America's Winning Playbook Against China

... But one issue cuts across the partisan divide with something close to consensus: China is the greatest strategic challenge of our era, and America must prevail...

That consensus is both practical and ideological...

The parallel runs deeper than most people appreciate. When America competed against the Soviet Union, we did not try to out-Soviet the Soviets. We did not build a command economy to match theirs. We built a freer one, trusted it to outperform, and won. The technologies that defined American victory - GPS, the microchip, the internet - were byproducts of a freedom-driven competition that unleashed American ingenuity at a scale no command economy could match...

As a Communist country, China does not play by free-market rules. It subsidizes relentlessly, dumps strategically, and builds dependency globally. In response, Washington is reaching for tools that would have been unthinkable in an earlier era of conservative governance - direct government subsidies, price floors, and even federal equity stakes in private companies...

The model is simple: government funds the pre-commercial frontier where private capital will not go, entrepreneurs scale the breakthrough once viability is demonstrated, markets determine the winners, and—when the industry can stand on its own two feet—government steps back. This is not industrial policy in the European or Chinese sense, which picks winners, sustains losers, and builds permanent bureaucratic constituencies around protected industries. It is something distinctly American: strategic intervention followed by competitive freedom.

History shows how effective this approach can be...