One American view of China — now increasingly popular on the left and the right alike, especially among the hate-Donald Trump crowd —is that the communist colossus will be forever ascendant, with continued astonishing levels of food production, ship construction and industrial output. In this pessimistic view, China will soon replace America as the world’s predominant power.
We are, supposedly, like an exhausted British Empire circa 1945, and China is the new version of the postwar American powerhouse.
Yet even Beijing’s miraculous 30-year leap out of poverty into first-world affluence and Westernized power is hardly the same as parity with the United States. In truth, Trump held almost all the cards at the current summit and will do so again when Xi Jinping visits the United States this autumn. According to nearly every historical measure of power, the United States leads China by sizable margins — in wealth, economic output, fuel, food and military strength.
China has roughly four times the population of the United States, but produces only about 60 percent of our total GDP. A crude way of looking at this asymmetry is that one U.S. citizen accounts for 40 percent more goods and services than his four Chinese counterparts. Americans enjoy a per capita GDP (roughly $95,000) more than six times higher than China’s (roughly $15,000).
We are the largest oil and gas producer and exporter in history; China must import 11 million to 12 million barrels of oil every day. The United States is also the greatest food exporter in history; China, for all its miraculous increases in agricultural productivity, still must import 30-40 percent of its food, a number that keeps rising as China becomes more affluent and more diverse in its food consumption.
The United States still spends almost three times as much on defense. Its nuclear forces are roughly six times larger, and its 11 carrier strike groups are nearly four times more numerous than China’s three conventionally powered carriers. The United States has more than 100 years of experience in carrier warfare; China has fewer than 15 years.
American universities’ science, technology, engineering and mathematics departments dominate global rankings. In terms of market capitalization, eight U.S. companies are in the world’s Top 10. American companies, along with NASA, have regained prior American primacy in space exploration. In new frontiers such as robotics, drones, artificial intelligence, nuclear fusion, cryptocurrencies and bioengineering, a once sluggish United States has woken up, rebounded and is reasserting its pre-eminence.
True, the U.S. fertility rate is down to 1.7. But China’s is 1.0, and its population is rapidly shrinking and aging.
But most importantly, China is an autocracy. It is superficially efficient, but its technology is ultimately derived from the free and wide-open atmosphere of the West and of the United States in particular. There are usually around 300,000 Chinese students here in the United States — and they are not art history majors, but sent here to master and appropriate U.S. scientific expertise and then return home to clone it.
China has spent more than $4 trillion in the past decade on its Belt and Road, mercantile and imperialist agendas and on its military-industrial complex. Yet recently, its effort to pull Latin America away from the United States has been failing miserably. China lost its client, Nicolas Maduro, in Venezuela, and, with his arrest, Venezuela’s discounted oil imports. Its insidious effort to control the Panama Canal was aborted by Trump.
For now, China has also lost its discounted oil from Iran. If, in the months ahead, the Iranian theocracy falls, China will have no presence in the oil-rich Middle East, even as its appetite for oil grows exponentially. In terms of China’s stranglehold on rare-earth minerals, a once sleepy United States is planning its own huge new mines in mad dash fashion everywhere from Greenland to California, Utah and Wyoming.
The latest Chinese air defenses have failed miserably in Iran in 2025-26. But U.S. naval and air power — both weapons and personnel — performed brilliantly against Iran.
Geostrategically, the United States enjoys two vast oceans off its coast and, despite tensions, considers Canada and Mexico allies. Both are dependent on the U.S. economy and ultimately the American military for their defense. And North America may be the most natural-resource-rich continent in the world. China, by contrast, shares a border with nuclear-armed archrival India and an always unpredictable nuclear Russia — not to mention volatile, nuclear North Korea. Besides these, China, which suppresses 12 million Uyghur Muslims, has five Muslim neighbors. The United States and its European NATO partners often bicker, but again, China’s North Korean “ally” is a nuclear global pariah.
Critics claim the Iran war plays into China’s hands, but they rarely convincingly explain how or why Beijing is stronger than before the war started. Its trading partner and oil supplier, Iran, is in shambles and now fires on Chinese tankers seeking oil in the Gulf. Israel and the U.S. allies in the Gulf are ascendant, and in the years to come, they will remember that China was an enabler of their shared archenemy Iran.
If there is peace soon in Ukraine, Russia will likely seek to triangulate with the United States against China and vice versa.
China is about as popular in the Pacific as was the hated Japanese Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere of World War II. It takes some effort to alienate formerly anti-American nations such as Vietnam and the Philippines and drive them into the U.S. sphere of influence. In truth, China has legitimate worries about its neighborhood because it is surrounded by its own “ring of fire,” nations that are far more potent and dangerous than the motley crew of Hezbollah, Hamas and the Houthis that Iran once used to encircle Israel. Australia, Japan, the Philippines, South Korea, Taiwan and Vietnam are all rearming, seeking closer military relations with the United States and forming a loose alliance against what they see as their common existential enemy China.
As far as leverage goes, tomorrow the United States could deny visas and green cards to hundreds of thousands of Chinese students and technicians, effectively aborting China’s 50-year effort to absorb and replicate U.S. technology.
Tomorrow, Trump could announce that he seeks “parity” and “equity” with China in a spirit of “friendship” as he announces that the number of Chinese nationals in the United States from now on will match the number of their U.S. counterparts residing in China. China can buy as much U.S. farmland as Americans can buy Chinese farmland. Chinese can buy property as close to U.S. bases as Americans can purchase land near Chinese bases.
Finally, the Ukraine and Iran wars have taught the world that cheap drones can sometimes nullify missile defenses and are nearly as effective as $100 million combat aircraft and $4 million missiles. The United States is now rapidly incorporating the data from these two wars and will soon deploy a vast fleet of its own air, surface and submarine drones.
The idea of a third of a million Chinese troops steaming across the 110-mile Taiwan Strait to land on the beaches of Taiwan, while fighting, in transit, and on arrival, thousands of drones, is not an appealing invasion scenario.
True, America can be sluggish, insular, complacent and naive.
But historically, its innately resilient free people, singular constitutional government, robust federalism and free-market economy eventually wake up to the next rising threat — if often just in the nick of time. In the 1930s, a disarmed America, mired in depression, was told that fascist Italy, Nazi Germany and militarist Japan were the paradigms of the future, armed to the teeth, fielding millions of goose-stepping, scary soldiers and engaging in massive rearmament.
When war broke out in 1939, the U.S. Army ranked 19th in size worldwide. Was it hopeless? No. By war’s end in August 1945, Nazism, fascism and Japanese militarism were in ruins, and the U.S. fleet and economy were larger than those of all the war’s belligerents combined.
A communist Russia on the move, we were told, starting in the late 1940s, would destroy the United States. And indeed, the Red Army loomed huge, and thousands of Russian nuclear missiles were eventually pointed at the United States.
The Soviet Union, we were further warned, was taking over the globe, as an unstoppable communism seemed to spread unchecked through Latin America, Africa and Asia to our doorstep in Cuba. But after the crackup of the Soviet Empire, Russia’s GDP today is pathetically one-thirteenth the size of the U.S. economy, and it has become a shrinking, aging and unhealthy society.
Next, Japan Inc. was also supposed to bury us in the 1980s, as confident, rich Japanese investors bought up the iconic Pebble Beach Golf Course, Rockefeller Center and Columbia Pictures. We were told Honda and Toyota were light years ahead of the soon-to-go-bankrupt Ford and GM. Today, Japan remains mired in deflation, and U.S. corporations dwarf their Japanese counterparts.
Then, at the beginning of the millennium, it was the European Union’s turn to be the next supposed wave of the future, with America once more relegated to the past. When the United States in 2008 was mired in the Iraq War, short of oil and faced with soaring gas prices, the dollar fell, and the euro rose to $1.60. Soon, President Barack Obama would lecture Americans that we were no more an exceptional nation than Greece or the United Kingdom. “Lead from behind” became his new declinist mantra, and “apology tours” the way of the future.
Yet now the energy-short Europeans import American natural gas, and in early 2025, the euro fell to about $1 before rising later in the year. Moreover, the Iran war revealed the European Union as militarily weak and energy-short, with vast numbers of unassimilated and often hostile illegal aliens, suicidal green policies and a shrinking and aging population — and as reliant upon the U.S. economy and military for its continued prosperity and security.
The latest supposed Chinese existential threat is not to be assessed by how fast and impressively the nation rose from its own prior weakness, poverty and irrelevance. What matters instead is to what degree its innate system ensures that such ascendance will be permanently continued and whether its political system, food and fuel capacity, military and scientific community are on par with those of America’s.
And so far, in these regards, China, like all the other rivals of the past 100 years, has not come close.
Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness and a classicist and historian at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. Contact at authorvdh@gmail.com.
