We Are in an Industrial War. China Is Starting to Win.
As Rob Atkinson writes in a New York Times essay, credit goes to Donald Trump for alerting the world to the dangers posed by China, particularly its efforts to overtake the United States as the world’s most advanced economy. But neither Trump’s first administration nor President Biden’s has done enough to combat China’s incursions, which have cost America millions of manufacturing jobs and the closure of tens of thousands of factories. That’s because policymakers on both sides of the aisle are only slowly waking up to the reality: We are already in the middle of an industrial war.
China’s primary goal is to damage America’s economy and pave the way toward becoming the world’s pre-eminent power. Countries like China are power traders, called such because their policies and programs are designed not only to advance their power but also to degrade their adversaries’, even at a financial cost to their own economies.
Against this backdrop, despite a highly polarized political climate, Congress managed to pass the CHIPS and Science Act, which invested billions of dollars to support new semiconductor factories in the United States. But Atkinson argues these measures are not enough:
- America must expand its competitiveness in a range of other industries—including aerospace, biopharmaceuticals and machinery—and lead in emerging ones such as AI, quantum computing, and nuclear fusion.
- Instead of across-the-board tariffs, the new administration should take a page from Ronald Reagan and negotiate a major decline in the value of the U.S. dollar vis-à-vis our trading partners.
- America needs closer collaboration among allied nations to push back on China’s predatory power trade practices.
- America should respect free-trade ideals and hold them dear. But that should not blind us to the harsh reality that the world now is distorted by its strongest power trader.
