Does China Really Pose an Existential Threat to America?

On his blog, Marginal Revolution, American economist Alex Tabarrok has made some unflattering comparisons between the way the US educational and scientific establishments responded to the Soviet threat in the 1950s to the way it is responding to China today. Tabarrok calls it the “Sputnik vs DeepSeek Moment”:

The response was swift and ambitious. NSF funding tripled in a year and increased by a factor of more than ten by the end of the decade. The National Defense Education Act overhauled universities and created new student loan programs for foreign language students and engineers. High schools redesigned curricula around the “new math.” Homework doubled. NASA and ARPA (later DARPA) were created in 1958 …

America’s response to rising scientific competition from China – symbolised by DeepSeek’s R1 matching OpenAI’s o1 – has been very different. The DeepSeek Moment has been met not with resolve and competition but with anxiety and retreat.”

The observation sparked New York Times columnist David Brooks to join with Tabarrok and speculate on the causes for this change.

Ultimately, Brooks opts for a moral judgment:

“This country sometimes feels exhausted, gridlocked, as if it has lost its faith in itself and contact with its future.”

Yet that judgment is belied by evidence of growing American prosperity, declining poverty, and improved quality of life.

A more persuasive interpretation of the Sputnik vs DeepSeek Moment starts with examining the stakes in the US-China competition, and whether it really is zero-sum. The big difference between the Cold War and the US competition with China today is that the United States did face an existential threat from the Soviet Union, at least in the early years following the Second World War. That was a time in which Soviet-led communist domination of the entire Eurasian landmass, from Western Europe to China, was a realistic prospect. It was feared that, if properly unified, economic and military power on that scale could overwhelm the United States.

Whatever modern China’s many achievements, there is no prospect of it achieving dominance over Eurasia, or even over Asia. The other great powers, many of them nuclear-armed, will simply not allow it. And even if they did, the United States would still have a strong domestic economy, a large military, and nuclear weapons. What kind of threat could China pose in those circumstances?

Confusion over the nature of the threat is revealed in two articles Tabarrok cites with links. “Many influential voices do view China as a very serious, even existential, threat …”, he says. But there is nothing in either article that comes remotely close to describing an existential threat – if we mean a power that could conquer America territorially or destroy its political system, such that the United States, as we know it today, ceases to exist. Again, there is no realistic prospect of China achieving that kind of power.

It suggests a different conclusion about what is at stake in the competition between the United States and China: status.

The grasping for high stakes (“existential threat”) might really be an attempt to create cover for Americans who are worried about being demoted by one rung in technology, GDP, and as an Asian great power. But clearly, as the Sputnik-DeepSeek comparison shows, status anxiety has not been enough to motivate American action. China’s rapidly growing military stature hasn’t done the trick either – the US military presence in Asia has barely grown since the end of the Cold War. Nor have America’s intellectual elites raised their game to Cold War levels. Brooks is one of America’s leading public intellectuals, yet his column marks a relatively rare intervention in the China debate. An economist like Tabarrok might call this a revealed preference.

So, Brooks’ moral judgment is misplaced. If Americans really are “exhausted”, it might just be that they are tired of the foreign entanglements in which Brooks wants to ensnare them. There is no question about China’s scale – historian Adam Tooze recently referred to China’s rise as “the material dethroning of the West as the central driver of world history.” Being dethroned is unpleasant, but Americans seem to have concluded that it isn’t worth fighting over, particularly since their own country is likely to remain wealthy and secure anyway.

Sam Roggeveen is Program Director of the Lowy Institute’s International Security Program. He is the author of The Echidna Strategy: Australia’s Search for Power and Peace, published by La Trobe University Press in 2023.

This article appeared originally at Lowy Institute's the interpreter.