U.S. de-industrialization

The U.S. optimized for efficiency, innovation, and globalization. China optimized for control, scale, and industrial learning.

How the U.S. Is Reshoring Without Admitting China Was Right

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For much of the post–Cold War era, the United States treated a set of interlocking doctrines—market fundamentalism, free-trade universalism, post-industrial optimism, asset-light corporate governance, financialization, limited-government absolutism, unfettered capital mobility, consumer-welfare reductionism, and the peace-through-trade assumption—not as historically contingent choices but as permanent economic truths. In combination, these ideas proved costly. They privileged short-term efficiency … Read more

China’s Car Industry: A Model of Strategic Industrial Growth

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China’s industrial success stems from treating manufacturing not as a byproduct of market forces, but as a core national security and development objective. The state protected and sequenced openness, conditioned foreign investment, and prioritized asset-heavy ownership, scale, and export discipline over short-term profitability. Capital was deliberately directed into factories, supply chains, and physical technologies—particularly autos, … Read more

Why U.S. Auto Policy Collapsed, And China’s Rose Instead

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After 1991, the central error of U.S. economic statecraft was not adherence to any single doctrine—market fundamentalism, free-trade universalism, or neoliberal reform—but the deeper meta-error of treating those doctrines as natural laws rather than contingent tools. The absence of a peer rival was mistaken for the end of competition; a fleeting unipolar moment was misread … Read more

US vs China: How Ideology Cost America Its Industrial Edge

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After the Cold War, the United States elevated a cluster of post-1991 doctrines—market fundamentalism, free-trade universalism, end-of-history liberalism, anti-industrial and asset-light biases, financialization as progress, limited-government absolutism, global capital mobility, consumer-welfare reductionism, and the assumption of peace through trade—into something approaching natural law. The meta-error was not any single ideology, but the belief that these … Read more

Why China’s Moon Mission Is Outpacing NASA’s Artemis

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In December 2025, former NASA Administrator Michael Griffin delivered unusually blunt testimony to Congress, warning that the current U.S. Artemis lunar landing architecture is technically unsustainable. His remarks were not a product of factional infighting or rhetorical pessimism, but a rare whistleblower-style intervention from a senior insider with deep engineering credentials. Griffin’s warning underscored a … Read more

Prins Shows Why U.S. Financialization Blocks True Abundance

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Within U.S. politics, a longstanding divide has existed between progressive leaders who emphasize distributional policy—welfare, equality, and redistribution—and those who argue that economic growth itself must remain a central objective. Critics and supporters of Abundance (Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, 2025) converge on a key claim: without robust growth and sustained supply expansion, redistribution alone … Read more

Why China’s Low-Cost Talent Beats U.S. High-Risk Engineers

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In the United States, the growing prevalence of ALICE households—asset-limited, income-constrained, and employed—represents not merely a social welfare challenge but a structural failure in talent mobilization. High living costs, pervasive legal and regulatory risk, and an expensive failure environment constrain individuals’ ability to pursue technical training, tolerate career risk, or sustain long time horizons. These … Read more

How U.S. Over-Finance Breeds Social Woes, China Avoids

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“Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed” (ALICE) describes U.S. households that earn above the Federal Poverty Level yet lack the resources necessary for economic security. ALICE is neither a conspiracy nor a moral failure; it is a rational outcome of interacting systems optimized for self-protection in a society that has lost its stabilizers. U.S. over-financialization and … Read more

From Moral Triumph to Strategic Drift in U.S. China Policy

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The United States persistently confuses moral conviction and procedural authority with substantive material strategy, a pattern evident in its unplanned decoupling from global dependencies—a deliberate echo of habits ingrained since the Cold War’s end. To effectively vie with China in the technological arena and avert recurring pitfalls, the U.S. must confront its fundamental errors and … Read more

Capacity Beats Values: Lessons for the U.S.–China Tech Race

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The United States misread the lessons of the Cold War, while China accurately understood the dynamics of the post–Cold War world. Today, as the U.S. and China compete in technology, it is imperative to draw concrete lessons from this divergence. In strategic competition, reality does not bend to values; outcomes are determined by capacity, cost, … Read more