'I doubt Trump's tariffs will turn the US into a manufacturing powerhouse' Thomas Peter-Pool / Getty Images
When Donald Trump visits the Middle East this week, he will bump into some familiar people. Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Fink and Sam Altman will also be in Riyadh. I doubt they will spend much time talking about Gaza, or Iran. They are all there for the same reason: to talk about AI.
The stock markets have currently put a high price on these tech companies. But AI is also commanding a high price from America’s foreign and security policy community: it will change the nature of warfare more profoundly than any other innovation we have experienced in our lifetimes. Ronald Reagan’s infamous Strategy Defence Initiative, also known as Star Wars, failed because the old technology could not deliver the precision that was needed. But AI could make it a reality and America’s concern is that China might get there first.
But America also worries that they are leading the charge with AI-powered drones. We think of drones as modern, but those used in the Russia-Ukraine war still need an operator. Imagine, then, if one side had AI-powered drones at their disposal? The West and Nato may be comfortable in their current — swiftly dating — military capabilities. But AI warfare is a completely new game.
And China is already forging ahead in the two areas that will prove critical. The first is the supply of energy — which is vital to power large AI data centres. The West should be concerned by the sheer scale of the expansion of China’s energy capacity. China has a renewable capacity target of 2,461 gigawatts by 2030. The corresponding numbers for the EU and US are respectively 1,100 and 500 gigawatts. For the Chinese, the heavy lifting will come from renewable sources, such as the world’s largest hydropower plant in Tibet, which will have an energy capacity roughly the size of Germany’s capacity today. Just from one single dam. This dam is not even included in China’s target number.
AI is furiously energy-hungry. As the car industry has only recently found out, the electric car is not just an evolution — it is a different product. The same applies to anything reliant on AI. Germany’s Rheinmetall is a formidable producer of ammunition and tanks. They make the best tanks in the world. But they are old-school — the heavy-metal version of defence manufacturing. You don’t want to be in one of them when being attacked by a swarm of AI-powered drones.
And so, as China marches ahead, Europe’s absurd data protection regulations and AI regulation effectively criminalise the 21st century’s most important evolving business sector. The Financial Times reported that British soldiers were prevented from using signal jamming on the grounds that it violated GDPR. Europeans have, in general, no idea what damage they are inflicting upon themselves with their absurd data protection obsession. And no clue what it does to their security. In the gilded foreign policy salons of Europe’s capitals, you will not hear much about AI-drones, or satellite-based AI-missiles systems. It is as though AI has yet to be invented in the Western foreign policy universe.
China, meanwhile, has more energy than we do, puts serious money into AI, and is not regulating itself to death. Take 5G. While we Europeans struggle with it, the Chinese are already developing 6G — the technology which is needed to handle the communications for next generation manufacturing.
This is the second critical area in which China is excelling: high-tech manufacturing. In the US and the UK, the prevailing view is that sophisticated countries should move into services and leave the shop-floor economy to upstarts like China. This is a story we have been telling ourselves for too long. And it is one that economists, in particular, don’t understand. They think it is more efficient to let China do all the manufacturing, for the US to specialise in high tech and finance, and to let Europe be a museum. They are simultaneously oblivious to those voters who want real jobs, to the nature of 21st-century manufacturing, and to security concerns.
The irony here is that the US understands the AI-service economy like no one else. And it still just about leads the world in research. But China has been able to catch up because all the new technology is open-source. As an anonymous employee at Google candidly admitted: “We have no moat, and neither does OpenAI.” Nor does the US. This is not a world of secret algorithms, or of industrial patents. The costs of entry are low — all you need is a bunch of desktop computers with a good graphics card. Anyone can join in. In the old world, the technology leadership meant that the US was years ahead of the competition. No more.
But the threat from China is more sophisticated than just copying our homework. They are better at producing and deploying at scale. Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, said years ago that his company picked China for its manufacturing not because it was cheap, but because they were good at it. Similarly, Elon Musk built his main European car plant in Germany because they know a thing or two about manufacturing. But there are also downsides — which he has recently discovered — but he still respects the skills. And while Germany’s mid-tech manufacturing economic model is no longer working, there are still skills in Germany and other European countries that may be tapped for a US keen on reinventing manufacturing.
While the US is keen for manufacturing to return to its shores, we must be clear that this doesn’t mean the reanimation of those old blue-collar jobs that were lost in the Rust Belt. This industry will be run by robots, not men, and serviced by robots. This isn’t about jobs. This is about capability.
For the US to acquire these capabilities, it needs allies. The Biden administration did manage to lure Europeans into relocating to the US through the Inflation Reduction Act. And Trump is trying to do the same through his much cruder policy of tariffs. The means are different, but the goal is ultimately the same — to get European companies to invest in the US.
I doubt, though, that Trump’s tariffs will turn the US into an Industry 4.0 manufacturing powerhouse, capable of competing with China. It has taken Beijing 30 years to get from a position of a pre-industrial economy to where they are now. Energy and manufacturing are what matters in this 21st-century arms race. China is streets ahead on both. The only chance the US has in this race is to build a clever alliance. The Riyadh meetings are useful. I still have not heard a plausible plan that tells us where the manufacturing know-how will come from.
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SubscribeI don’t think Mr Munchau is any authority on technology:
“Take 5G. While we Europeans struggle with it, the Chinese are already developing 6G — the technology which is needed to handle the communications for next generation manufacturing.”
First, I’m not sure just how we are “struggling with it”.
And secondly, I’ll take some convincing that 6G is needed to handle next generation manufacturing comms (or indeed that this is a serious bottleneck).
Beyond that, it’s almost certain we’ll come up with more power efficient implementations of AI than the power hogging garbage we have today (we’ll have to). Munchau’s making linear forward extrapolations for a future that is never going to work out that way and is foolish to operate under such assumptions.
And beyond that, he simply ignores all historical evidence that free and open societies out innovate and out compete closed, authoritarian ones. WWII is a textbook example in which technological advance was far faster in the US and UK than in Japan, Germany and the Soviet Union (the Soviet Union relying almost exclusively on spying/stealing for its “innovation”).
If I was Tsar I’d stage an existential war of aggression with China now.
China will most likely end up dominating the world because of AI. You will need to cope better.
On past form not a chance, they’ll make a hash of it as they always do.
Not that long ago the Japanese thought they were the new asiatic ‘supermen’, that is until the B 29s arrived.
The headline maybe misleading but the article not entirely so. The literal AI arms race is hotting up. China is firmly in the lead for industrial applications but when it comes to military deployment, Israel, a close ally of the US, is one of the front runners. The US is not too badly off in AI application in consumer tech and financial services but it needs to do more in the military domain. It’s proxy war in Ukraine would be a good testing ground.
In a war the US will do to China what the British did to Germany in 1914.
The Royal Navy sitting in Scapa Flow limited Germany’s access to the sea and in the following 6 months removed every German surface ship from the world’s oceans, no imports and no exports.
The US will do likewise and limit Chinese power to a few reefs in the South China Sea, and then watch them starve.
AI won’t count for a jot.
Britain in 1914 was a resilient society.
It was culturally and racially homogeneous. People were naturally inclined to trust and support their neighbours. Foreigners stood out like a sore thumb.
People were accustomed to a certain level of hardship. Horses still played a major role, and most houses didn’t have electricity. People knew how to preserve food.
Compare that with today. Saboteurs can wander abound unnoticed, and three days without electricity would plunge the country into chaos. China doesn’t need anything as dramatic as nukes or killbots to bring us down. They just need to turn off the lights, and watch us destroy ourselves.
Yes, but he’s talking about the USA in 2025, not the UK in 2025.
The USA in 2025 perhaps isn’t in as bad a position as Britain in 2025, but it’s still vulnerable compared to Britain in 1914, for the reasons I highlighted.
America can’t function without electricity, and its grid is as vulnerable to attack as ours. Food and water supplies are also easy targets.
If the Chinese decide they want to kick off WW3 with nukes, they don’t have to send them on rockets. They’ll just detonate some that are already in shipping containers.
An open society is a vulnerable society,
Those at the top know all of this, but they’ve taken this path anyway.
Maybe they know the world as we know it is coming to an end soon, through a natural cyclical cataclysm, and they’re working with the Chinese to plan for what comes next.
Maybe Ukraine, Gaza, tariffs and Taiwan are just distractions from a much bigger agenda, and excuses to send more money into black budgets.
I don’t know what’s really going on, but very little of our world makes sense in terms of the reasons given, and one common theme is control. Every year, whoever is in power, we’re less free than we were the year before.
Interesting you should mention “shipping containers”.
The UK’s first atomic test bomb* envisaged such a scenario when it was detonated on a small redundant warship in a shallow lagoon within the Monte Bello Islands off the coast of Australia. The lagoon was picked because it represented the depth and profile of the London Docks.
*Operation Hurricane, 1952.
China
Oh how wrong you are
Absolutely central to Chinese philosophy to War is best conveyed by the following saying that China continues to
Repeat till this very day and as it has done so for Thousands of Years
” China does NOT start wars ”
China’s only business regarding War is that
China’s business is solely in Ending Wars
Well, they started one with Vietnam (and that didn’t end well for them). They arguably put North Korea up to invading South Korea. And they invaded Tibet.
But, as you say, “they don’t start wars”.
Others may see a contradiction here. You’ll keep turning a blind eye.
“Every year, whoever is in power, we’re less free than we were the year before.”
This is the reality we need to deal with. War with China is highly unlikely; too costly and destructive for the Chinese, who have been working toward economic hegemony since the Opium Wars. There’s no money in smoldering ruins.
But it seems more and more likely that we will complacently become so much like them that it won’t actually matter anymore. At the same time AI will make idiots of us all so we won’t even remember that once we could fly.
Britain in the years immediately preceding WW1 was in a state of upheaval.
The period known as the Great Unrest (1910-14) saw 80M days lost to strikes with national miners, railway workers and dockers strikes taking place for the first time. The army opened fire on striking railwaymen in Llanelli, killing two and troops were deployed against striking miners in Tonypandy. Irish nationalist violence was also common and anarchist terrorists (often foreign) committed a number of violent outrages – including killing two policemen at the Siege of Sidney Street in East London.
Societal breakdown was a real fear in the pre-war years and this led to the rise of the Labour party and the Liberal welfare reforms (pensions, minimum wage laws, National Insurance etc) in the 1906-1914 period.
Even the ladies got in on the act when the dreadful Pankhursts decided that “deeds, not words” were required and their fans started throwing themselves under horses and bombing buildings.
On top of this there was a widespread belief that the nation’s men were too weak, poor and effeminate to beat the Germans in a future war – in the Boer War 40% of recruits were deemed unfit for service.
It would’ve been a fair assessment, except your reference to the Pankhursts was unnecessarily gratuitous. I take it that if you’d been in the position of a an adult female during that period, you’d have been content to march down the street, achieving precisely nothing.
The work that women undertook during the war years amply demonstrated the point the Pankhursts were making. In a just society, they shouldn’t have had to resort to tactics which harmed virtually no-one apart from those women brave enough to stand up against the male sense of superiority, something which clearly still exists as per comments.
The Suffragettes were not averse to throwing a few bombs, one of which actually shattered the ‘Stone of Scone’.
Additionally four deaths can be attributed to their violence. Thus it would be quite acceptable to describe Emily Pankhurst and her Coven as terrorists.
it seems you can’t up vote this – even though count is zero, “you’ve already voted for this …”
Absolutely correct Charles.
Campaigners achieved voting rights for women in many other, similar countries without recourse to what by modern standards would be considered terrorism. The violence was not necessary and the lionisation of the Pankhursts wholly unmerited as a result. We’ve allowed history to be airbrushed to paint them as victims and ignored the actual victims you mentioned.
the effect of their terrorism was to delay votes for women. See Simon Webb “The Suffragette Bombers – Britain’s Forgotten Terrorists”. The honouring of these terrorists is monstrous.
Precisely, the war saved ‘them’ otherwise they would still be ‘shackled to the stove’.
The same applies to that other ‘late’ terrorist, one Nelson Mandela. Now lauded as a hero when in fact he was a ‘wannabe killer.’
Was that 40% due to malnutrition NOT lack of moral fibre?*
*LMF.
Also note that Germany was encircled by hostile powers.
Would China’s neighbours be as sure to side with the US?
Scandinavia wasn’t hostile, nor were the Netherlands, Switzerland or indeed Austria-Hungary.
Everything I’ve read suggested the royal navy blockade was effective, so much so that Germans were driven to the point of starvation. Was this an exaggeration?
I assumed this only worked because Germany couldn’t get food by land, e.g. from Russia.
Am I wrong in thinking that China would have lots of options for sourcing food by land, even in the unlikely event that the US navy could effectively impose a blockade (surface ships wouldn’t last long, and they’d need a lot of submarines to cut off shipping lanes to China).
No, as I say below Germany was starving by 1918. What is a mystery is why having conquered the Ukraine in March 1918 they didn’t use its harvest properly to alleviate the problem.
Yes, China has plenty of options for finding food. Also they are quite well trained when it come to starving.
During that masterpiece of Communist central planning known as ‘The Great Leap Forward’*an estimated 40-50 million starved to death.
As you say a blockade will be a difficult proposition, and I expect the 18 Ohio class submarines of the USN to be the deciding factor.
*1959-1962.
True and by 1918 Germany was starving.
However had Imperial Germany concentrated on feeding themselves from the huge ‘weetabix’ empire they had just won at Brest-Litovsk rather than launching a massive offensive* on the Western Front, they might have gained a favourable compromise peace, rather than the Carthaginian one they actually received.
Thus I don’t think China would stand idle by whilst it starved, but rather it would comprehensively plunder and probably slaughter its neighbours. They would have little other option.
*The so called Kaiserschlacht launched on the 21st March, 1918.
Clearly ‘Unherd Reader’ is a deranged ignoramous.
“…For the US to acquire these capabilities, it needs allies..”
Excellent article. A few points (in random order):
My fear is that much like in the last century, the very best individuals out of Europe will simply migrate to the US, rather than the US creating a distributed network of alliance capabilities in European countries – and this will be no good at all for the currently dissatisfied populations of Europe. The twentieth century migration of the very top European talent, ‘The Martians’, ‘The Vienna Circle’, and after WWII the exodus of German rocket scientists like Von Braun, etc (except those who got trapped on the eastern side and ended up powering the USSR space programme) massively accelerated the US transitioning to a high-tech superpower. The current situation is not helped by the attitudes of the ruling stratas in the Europe (including the UK) who create a hostile environment for talent capital because of ‘values’. The same phenomena is visible across the globe these days. Many of the very brightest out of India are currently sitting atop the most elite of corporate America. Imagine Africa had somehow managed to find a way to accommodate and keep Musk – then he would have become Africa’s first tech titan instead of American’s richest tycoon – to the incalculable benefit of Africa – but the African ruling elites are too hung up on the cultural and racial chips on their shoulders to see this.
It is an unacknowledged fact that the top 0.01 percent of humanity is responsible for the production of something like half of all human intellectual capital, which makes the very top talent across humanity the most valuable currency of the 21st century. I fully expect machine intelligence to change this equation, in ways not as yet foreseeable, but for now it still remains true. A related point to all the above is about which superpower block top talent is going to find attractive and will migrate towards. And here I ask the question: if you were the very top talent, would you be pulled towards America or China? I don’t for example see vast numbers amassing on the Chinese borders, desperate to get into the earthly paradise that is the People’s Republic of China. I saw that podcast with Wolfgang Munchau and Yanis Varoufakis where Yanis full of admiration for Chinese strategy, went about claiming that China would create an alliance block ordered to its interests – but I note, he himself has become an Australian citizen, not a Chinese one. My question is: if you cannot even rely on the beneficence of the US, which country is then going to say to itself “I know, I will instead trust China to play fair with my interests”? What I’m saying is, any alliance China creates will be coercive and flakey. Don’t get me wrong – as those vultures across Arabia have proven, the most odious regimes can buy talent with money, for a while. But the alligence will be skin deep.
Excellent observations. My sense of Australia, after a recent visit, was that their most valuable product was good government, civil rights and the rule of law. Chinese buy simple homes near Sydney for a $million and make Aussies rich.
On a related note, I’ve always thought Xi’s biggest problem is nobody wants what he is offering – a primitive police state ruled by a megalomaniac. That’s also why the Germans and Japanese were such terrible colonialists: they treated everyone else as subhuman. (The English knew they were superior, but there was often some civilized respect for their subjects).
Hey UnHerd, why on earth have you sinbinned my totally innocuous post??
No big mystery, its blandness pissed them off. Add more spicy.
An aside, regarding the emerging US – China ‘deal’ on tariffs – it’s a phantom in that US tariffs on China remain very high, and it’s temporary. Even if, from here, the US and China reach an accommodation, it is too late to prevent a global recession – I don’t see anything that would prevent it. The only question is, will a global recession turn into a global depression?
A friend in Big Tech says leading western AI firms are full of Chinese nationals.
Our open society will be our undoing.
I don’t know what plan the puppet masters have, but it is well underway. They are flooding the west with migrants from the third world, and undermining our food and energy security.
Even if we had a ruling class that cared about us, it would be very difficult if not impossible to rein China in at this stage.
China’s ongoing rise is not at all stoppable by the West, but it is likely self-limiting because of the demographics. China is following a trajectory similar to the other Confucian countries, but two decades delayed. The zinger however, is that China is six times the size of Japan and S. Korea combined – so the Chinese peak in the next few years could sweep the rest of the world aside, for a decade or so. However I don’t think this would happen if they distract themselves attempting to grab Taiwan.
How to defeat China?
Don’t buy from them.
A state managed economy, subject to the whims of unelected oligarchs, will always fall behind. The West’s greatest strength is free markets and free minds. Have faith.
I think Munchau is hyperventilating (to use one of his favourite terms), for the purposes of earning clicks and lolly.
Fair enough. But I hope he doesn’t always do this
Yes. He’s got a fair point on energy production, but you really can’t count the US out, they are the leader today and the place where AI research is happening, moat or not moat.
Can anyone identify the actual military unit of ‘Goldilocks Praetorians’ shown in the caption photo?
None of them too hot or too cold for your taste? My guess would be they have probably been lent to Pres. Xi for the occasion by Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un.
Actually I was struck by how ‘clone’ like they all looked! I
Well now there’s a thought. I had so far assumed that China’s rise will eventually come to a grinding halt because of demographics, but if they have perfected zygote bank technology, as well as AI (the insemination rather than the intelligence version) then we really are in trouble.
‘…all the new technology is open-source. As an anonymous employee at Google candidly admitted: We have no moat, and neither does OpenAI…’
I was making exactly this point a year ago:
https://unherd.com/newsroom/the-degrowth-lobby-is-on-the-rise/#comment-636447
I suggest that you look up Anduril in the USA. AI drones in action and the USA has plenty of coal, nat gas and oil so energy is not a concern here. Net zero sure isn’t a concern in China, India and the Global South. Look up their use of coal to see…renewables growing fast but still a rather small portion of their overall energy mix
First off, the world is undergoing a massive change. Plenty will try to blame Trump, but we and our allies were already running out of money anyway. The decoupling in many started back when Obama tried to pivot to Asia. That is going to greatly curtail China’s ability to keep dumping it’s goods on the rest of the world even as China still relies on the US to protect the sea lanes and keep the terrorists at bay.
That brings you to China’s Achilles heal. Authoritarian nations tend to be brittle and slow to change even at the best of times. It took China 30 years to get where they are and that was with us willingly playing along. It won’t take us 30 years to shift to a new paradigm. Meanwhile China has massive problems in real estate, demographics, internal capital markets and just about every where.
I won’t bet against us, at least not in favor of China.
Currency issuers do not run out of money!
China leads in stealing
SDI didn’t fail.
I believe there are two crucial points that need to be distinguished when examining Europe’s persistent sense of paranoia and the realities of global economic advancement.
First, when a person—or a region—constantly feels under threat without any immediate or tangible danger, rational thinking begins to break down. This psychological pattern applies not just to individuals, but scales up to national and strategic decision-making. So why does Europe feel so threatened? The fear is paralyzing—but fear of what, exactly? Immigrants? That’s a matter of policy—change it if it’s not working. Russia? After 80 years and the collapse of the USSR, are we still afraid? Let’s pause, breathe, and think rationally. Europe needs to think faster—and better.
Second, the global power dynamic has already shifted. The United States has consolidated its influence in the Middle East, and China has effectively taken Africa. That’s the new reality. China is developing a self-sustaining, inward-focused market of 1.5 billion people who will consume their own resources and energy. The U.S., meanwhile, is investing heavily in the Middle East—not out of ideology, but because the region still holds undeniable strategic value. Energy, capital, and influence flow through it. And US wants to invest like they did in Europe after the war – it is almost like Gaza mess gave US a new idea! destruction needs capital to build it and here comes the almost dying US dollar…what a better opportunity!
Despite efforts to suppress or control it, the Middle East remains a central player in sustaining U.S. dollar hegemony. Recently, OPEC+ executed a coordinated move—almost like a test—to gauge the world’s reaction. I don’t know the final outcome, but I believe it played in favor of ME and the U.S.
The game isn’t changing—it’s already changed. It ended yesterday.
I enjoyed reading the author’s ideas about A.I. as a new arms race, with China in the position of eating everyone else’s lunch until I got to:
“Ronald Reagan’s infamous Strategy [sic] Defence Initiative, also known as Star Wars, failed because the old technology could not deliver the precision that was needed.”
President Reagan’s strategy was not to deploy a missile defense system, it was to bankrupt the Soviet Union as it tried to meet the challenge of his Strategic Defense Initiative. His program succeeded in destroying the U.S.S.R. without a shot being fired.
Then the author goes on to rave about China’s renewable energy resources. While hydro is certainly a wonderful energy system, it’s applications are limited geographically. Like the Three Gorges Dam, any hydro dam will always be subject to destruction by conventional weapons, and the more hydro contributes to China’s energy supply, the more that vulnerability grows.
And lessons from Spain’s recent nationwide power outage the day they switched over to entirely renewable sources to power their economy is certainly a cautionary lesson for anyone who thinks they can utilize such sources to provide the energy they need. China has to import a large part of its energy, just like they have to import food to feed their people. So, China continues to build coal powered generating capacity at a brisk rate. Touting China’s renewable infrastructure without pointing out its weaknesses is disingenuous.
Chinese R&D is founded upon commercial and defense oriented espionage. Without the creativity of the West, China would never have achieved its growth, and burgeoning military power.
But, in all the author’s thoughtful discussion, I see nothing about:
China’s economy is crumbling as its leaders conceal the decline in economic output,
Misallocation of capital in construction of such things as massive urban housing and infrastructure that now sit vacant and unused is coming home to roost as increasing numbers of Chinese citizens discover their real estate holdings meant to secure their retirement are worthless,
The rise of double digit unemployment among its young population,
China’s rampant corruption in key industries like international construction (substandard materials and bribes are endemic) and defense, not to mention the fiscal problems of its Belt and Road Initiative.
Today’s announcement that China and the United States have agreed to reduce their tariffs substantially, with buyers of Chinese exports still having to pay a 30% tariff while American exports to China carry a 10% tariff is certainly indicative of Xi’s realization his position is a weak one.
Most importantly, there is one crisis no amount of energy and weapons can address: China’s declining population (something that started over 10 years ago) will leave her with a workforce insufficient to serve industry and the ambitions of Xi and his People’s Liberation Armed Forces. Without a drastic change, by 2100 China will have a population of only 500 million, with half of its citizens 65 years of age, or older. In the interim decades between now and then this decline will accelerate, robbing China of the manpower it requires for its financial and military power.
https://www.vu.edu.au/about-vu/news-events/news/chinas-population-shrinks-again-and-is-set-to-more-than-halve
China will never rise to become the world’s first among equals because its economy and demographics simply won’t support that goal.
In the meantime, a megalomaniac like Xi Jingping, knowing the reality of his country’s economic and population implosion, faces a crisis Chinese leaders in the past did not have to consider: he has fewer people every day, and no way to get more. China’s position as a world military power will not grow from where it is today, because there will not be enough people of military age to man, maintain, and deploy all of his weapons systems.
When an ageing dictator like Xi (who is 72) faces an existential crisis that could thwart his plans what will he do in the short term?
The answer is left as an exercise for the student.
Very good article.
China has significant latent vulnerabilities that should be considered when prognosticating its future. First of all, it is far more dependent on a single leader (Xi) than any Western nation. That gives it a significant advantage when Xi gets things right. But, if he gets things wrong, the downside is potentially enormous. Centralized economies and governments are at the mercy of their leader. China experienced this before with Mao to catastrophic ends, and we cannot assume Xi to be omniscient. Xi has notably drifted back toward more Marxist ideals, which will undermine China’s consolidation of newly-acquired abilities to innovate.
Secondly, the Chinese political system is very rigid with little political capacity for or experience with internal conflict. The US and Europe are far more adapted to regime change and political discord. It would be hard to imagine China coping with a situation analogous to the Obama-Trump-Biden-Trump sequence. As disruptive as those changes have seemed to us, a comparable situation would be catastrophic for the PRC. Also, were China to experience internal strife resulting from economic downturn e.g., their model provides only suppression of dissent as a mechanism to confront it. Large scale public suppression is toxic to innovation.
Another vulnerability is that it is out of sync demographically with the West. Their “Baby Boom” came a generation later than the West’s. The economic rise of China was partly due to a relative absence of resource-consuming non-productive elderly people from the 1980’s to 2010’s. They are now about to face a greying non-productive resource-consuming population accompanied by a massive working-age population crash brought on by Mao’s “one child” policy and exacerbated by the stunning lack of interest among Chinese young adults to procreate. The West is at the tail end of its “Boomer burden”, which has been mitigated via immigration. The problem is just beginning for China and will be even more disruptive for them because their system is predicated on adherence to political and cultural orthodoxy precluding immigration as a solution. Their handling of the Uyghur situation informs us as to their limitations.
Well, as usual in AI discussions btl, the energy elephant in the room is ignored. A scan through the first 50 or so screens, and only two tangential remarks, despite for once the article stressing exactly this wicked problem. It’s as if the commentariat is so overexcited by the fins and the flashing lights that they can’t see the empty fuel tank.
AI will eat up all the energy we think we’re going to use for our new EVs, and then start on what’s left of our industrial capacity – and that’s just on the recreational gimmickry and the chatbots. Soon it’ll be hard choices between the central heating and the data centres, with drone swarms a long way down the list of priorities. But look! A dead cat.
«Conant’s American meritocracy — rooted in IQ and STEM aptitude — produced not just McNamara, but Gates, Jobs, and later Brin, Page, Thiel, Zuckerberg, Musk. Visionaries, certainly. Builders of systems. But also, inheritors of a blind spot: phronesis — or what Aristotle called practical wisdom. It is the kind of intelligence that knows how to act well when rules run out. It cannot be taught in a classroom, measured on a test, or programmed into a machine. It asks, not “How do we make this faster?” but “What do we want this for?”
«But reason’s boundaries were not well understood. The French Revolution, inspired by rationalist zeal, led not to harmony but to the guillotine. Voltaire, in tearing down superstition, failed to see that rationality can become its own idol. By the 19th century, governments turned to technocrats — not to build utopias, but to manage complexity. Cities were filthy, chaotic, overrun. Actuarial tables, engineering reports, and bureaucratic reforms promised stability. The New Atlantis did not come all at once, but in pipes, sewers, bridges, blueprints, and statistics.
Thorstein Veblen saw it clearly. In The Engineers and the Price System, he argued that the new ruling class would not be barons or clergy, but engineers — people who understood systems, but not people. Their rise was quiet but decisive.»
«That man was Robert McNamara — Secretary of Defense under President Lyndon Johnson and a perfect product of the meritocratic experiment. He had risen fast: from Harvard Business School to the presidency of Ford Motor Company, and then to the Pentagon. There, he approached war as a systems problem. He counted bodies, sorties, munitions. He believed in management, in metrics, in IQ. There were plenty of bodies. On paper, the war was being won.
But McNamara didn’t understand the war he was in. The Viet Cong weren’t trying to win by his rules. He had analysis when the moment required judgment. He saw the data, but not the terrain.
That was the problem.
Technocracy as a cultural force has older roots still. In the 17th century, Francis Bacon imagined a new kind of city — The New Atlantis — governed not by kings or priests, but by scientists. It would be the first the Smart City. Observation would replace tradition. Experiment would guide governance. It was a dream of order born in an age of chaos.
That dream found its early triumphs in astronomy, engineering, and navigation. Copernicus corrected the calendar and moved the sun to the center of the cosmos. Galileo was forced to recant, but his muttered “E pur si muove”— and yet it moves — still resonates. Newton reduced the heavens to a set of equations. Enlightenment thinkers believed that what reason could uncover, humanity could master.»
The rest of the article: https://unherd.com/2025/05/why-smart-cities-are-a-dumb-idea/
Remember the EMP? The electromagnetic pulse released by exploding a nuclear device high in the air? That should b****r up any AI drones; what are the odds that AI tells one side or the other – logically speaking everybody – that the occasional airburst over enemy territory is just what the doctor ordered? AI nuclear warfare, what a delightful thought.