Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto is said to have intoned, “We’ve awoken a sleeping giant.” (Some historians say this is an attribution – the admiral might not have said so.) The Empire of Japan had just attacked Pearl Harbor during World War II.
Hitherto, America had been very ambivalent about entering another European War. Pearl Harbor immediately won over even the most diehard of isolationists. So, America arrayed its lethal arsenal and unleashed pulverizing misery upon its enemies in that theater of that cataclysmic war.
Presently, Japan was subdued – two atomic bombs having been detonated on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, respectively. A proud empire surrendered unconditionally. And as if inglorious defeat wasn’t ignoble enough, the emperor, held up as the direct descendant of the sun goddess, Amaterasu, was humiliatingly demoted. Henceforth, he would join the ranks of other mortals. All this happened in 1945.
We observe a parallel here in 2025 – except for the fact that military conflict isn’t the issue at stake. The spring of 2025 is heralding a disruptive trade war – for which there shall be no victors, only losers.
America, an economic and military hegemon since 1945, has awoken a quiet but rising economic giant, China. China, a member of the WTO, wasn’t the author of the rules of international trade. A nouveau riche, China joined the ranks of powerful economic nations long after the rules had been etched in stone.
In fact, since the industrial revolution, the so-called rules-based international order – whether in diplomacy, international trade, cross-border banking and financial settlements, immigration, even the conduct of warfare, and international tribunals – has had the imprimatur of the West.
The West designed the architectural blueprint of the order. The West has overseen the implementation and enforcement of these rules. These days, when there are trade disputes, the WTO is the right forum to register grievances, as well as seek negotiated resolutions. A purveyor of a unilateral action deals a rude shock to the system.
In the 19th century, the United Kingdom was the bellwether of empires. In the vaunted words of Rudyard Kipling, Britannia bore “the white man’s burden.” After all, Britannia ruled two-thirds of the globe. After all, hadn’t Europe, at the Berlin Conference, in 1885, on matters of trade and boundaries, consummated the colonization of Africa? And doing so gluttonously, with the certitude of a superior race, untroubled by any moral ambiguities?
Meanwhile, the colonized peoples could marshal neither the will nor wit to punch holes in Kipling’s parody of their plight. Nor the wherewithal to resist the insidious, the surreal takeover of their lands, peoples, and bequests.
Ultimately, the European empires unraveled after two self-inflicted, calamitous world wars.
So, since 1945, America has held the helm. It has been the powerful guardian angel of the Western worldview regarding political ideology, economic system and military alliances. It has refashioned the rules-based order after the American ethos. Democracy, free enterprise, and free trade on a global scale must be embraced. It leads to posterity in freedom. The West extolls the system, particularly its bountiful material accomplishments.
Meanwhile, by persuasion, by wads of inducement, by subtle manipulations, by none too subtle intimidation, or by outright subversion, the West, led by America, has corralled the Global South into this order.
So, poor nations have submissively abided by these rules. The defeat of communism in the early 1990s has since added brio to the Western worldview. (Russia is a nuclear power, but its economic performance is dwarfed, in GDP measures, by the Netherlands’.)
Here is to the triumph of liberal democracy. Here is to an enviable inter-connected world economy – globalization. A new order for the ages. All this has happened admirably under the aegis of the United States of America – a powerful nation that never ceases to proclaim American exceptionalism.
Doubtless, until recently, the spheres of STEM, of managing complex, multinational private enterprises, and of running equally complex institutions of the modern nation-state had been nearly the exclusive preserve of the West.
Suddenly, the West realizes that other nations are rising – at zestful but deliberate speed, on Earth’s eastern shores. China leads the way. India isn’t far behind. These two populous nations, employing dissimilar political economies, have caught up with the West. They have the West off guard.
The West feels comfortable with India. They indulge India’s brand of liberal democracy – though, not infrequently, that ancient land expends precious energies on internecine feuds, fueled by religious intolerance.
China is a different matter. The West looks upon the Middle Kingdom with incomprehensible fear. For, in temper and tempo, China defies all the settled conventions the West holds dear. The clutch of secular creeds – constitutive of Western liberalism, progress and resiliency and power – faces an epic challenge from the East.
Annually, China produces more engineers than the entire Western world’s output. China’s domestic market has the genuine potential to surpass the combined markets of the USA and the EU.
But be it as it may, no nation can stop the economic juggernaut that China has become. It is likely to outstrip the US in economic power before 2050.
Evocatively. The triumph of China demonstrates that nations, coming as they do from almost always unique histories, could choose idiosyncratic paths towards political and economic development.
Fear, unjustified fear, of the other rising nations, undergirds President Trump’s obsession with tariffs and the implied American isolationism. He waxes nostalgic about a great period in American life, when tariffs had worked magic, when there were no federal income taxes (1790s to 1913). But there is more to that story than meets the eye. When a tariff regime was resurrected in 1930, under the Smoot-Hawley Act, the ensuing economic and social misery deepened the Great Depression. Thus, Mr. Trump, a seasoned businessman, must be romanticizing a past prosperity that didn’t occur. So, it feels like he is weaving a basket to catch the wind.
How could any sanguine, far-sighted leader apply obsolete economic policy tools to rectify a structural, but repairable, defect in the American economy? And other Western economies? David Ricardo, the 19th-century eminent British economist and the exponent of international trade, must be turning in his grave.
The American people may soon learn, to their chagrin, that President Trump is bungling the American success story. He is addressing none of the gaping holes in the American political economy. As an example, the quality of public-school education (elementary, middle and high school) requires a significant upgrade.
An ounce of investment in high school and vocational training would redound to the long-term benefit of the United States. More so than a pound of knee-jerk, reactionary, pusillanimous tariff.
Now, though, the so-called reciprocal tariffs are the 21st-century Pearl Harbor of international trade. America has been the first to lob a salvo. It shouldn’t be a surprise at a more than proportionate response from otherwhere. A powerful nation may bully weak and diffident nations, but not an equally powerful one.
As the Chinese themselves – as well as American watchers of China – have said, Trump’s tariffs have only invigorated China. More importantly, China is unstoppable. The only nation that could stop China would be the Chinese themselves.
Such as if they got lured into the hubris of nations syndrome. When a nation is prone to deploying power and pride, and military adventurism, and a conquest instinct to project self-importance.
Such as if they applied precious resources to develop nuclear and other lethal armaments, instead of producing goods and services to upgrade the human condition. (China has over one billion mouths to feed, clothe and shelter.)
Such as if they over-extended themselves in foreign wars and esoteric entanglements.
Then China, too, would lose luster. Enough said.
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