American Power Depends on Preserving the Open Order China Needs

Walter Mead does not think China can surpass the United States in a direct contest for global power. His reason is not that China lacks technological ambition, industrial capacity, or military potential. It is that China’s rise has unfolded inside an international system whose trade routes, markets, raw materials, and supply chains become liabilities when access to them can be denied.

Mead’s historical shorthand for the powers that have repeatedly built and led such systems is “UP to UK to US”: the Dutch United Provinces, then the United Kingdom, then the United States. Each was a commercially oriented maritime power. Each faced challengers that were more centralized, more continental, and at times apparently more coherent: France under Louis XIV and Napoleon, Germany, the Soviet Union, and now China.

Those challengers shared a wager. They believed a disciplined land power could attain technological and military parity without accepting the disorder, liberalism, and commercial pluralism of the English-speaking maritime order. At several points, Mead says, the centralized challenger looked likely to prevail while its rival appeared divided, confused, and politically chaotic. “And yet somehow in the end,” he says, “the hobbits keep winning.”

The mechanism is not mysterious, but it has several linked parts. First comes relative openness at home. Mead’s Dutch example is comparative rather than idealized: seventeenth-century Netherlands was Calvinist and hardly tolerant by contemporary standards, but it gave Lutherans, Catholics, Jews, scientists, merchants, and dissident intellectuals more room than many contemporaries did. A person without inherited status could test an idea, enter commerce, or find support for an enterprise.

That latitude attracted talent and supported innovation in finance, commercial organization, sea-going technology, and science. Mead points to Dutch government-finance practices and the joint-stock company, as well as the intellectual refuge Holland offered figures such as John Locke. Openness, in this telling, does not automatically generate national power. It gives a society more ways to turn talent, argument, experimentation, and risk-taking into wealth and technological capacity.

The next step is global trade. Innovation becomes commercial reach; commercial reach produces extraordinary wealth. Mead tells students looking at Dutch masters not simply to admire composition, but to notice the goods filling the scenes: Chinese silk, Turkish rugs, Brazilian parrots. The point is the material abundance of a society participating in a global system.

The final step is the strategically consequential one: the dominant commercial power lets others participate. Britain’s nineteenth-century system did not reserve trade within the empire to British merchants. Other countries could trade, while British naval power suppressed piracy for the broader commercial system. The United States became one of the largest beneficiaries of that British-centered order after 1812. Germany, too, grew rich, technologically sophisticated, and globally connected through international commerce.

Integration creates power for participants, but it also creates dependencies. Mead uses Germany in World War I as the key illustration. Germany had become dependent on imported grain from the Americas and Argentina, rubber from Malaya, and other inputs. Once at war with Britain and its partners, those connections became vulnerabilities.

China faces a comparable problem. It has benefited enormously from global integration while remaining a potential challenger to the system that enabled its rise. Mead sees Beijing’s push for solar, hydroelectric, coal, and large energy stockpiles partly through that lens: not as an environmental program alone, but as an attempt to reduce the country’s exposure in a worst-case conflict with the United States.

A Chinese blockade of Taiwan is the scenario that concentrates the risk. Mead imagines the United States imposing a counter-blockade farther from China’s coast. Oil imports could be interrupted; manufactured exports could lose access to markets; soybean contracts with Brazil and Argentina could go unfilled. Xi Jinping, he believes, understands the severity of this dependence.

America’s advantage, then, is not merely its own strength. It is an ability to operate through an open commercial order in which others prosper, become connected, and—if they choose confrontation—discover that their prosperity depends on access they do not control.

The United States cannot preserve this advantage by withdrawing into self-sufficiency. Mead acknowledges America’s exceptional geographic position, natural resources, agricultural capacity, and protection by two oceans. But none makes a closed national economy workable. The country cannot produce every good or raw material it needs, and its producers need foreign markets.

American agriculture makes the point plainly. U.S. farmers can produce more than the domestic market can absorb at profitable prices. Technology companies, likewise, cannot rely on the U.S. market alone if they are to generate the revenue, growth, and scale necessary to remain technologically ahead of China.

That does not amount to a defense of simple, doctrinaire free trade. Mead says the United States accepted nonreciprocal trade arrangements after World War II because rebuilding devastated European economies was necessary to prevent communist expansion and secure American interests. Some of those arrangements became institutionalized long after their original rationale had faded. He also accepts that Trump’s supporters were right to identify unequal barriers, supply-chain vulnerabilities, and what he calls systematic Chinese cheating.

The challenge is to correct those vulnerabilities without abandoning the system that creates American scale and strategic reach.

Mead believes the postwar system is already being degraded. The Pax Americana built after 1945 and refurbished after the Cold War rested on predictable commitments, rule-based trade, alliances, and institutions. NATO, the World Trade Organization, the United Nations, and a wider expectation of U.S. reliability enabled allies to plan around American commitments and helped adversaries understand American red lines.

Donald Trump, in Mead’s assessment, has accelerated the disintegration. Trump prefers direct bargaining, tariff threats, public confrontation, and unpredictability to institutional channels and settled commitments. Mead grants that Trump would argue older methods had failed. But he expects the destruction of institutional networks to be difficult for successors to reverse.

Trump’s method, as Mead describes it, is a distinctive use of spectacle as power. He has converted fame, drama, and permanent media attention into unusual freedom of action. Mead compares his mastery of the medium to Napoleon’s mastery of his own sphere, while noting that Napoleon’s career did not end happily. Trump’s larger historical importance, he suggests, may be his role in a return to personal politics: politics centered less on bureaucratic institutions and more on powerful individual leaders.

That shift is visible beyond the United States—in Narendra Modi’s India, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Turkey, Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israel, Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Xi Jinping’s China, and the late Shinzo Abe’s Japan. The internet, Mead thinks, has made publics more willing to be led by identifiable people rather than committees, bureaucracies, and institutions.

The irony is that America’s external advantage relies heavily on the institutions and expectations that personal, transactional politics can weaken. Raw American power may remain strong even as the networks that convert it into durable influence burn or crumble.

Technology intensifies that tension. In the 1990s, many technology companies treated themselves as global enterprises operating in a borderless digital realm. Washington seemed peripheral; the internet was supposed to make national boundaries less important. That posture has become harder to sustain as advanced technology has become a central arena of great-power competition.

China’s effort to build a competing technosphere makes supply chains, intellectual property, and technological independence matters of national power. Mead calls the resulting alignment “tech Hamiltonianism”: a renewed connection between the state’s strategic interests and the interests of companies building critical technologies.

A traditional multinational manufacturer may require seamless access to overseas components, factories, labor, and markets. A technology company has a different set of priorities. It may care less about the marginal cost of janitorial or landscaping work than about secure supply chains, protected intellectual property, and employees who regard the transfer of proprietary technology to China as a serious betrayal rather than a routine private transaction.

This is a partial renationalization of technology and economic policy. It does not mean that American technology can prosper in isolation. It means the sector increasingly has reasons to care about which global system governs markets, knowledge, and strategic dependence.

India matters here not as a third pole equal to the United States or China, but as a potential correction to Asia’s current imbalance. Mead describes India as a rising power with a substantial technology sector and a distinct preference for a multipolar order. Citing Indian Foreign Minister S. Jaishankar, he distinguishes India as a “reformist” power from China as a “revisionist” one: India wants changes to an international system still shaped by Western power, but does not see China’s centralized model as right for India or for the world.

The gap between India and China is strategically significant. Mead says India’s GDP was roughly 60% to 65% of China’s in 1980 and is now about 17%. That imbalance can make Chinese regional hegemony appear more plausible than it otherwise would. Faster growth in India, Indonesia, Vietnam, and other Asian states could make the region too large and capable for China to dominate.

America’s ability to compete abroad depends on whether it can make technological progress politically sustainable at home. Mead compares the information revolution, cautiously, to the Industrial Revolution. Britain’s early industrial lead helped underpin roughly 150 years of global dominance. The present transformation is moving far faster, but it poses a related question: which countries can develop and exploit new technologies without being overwhelmed by the social disruption they create?

The United States remains at the technological frontier, he says. Yet it is also experiencing conflict over data centers, housing, economic insecurity, institutional legitimacy, and the social consequences of rapid change.

Mead frames the problem through America’s history as an ownership society. The early republic was thought capable of sustaining democratic government partly because so many citizens owned farms. Ownership gave people a stake in public decisions. A farmer might want a bridge, recognize that it required taxes, and weigh the tradeoff as someone with both independence and responsibility.

Industrialization threatened that arrangement by moving people from farms into cities and wage labor. In Mead’s account, the nineteenth-century response paired national infrastructure with access to property: railroads created a continental market while the Homestead Act made land available to people willing to live and work on it. In the twentieth century, as family farming became less viable, the single-family suburban home became a replacement source of independence, wealth, and civic stake.

Highways, favorable tax treatment for municipal bonds, local infrastructure, housing development, and rising property values formed a mutually reinforcing system. The arrangement made economic growth tangible to ordinary households.

That machine is now straining. Housing close to work is too expensive for many people, while cheaper places can impose punishing commutes. Mead sees remote work, hybrid work, and eventually self-driving vehicles as possible ways to reopen the geography of ownership. If workable commuting distance expands from 40 miles to 75 miles, the amount of potentially developable land rises with the square of the radius.

The relevant task is not simply to build more physical infrastructure. Mead calls for “infostructure”: legal, institutional, and regulatory arrangements that let information technology produce useful results in hospitals, legal systems, workplaces, and housing markets. AI might improve medical decisions or transform legal processes, but neither result arrives automatically. It requires social imagination, policy design, and acceptance of tradeoffs.

Remote and hybrid work illustrate the argument. Mead recognizes costs, including reduced mentoring and the loss of in-person interaction. But he also argues that allowing employees to work remotely much of the time could ease wear on infrastructure and reduce the demand for new construction. Tax incentives for greater hybrid work, in his view, need not be a net fiscal cost if they reduce pressure elsewhere in public budgets.

This domestic settlement matters to foreign policy because sustained deterrence requires public confidence. A country that feels technology is working for it is more likely to support an administration that asks it to bear the costs of alliances, military readiness, and external commitments. A country consumed by internal disorder will struggle to make credible commitments abroad.

Mead’s framework for these disputes divides American foreign-policy instincts into four enduring traditions:

The postwar establishment consensus combined Hamiltonian and Wilsonian ideas: build an international system that makes the United States prosperous while promoting democracy, human rights, and lasting peace. Mead sees Trump’s coalition as more of a Jeffersonian-Jacksonian mix. One side wants to avoid conflicts that do not directly concern the United States; the other wants to strike enemies forcefully when they threaten American interests or honor.

The disagreement is visible in Ukraine. Jeffersonian restraint treats the war as not fundamentally America’s fight. Jacksonian sentiment sees Russia as an enemy that should be checked and punished. Mead’s own emphasis is on deterrence: the goal is not to fight a long war after aggression begins, but to ensure beforehand that an aggressor expects consequences severe enough to make aggression irrational.

The information revolution also complicates that task. Mead worries about cyber and biological weapons because they are harder to detect, inspect, and govern than nuclear programs. Nuclear proliferation has never been fully stopped, but efforts to build nuclear weapons usually leave detectable traces and create some lead time for response. A dangerous pathogen or cyber capability may be developed and deployed with far less warning, while compliance with arms-control agreements may be nearly impossible to verify.

AI raises a further deterrence dilemma. Deterrence works when an adversary believes that if it does $X$, the United States will do $Y$: Washington can act and is willing to act. Automating decision-making could make that threat appear more certain. But the stronger the automation, the more the country confronts the question of whether it is willing to give an AI system effective authority over escalation, war, or even nuclear use.

Mead’s visits to Ukraine have made the pace of military change concrete. Early in the war, he visited a drone factory where designers received battlefield feedback in real time and adapted improvised systems accordingly. Some ground drones were essentially repurposed children’s toy trucks equipped to carry mines toward tanks.

On a later visit, he found the progress startling. Drones had helped create a broad kill zone in which soldiers cannot safely gather in ordinary units. He was told that bullet wounds were no longer the standard injury; drones had become the dominant threat. Even casualty evacuation is now a technical and tactical problem requiring new ground drones, metal shielding, and other drones to protect the recovery vehicle from attack. Mead recounts being told of one wounded soldier who took 63 days to evacuate.

The implication is larger than the importance of drones. The old language of a discrete “Revolution in Military Affairs” assumed that military transformation was an event: a new technology emerged, forces adapted, and a new equilibrium followed. Mead thinks the world has entered continuing revolutions in military affairs. Tactical and technical advantages can change every six months.

That makes legacy strength a potential vulnerability. If tanks become far less useful, the country with the largest inventory of tanks may face a bigger adjustment problem than the actor that develops an effective tank killer. Ukraine’s ability to constrain Russia’s Black Sea Fleet despite lacking a conventional navy similarly raises questions for an American strategy historically centered on sea power.

Taiwan is a leading test. Mead believes Xi Jinping is committed to acquiring the island, but does not think Beijing operates against a fixed deadline. China would need a high probability of success before launching an operation whose failure could be catastrophic for the leadership. That makes measures below the threshold of invasion especially important.

A soft blockade is one possibility: China could order ships bound for Taiwan to clear customs at Chinese ports, asserting sovereignty without immediately triggering the response that a conventional invasion might provoke. Mead expects Beijing to search for measures that alter the situation in its favor while remaining just below the threshold that compels a full U.S. reaction.

Japan may complicate those calculations. Mead says Japan increasingly regards Chinese control of Taiwan as a direct threat to Japanese independence. It is raising defense spending, rethinking doctrine, and reshaping its strategic posture. The question is how quickly and seriously Japan adapts—and how far that adaptation changes Beijing’s estimate of success.

The Middle East poses a related deterrence problem. Mead describes the collapse of Arab nationalism as an organizing force, the breakdown of Iraq and Syria, and Iran’s construction of influence through the Shia crescent across Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Iran. Israel’s actions since October 7 have, in his view, disrupted much of that structure. But the underlying weakness of the Arab world remains.

The Gulf states can deploy oil wealth effectively, he says, but cannot defend themselves from Iran without outside assistance. If Iran is not held back, Mead believes it could gain a form of hegemony over Middle Eastern oil resources that would enable economic coercion far beyond the region. Israel may want to serve as the counterweight, but he considers it too small and too alien to much of the Middle East to play that role effectively.

The vulnerability is not confined to tankers in the Strait of Hormuz. Iran could threaten Gulf desalination plants, Mead says, making major cities effectively uninhabitable. Such a threat would deter foreign investment and undermine the economic-development plans on which Gulf governments depend.

For that reason, he sees the erosion of deterrence as a central geopolitical failure. The preferable outcome is not a difficult and divisive war after an aggressor acts. It is a commitment clear and credible enough that aggression never begins. That requires military capacity, but also presidents able to explain commitments and publics prepared to support them. Mead invokes Harry Truman and Franklin Roosevelt as leaders who could take Americans into their confidence and make the logic of external commitments intelligible.

Mead remains optimistic about the material possibilities of the information revolution. He expects AI and related technologies to accelerate medical research, improve treatments, and eventually make care both better and cheaper. He cites Ben Sasse, who has terminal pancreatic cancer but is receiving a drug that did not exist a year earlier and that allows him to remain active and engaged despite the seriousness of his condition.

Over time, Mead expects lower-cost, better health care to ease some of the fiscal pressure associated with Medicare and other entitlement programs. More broadly, he thinks many problems treated as immovable may become more manageable as new technological capabilities arrive.

The obstacle is governance. The “cornucopia” of wealth and capability created by the information revolution may arrive faster than societies can organize around it. If America cannot make the gains broadly felt, it risks both losing ground in its technological contest with China and becoming, in Mead’s phrase, “like rabid ferrets fighting with each other in a cage.”

If it succeeds, American leadership need not mean carrying every burden alone. Germany and Japan have resources and capabilities of their own. A stronger India, Indonesia, Vietnam, and wider Asian balance could reduce China’s expectation that it can dominate the region. A Russia stopped in Ukraine, followed by a prosperous Ukraine, could find its expansionist path closed without an indefinite commitment of American troops.