How We Can Beat China (Noahpinion)

Author: Noah Smith (Noahpinion) · Published: September 20, 2026 · URL: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/how-we-can-beat-china

[PARTIAL — paywalled preview only, checked 2026-10-11.] The article gates its content after the section heading “Many hegemons eventually beat themselves…” The setup, thesis recalibration, and reframing of what “beat China” means are all from the free portion. The mechanism (how internal contradictions actually work against China) is not archived.

One-line: Trump has made the Biden-era Cold War 2 strategy impossible, so “beating China” must be reframed as helping smaller democracies resist Chinese domination while waiting for China’s own internal contradictions to do the heavy lifting.

Key claims

• George Kennan’s 1946 Long Telegram prescribed containment — not confrontation — arguing that Soviet power was internally unstable and would eventually collapse from its own contradictions; this strategy took 45 years but worked, and Smith uses it as the template for China policy.
• During the Biden years Smith recommended tight economic integration with allies (Europe, Japan, Korea, India) to build an anti-China economic bloc capable of outmatching China’s manufacturing — drawing on proposals from Rush Doshi and Kurt Campbell.
• The election of Donald Trump has effectively killed the alliance-building strategy: he has degraded or torn up key alliances, especially with Europe, and created enmity where friendship once existed.
• America is “too internally divided” to run the purposeful, far-seeing international competition it ran in the 20th century; Americans now fight each other more than they coordinate against external rivals, and that condition will persist for years.
• Trump has forfeited America’s claim to moral superiority over China — threatening neighbor countries, building what Smith calls “a sort of gulag archipelago” through immigrant detention, and abandoning the human-rights framework of the post-WW2 order.
• The goal should be reframed: not “America defeats China” but “keeping China from dominating other countries” — helping smaller nations and nations that value human rights and democracy to resist Chinese power.
• Europe, Japan, India, the Philippines, Korea, and many developing nations still uphold liberal democratic values, and people in those countries deserve to determine their own destiny without being subject to Beijing’s whims or the Russian aggression that China quietly backs.

Notable quotes

“The United States is simply too internally divided to engage in the sort of far-seeing, purposeful, smart kind of international competition that we pursued so effectively in the 20th century.”

“Americans care more about fighting other Americans than about fighting the Chinese, and that state of affairs will persist for a while.”

“Donald Trump’s presidency is an outgrowth of America’s internal divisions; he cares much more about fighting his own internal enemies than about prosecuting international rivalries. He has willfully degraded or torn up America’s key alliances, especially with Europe, and created enmity where friendship once reigned.”

“Trump has thus forfeited America’s claim to moral superiority over China. It’s true that Trump and his ragtag movement are far less competent than the Chinese Communist Party, but that doesn’t mean that increasing American power will lead to a more liberal world.”

“when I say ‘how we can beat China’, what I actually mean is how we can keep China from dominating other countries. This doesn’t mean we should try to make China collapse, or impoverish the Chinese people, etc. Instead, it just means how smaller nations — and nations who value human rights and democracy — can resist Chinese power.”

How it connects

• Noah Smith — this is a direct follow-up to his series of Biden-era Cold War 2 pieces (“You are now living through Cold War 2,” “Why the U.S. should fight Cold War 2,” “Sizing up the New Axis”)
• China — the piece’s subject; Smith’s view on Chinese power and its internal contradictions
• Geopolitics — reframes US-China competition through containment theory and the limits of American domestic politics
• People Over Politics — the argument that America’s internal divisions now undermine its capacity for strategic competition