Rush Doshi
Appearances
3 Takeaways
The U.S. Alone Can’t Compete with China. Here’s What Absolutely Can. (#250)
What Kurt and I have offered is a sense that our alliances can't simply be what they've been for a long time. We can't look at alliances in the purely hierarchical sense that we had. We can't fall into past habits. We can't see them in purely military terms either.
3 Takeaways
The U.S. Alone Can’t Compete with China. Here’s What Absolutely Can. (#250)
We have to see them now at a time where China has scale across just about every dimension as ways of pooling capacity or as being the foundation for a capacity-centric statecraft. There's a bit of humility in this for the United States as well.
3 Takeaways
The U.S. Alone Can’t Compete with China. Here’s What Absolutely Can. (#250)
What we're doing is we're saying there are areas where the US has lost a capability that its allies have gained or maintained, and those allies can bring it back to the US and we can work on that together. What we offer is several practical solutions. On the security side, we talk about Japan and Korea being able to help build American ships.
3 Takeaways
The U.S. Alone Can’t Compete with China. Here’s What Absolutely Can. (#250)
or relatedly, the US providing some of its most advanced military capability to its allies. Curt was the father in many ways of the AUKUS agreement, which is essentially an effort by the US and the UK to provide Australia the capability of a nuclear powered submarine, which would give Australia great capability in the region.
3 Takeaways
The U.S. Alone Can’t Compete with China. Here’s What Absolutely Can. (#250)
That's some of our most sensitive technology, but it's a kind of example of capacity centric statecraft. So too, in the economic and tech dimension, do you need this kind of new approach? What that means in practical terms is understanding that China, that is maybe four times more than the U.S.
3 Takeaways
The U.S. Alone Can’t Compete with China. Here’s What Absolutely Can. (#250)
in global manufacturing in a few years, it has capacity that simply will put other countries' industries out of business. It will deindustrialize the rest of those countries just by being able to compete maybe with some government help, of course.
3 Takeaways
The U.S. Alone Can’t Compete with China. Here’s What Absolutely Can. (#250)
The only solution to that isn't just to protect the American market, because if American firms have their market safe, but they can't sell into third country markets, then they'll never achieve scale in the global system. Those markets have to be available to American companies and vice versa. Those countries have to be able to access the American market.
3 Takeaways
The U.S. Alone Can’t Compete with China. Here’s What Absolutely Can. (#250)
What we have to do is collectively put up more barriers against China's capacity. These can be trade barriers. They can be regulatory barriers. but then reduce barriers within that family of allied countries, essentially, that are free world. And that will require a different approach to how America conducts itself and its alliances. It will require greater humility.
3 Takeaways
The U.S. Alone Can’t Compete with China. Here’s What Absolutely Can. (#250)
But if we're able to pull it off, it'll give us the ability to maintain a system that has essentially brought prosperity to Americans, to our allies, and to the world.
3 Takeaways
The U.S. Alone Can’t Compete with China. Here’s What Absolutely Can. (#250)
I think first is that scale matters in the rise and fall of great powers. That scale is important. And this gets to Kurt's point about hegemonic prophecy. You don't want to underestimate others. If you take into account their scale, where that is a strength, where they have weaknesses, but scale matters.
3 Takeaways
The U.S. Alone Can’t Compete with China. Here’s What Absolutely Can. (#250)
China has scale right now relative to the United States in critical metrics relevant for the generation of strategic advantage and technological advantage. And the US on its own lacks that sense of scale. The US can find scale. It has a great repository of scale in its allies. And together with those allies and partners, That group of countries vastly outscales China.
3 Takeaways
The U.S. Alone Can’t Compete with China. Here’s What Absolutely Can. (#250)
So to kind of sum it up, scale matters and you have to get your hegemonic prophecy right. China has scale. The U.S. alone does not. The U.S. can get it with allies.
3 Takeaways
The U.S. Alone Can’t Compete with China. Here’s What Absolutely Can. (#250)
Thank you very much, Lynn. Thank you.
3 Takeaways
The U.S. Alone Can’t Compete with China. Here’s What Absolutely Can. (#250)
We basically think that scale is one of those factors that affects the rise and fall of great powers. Not all large countries are able to achieve scale. A lot of large countries don't become true great powers, but some do.
3 Takeaways
The U.S. Alone Can’t Compete with China. Here’s What Absolutely Can. (#250)
And when they're able to essentially take the efficiency models that smaller countries have sometimes developed first, think Great Britain, for example, during the first industrial revolution, and apply it on a larger foundation, they can be truly world-shaking. No one really expected that an island in the northwest corner of Europe would grow to dominate much of the world.
3 Takeaways
The U.S. Alone Can’t Compete with China. Here’s What Absolutely Can. (#250)
And Great Britain did it on the basis of a first mover advantage in the Industrial Revolution. But once those industrial methods proliferated out to other countries, especially larger countries, the British knew that essentially they would get outscaled. And in 1883, a top British nobleman, a guy named Lord Seeley, wrote essentially that Great Britain might go the same way that Florence went.
3 Takeaways
The U.S. Alone Can’t Compete with China. Here’s What Absolutely Can. (#250)
was outscaled by the great country states of Europe in the 16th century, so too could Great Britain be outscaled by the great powers of the US, Russia, and Germany in the 19th and 20th centuries. And that's essentially exactly what happened. And the question today is, does the US have sufficient scale vis-a-vis China? And I'll end by just noting, China has twice the U.S. manufacturing capability.
3 Takeaways
The U.S. Alone Can’t Compete with China. Here’s What Absolutely Can. (#250)
It's on track to achieve four times the U.S. manufacturing capability by 2030, according to the United Nations. It's four times the U.S. population. It's investing heavily in the industries of the future. On a lot of different metrics, it actually outscales the U.S. And the only path for the U.S.
3 Takeaways
The U.S. Alone Can’t Compete with China. Here’s What Absolutely Can. (#250)
to achieve the kind of scale that eluded Great Britain is in common cause with allies through a kind of new capacity-centric statecraft that Kurt and I lay out in the piece.
3 Takeaways
The U.S. Alone Can’t Compete with China. Here’s What Absolutely Can. (#250)
Let's just take China for a moment. I mentioned their manufacturing capability being twice the U.S. That's a value added share of global manufacturing. But if you look at just raw productive capacity and you don't think about the value added component, China's scale there is almost three times the U.S. That ability to manufacture has a lot of advantages for an economy.
3 Takeaways
The U.S. Alone Can’t Compete with China. Here’s What Absolutely Can. (#250)
First, it has advantages in wartime. It can lead to enormous production. But manufacturing also matters in a second dimension, which is for technological advancement. A lot of innovation comes from the factory floor. It's incremental. A lot of process knowledge and tacit knowledge comes from manufacturing. And even financial advantages can sometimes emerge from being the world's manufacturer.
3 Takeaways
The U.S. Alone Can’t Compete with China. Here’s What Absolutely Can. (#250)
That was certainly what happened to the U.S. And today that prowess is held by China. If you look at the statistics, Lynn, it's really shocking. I mean, China is twice U.S. power generation, three times U.S. car production, 11 times U.S. steel production, 20 times U.S. cement production.
3 Takeaways
The U.S. Alone Can’t Compete with China. Here’s What Absolutely Can. (#250)
In global market share, it's two-thirds of all electric vehicles, 80% of electric vehicle batteries, 80% of drones, 90% of uncrewed systems or UAVs or unmanned systems, as some call them. and more than 90% of solar panels and critical minerals. And if you look to the future, manufacturing is going to be dominated by robotics.
3 Takeaways
The U.S. Alone Can’t Compete with China. Here’s What Absolutely Can. (#250)
Well, China is responsible for seven times more installations of industrial machine robotic technology than the United States. And half of all the world's robot installations occurred in China in 2023. So they're betting on the ability to convert that into even greater manufacturing capability. And again, that is just one of the many metrics of scale.
3 Takeaways
The U.S. Alone Can’t Compete with China. Here’s What Absolutely Can. (#250)
China is number one in top-sided academic publications in science. It's also number one in active patents. You can quibble with those statistics. You should. They have problems. But quantity is a quality of its own. And we think that matters for global politics.
3 Takeaways
The U.S. Alone Can’t Compete with China. Here’s What Absolutely Can. (#250)
On the demographic side, there's two dimensions here. One is the sheer size of China, four times the US population, which means there's a large base of talent that they can draw from domestically if they can educate their population properly.
3 Takeaways
The U.S. Alone Can’t Compete with China. Here’s What Absolutely Can. (#250)
And we do see that in sheer numbers, China produces a significant cohort of top flight scientific talent, including in some of the arcane fields we might only have a few dozen experts in. So there's a demographic advantage that comes from that. But there's also a disadvantage that China has, right? It's a fast-aging society.
3 Takeaways
The U.S. Alone Can’t Compete with China. Here’s What Absolutely Can. (#250)
In the next 75 years, China's population will drop by half from the number it's in today. That's a significant drop. The question, though, isn't, is China graying? The question is, what timeframe matters for American geopolitical advantage or for Chinese geopolitical advantage?
3 Takeaways
The U.S. Alone Can’t Compete with China. Here’s What Absolutely Can. (#250)
The basic point is that China has a grand strategy that's evolved over time to displace the U.S. from its order, first at the regional level within the Indo-Pacific and then at the global level. And really, if you look at how China's approach has shifted across time,
3 Takeaways
The U.S. Alone Can’t Compete with China. Here’s What Absolutely Can. (#250)
The biggest variable that has always affected China's strategy is its perception of the relative power gap between the US and China. Back in the Cold War, the US and China were almost quasi-allies against the Soviet Union. It all changed because of a traumatic trifecta of events from Beijing's perspective. The Gulf War showed American military dominance.
3 Takeaways
The U.S. Alone Can’t Compete with China. Here’s What Absolutely Can. (#250)
The end of the Cold War took away the glue that held the U.S. and China together. And then, of course, there was the reality of the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, which revealed to China an ideological threat from the U.S. And after that, the Chinese Communist Party's Central Committee sort of determined that the U.S. was the chief adversary of China.
3 Takeaways
The U.S. Alone Can’t Compete with China. Here’s What Absolutely Can. (#250)
And that led them to start a strategy that they called hiding capabilities and biding time to quietly blunt America's power while continuing to benefit from the economic trade with the United States that built China into superpower today. And all that continues until 2008, when the global financial crisis scrambles China's perception again of America.
3 Takeaways
The U.S. Alone Can’t Compete with China. Here’s What Absolutely Can. (#250)
And this time they saw the United States as weakening, still threatening, but weakening. And that led them to a new strategy, not hide capabilities and buy time, not blunting American power, but actively accomplishing something, building Chinese power, specifically Chinese order within Asia.
3 Takeaways
The U.S. Alone Can’t Compete with China. Here’s What Absolutely Can. (#250)
They invest in power projection capabilities within the region so they can tell their neighbors more what to do. They build economic institutions within the region so they can demonstrate leadership. They also build political institutions, et cetera. Beginning in 2016, 2017, China's perception of the US changed one more time.
3 Takeaways
The U.S. Alone Can’t Compete with China. Here’s What Absolutely Can. (#250)
There was a perception that the US and the West were sort of riddled with populism that was eroding the capability of government to function. And they have a new phrase, the Chinese in this period under Xi Jinping, which is great changes unseen in a century. The world is undergoing great changes unseen in a century.
3 Takeaways
The U.S. Alone Can’t Compete with China. Here’s What Absolutely Can. (#250)
And that's what brings us to a global period of Chinese grand strategy focused on global military bases, making the world more dependent on China's supply chains than China is on the world's.
3 Takeaways
The U.S. Alone Can’t Compete with China. Here’s What Absolutely Can. (#250)
leading in technology, what they call the fourth industrial revolution, not just for prosperity, but for power and resetting the foundational baseline assumptions of the international system to be more conducive to China's authoritarian system of government than the democratic one that we have.
3 Takeaways
The U.S. Alone Can’t Compete with China. Here’s What Absolutely Can. (#250)
We're right now a few months into a new US administration, the Trump administration, which is pursuing a different approach on a variety of fronts, including with allies. What China is doing right now is it's seeing a degree of opportunity in pulling away some of the countries that might be wary of the US approach or disaffected. And it's trying to drive a wedge between the US and those countries.
3 Takeaways
The U.S. Alone Can’t Compete with China. Here’s What Absolutely Can. (#250)
That's not new. China has sought to do this, and Kurt knows it better than I have, having been involved in just about every major effort in the post-Cold War era on Asia. China has been trying this game for a long time. It's not clear they're going to succeed now either, but that's a critical focus of their foreign policy.
3 Takeaways
The U.S. Alone Can’t Compete with China. Here’s What Absolutely Can. (#250)
Separately from that, they're also aligning with countries that share their perspective or their sense of agreement relative to the U.S. order. And we know those countries. It's Russia, Iran, and North Korea.