “theory of everything” ascribes some sort of altruistic and mature paternalistic wisdom to DJT and his cabinet that would patriotically save American sovereignty from brute domination by a foreign super power decades from now, but perhaps there is more to Trumps and his predecessor’s calculus while they can be found to be complicit with Israel at every turn, to strike lucrative deals with the GCC, to mix defense contracts and massive amounts of donor money inextricably into American politics. If there is such sophisticated coherence to Trump’s foreign policy, the American people would appreciate the measure of respect to at least receive consistent messaging regarding something as paramount as war in the face of many other failed campaign promises. He ran as an outsider economic populist, but is delivering far from that station, instead fitting in well with the war hawks who came before him who would rather invest in defense contracts than domestic infrastructure, though in his case with unprecedented levels of corruption. American people are increasingly aware that the ever desperate pushes for US unipolar hegemony only levy regressive taxes on America that undercuts true long term economic gain, not to mention erosion of meaningful global alliances that might offer comparable global stability. This unconstitutional war with Iran couched as a Saturday “mowing of the lawn” seems a gross misinterpretation of what is more likely a picture of an empire in late stage capitalism nearing ever closer to significant collapse, with a severely compromised president clearly bent on self-enrichment, that cannot give up on the toxic thread of corruption and colonialism to save itself by democratically evolving into perhaps a more fitting global role of multipolar power and good faith diplomacy.
There is a doctrine that drives America's forever wars and other predatory behavior around the world--but most Americans would rather try to deny or downplay it.
It's called the Wolfowitz Doctrine, which was formulated in the early 1990s after the end of the old Cold War.
The Wolfowitz Doctrine has been the implicit driver of US foreign policy for decades and asserts that American grand strategy should be to prevent the rise of any country or group of countries from challenging America's status as the world's only superpower--on even a regional level, never mind global level.
The Wolfowitz Doctrine was later tacitly manifest in the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) think-tank, which called for the remilitarization of the USA, and also the Pentagon's Full Spectrum Dominance doctrine, which called for American domination of land, air, sea, outer space, and cyberspace as domains of warfighting.
This megalomaniacal American vision is the basis of what is called the USA's unipolar world order--a world with a single pole of power (America) that all nations must kowtow to.
America's phony War on Terrorism, the War on Drugs, Humanitarian Intervention (or, the Responsibility to Protect doctrine), and the New Cold War against "authoritarianism" are the geopolitical figleafs that the USA has deployed to advance its ambitions for American unipolar dominance.
Americans also often deploy Orwellian euphemisms to justify this unipolar US world order as a "rules-based international order," "America First" or, most laughably, defending Liberty, Democracy, and Free Markets....
This unipolar American world order necessarily comes into conflict with the vision of a multipolar world advocated by nations like China, Russia, Iran, and the BRICS countries in which there multiple poles of power throughout the globe.
The United States is obsessed with China in that the latter represents one of the leaders of the multipolar world, which ultimately must be confronted and subjugated as a potential "threat" to US unipolarism.
America's geopolitical ambitions for a US Unipolar World thus could be called the "America Theory of Everything." ;-)