The West doesn’t have a China problem. It has a story problem.
It began in January 2017, Trump’s inaugural address: “From this day forward, it’s going to be only America first.” He added “only” at the last minute, ad libbing.
Foreign policy expert Daniel Drezner heard it as the end of the post-war international order:
“All presidents try to advance the national interest. But Trump was explicitly saying we don’t care if anyone else benefits.”
For three decades, American hegemony worked by making US choices feel like everyone’s. Free trade benefits all. Democracy promotion serves universal values. International institutions coordinate mutual interests.
Trump ripped that language apart. Not American leadership serving global prosperity – just American interests, period.
The establishment spent four years treating this as aberration. Trump’s gone, frameworks restored, back to normal.
Then Jake Sullivan stood up in September 2022 and said the quiet bit even louder. Speaking about semiconductors, Sullivan said simply that America needs “as large of a lead as possible” in critical technologies.
No free trade. No mutual benefit. No market efficiency. Just strategic dominance.
Trump didn’t break the framework. He exposed what remained once the framework broke. And Biden’s presidency didn’t restore that universalist language – it ratified its absence. The pretence that trade liberalisation serves everyone evaporated across both administrations.
The post-Cold War order made US preferences feel necessary, modern, efficient. Like gravity rather than empire.
Fifteen months after Sullivan’s speech, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo made the shift even plainer: “We cannot let China get these chips. Period.”
Nvidia had continued redesigning chips to skirt US export controls – creating downgraded versions that technically met the letter of the law whilst violating the spirit.
“If you redesign a chip around a particular cut line that enables them to do AI, I’m going to control it the very next day…
This is the language of economic nationalism: zero-sum great power competition.
For three decades after 1989, American hegemony operated almost invisibly. Cloaked in “the end of history.” Everyone saw the military bases, the dollar system, the institutional architecture.
What stayed hidden too was its arbitrary nature. The post-Cold War order made US preferences feel necessary, modern, efficient. Like gravity rather than empire.
That disguise is gone.
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