Winning without fighting
Local Hegemon
Last week, Foreign Minister Wang Yi warned Secretary of State Marco Rubio, already sanctioned and banned from entering China, hǎo zì wéi zhī, warning him, as a subordinate, to behave responsibly. Secretary Rubio, who had already signaled the end of unipolarity, took the warning to heart:
It’s not normal for the world to simply have a unipolar power. That was an anomaly. It was a product of the end of the Cold War. But eventually you were going to reach back to a point where you had a multipolar world, multi-great powers in different parts of the planet.
Heeding Wang’s warning, the Department of State replaced its former Taiwan page, signaling that it would no longer oppose reunification:
Quid pro quo?
In return, the US will receive TSMC and its negligible IP because, without ASML technology, TSMC is worthless to China but signals a great victory for President Trump.
Trade sanctions?
Sixty-percent of China’s exports to the USA are made in American-owned factories in China1 and, apart from the jobs they provide, China does not need them. Besides, since Trump was elected in 2016, America’s share of Chinese exports has fallen from twenty-two to fifteen percent–much of that being goods that only China can provide.
Imperial moments
Despite three thousand years of failures, the lure of global hegemony still entices wealthy nations to impoverish themselves, as Britain did:
The content below was originally paywalled.
When Winston Churchill entered Parliament in 1901, the British Navy ruled the waves and the Empire, upon which ‘the sun never set,’ spanned the globe. When he left office in 1955 the empire had vanished and Britain was a bankrupt, second-rate power. No one admired the Empire more than Churchill, who devoted his life to its preservation, yet no one played a greater role in its collapse than he. Through his decisions, especially his determination to take Britain to war and keep it there—he unleashed the forces that dismantled his beloved empire he so cherished.
As the sun sets on the young American Empire and rises on the older, wiser Chinese imperium President Trump, rather than being forced into a messy retreat, has begun a controlled withdrawal from foreign commitments, while the West figures figure out how to survive in a Chinese-led world, as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth indicates:
China’s hypersonic missiles can destroy all US aircraft carriers in 20 minutes. In every Pentagon war game, the US loses to China.
China has won without fighting.
Like many US companies, Tesla’s production in China generated $21.75 billion from China in 2023, or 25% of Tesla’s total revenue.
