America Cedes the Stage to China

 

Rush Doshi

America Cedes the Stage to China

Mr. Doshi was the deputy senior director for China and Taiwan affairs at the National Security Council under President Joe Biden. He is a scholar at Georgetown University and the Council on Foreign Relations.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/01/11/opinion/trump-new-world-order.html

 

For the first time in more than a century, the Americas appear to be Washington’s highest priority — to the detriment of time and attention on Europe and Asia, and to the ultimate benefit of Beijing.

 

The administration’s pursuit of a “Fortress America” offers no refuge against China’s growing power. And building it through imperial adventures risks repeating the mistakes of other great powers that similarly misdiagnosed the true sources of national strength as territorial control instead of technological mastery.

 

In the 18th century, China and Russia myopically built spheres of influence on the Eurasian steppe while Britain won the century by perfecting the steam engine. In the 19th century, Europeans fixated on the scramble for Africa while the United States leaped ahead by inventing electrification and mass manufacturing.

 

Now the United States risks distracting itself by trying to govern Venezuela and seize Greenland while China is dedicating vast sums to winning the technologies of the future, from artificial intelligence and robotics to quantum computing and biotechnology.

 

Already, China’s economy is roughly 30 percent larger than the United States’ by purchasing power, its industrial base twice as large, its power generation twice as high, and its navy is on track to become 50 percent larger by the end of this decade. It leads in new technologies like electric vehicles and next-generation nuclear reactors while the United States increasingly depends on it for everything from antibiotics to rare-earth minerals.

 

Dominating the Americas does little to change this. The Western Hemisphere has only about 13 percent of the world’s population and a shrinking share of its economy and manufacturing capacity. If prioritizing the Americas means fewer resources are devoted to Asia, that is a poor trade, one that risks ceding the world’s most populous and economically dynamic region to Beijing’s influence. America would fall behind China technologically, depend on it economically and risk being defeated by it militarily. The result would be a Chinese century.

 

For America, the only path to balancing China’s sheer scale is to renew American strength at home and leverage the collective power of U.S. partners by building “allied scale” abroad. An “Americas first” fixation on the Western Hemisphere complicates that. It distracts leaders from the task of domestic renewal and alienates allies and partners. Seizing Greenland from Denmark, for example, would fracture NATO and drive Europe closer to China. That would be strategic malpractice.

 

Beijing appears to recognize that in statecraft, focusing one’s energies on the right question matters. For Washington, the central strategic question of the 21st century is not whether the United States can build a bastion in the Western Hemisphere. It is whether America, after a century as the world’s most powerful, advanced and prosperous country, will renew the true sources of strength or pass the torch to China.