In May the secretary of war asked Congress for a 2027 Pentagon budget of 1.5 trillion dollars, and the reason given was China. By July the House appropriations committee had moved a 1.1 trillion dollar bill with another 350 billion queued behind it in reconciliation, and the Speaker was explaining the vote in a register that would have embarrassed 1954. Mike Johnson: “We're fighting communism on our own shores, and we're fighting evil terrorists and tyrants around the world.”
That is the whole mechanism, said out loud on the floor of the House. The China frame is not primarily about China. It is the last reliably bipartisan argument in American politics, and it is spent on weapons systems, base agreements, semiconductor rules and nuclear modernisation by people who could not carry a vote for a dental benefit. Megan Russell of CODEPINK drew the line where it actually falls.
China is not a military threat, but it is a threat to the political and economic balance of power.
Nothing in that is a defence of Beijing, and the campist habit of hearing it as one is why this argument keeps losing. China runs a surveillance state, jails its labour organisers, rams Philippine resupply boats and undercuts the wages of workers it does not let organise. A left that cannot say so has nothing useful to tell a machinist in Ohio or a docker in Manila, and deserves the hearing it gets.
What the tariffs did, meanwhile, is measurable, and it is not what was advertised. China's share of American imports fell from nearly 18 per cent in 2018 to about 11, while the Chinese value added inside what Americans buy held near 15. Factories shed 59,000 jobs between April and November. Some firms have simply gone back: Phil Laster, chief operations officer at Alliance Consumer Group, put it in nine words. “Have we pulled back to China? Yes, we have.” Mary Lovely of the Peterson Institute was blunter still: “Manufacturing is not coming back.”
The same frame is now rearming somebody else's country. Takaichi Sanae's Liberal Democrats took 316 of the seats in Japan's February election, up from 198, and the supermajority is being spent on the fastest military expansion since the constitution was written. Gavan McCormack, who has watched this for fifty years, dates the mood to 1937. He is not being rhetorical about it.
The honest difficulty is that a slogan is not a policy, and refusing the arms race does not tell you what to do about a coastguard cutter with a baton. The answer is the unglamorous one: incident-avoidance agreements that are actually signed, arms control that includes missiles nobody wants to count, and unions on both sides of the ocean talking to each other before their governments do. None of it costs a fraction of one carrier group, which is most of why none of it ever reaches a vote.
The bill, though, is the argument. American households paying tariffs averaging close to 30 per cent on Chinese goods are the same households paying for the carrier groups sent to keep a strait open, and they were told both were for their protection. One of those claims can be tested at the till. The other is being tested in the Gulf, and it is not going well.
