Leadership1 publisher2 min readPublished
The strategy for outbuilding China now waits on decades of American political repair
A Noahpinion post says the United States is too internally divided to assemble the allied manufacturing bloc its author spent the Biden years recommending, and puts the repair of those alliances decades away.
The Board Room · Leadership desk
What happened
- Kennan's 1946 Long Telegram argued that Soviet leaders would be permanently hostile to the United States but too cautious to start a world war the way Germany had.
- The Noahpinion author spent the Biden years recommending much tighter economic cooperation with a maximally large set of allies, a bloc capable of overmatching Chinese manufacturing.
- He now writes that the election of Trump shows the strategy probably will not work, because the United States is too internally divided to prosecute that kind of competition.
- He attributes to Trump the willful degrading or tearing up of America's key alliances, especially with Europe, and the creation of enmity where friendship once reigned.
- The post cites Rush Doshi and Kurt Campbell arguing the old alliances could be reconstituted if America credibly overcame its divisions and again became a stable, reliable great power.
Compiled by The Board RoomSomething wrong?How this is made
Why it matters
- constraint A commitment with a fifteen-year payback assumes coordinated allied industrial policy, a condition this argument dates in decades. The hedge against it has to be bought out of today's margins.
- decision Sourcing choices between one cheap supplier and redundancy across allied jurisdictions now turn on a forecast of American political constancy. No procurement model carries that forecast as a line item.
- contradiction The post endorses the economics of the allied bloc and rejects its politics in the same passage, leaving a planner to decide alone whether to build for the bloc or around it.
- exposure Contracts written on the assumption of continued US-Europe alignment are exposed to alliance damage the post attributes to Trump. That exposure is political.
The claim carrying the weight here is about whether the United States can hold to a commitment long enough for anyone else to build against it. The bloc the post described had to be large enough to overmatch Chinese manufacturing. The author's own reason for needing that scale is that China is bigger than the USSR was, has a better economic model and is far more globally integrated [8][9]. Overmatching on that scale requires allied governments and firms to sink capital on the expectation that Washington is still a partner when the assets are written down. "Americans care more about fighting other Americans than about fighting the Chinese, and that state of affairs will persist for a while," the author wrote [12].
Kennan sent his telegram in 1946, and by the post's count containment took 45 years to work, which dates the Soviet collapse to 1991 [1][4][5]. Against that, the post puts the repair of America's internal divisions at decades at the very least. Those decades, it says, are exactly the window in which China sits at its peak of relative power [15].
The author disclaims his own authority. "I am certainly no George Kennan," he wrote, noting that he has never lived in China, does not speak Chinese and does not talk to leaders there [16][17]. The supplied text stops mid-sentence, just as he turns to the alternative [19]. The durable part of the argument is a judgement about the supply of American political constancy, and that is testable in public, in whether allied governments and firms sign long-dated arrangements with the United States.
Tariffs and export controls, the instruments most companies actually feel, do not appear in the passage [18]. Its variables are industrial capacity and alliance durability [9][15]. For an operator, the fragile line in the model is the expected life of the subsidy, procurement preference or tariff wall that made a site pencil out.
The trade-off is explicit. Redundancy across allied jurisdictions costs margin in every quarter it is carried and pays only if the bloc actually forms; concentrating on the cheapest source books the saving now and leaves the political risk on one balance sheet. Anyone making that call this quarter is implicitly forecasting American political constancy, and the forecast in this post is decades at minimum before the alliances could be reconstituted [15].
What to watch
- Whether allied governments and firms commit to long-dated industrial arrangements with the United States, the observable test of the durability claim.
- The full Doshi and Campbell article, and whether their conditions for reconstituting the alliances come with a timeline.
- Whether the post's cut-off conclusion proposes a substitute strategy or an accommodation with China.