The ‘America-worst’ crowd cheers for China — but here’s what they forget

One American view of China — increasingly popular on the left and among the hate-Trump crowd on the right — is that the communist colossus will be forever ascendant, boasting astonishing levels of food production, ship construction and industrial output.

In this pessimistic view, China will soon replace America as the world’s predominant power.

Yet even Beijing’s miraculous 30-year leap out of poverty into first-world affluence is hardly the same as parity with the United States.

In truth, President Donald Trump held almost all the cards at last week’s Beijing summit — and will do so again when Xi Jinping visits Washington this autumn.

According to nearly every historical measure of power, the United States leads China by sizable margins — in wealth, economic output, fuel, food and military strength.

China has roughly four times the population of the US, but produces only about 60% of America’s total GDP.

The US is the largest oil and gas producer and exporter in history; China must import 11 to 12 million barrels of oil every day.

The United States is also the greatest food exporter in history; China, for all its miraculous increases in agricultural productivity, still must import nearly 40% of its food.

US nuclear forces are roughly six times larger than China’s, and its 11 carrier strike groups nearly four times more numerous than China’s three conventionally powered carriers.

The United States has more than 100 years of experience in carrier warfare; China has less than 15.

American companies, along with NASA, have regained US primacy in space exploration.

In new frontiers such as robotics, drones, artificial intelligence, nuclear fusion, cryptocurrencies and bioengineering, a once sluggish United States has rebounded and is reasserting its preeminence.

But most important, China is an autocracy.

It is superficially efficient, but its technology is ultimately derived from the free and wide-open atmosphere of the West and of the United States in particular.

China has spent over $4 trillion in the last decade on its Belt and Road imperialist agenda and its military-industrial complex, yet its effort to pull Latin America away from the United States has been failing miserably.

China lost its client Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela, along with its discounted oil imports.

Trump aborted its insidious effort to control the Panama Canal.

For now, China has also lost its discounted oil from Iran, and could soon lose its presence in the oil-rich Middle East, even as its fuel appetite grows exponentially.

China’s stranglehold on rare-earth minerals is fading as a once sleepy US plans its own new mines from Greenland to Wyoming.

The latest Chinese air defenses failed miserably in Iran, while US naval and air power — both weapons and personnel — performed brilliantly there.

True, America can be sluggish, insular, complacent and naïve.

But historically, its innately resilient free people, singular constitutional government, robust federalism and free-market economy eventually wake up to the next rising threat — if often just in the nick of time.

In the 1930s, a disarmed America, mired in depression, was told that fascist Italy, Nazi Germany and militarist Japan were the paradigms of the future.

When war broke out in 1939, the US Army ranked 19th in size worldwide.

Was it hopeless? No: By August 1945, Nazism, fascism and Japanese militarism were in ruins, and the US fleet and economy were larger than those of all the war’s belligerents combined.

Starting in the late 1940s, we were told that a communist Russia on the move would destroy the United States.

The Soviet Union was taking over the globe, as its unstoppable ideology spread unchecked to our doorstep in Cuba.

But after the crackup of the Soviet empire, Russia has become a shrinking, aging, unhealthy society, with a GDP pathetically one-thirteenth the size of the US economy.

Japan, Inc. was supposed to bury us in the 1980s, with Honda and Toyota light-years ahead of the soon-to-go-bankrupt Ford and GM.

Today Japan is mired in deflation, and US corporations dwarf their Japanese counterparts.

At the beginning of the millennium, it was the European Union’s turn as the wave of the future.

When the US in 2008 was stuck in the Iraq War, short of oil and faced with soaring gas prices, President Barack Obama lectured Americans that we were no more an exceptional nation than Greece or the United Kingdom.

Yet the Iran war revealed the EU to be militarily weak and energy-short, reliant upon the US economy and military for its prosperity and security.

China’s supposed existential threat is not to be assessed by how fast and impressively the nation rose from its own prior weakness, poverty and irrelevance.

What matters instead is to what degree its innate systems can ensure its continued ascendance — and whether its political structure, food and fuel capacity, military and scientific innovation are on par with America’s.

So far China, like all the other rivals of the last 100 years, has not come close.

Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness.