American soft power against China is a dangerous delusion
29th May 20
Despite the fact that China’s economic power is visible to anyone paying attention, the West continues to underestimate it, assuming Western soft power will preserve the old order. Foreign policy analyst Narain D. Batra argues this a dangerous delusion; one in which American dominance is treated as the natural, permanent order of things. The new geo-economic settlement is clear: China has already built structural dominance in manufacturing, trade, critical minerals, electric vehicles, and artificial intelligence. Great powers do not decline through weakness alone, but through the inability to see the world clearly.
After President Donald Trump’s friendly and deferential visit with China’s Xi Jinping, Matthew Hennessey, a Wall Street Journal editor, wrote a column alerting us about the false “Red Scare.” The argument, stripped to its bones, was this: America is great, China ain’t, and you should stop worrying. Hennessey’s article, confident and sharply written, is a near-perfect specimen of American triumphalist thinking. But when you hold it up against the actual data, it’s deeply misleading.
His argument makes us feel comfortable. Why? Because “America has NVidia. We have Apple, Microsoft, Google, Meta, and Tesla. We have the NBA. We have Sydney Sweeney. We have the B-2 bomber.” We are, in his words, “crushing it.” China, on the other hand? “TikTok. That’s pretty much it.” That’s the full accounting of China’s rise. There’s something almost refreshing about the confidence. Hennessey isn’t hedging. He’s saying, we’re winning, China is not, don’t worry, relax. The problem is, when you actually look at the numbers, the confidence isn’t confidence. It’s a falsetto.
Consider the numbers Hennessey doesn’t mention. Let’s start with manufacturing. Hennessey frames America as the world’s economic engine, and manufacturing is where that engine gets built. But China accounts for 27.7% of all global manufacturing output. That’s nearly five trillion dollars in 2024 alone. It has held the title of world’s largest manufacturer for sixteen consecutive years. China is not rising, not catching up. China has been dominant for a generation.
Now let’s talk about the industry that will define economic and military power for the next fifty years: electric vehicles. In 2024, China produced 70% of every electric vehicle built anywhere in the world. And it produces nearly 80% of all lithium-ion batteries. BYD, a Chinese company, sold 4.3 million vehicles last year. Tesla sold 1.8 million. Six of the world’s ten largest EV manufacturers are Chinese. And here’s the number that I think really cuts through the noise: the cheapest BYD model retails in China for under eight thousand dollars. The cheapest American EV starts at thirty-three thousand six hundred. That gap is not marketing. That’s an industrial capability that took decades to build, and we do not currently have an answer for.
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Culture follows power.
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Jim Farley, the CEO of Ford, toured Chinese factories last year and test-drove Chinese EVs. And afterward, he said: “The most humbling thing I’ve ever seen.“ That’s the CEO of Ford. Not a think-tank analyst. Not a politician. The guy who runs one of the most iconic American car companies in history.
And then there’s Elon Musk, the very Elon Musk that some cite as American proof of greatness, who warned that Chinese EV makers would “pretty much demolish” most global competitors without trade barriers.
Most of us don’t think about rare earth minerals, probably the most alarming point in this whole conversation. These are elements that sound obscure until you realize they are physically inside every smartphone, every EV, every wind turbine, every F-35 fighter jet, and every missile guidance system that the United States builds or deploys. There is no modern military without rare earths. There is no clean energy transition without rare earths. There is no semiconductor industry without rare earths. China mines roughly 70% of the global supply. But mining is not even where the real leverage is. China refines approximately 90% of the world’s output.
Think about what that means for a moment. The most powerful military on earth cannot fully build its own most advanced weapons systems without materials that Beijing controls and can cut off. And we know Beijing is willing to use this. In April 2025, after the Trump administration announced tariffs, China restricted exports of seven critical elements. Ford temporarily halted Explorer production within weeks, not because of a trade dispute in the abstract, but because the supply of rare earth magnets dried up.
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In January 2025, a Chinese AI start-up called DeepSeek released a model. It reportedly matched or outperformed leading American AI systems, systems that companies like OpenAI and Anthropic spent billions of dollars developing. DeepSeek was built for approximately six million dollars, using chips that are already subject to U.S. export restrictions.
The market reacted instantly. NVIDIA lost nearly six hundred billion dollars in market capitalization in a single trading day. It was the largest single-day loss for any company in the history of stock markets. The Nasdaq fell 3%. The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index dropped 9.2%, its worst day since March 2020.
A Gartner analyst commented that the event “changed global beliefs about frontier-model cost curves and China’s competitiveness.” That’s a Sputnik moment, the moment when you realize the assumptions you’d been operating on were wrong.
Or consider global trade. In the year 2000, thirty-three countries traded more with China than with the United States. But by 2025, China had become the top goods trading partner for most of the world. Every major economy in South America now trades more with Beijing than with Washington.
Wall Street Journal’s Hennessey says the world is “with us.” That “if they could, they would be us.” True, of course, America’s model of open markets and rule of law does remain genuinely attractive to a lot of people in a lot of places. But the trade data tells a different story about who the world is actually doing business with. And doing business with a country is the most honest vote. The world isn’t with us the way some of us think. It’s hedging. It’s diversifying.
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America is not winning on autopilot.
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Let’s address the cultural argument, because it’s the one that sounds most compelling on the surface. Hennessey asks, name a Chinese movie star with global appeal. Name a Chinese musician who fills stadiums. Name a Chinese thinker reshaping intellectual discourse.
Right now, in 2026, the honest answer is, of course, it’s America. But cultural dominance doesn’t lead to structural power. It follows it, usually by a generation, sometimes two. America’s cultural dominance after World War II wasn’t just the organic product of freedom and creativity. It was built on top of structural advantages, such as a broken Europe that needed rebuilding, a dollar that became the world’s reserve currency, Hollywood’s market-driven universal appeal, and decades of deliberate policy designed to export American culture as a strategic asset. That foundation took decades to build. The British Empire didn’t start exporting its cultural soft power until after it had already built the empire. Culture follows power.
Hennessey asks us to consider America’s military prowess during the 2003 Iraq war. But then what? The United States spent twenty years in Iraq and Afghanistan. Over two trillion dollars. Nearly seven thousand American military lives. And we ended with the Taliban back in power in Kabul, and Iran more influential across Iraq than it was before the Iraq invasion. Now, after the Middle East devastation, Iran is still standing despite the threat of total annihilation.
Do we have to worry about a potential conflict with a nuclear-armed nation of 1.4 billion people, one that has the world’s largest standing army and has been explicitly building a navy designed to contest American power in the Indo-Pacific, especially if it comes to Taiwan, a bastion of freedom and technology that America enabled? Keep thinking.
America does have real, deep advantages. The capacity to attract talent from around the world, genuine talent, people voting with their feet, building lives and companies and futures here, that’s something no authoritarian state can manufacture. The rule of law, for all its failures, creates conditions for economic dynamism that centrally planned economies consistently fail to match. These are not nothing.
But here’s the distinction we have to keep in mind. There’s a difference between “America has real strengths” and “therefore, don’t worry.” The first is true. The second is dangerous. A nation that wants to stay a global power doesn’t just celebrate its advantages. It protects and builds on them. It asks why the CEO of Ford is flying to Shenzhen to study Chinese cars. It asks why a Chinese start-up just built an AI model for six million dollars that shook the foundations of a six-hundred-billion-dollar American industry in a single day. It asks why China controls the materials inside our own fighter jets.
America is not declining as Xi Jinping admonished Trump in Beijing. America has extraordinary assets. Its institutions, its talent, its culture of innovation. These are real, and they are formidable. But America is not winning on autopilot. And the countries, the empires, the powers that have fallen throughout history, they mostly didn’t fall because they lacked strength. They fell because they stopped seeing clearly. Because they confused the present moment with the permanent. Because they ceased to be vigilant.
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