Derek Thompson writes:

China may well come to dominate the next century—because President Donald Trump is taking a page from the most famous Chinese leader of the previous one.

The United States remains the world’s preeminent soft power. It’s a financial and cultural juggernaut, whose entertainment and celebrities bestride the planet. But as an industrial power, the U.S. is not so much at risk of falling behind as it is objectively behind already. A recent essay in the journal Foreign Affairs by Rush Doshi and Kurt Campbell, both China experts who served in the Biden administration, made the case with alarming specificity. China makes 20 times more cement and 13 times more steel than the U.S. It makes more than two-thirds of the world’s electric vehicles, more than three-quarters of its electric batteries, 80 percent of its consumer drones, and 90 percent of its solar panels. China’s shipbuilding capacity is several orders of magnitude larger than America’s, and its navy will be 50 percent larger than the U.S. Navy by 2030.

The Trump administration clearly recognizes the need to rebuild industrial capacity. In its executive order published on “Liberation Day,” the White House suggested that, without high tariffs, America’s “defense-industrial base” is too “dependent on foreign adversaries”—a clear allusion to China.

But Trump’s approach to countering China has been so scattershot, so inept, so face-smackingly absurd, that it sometimes seems like covert policy to destroy America’s reputation. Rather than build a global trading and supply-chain alliance to match the scale of China, we’ve threatened to invade Canada and slapped new tariffs on our European and East Asian allies. Rather than invest in scientific discovery, which is the basis of our technological supremacy, the administration threatens to decimate the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation while attacking major research universities, including Harvard and Columbia. Rather than compete on clean energy, the White House has targeted solar and wind subsidies for destruction. Rather than invest in nuclear power by expanding the Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office, which provides billion-dollar loan guarantees for nuclear projects, the administration dismissed 60 percent of its staff. Rather than secure our reputation as the world’s premier destination for global talent, we’re driving away foreign students.

“If you take every asymmetric American advantage”—our universities, our science, our reputation for attracting the world’s smartest young people—“we’re going after each of them in a fit of cultural Maoism,” Doshi told me last week. Mao Zedong, who led China’s one-party state after World War II, oversaw a fraught and fatal attempt to industrialize the country, known as the Great Leap Forward. His regime was infamous for its cult of personality and its purging of ideological enemies, not to mention millions of deaths from starvation.

Doshi does not think that Trump will starve millions of Americans to death (nor do I). But he does see Trump’s second term featuring a “cult of personality,” he told me, which may not quite be Maoist but does feel Mao-ish. The first 100 days of this administration were “defined by the relentless targeting of individuals and organizations for their heretical views and purges within the administration for those deemed insufficiently loyal. And its destination is the destruction of state capacity and leading institutions as fervor and zeal overwhelm any prudence and planning.”

Doshi isn’t the only one making this analogy. [Continue reading…]