When “America First” policy translates into “China First” outcome in a new Cold War
The paradox of containment
The “America First” doctrine, most closely associated with Donald Trump, rests on a clear geostrategic premise: that the US can secure its economy, preserve technological leadership, and safeguard national security by reducing structural dependence on China and strategically pivoting to contain what it perceives as its principal global rival, albeit without capitulation. Tariffs, export controls, industrial subsidies, and selective supply-chain decoupling have accordingly emerged as the preferred instruments of this strategy. Yet these measures are not merely economic correctives; they form part of a broader architecture of competitive statecraft designed to slow China’s ascent in advanced manufacturing, critical technologies, and global standards-setting. The paradox, however, is that defensive instruments intended to assert American primacy may simultaneously accelerate the very reorganisation of global production networks that reinforces China’s long-term centrality—a classic example of strategic inversion.
The underlying assumption is linear and sequential: restrict China’s access to advanced technology, critical materials, capital markets, and allied ecosystems, and American primacy will be preserved through constraint. Succinctly put, this strategy carries an unintended consequence: by fraying allied coherence, eroding supply-chain trust, and constricting the openness that has historically underpinned innovation, strategic denial can inadvertently provide the infrastructure for China’s accelerated consolidation.
It would, however, be presumptuous, if not downright disingenuous, to posit that the pivot towards containment originated with the “America First” moniker; rather, the doctrine merely gave an older strategic disposition—never an “airy nothing”—“a new habitation and a name.” In other words, President Barack Obama’s “Pivot to Asia” marked the first explicit acknowledgment of a political othering already long in the making. The pivot sought to recalibrate the US posture in East Asia by integrating trade, military alliances, and regional diplomacy into a coherent strategy of influence. Its most consequential economic instrument was the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), conceived not simply as a trade pact but as the normative architecture through which Washington hoped to write the rules of the twenty-first-century Pacific before Beijing could do so. By design, China remained outside its initial framework, making the agreement an indirect yet unmistakable effort to isolate it within the emerging grammar of regional order. As Obama himself underscored, the strategic logic was that America—not countries like China—should write the rules of the global economy.
Yet the deeper tension between engagement and containment remained unresolved, foreshadowing the dilemmas that would later surface more overtly under the “America First” banner. The very structure of the pivot embodied this contradiction: while its diplomatic language spoke of rebalancing, cooperation, and regional reassurance, its economic architecture simultaneously consolidated a perimeter of exclusion around China’s rise. In that sense, the TPP functioned as the soft-power counterpart to strategic encirclement—less spectacular than military signalling, yet potentially more consequential in shaping supply chains, standards regimes, and the symbolic geography of legitimacy in Asia. What later appeared as abrupt confrontation under Trump was thus already latent within Obama’s ostensibly multilateral design: the unresolved oscillation between integrating China into a rules-based order and containing its capacity to become the author of that order itself.
The genealogy of othering
Yet this genealogy of othering is neither novel nor confined to the post-Cold War moment. Its roots reach back not only to the first Cold War of the 1960s—when the US rivalry with the Soviet Union, most vividly staged through the space race and the contest for technological supremacy, crystallised a political psychology premised on the rival other—but further into the colonial archive through which the Occident first learned to narrate itself by producing the Orient as its constitutive outside. Here Edward Said remains indispensable: in Orientalism, he showed how the West’s epistemic authority was secured through a discursive partition between Occident and Orient, where the East became the West’s contrasting image, its “surrogate and underground self,” against which Europe, and later America, could stabilise their own claims to rationality, modernity, and civilisational mission. In this deeper sense, Cold War othering was less an invention than a strategic mutation of a much older grammar of power.
The literary archive of empire offers an equally revealing precursor. Rudyard Kipling, especially in the imperial imagination surrounding The White Man’s Burden and The Jungle Book, exemplifies how the Orient was rendered as exotic, childlike, unruly, and in need of stewardship—a representational economy that simultaneously elevated the Occident as disciplined, mature, and destined to rule. This is precisely the logic Said anatomised: the West constructs itself through the symbolic labour of othering, and, in doing so, converts difference into hierarchy. Lessons from the Cold War era still resonate within this longer genealogy: productive engagement with the other often yielded greater dividends than open confrontation, while soft power—cultural influence, scientific prestige grounded in unprecedented public and private investment in pioneering research and development, and economic-diplomatic leverage as arbiter of the global order—frequently outweighed the blunt instruments of hard power. Strategic denial and overt competition could produce short-term spectacle, but sustainable advantage lay in managing rivalry with discernment, selective cooperation, and symbolic gestures that acknowledged the other without capitulation.
Rising debt-service costs, permanent global force projection, alliance maintenance, and the diffuse expenditures of empire together absorb a growing share of state capacity, redirecting resources away from the industrial ecosystems, semiconductor platforms, scientific research, and advanced manufacturing infrastructures necessary for a new phase of material renewal. Yet this drag is not absolute: the enduring depth of American capital markets, university research systems, entrepreneurial risk culture, and dollar-centred financial liquidity still furnish the United States with a regenerative capacity unavailable to most historical hegemons.
The military-industrial genesis of American hegemony
The rise of the US to global leadership cannot be disentangled from the historical moment in which it abandoned the protective shell of isolationism and entered the two world wars not merely as a reluctant participant but as the decisive architect of their aftermaths. What emerged from this passage was more than victory in battle; it was the forging of an industrial civilisation organised around permanent preparedness, technological innovation, and global strategic reach. The military-industrial complex was not an accidental by-product of this ascent but coeval with the country’s own accelerated industrialisation. Wartime production transformed the American economy into an “arsenal of democracy”, generating near full employment, retooling factories at unprecedented speed, and absorbing labour on a scale that dwarfed even the ambitions of the New Deal. Most strikingly, it inaugurated women’s unprecedented entry into the primary labour force, recasting gendered divisions of work and embedding mass industrial mobilisation into the social fabric of American modernity.
It was this very historical formation that Dwight D. Eisenhower, soldier-statesman and architect of postwar American primacy, would later name with unforgettable precision in his 1961 farewell address, warning the nation against the “unwarranted influence” of what he famously called the “military-industrial complex.” His warning was less a repudiation of American strength than a sober recognition that the institutional machinery underwriting US ascendancy could, if left unchecked, begin to distort democracy, strategic judgement, and economic priorities. That shadow now extends into US foreign policy under a mercurial and megalomaniacal president overseeing the contemporary rivalry with China. The sprawling corporate and strategic apparatus that designs, tests, and markets advanced weaponry functions today as both the material base and ideological grammar of American power, creating self-reinforcing incentives for technological escalation, strategic posturing, and the perpetual anticipation of systemic rivals. Here lies the tension: the very machinery that once underwrote American ascendancy can also lock Washington into defensive, present-focused responses that inadvertently hasten Beijing’s long-game advantage. When “America First” reflexes privilege immediate containment through tariffs, decoupling, and military signalling, they risk reproducing a “China First” outcome by compelling allies, markets, and supply chains to reorganise around China’s industrial depth and infrastructural patience. In this sense, the military-industrial legacy that once made the American century may now be implicated in the strategic inversion of its global primacy.
Contemporary lessons: The US–China dynamic
The “America First” doctrine, while framed as a decisive pivot to contain a principal rival, risks neglecting the enduring insight of the Cold War: productive engagement with a geopolitical other often yields more durable influence than unilateral denial or coercive confrontation. Tariffs, export controls, industrial subsidies, and selective supply-chain decoupling may signal strength, but, without the strategic calibration learned from earlier experience, they risk creating the very conditions that accelerate the other’s consolidation. In this light, the current pivot—though rhetorically anchored in “America First”—can be seen as both a continuation and a distortion of a longer historical logic of engagement, containment, and the delicate interplay between hard and soft power.
Global networks and the limits of constraint
The challenge becomes evident in a deeply networked global economy. In such an environment, constraint does not merely weaken; it prompts, if not provokes, adaptation. Efforts to contain a rival can trigger substitution, consolidation, and accelerated self-reliance.
In tightly integrated sectors—semiconductors, artificial intelligence, telecommunications infrastructure, critical materials processing, and green energy—piecemeal decoupling risks producing an iatrogenic effect: policies intended to slow China may instead intensify its coordination and scale. Under these conditions, the “America First” policy ceases to function as a strategy of preservation and begins to generate its structural inversion—a “China First” outcome emerging from the very mechanisms intended to stymie it.
Semiconductors: Controlling the technology frontier
Nowhere is this dynamic clearer than in semiconductors—the tiny chips that serve as the brains of everything from smartphones and cloud servers to missiles and advanced weapons systems. Washington has imposed export controls targeting advanced-node logic chips—particularly those at 7 nanometres and below, the cutting edge of miniaturised and high-performance chip design—along with extreme ultraviolet lithography machines (EUV), the specialised tools used to etch the smallest and most advanced circuits, and electronic design automation software (EDA), the digital architecture required to design those chips in the first place. Semiconductors thus function as a strategic fulcrum, linking civilian innovation, artificial intelligence, and military power.
Yet chokepoints alone do not secure supremacy. Without sustained domestic investment, workforce development, and allied integration, export controls may produce bifurcation rather than dominance—in other words, the emergence of parallel technological ecosystems instead of continued American leadership. By targeting frontier access while leaving mature-node expansion unchecked, the US risks accelerating China’s industrial consolidation, transforming technological denial at the top into industrial strength at the base.
In the short term, these restrictions matter. Access to cutting-edge chips and manufacturing tools directly shapes AI research, data-centre scale, and advanced military applications. Yet the semiconductor ecosystem is layered. Much of global manufacturing—automobiles, consumer electronics, industrial robotics, and household appliances—relies not on frontier chips but on mature nodes, typically 28 nanometres and above, which prioritise reliability and mass production over bleeding-edge speed. China has rapidly expanded capacity in this domain, strengthening domestic supply resilience and embedding itself more deeply in the industrial base of everyday global production.
The US nevertheless retains structural advantages in advanced chip design and software, reinforced by what strategists call allied chokepoints—critical bottlenecks in the global semiconductor supply chain that no single country can easily replicate. These include the Netherlands’ ASML—originally Advanced Semiconductor Materials Lithography—whose lithography systems are indispensable for frontier manufacturing, Japan’s specialised materials and precision equipment, and Taiwan’s advanced-node fabrication ecosystem led by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company. Together, these actors form a non-Chinese semiconductor coalition with Washington at its core.
Yet chokepoints alone do not secure supremacy. Without sustained domestic investment, workforce development, and allied integration, export controls may produce bifurcation rather than dominance—in other words, the emergence of parallel technological ecosystems instead of continued American leadership. By targeting frontier access while leaving mature-node expansion unchecked, the US risks accelerating China’s industrial consolidation, transforming technological denial at the top into industrial strength at the base.
Artificial intelligence: Beyond hardware to domain mastery
AI magnifies the paradox of containment. Leadership depends on advanced compute but also on deployment breadth, data accumulation, domain specificity, industrial integration, and iterative feedback.
While the US retains an edge in frontier AI models and high-end graphics processing units (GPUs), competitive advantage increasingly compounds through domain-specific deployment. China’s vast digital ecosystem—spanning e-commerce, fintech, logistics, manufacturing, health, and smart cities—generates continuous, sector-specific datasets embedded within industries. Over time, this produces vertically integrated expertise that is difficult to replicate externally.
In addition, sector-specific deployment allows China to refine operational AI capabilities in logistics optimisation, financial risk modelling, and industrial automation—creating a feedback loop of expertise that gradually diffuses from experimental labs to large-scale industrial application.
In tightly integrated sectors—semiconductors, artificial intelligence, telecommunications infrastructure, critical materials processing, and green energy—piecemeal decoupling risks producing an iatrogenic effect: policies intended to slow China may instead intensify its coordination and scale. Under these conditions, the “America First” policy ceases to function as a strategy of preservation and begins to generate its structural inversion—a “China First” outcome emerging from the very mechanisms intended to stymie it.
Centralised industrial policy accelerates coordinated adoption at scale. In key Chinese provinces, lower electricity costs—often reinforced by regional subsidies, centralised grid coordination, and dedicated industrial pricing for data-intensive sectors—reduce the burden of compute-intensive deployment. Wide-scale diffusion produces learning curves, feedback loops, and tacit knowledge. By focusing too narrowly on frontier hardware, the US risks underestimating the terrain where AI advantage increasingly compounds: ecosystem density, domain-specific deployment, and applied specialisation.
Infrastructure, path dependence, and rare earths
Telecommunications infrastructure and rare earth processing further reveal structural asymmetries. Exclusionary policies can redistribute influence rather than eliminate it. Chinese firms, shut out of Western markets, consolidate their presence in emerging economies, entrenching standards, vendor ecosystems, and regulatory norms.
Rare earth elements—critical for EVs, wind turbines, electronics, and defence—highlight how processing, refining, and magnet manufacturing remain concentrated in China. Trade restrictions may encourage domestic consolidation, reinforcing the very dominance the US seeks to dilute. Strategic leverage resides in ecosystem coordination, not raw extraction alone.
Divergent innovation models and ecosystem conversion
The US benefits from universities, capital markets, entrepreneurial culture, and alliance networks. Yet it has historically thrived on openness—scientific exchange, talent mobility, and cross-border collaboration. Excessive restriction risks dampening this dynamism.
China’s centralised model integrates state planning, industrial policy, and long-term coordination. Public funding aligns with strategic sectors; local governments mobilise resources; state-owned and private firms operate within national priorities. While this carries vulnerabilities, it accelerates ecosystem conversion—translating research into scalable industrial capacity. Conversely, fragmented US policy risks slowing this process.
Green energy and industrial scale
The energy transition amplifies these dynamics. China dominates polysilicon, lithium-ion batteries, solar modules, and EV supply chains. State-backed financing and coordinated domestic deployment reinforce scale.
The lesson is stark: without embedding present action within a coherent long-term vision, short-term containment becomes the architect of strategic drift. The US can preserve its competitive edge not by attempting to freeze rivals at the frontier but by catalysing ecosystems, fostering innovation velocity, and demonstrating leadership through example—precisely as it did during the Cold War, yet, unlike ever before, in a world of unprecedented interconnected complexity. Ultimately, enduring primacy depends less on constraining rivals and more on catalysing collective progress—an approach that leverages America’s systemic strengths in talent, capital, and research infrastructure. By demonstrating audacity, coherence, and strategic patience, the US can still set the tempo of global innovation rather than allowing the diffusion of innovation to outpace its own capacity for strategic orchestration.
The US has responded with incentives, subsidies, and local-content requirements, but fragmented measures raise costs and slow deployment. Without an integrated industrial strategy, the US risks constructing higher-cost ecosystems while China consolidates across emerging economies.
The structural paradox and risk of stagnation
In a networked technological order, narrow containment produces substitution, parallel architectures, and self-reinforcing rival ecosystems. Formidable US advantages remain—finance, research, alliances, and entrepreneurship—but power flows from systemic coherence and innovation velocity, not isolated chokepoints.
Knowledge diffuses. Innovation compounds. Constraints at the apex incentivise adaptation below. Decoupling without reconstruction risks bifurcation without advantage. Velocity, integration, and systemic acceleration—not tariffs alone—determine strategic outcomes.
A “China First” outcome need not emerge from dramatic technological defeat. Incremental inertia—slower research translation, weaker industrial coordination, and diminished talent inflows—can achieve the same effect. Drift, in a networked age, is another name for decline.
The Hegemon’s Autumn: Debt, empire, and the systemic cycle of transition
Beneath the technological rivalry lies a deeper contradiction inscribed within the historical logic of systemic cycles of accumulation. The American economy, still the world’s largest at roughly $30 trillion, continues to benefit from the unparalleled privilege of issuing the world’s reserve currency, enabling it to sustain a federal debt exceeding $39 trillion without immediate rupture. Yet, in an Arrighian sense, this very financial elasticity may signify not renewed vitality but the mature phase of hegemonic expansion, when surplus increasingly migrates from productive reinvestment into the financial and military mechanisms required to preserve an inherited world order. Rising debt-service costs, permanent global force projection, alliance maintenance, and the diffuse expenditures of empire together absorb a growing share of state capacity, redirecting resources away from the industrial ecosystems, semiconductor platforms, scientific research, and advanced manufacturing infrastructures necessary for a new phase of material renewal. Yet this drag is not absolute: the enduring depth of American capital markets, university research systems, entrepreneurial risk culture, and dollar-centred financial liquidity still furnish the United States with a regenerative capacity unavailable to most historical hegemons. China, despite its own opaque local-government and property-linked liabilities, remains less burdened by a planetary military architecture and can therefore concentrate a greater proportion of national surplus on long-horizon productive transformation. The paradox is historically familiar: as Fernand Braudel and Giovanni Arrighi both suggest, hegemonic powers often enter a phase in which financial expansion and imperial maintenance, once instruments of ascent, become symptoms of systemic maturity and eventual deceleration. In this light, America’s debt is not merely a fiscal burden but an index of a deeper world-systemic transition, where the very structures that secured earlier dominance now generate temporal drag against adaptation. The result is a slowing of strategic momentum precisely when the new Cold War demands accelerated innovation cycles, rapid industrial redeployment, and the capacity to convert surplus into productive transformation at speed.
While dedollarisation discourse has gained traction across parts of the Global South through bilateral currency swaps, alternative payment systems, and selective trade-settlement diversification, its impact remains gradual and uneven; China, despite encouraging such experimentation, is still constrained by the yuan’s limited global convertibility and thus advances internationalisation primarily through trade and industrial embeddedness rather than full monetary substitution.
The “America First” doctrine, most closely associated with Donald Trump, rests on a clear geostrategic premise: that the US can secure its economy, preserve technological leadership, and safeguard national security by reducing structural dependence on China and strategically pivoting to contain what it perceives as its principal global rival, albeit without capitulation. Tariffs, export controls, industrial subsidies, and selective supply-chain decoupling have accordingly emerged as the preferred instruments of this strategy. Yet these measures are not merely economic correctives; they form part of a broader architecture of competitive statecraft designed to slow China’s ascent in advanced manufacturing, critical technologies, and global standards-setting. The paradox, however, is that defensive instruments intended to assert American primacy may simultaneously accelerate the very reorganisation of global production networks that reinforces China’s long-term centrality—a classic example of strategic inversion.
Leading by example, not freezing rivals
Fixation on the immediate—tariffs, export controls, and chokepoints—risks jettisoning long-term goals. By privileging the present, the US may inadvertently carve a trajectory it never intended: one in which strategic denial at the apex accelerates consolidation at the base. Competitive advantage cannot be safeguarded merely by protecting what one already possesses or aggressively preventing others’ access. In a deeply networked technological order, lasting primacy comes from leading through example, systemic coherence, and the acceleration of innovation.
Defensive, present-focused strategies can crystallise into enduring competitive inversion—a “China First” outcome emerging not from defeat but from the very mechanisms designed to circumvent it. Yet hope remains tangible. Despite expansive military posturing in Venezuela and persistent tensions with Iran, the US also signals a different kind of leadership through its space programme. Artemis II, the second crewed mission to orbit the Moon in over half a century, carries the long shadow of Apollo 11 Moon Landing, rekindling the aspirational trajectory of national and scientific ambition. This mission, involving a crewed lunar flyby, serves as a reminder that strategic vision, coupled with audacious execution, can still shape the tempo of global affairs.
The lesson is stark: without embedding present action within a coherent long-term vision, short-term containment becomes the architect of strategic drift. The US can preserve its competitive edge not by attempting to freeze rivals at the frontier but by catalysing ecosystems, fostering innovation velocity, and demonstrating leadership through example—precisely as it did during the Cold War, yet, unlike ever before, in a world of unprecedented interconnected complexity. Ultimately, enduring primacy depends less on constraining rivals and more on catalysing collective progress—an approach that leverages America’s systemic strengths in talent, capital, and research infrastructure. By demonstrating audacity, coherence, and strategic patience, the US can still set the tempo of global innovation rather than allowing the diffusion of innovation to outpace its own capacity for strategic orchestration.
Dr. Faridul Alam, a former academic, writes from New York City.
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