Ceding the Future to China
Ambassador Chas W. Freeman, Jr. (USFS, Ret.) remarks to Brown University’s Watson School’s “China Chat”. Providence, Rhode Island, 2 December 2025.
Pascal’s Note: The following is a speech by Ambassador Chas Freeman from December, which I wanted to share but that remained on my desktop due to the sheer number of events taking place in the past months. However, Ambassador Freeman’s observations about the mistakes of a hostile China policy—by the US or Europe—are as important in 2026 as ever.
By Ambassador Chas W. Freeman, Jr.
It is human to imagine that change lays bare the ambitions of those who benefit from it. China has successfully returned to wealth and power. But there is little evidence that, in doing so, the Chinese have sought anything other than their own enrichment, international respect, national unity, and reassurance against renewed subjugation by foreigners. We Americans nonetheless fear our eclipse. Our fears are augmented by our lapse into xenophobia and authoritarianism.
As Hannah Arendt so presciently explained,
“Authoritarians arise when economic, social, political, or religious change makes members of a formerly powerful group feel as though they have been left behind. Their frustration makes them vulnerable to leaders who promise to make them dominant again. A strongman downplays the real conditions that have created their problems and tells them that the only reason they have been dispossessed is that enemies have cheated them of power.”
Americans attribute to China an aggressive desire to replace us as the global hegemon. This conjecture may or may not have a basis in anything other than neuroses born of fears of lost supremacy. It really doesn’t matter. We Americans once insisted, as the Chinese do now, that we would never emulate Great Britain’s imperious dominance of world affairs. Then we did.
At present, the Chinese shrink from replacing us in leading the causes and institutions we have ceased to lead or outright abandoned, like climate change, official development assistance, setting the rules for international trade and investment, or countering nuclear proliferation. But like us, the Chinese will surely have regional and global leadership thrust upon them. We cannot know whether they will eventually follow us into our current experimentation with global despotism.
China’s new global prominence reflects its ongoing national rejuvenation and the reality that:
China once again accounts for more than one-third of everything humanity produces.
In purchasing power terms, China’s economy is now much larger than ours and, in nominal terms, the greatest driver of global growth.
China has become the largest source of financial and material support for the economic development of poorer nations.
China is the world’s largest trading nation. It is destined to become the world’s biggest market for imported goods, supplanting the United States.
China is a civilizational state with what is possibly the most entrepreneurial population on the planet and the world’s largest community of scientists and engineers.
American efforts to stifle Chinese innovation have instead galvanized it. China now leads the world in the production of intellectual property and innovation in almost every field of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. And China’s increasing dominance of key consumer, industrial, and energy technologies enables it to set global standards for them.
The United States is severing or attenuating ties to international institutions and other countries, while China is strengthening them. China now has the world’s largest and most widespread diplomatic presence abroad. It is also the most prominent member of new institutions that complement and expand the purposes and programs of those the United States sponsored after World War II. By contrast, we Americans have chosen to oppose reform in legacy institutions and to exclude ourselves from the new ones.
China tries hard to be inoffensive. Beijing practices strategic neutrality. It keeps its commitments limited, its ideology both idiosyncratic and vague, and its ambitions restrained. It makes itself available as a conciliator but avoids entangling itself in foreign quarrels. It does not seek to impose its political system or ideas on others.
As the United States gains a reputation for bullying behavior, double standards, and indifference to crimes against humanity, China is self-consciously and somewhat improbably emerging as the global moral leader.
The United States has chosen to treat China’s rise as a national-security threat rather than as an opportunity to benefit from global economic and technological advance. So, we have launched economic warfare against China and invested in its military containment. This stance is intended to sustain American military primacy in Pacific Asia by preventing the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) from conquering Taiwan, thereby completing its victory in the unfinished Chinese civil war. Empathy for Taiwan as a newly robust Chinese democracy, ironically now considerably more devoted to the rule of law than we are, reinforces this stance. But the principal result of our policies has been to stimulate Beijing to modernize the PLA and to expand its nuclear arsenal so that it can prevail in a war with us if we again intervene to perpetuate Taiwan’s separation from the rest of China.
We have declared China to be our “pacing threat.” Nonetheless, what we are doing to compete with China and other rising and resurgent powers is more self-debilitating than invigorating and more rhetorical than real.
We are in the midst of a Great Leap Backward or Cultural Revolution-style assault on the domestic institutions that made America great – the rule of law, freedom of speech, academic freedom and scientific excellence, federal partnerships with research universities, openness to foreigners and their ideas, policies based on evidence and expertise rather than fake news and unsubstantiated prejudice, and the prioritization of objectivity over political correctness.
We have abandoned reliance on diplomacy as a means of threat reduction or an alternative to economic and military warfare that can achieve adjustments in our relations with other nations or groups of nations. More compelling interests overwhelmed our much-ballyhooed “pivot” or “rebalance” to Pacific Asia, and it never took place. Our armed forces remain pinned down in other regions. We have made only minor adjustments to our alliance relationships even as we alienate former partners and friends.
Meanwhile, the balance of naval and air power on China’s periphery has turned against us. In the absence of a strategy implemented and backed by diplomacy, huge increases in our so-called “War Department’s” budget will not persuade China not to do what it feels it must in its region.
Rather than increasing our political and economic involvement in Pacific Asia, we have absented ourselves from its councils. We skip or make only cameo appearances at most of its gatherings. We have adopted visa and other policies that discourage Asians from visiting, studying, working, or investing in our country. Strategic abdication and self-isolation are not effective responses to shifting balances of regional and global power.
The Biden administration’s effort to replace the United Nations Charter and international law with a so-called “rules-based order” dictated by the United States and other members of the G-7 utterly failed to gain traction. Instead of buttressing the global leadership of the West, we Americans discredited our pretentions to exemplify a civilization entitled to impose its allegedly superior values on others. Consider:
our abandonment of the rule law and endorsement of indefinite detention without charge both at home and abroad,
our participation in kidnapping, torture, and regime-change operations,
our egregious application of double standards in our stand on foreign wars,
our turn from enablement to active participation in Israel’s mass murder, starvation, denial of medical care, assassination of journalists, and other war crimes,
our indifference to cruel and unusual punishment, including torture, sodomy, and rape,
our politically vindictive suppression of dissenting opinions, and
our abandonment of constitutional democracy in favor of what Latin Americans call “caudillismo” -- a form of authoritarianism characterized by a personality cult.
We have ceased to offer others access to our market, provide foreign assistance, or build institutions to meet challenges to regional and global interests that legacy bodies lack the capacity to address. We have withdrawn from or are sabotaging the institutions we created to promote and regulate global cooperation and commerce, substituting for them unilateral American attempts to exercise dominance coercively through economic warfare, punitive tariffs and sanctions, extortion, the operation of a protection racket involving the expropriation of foreign real estate and resources, and the lawless use of force. We are now seen as cruel and profiteering rather than caring.
At home, the United States is adopting a novel form of ‘state capitalism with American characteristics.’ This grifter-directed economic order is a parody of our distorted understanding of the Chinese system. It is based on political payola, the protection of vested industrial interests, subsidies to offset the damage done by deleterious policies, and the rake-off of private profit from government activities by a privileged class of plutocrats. Among other things, our version of state capitalism entails:
disregarding conflicts of interest to enable private enrichment at government expense,
subsidizing uncompetitive economic sectors and protecting them from foreign competition,
disinvesting in education, scientific research, infrastructure, and government services,
curtailing investment in new technologies like electric vehicles, wind, and solar power to make the U.S. market safe for coal, oil and gas, and the internal combustion engine,
snatching partial government control of key industries by extorting equity shares from them in return for policy favors, and
relying on credit rollovers rather than revenue to finance unprecedented levels of government debt.
The world economy no longer revolves around the volatile, contracting, and increasingly inaccessible American market. It is fragmenting into multiple regional trade and investment regimes whose only common characteristics are (1) their exclusion of the United States and (2) their commitment to restoring and enhancing the open trading regime once embodied in the World Trade Organization (WTO). Smaller economies are shifting toward reliance on larger ones that can guarantee trade and capital. The United States is no longer a dependable source of either.
America also no longer leads most fields of science and technology. Recent polls suggest that as many as three out of four scientists in our country – both native and foreign born – have considered or are considering emigration. We are making the United States an ever-smaller yard with an ever-higher fence.
Exporting scientific talent is an increasingly damaging blow to our ability to compete with China or other rising or resurgent powers. This is political self-mutilation resembling what happened when ultra-nationalist xenophobia took hold in Germany in the 1930s. As Germans forfeited their global leadership in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, the United States absorbed it. We are now following the German example by driving our most inventive STEM workers to greener pastures. Increasingly, these are in China.
In the last half of the 20th century, Americans were the primary guarantors of international law and of other nations’ security. But in the third decade of the 21st century, others see us as the most powerful threat to both. Other nations that once felt safe in the Pax America now feel obliged to protect themselves against an America they view as bellicose, not benign; selfish, not generous; cruel, not compassionate; inhospitable, not welcoming; and inimical, not companionable.
In short, we Americans are now well along in our withdrawal from the world order we once championed and helped establish. Our country is becoming an ever-smaller participant in global decision-making, supply chains, trade, value-added investment, and a world economy no longer dominated by the West. We prioritize the gratification of our political elite over strategic calculation, propelling other nations, including those in our own hemisphere, toward China and other great powers able to fill the void created by our retreat from globalization and our retirement from constructive participation in world affairs.
China’s expanding influence must be seen in this context. China’s new prominence is not a measure of threatening Chinese ambition but the inevitable consequence of our retreat from leadership and our alienation of other nations. But to the regret of much of the world, China is not moving to occupy the leadership void we are creating.
An authoritarian, caprice-based order is no substitute for one based on the predictable foundation of international law. Ego-driven petulance is no substitute for strategy. Protection rackets and cronyism are no substitute for diplomacy. Intemperate insults do not promote partnership. Disregard for the sovereignty of others enrages them and disincentivizes their cooperation. It is generally considered wise to divide, not unite one’s adversaries. We have done the opposite.
China and other rising powers are well aware that they owe their prosperity to their embrace of the international system created by the consensus of the United States and other capitalist powerhouses. The BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) do not want to set that system aside. To the contrary, they seek its reinstatement, free from American dominance and empowered to address neglected global challenges through consensus-based incremental change. They are groping for ways to restore or reinvent the beneficial consensus-based rules that America led the world in creating and has since demolished.
If the WTO cannot be rescued from the U.S. sabotage of it, its market opening and dispute-resolution functions must be recreated in sub-global form. The challenge is to create substitutes for the growing number of institutions the United States now shuns or blocks. Doing so requires resorting to ad hoc conferences and gatherings to address planetwide issues that the United States officially denies exist and won’t allow international organizations to address. It demands developing trade settlement mechanisms that flank the increasingly weaponized U.S. dollar. It suggests looking for ways to preserve value that reduce reliance on the dollar as a reserve currency. It means forming new defensive coalitions, ententes, and alliances to make up for the lost protections of international law and the transformation of the United States from military protector to uninhibited predator.
Meet the proposed “new world order “– same as the old one, but under new pluralistic management and regulated by new institutions. America has turned its back on globalization. But the world beyond the transatlantic community continues to globalize.
American strategy has always aimed at preventing the rise of a Eurasian hegemon that might menace our global primacy. But our confrontations with China and Russia have pushed them into a close embrace, to which other U.S. policies have now added Iran and North Korea. This unnatural grouping – China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia – has nothing in common beyond its discordant members’ enmity to U.S. dictation. Current U.S. policies, statements, and actions are bringing into being the very Eurasian counterweight to our power that we have traditionally sought to preclude.
Three months ago today, at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit in Tianjin, the leaders of three of the four major power centers on the Eurasian landmass – China, India, and Russia – joined in a defiant response to American unilateralism. The gathering was attended by Iran, all Central Asian, and almost all Southeast Asian countries. Only Arab states (except for Egypt) and Europe were missing.
Once the home of the world’s colonial overlords, Europe is now “the sick man of Eurasia.” The European Union (EU) lacks the institutional capabilities, unified Weltanschauung, resolve, and steadfastness needed to pursue either strategic or tactical objectives effectively. It has many of the attributes of a geoeconomic superpower but seems determined to remain less than the sum of its parts and thus politically impotent. Having invented modern statecraft, it has forgotten how to practice it.
Europe’s malaise and declining competitiveness will not be restored by the weird combination of austerity, rearmament, and embargo of Russian natural resources most of its governments have adopted. No European has come up with a coherent response to deteriorating transatlantic relations, Russian advances in Ukraine, energy insecurity, China’s increasing technological prowess, or the emergence of a world order no longer centered on the West. In short, Europe is adrift. No one can now confidently predict Europe’s future geoeconomic role or geopolitical orientation.
The other major absentee at the Tianjin gathering was Japan, whose defeat in World War II was celebrated two days later in a grand military parade in Beijing. For its own reasons, India did not attend the parade, but Japan’s efforts to persuade other Asians not to do so failed. The military might on display succeeded in demonstrating a convincing ability by China to defend itself against the United States if Americans contrive a bloody rendezvous with Chinese nationalism, something we increasingly risk, as does Japan.
The United States is seven thousand miles away from the East and South China Seas. Distance attenuates power. Great distance attenuates it greatly. Together, the SCO meeting in Tianjin and the Beijing parade raise unwelcome questions. How long should we Americans expect to retain the politico-military dominance we have enjoyed in Pacific Asia since the defeat of Japan eighty years ago?
Beyond that increasingly ripe conundrum, what is our strategic view and focus?
To what extent does our view of Japan’s role as an actor in Pacific Asia or the Indo-Pacific coincide with Japanese aspirations? Must we follow Japan’s recent threat to extend its defense perimeter to include Taiwan? Do we imagine we can move India, a resolutely independent player, on the geopolitical chessboard? If so, where, and how? What of Pakistan and its apparent extension of nuclear deterrence to Saudi Arabia against our nuclear-armed Israeli client state? Can we extricate ourselves from the moral turpitude and alienation of the global majority that complicity with Israel in genocide has entailed? Will Latin America accept a return to lawless U.S. overlordship of the sort that we seem to be pursuing? How do we propose to deal with the countries of Africa as they rise in demographic and economic weight in association with China, Arab states, Brazil, India, Russia, Türkiye, and other resurgent powers? Are we capable of minding our own affairs? Is building barriers to cooperation with other countries a feasible way to do so?
All these issues impinge on our relationship with China for the simple reason that for the first time in its long history, China is a world power – a nation whose economic, political, and other interests and policies must be considered everywhere on the planet, as ours must. Anywhere we appear to push other countries around, they will seek to enlist China in opposition to us. China will not necessarily accept such invitations, as its cautious policies in West Asia and the Western Hemisphere suggest, but we cannot rule this out.
After all, we are currently engaged in a strange version of self-containment, retreating politically and economically while uniting allies, friends, and foes against us. Our media curate reality rather than reporting it. Our government is systematically stripping itself of expertise and competence. While other governments are willing to talk to us, they no longer follow our lead or replicate our policies in their relations with other countries. We may inadvertently be creating a world divided between the United States and a few vassal states and a global coalition or sphere of influence animated by aversion to our selfishness and bullying behavior and aligning against us with China. At the Sino-American summit in Busan, our president acted as though he understood that we can neither outcompete China nor win a war with it.
China has learned from us how to use export controls, sanctions, boycotts, and embargoes to put pressure on countries that challenge it. Will it wield its growing strength as unilaterally as we have as our power diminishes? Will it emulate our new disdain for international comity? Is the West up to countering a China behaving like we do? Western international prestige and privilege have been overtaken by events, and the West – as we have known it since the late 1940s – is moribund. It still has three permanent members to cast vetoes in the UN Security Council, but it lacks both the cohesion and the authority to control the direction of world events.
China has many problems, but most of them do not conform to those that career anti-China polemicists have predicted. China shows no sign of collapse. It is not growing old before it grows rich. It is instead growing rich through automation and offshoring those labor-intensive industries that cannot be manned by robots. Negative population growth plus steady economic growth and gains in productivity foretell higher per capita incomes for the Chinese people. Most Chinese do not share our distaste for their political system. Unlike us, China is not at war with other countries. It may yet be able to conclude its civil war through shows of force – assimilating Taiwan by making the island an offer it cannot refuse rather than through outright warfare. We better hope so. Our current mindless drive toward war with China over Taiwan can end only in tragedy for all concerned.
It is, of course, not inevitable that China’s progress toward greater affluence and global leadership will continue without interruption. Many things have gone wrong for China in the past. Much could again go wrong for it. But hoping that China will suffer unanticipated setbacks is not a strategy.
The fact is that the United States does not have a plan for dealing with the most probable scenario before us – a world in which China has returned to the preeminence of past millennia. We need to conceptualize one. This means we must nurture a realistic understanding of China and the Chinese, not indulge in spurious reasoning by analogies.
China does not seek to conquer or abridge the sovereignty of its neighbors. It is not engaged in a search for Lebensraum or foreign colonies. It has no theory of “manifest destiny.” Its “warring states” period – in which it resembled Europe or India in the viciousness of its internal rivalries – is long past. It is unlikely to follow either our path or that of other civilizations.
Tragically, whatever the source of our current approach to managing relations with China, it is not expertise. We are now led by “China hawks” who have never been to China or studied it but who are convinced they know everything they need to know about it. Our president’s first and only visit to China was as president – in the security cocoon and perceptual bubble that presidential visits involve. Neither our secretary of state, who was sanctioned by Beijing for his vituperative comments about it, nor our ‘secretary of war’ have ever been to China.
The architect of the administration’s trade and investment war on China, Peter Navarro (also known as ‘Ron Varro’) made his career with decades of China bashing but had his first and only visit to China in 2018. He has not been back. The small army of China hands that used to populate our diplomatic and intelligence services has been decimated. Those who remain have no real input into China policy. In any event, there is no coherent policy process in today’s Washington in which their expertise might play a role.
The past quarter-century has seen an unbroken series of defeats, disappointments, and political and economic crises for our country, most recently the scuttle from Afghanistan, the failure of our proxy war in Ukraine, our entanglement in the genocide in Palestine, a forever war on behalf of Israel with Iran, dysfunctional policies that have made North Korea a nuclear threat to our cities, and escalating confrontation with Venezuela and its neighbors. We are engaged in combat with so-called terrorist forces in at least eighty-two countries.
But instead of learning from this sorry record, the United States has adopted an approach to international relations that combines the belief that the right combination of pressures can bring foreign nations to heel, that personal chemistry can overcome conflicting national interests, and that military action should precede diplomacy rather than back it. Our leaders habitually avoid the hard political choices that statecraft demands while throwing money, sanctions, weapons, and soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines at problems. They like flashy signing ceremonies – pseudo-events – that celebrate their resolution of problems they have not in any way resolved.
We cannot afford to apply this self-indulgent methodology to China, which is destined to play a role at least equal to ours in world affairs. We must be realistic.
We had better come up with a way to coexist with the Chinese, leverage their rising prosperity and technological competence to our own, and reduce the danger of pointless confrontation with them. Such confrontation promises to be catastrophic for us as well as for them.
To conclude: Our current China policy is as ruinous as our repudiation of the world order we played the major role in creating. It cannot and must not be sustained.
Pascal’s Note: Thanks for reading. If you made it this far, you might also be interested in my talk with Ambassador Freeman in early January.
Ambassador Freeman for president. Imagine an American president as intelligent as Xi and Putin. Imagine what we could achieve working together.
Thank you Ambassador Freeman, for gifting your voice and professional expertise in service to life and to all of us who share this Earth. Your honesty, courage, and honourableness are needed - especially now. You have opened a window to let out the degenerating dogma and toxic ill will polluting the thoughts that many populations are breathing each day through their screened devices. Your voice is a clarion for me and I rejoice and delight in its message. America has the opportunity to learn it can be great again, if it will listen and learn from wisdom such as yours. I send you compassion and will hold a healing vision for your country and your countrymen, that greatness of character and generosity of spirit may thrive again one day.