T. Greer divides policy debates on China into two large buckets:
One is centered on geopolitics, diplomacy, and defense; the other on trade and finance. I was surprised to find that these two dimensions do not map neatly onto each other. Where a man stands on the question of America’s economic relationship with China does not always predict where he falls on questions of military posture.
Those in the right quadrants see U.S. competition with China as a race. Winning the race means being the first to occupy the commanding heights of the future global economy. The country that develops, deploys, and commercializes the next generation of technologies will seize these heights.
Those on the left two quadrants reject this framing. They believe ‘winning’ requires a broader industrial renaissance that revives American manufacturing, restores its industrial capacity, and revitalizes the regions left behind by the tech-driven growth of the last three decades. They argue that orienting industrial policy solely around emerging technologies reinforces the very conditions Trumpism was born in reaction to.
At the bottom are the skeptics. Those pulled towards this position have no faith in bureaucrats. Many distrust the type of person that staffs our bureaucracy (left leaning, academic, inexperienced, etc); others doubt whether it is possible for any bureaucrat, no matter how skilled, to manage the market—especially when this means picking winners and losers in a domain as uncertain as emerging technology. If venture capital cannot pick out winning firms in advance, why think that Congress will do any better?
Those in the upper two quadrants of my diagram have more faith in the administrative state. They are inspired by the developmental states of East Asia and successful defense-industrial programs of the Cold War. They believe those successes can be replicated in 21st century America. From this viewpoint the key bottleneck is not personnel but political will.
In the bottom right, we find the Dynamists—technophilic types who think the greatest obstacles to victory are overregulation, DEI mandates, and the weak ties between Silicon Valley and the White House.
Sharing their technophilia are the fellows in the top right quadrant: the Techno-nationalists. These folks often have backgrounds in national security. That experience biases them towards active government involvement—through defense contracts, R&D funding, and procurement—in “strategic” industries (this group also tends to be most eager to apply export controls on Chinese technology purchases).
On the top left sit the Industrialists. They hope to rebuild legacy industries like steel and automotive manufacturing with tools the Techno-Nationalists would reserve for things like semiconductors or unmanned vehicles. They are unabashed defenders of the full industrial policy suite, from tariffs to strategic planning.
The bottom left quadrant—the Trade Warriors—share Industrialist goals but reject the bureaucratic apparatus (and spectacular budgets) that full-scale industrial policy would require. Their preferred instrument is the tariff. These appeal to people who would like to reshore manufacturing while simultaneously hacking away at the New Deal. A tariffs-first industrial policy is entirely compatible with a shrinking federal footprint—USTR can run all of American trade policy with less than 200 people.
In the right two quadrants we find Trumpists who emphasize the fiscal, cultural, political, and even physical constraints on American military power. They describe America as a nation in both relative and absolute decline. Like Nixon and Kissinger in the 1970s, they believe that we must face these realities soberly, and adopt a national strategy that frees the United States from diplomatic and military commitments it can no longer sustain.
This logic is rejected by the optimists, located on the lefthand side of the diagram. They balance the constraints America faces with the manifest weaknesses of America’s rivals. They acknowledge the problems identified by the pessimists, but tend to describe these problems as self-inflicted. Inadequate defense budgets are not a law of nature, but a choice—with Trump in command America might choose otherwise.
At the top are hard-nosed realists. They argue that force is the foundation of international politics. They understand statecraft as the art of accumulating, preserving, and using power.
Those in the bottom quadrants do not find this view sufficient. They trace connections between the way American power is used abroad and political conditions at home. As the international order goes, the domestic order may follow. Individuals in these quadrants tend to believe that the American government should actively commit itself to strengthening specific cultural ideals—and see no reason why this should not be true in the realm of foreign policy.
In the bottom left quadrant are the Crusaders. This group generally describes U.S.-China competition in ideological terms. In this view the two competing regimes rest on incompatible foundations. In the long run there can be no stable accommodation or compromise between the two powers, as the success of one undermines the domestic stability of the other. As a general rule, Crusaders believe that in a globalized world preserving basic liberties at home means defending them forcefully abroad.
The Culture Warriors in the bottom right quadrant are the Crusaders’ opposites: to them, both the Washington foreign policy establishment and the ‘liberal international order’ are extensions of the liberal domestic order they reject. At best, foreign policy interventionism is a distraction from the culture war they want to wage at home; at worst, it erodes the very liberties that Crusaders claim to champion.
The top quadrants are more traditional. The Prioritizers on the top right do not share the Culture Warriors’ ideological objections to the international order, but they do think this order demands more from America than she currently has the capacity to give. They consequently argue that the United States must shed many of its international commitments so that it can concentrate on the problem posed by China.
The Primacists in the top left quadrant share the realpolitik language of the Prioritizers, but believe the Prioritizers do not take the connections between China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran as seriously as they should. They believe that America does have the potential power to manage global commitments—if only we can muster the will to do so. They believe that Trump is the only man capable of supplying that will.
The chief divide is along the Corruption axis. China can make things that America can’t because it is less corrupt. The Chinese system is less corrupt because, in China, corrupt men can be, and often are, arrested, tried, and executed, and the Chinese people is less corrupt in that it wastes less time, its richest steal less, it’s vastly more healthy, and so on.
Nothing much will change in America until the criminals and terrorists of the U.S. Regime are hanged (dishonorable) or shot (honorable).
P.S. My personal favorite bit of U.S. Regime propaganda is when Chinese presidential anti-corruption efforts are themselves cast as corruption—a fear reflex by the U.S. lawyers, billionaires, and spies running America into the ground that noble Chinese precedent may give people ideas.