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In American foreign policy, what is old is new again. As one famous historian observed, the Trump administration’s embrace of tariffs, military interventions in Latin America, “spheres of influence,” and a “great power rivalry” complete with arms races, call to mind the late 19th century, not the 21st.
But the administration is not a retrograde force. Rather, it is reacting to the world as it now is, not as America wishes it to be.
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz recently declared that “we’re seeing the temporary end of a rules-based, multilateral world order based on international law. We are in a phase in which the law of the strongest is being enforced.” It is, he warned, a “new era” in global politics.
Whether a “rules-based order” ever existed is questionable. But what is currently coming into being is most certainly not temporary. The future is here, and it promises to be a sharp departure from recent decades.
Indeed, the United States now finds itself in what some have called a new Cold War. But here, too, the parameters of this conflict differ sharply from its predecessor. The Soviet Union was a committed communist power that eschewed capitalism in all its forms. With the exception of portions of the underdeveloped Third World, the USSR was not an attractive partner. It did not offer a model that most countries wanted to emulate, nor was Moscow the “factory of the world.”
China is another story. As an industrial powerhouse, Beijing possesses significant leverage over huge swaths of the globe. And China offers another thing that the Soviets lacked: markets. For centuries, the world has wanted access to China’s vast population, both to peddle their goods and to purchase them. This has made the budding rivalry all the more complicated.
Beijing has used its economic might to seduce the West, the U.S. included. Consequently, for the first time in its history, the U.S. finds itself economically dependent on its foremost foe. It would’ve been unthinkable for the U.S. to have crucial sectors of its economy and its supply chains, including those related to national defense, intertwined with the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, or Imperial Japan. Yet that is precisely where America finds itself today.
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Beijing’s strategy of ensuring economic dependency has provided the CCP with tremendous leverage over longtime U.S. partners and allies. Even more than the U.S., much of Europe has outsourced manufacturing. Consequently, many on the continent find themselves reliant on the Chinese Communist Party.
The idea that European allies, with their own limited defense capabilities, would assist the U.S. militarily in a conflict in Asia is fanciful at best. Geography alone means that they’re likely to feel less threatened than many of America’s security partners in the Indo-Pacific. From their perspective, their core interests are less at stake.
These are tremendous shifts in the global order. And China itself possesses a tremendous challenge. The CCP has been engaged in the largest military buildup in history. Its head, Xi Jinping, is the most powerful Chinese ruler since the regime’s founder, Mao Zedong, died half a century ago. And the China that he rules over is vastly more powerful.
The CCP seeks to supplant the U.S. as the world’s leading superpower. Doing so will first require becoming dominant in the Indo-Pacific, the region that will soon account for the majority of the world’s GDP. The first step is the first island chain. Taiwan will be the appetizer. The CCP has long coveted the island. And it is well on its way to having the means.
In March 2025, Adm. John Aquilino, then serving as the head of the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, warned that Xi’s military was on track to fulfill his command of being able to seize Taiwan by 2027.
The CCP’s preparations are underway. Beijing is building a wartime command center that dwarfs the Pentagon. It is constructing and testing D-Day-style landing barges, which, one naval analyst noted, are “particularly relevant to any future landing forces on the Taiwanese Islands.” China is building underground hospitals, hoarding fuel and grain, and hardening hundreds of air bases throughout the region.
In short, China is preparing for war. And the U.S. has been asleep at the wheel.
For decades, China has been rising. Meanwhile, the U.S. has sat and watched as its industrial base, the real power that wins war, was hollowed out. By last count, China has 232 times the shipbuilding capacity that America possesses. A 2023 study by the Center for Strategic and International Studies found that in a war over Taiwan, the U.S. would run out of key munitions in a matter of days and weeks.
In short, the U.S. finds itself in a very, very bad place, short on the men, munitions, material, and capable allies that a conflict of that nature would require. And, it must be said, it is largely America’s own fault. Complacency kills.
Nor have demoralizing distractions helped. When the U.S. military was going woke, China was steeling itself for war.
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The stakes are tremendous. The U.S. has never faced a hot war with a “peer adversary.” A Sino-American conflict would be a great power conflict of a kind that the world hasn’t seen since at least World War II, if not ever. It would be of a type that the U.S. managed to avoid for the entirety of the Cold War. China, after all, is a nuclear power with a variety of means to hit the homeland, including in the new domains of space and cyber.
What does all of this mean? It means that the U.S. has to play catch-up. And there isn’t any time to waste. It also means that change, painful though it may be, is inevitable. It’s been a long time coming.
After fighting two world wars in the span of three decades, the U.S. set about building a global security architecture to prevent another one. America led the way in constructing successful military alliances such as NATO and, with the Marshall Plan, the reconstruction of a war-ravaged continent. The objective behind this architecture was simple: to contain communism and its then-leading exponent, the Soviet Union. Deter and, if need be, win a great power war.
At the end of World War II, the U.S. stood alone as an economic colossus. Indeed, America accounted for an astonishing 50% of the world’s GDP.
Throughout the Cold War, the U.S. prioritized Europe. Berlin, not Taipei, was the flashpoint. As Europe was then developed, and much of Asia was not, this made perfect sense. The Soviets were the communist military superpower. China was comparatively poor. As the historian Frank Dikotter has documented, well into the 1970s, China was incapable of even manufacturing buttons.
Times have changed. The Cold War with the Soviet Union, in which the U.S. prioritized Europe, ended in 1991. The foundations built to confront that threat are ill-positioned for a conflict with China.
This doesn’t mean, of course, that NATO should be shunted. Far from it. NATO has been the most successful military alliance in history. Other threats — Russia, Iran, North Korea, to name a few — remain. But it does mean that, for the present at least, America must do more with less. And American allies must assume more of the defense burden in their respective parts of the world.
For the past three decades, America and its partners have been on autopilot. At best, they’ve tried to make the post-World War-era system work for the new challenges that have arisen. At worst, they’ve buried their heads in the sand. But the clock is ticking, and the U.S. can no longer afford to indulge in illusions.
The Trump administration is responding to these seismic changes in the international order. Trump is the first occupant of the Oval Office to truly appreciate the imminent danger posed by the Chinese Communist Party.
When Trump first took office in 2017, he could have continued the status quo, hoping against hope that China would finally liberalize and that America’s partners would, without pressure, increase their defense spending. Instead, his administration recognized that what was broken needed fixing, and that this required a break with the past.
America can’t continue to feed its foremost opponent. America can’t be dependent on its enemy. And it can’t continue to indulge allies who “free-ride” and refuse to step up and do their part. Simply put, that is unsustainable, both for America and for the longtime security and safety of its friends.
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Other truths remain. Industrial power, not “international law,” wins wars. And military strength, not speeches at international forums, offers the best means of deterrence.
A “new era” has indeed dawned in global politics. But it isn’t because of Trump rejecting some mythical “rules-based international order.” Rather, it is because of China challenging the U.S. for primacy. Trump is simply the first world leader to do something about it.
