does unipolar=omnipotent?

thoughts on that past moment

The Financial Times of London, replete with insightful business views, holds a special place in my reading list. I first subscribed in the mid-2000s, recognizing the need for its unique perspective. However, its substantial subscription cost doesn't always align with my financial situation, leading me to read it only when a compelling article appears.

Recently, I received an article with a striking comment: "[A]n exceptionally rare piece well worth reading." This endorsement, coming from someone with a deep understanding of the business world due to his role in a think tank program inside the Beltway, piqued my interest.

Janan Ganesh's article, "Tariffs won't bring back America's unipolar moment," prompts us to reconsider the lens through which many Americans view China's rise. It challenges the notion that we could have prevented China as a "pacing threat," a term coined by then-Secretary of Defense Mark Esper in July 2020, in perpetuity. This reflection on our power and position as the world's determinative state, imperiled by China's rise, is a worthy historical lesson.

Ganesh reminds us that many Americans questioned, "Who lost China?" after the Communists won the civil war against the Nationalists in 1949. We don't ask the profound question of why we believed China was ours to "lose" since the United States never owned the country; we supported the losing side in the civil war. "Losing China" diatribes here, in turn, stoked the CCP's claims about defending China's sovereignty after a Century of Humiliation during which foreigners retarded the country's position as the Middle Kingdom, a great power.

Today, many ask, "Who empowered China to challenge us?" as if we also had that power. Ganesh is unconvinced we had as many options to stop Beijing as so many currently assume.

Ganesh argues imposing tariffs won't satisfy our yearning to return to the absolute dominance that most Americans recall. He reminds readers of a history somewhat different from the current narrative about US power declining because of a modernizing China, implying a naïveté on the part of some who seek to blame past administrations for foolishly allowing China into the World Trade Organization, at a minimum, to dump cheaper products on the marketplace.

However, the author is not merely writing about differences in partisan opinions; Ganesh implicitly rejects the omnipotence many Americans assumed from the era when we felt few, if any, challenges menaced us.

"A coroner examining the corpse of American unipolarity would return a verdict of death by natural causes, not suicide or misadventure. Even those of us who would take a U.S.-led world over the plausible alternatives must see the intrinsic unlikelihood of a nation with 4 or 5 percent of the human population commanding the scene. The same force of numbers allowed the US to eclipse Britain as the foremost power a century ago. At the time, liberal Brits had their grievances with the usurper, which had industrialized behind tariff walls. Looking back, who thinks protectionism was the paramount issue? As long as the US didn't self-harm, its scale was going to tell in the end [emphasis added—cw]."

Ganesh examines the reasons behind China's rise and its return to scale. He points out that Beijing had to wait seven years before gaining World Trade Organization membership, a delay due to objections over its practices. He also reminds us that the US economy and consumers benefitted from trade during the 1990s despite some industries falling behind. David Ricardo's economic theory of comparative advantage reminds us that states have advantages in producing various products, but countries rarely achieve complete advantage.

Ganesh acknowledges Beijing may have been disingenuous in its commitments in exchange for WTO accession in 2002. Still, he asks what the alternative was since continuing to exclude fully one in five people on the planet from the global trade regime would have, in his eyes, led "to forfeit the legitimacy of the world system."

I do not forgive CCP leaders for lying about their access goals on their terms. As any reader knows, I find Beijing's behavior appalling across the board in politics, human rights, religious interference, fundamental human rights, and anything else I can conjure up: the CCP is a predatory regime, fearful of its population while determined to operate in a global system favoring its preferences.

Too many Americans today prefer to ignore the inherent dynamism brought forth, even under restricted governance by an authoritarian, paranoid Party, by more than a billion people following half a century of economic change. Raw population numbers matter: China has almost five times the population of the United States, which matters in financial terms over decades of growth.

India, similarly larger than us, has not sustained growth enough to pass us economically, while China, having made different choices, did. However, both have a built-in labor pool based on the number of employable people, even if Delhi's policies have been less successful. But we forget the role that a big population can have on a country's growth because we, too, had a relatively large population during our years of gangbuster economic expansion. We are not too historically inclined, however.

China emerged from a century of chaos around 2000. I started substituting "the century and a half of humiliation" in place of the more traditional phrase "a hundred years" because unquestionably assertive behavior from China coincided with the Ep-3 incident on 1 April 2001 and the Beijing Olympics seven years later. The population was wealthier (thus less prone to challenge the CCP system), so the Party could slightly relax its obsession with domestic security (the return to that fear coincides with the more recent fifteen years as Xi moves to enshrine the surveillance state apparatus throughout Chinese life). PLA modernization sped up to prevent repeated embarrassment, such as the 1995/6 Taiwan crises.

I mentioned last week that China leans far more aggressively on trade, tourism, and grandiose projects than we have in recent decades as we concentrated on hard power. President Trump intends to use tariffs as one of our most incisive instruments, altering the dynamics of our strategy. Additionally, Americans currently doubt the efficacy of free trade, perhaps diminishing its centrality to our approach in the future. Recapturing our once-prodigious prowess will require changes to the recent past.

We have conflated two ideas: unipolarity—a condition where a single state amasses superiority in the international system—with omnipotence, the concept of unlimited, unchallengeable power. Unipolarity is a dynamic, of course, as superiority is a relative measure of power that can increase or, even more likely, decrease relative to the actions of others. We had markedly greater power than any other state or coalition of states in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War because others accepted that the Soviet model failed miserably.

The CCP even repudiated Soviet economics to a great extent by embracing the Modernization era. The resulting urbanization of a more open labor market, in conjunction with foreign infusions of technology and investment, allowed the development of a competitor whose role in the global economy contributed to our relative decline. That process, however, offered US consumers lower prices and increased profits for American companies who moved to the cheaper labor environment, which was hardly an unmitigated failure for the United States in some crucial ways.

However, the process was part of the moves offshore for businesses that refused to employ US labor. At the same time, automatization and differentiation in skill requirements bedeviled those very workers left behind. The workers saw their standards of living freeze and then atrophy. The financial crisis of 2007-2008 revealed that many of their assumptions about their role in the future were severely off. They felt disheartened, forgotten, and increasingly sure China was stealing their jobs rather than recognizing changes in our labor market and technology.

Simultaneously, China's increased confidence and role in global trade attracted much attention because its economic strength also empowered a modernized, bigger military to protect its interests at home and abroad. This painful coincidence occurred over several decades as the Middle Kingdom returned to its traditional dominant economic position in Asia as well as an important political role worldwide.

But the decline was relative because we could not control the other player. It wasn't that we had declined as much because China threatened us as it rose through its choices.

For Americans, this was a bitter lesson in understanding that superiority is often ephemeral, not necessarily an assurance of eventual omnipotence. If the first fifteen years of the twenty-first century were a reality check on a growing China chipping away at our economic and political dominance, the past decade more clearly indicated that our underlying assumption of omnipotence was false. Regardless of how hard we try, we cannot make everything happen everywhere. That is not defeatism but an honest reflection of the impossibility of omnipotence in the twenty-first century.

Two parallel assumptions explain why this is true, neither of which is adequate to address the real problem. One explanation is that we failed at protecting our position in trade, with China manipulating rules to leave us vulnerable and weak. Withdrawing from those institutions and agreements by which China gains an unfair advantage is the best solution for those who find this shocking.

The other explanation is that we confront an intractable enemy whose communist government makes intercourse between our nations naïve, if not foolish. This analysis recommends more hard power and closing doors to anything perpetuating this zero-sum threat.

Ganesh concludes his analysis by reminding readers that either the "loss of China" or "who empowered China" ignores reality: China, Russia, Burundi, or Laos actually has agency or means of acting on its interests. I suspect many of us forgot this amid our unipolar exuberance. Regardless of our desires, other players have steps they can implement—or not take other decisions.

We may be the most potent state, by whatever indicator we choose, on a given day, but the United States is not omnipotent, nor has it ever been. We do not have unlimited power over everything, no matter how much we want to believe otherwise. As the CCP has learned, no one is omnipotent. We lack an unlimited population (not even the biggest, as India and China vastly outnumber us) and an unending supply of resources. However, we have many people and a bountiful endowment. Our ability to influence others through coercion, deterrence, cajoling, or encouragement is significant but not universal. The long and short is that we are not omnipotent because others get a vote through action. In the unipolar moment of the 1990s, we did not appreciate the uniqueness of the circumstances by which we thought it was omnipotence.

What does that foretell for the United States in an era of remaking greatness? Where can we advance our interests without the frustration of failing to achieve omnipotence? Where does the United States pull back versus forging ahead? Inquiring minds and those merely affected need to know. Still, the question is vital for a society recasting its links to the world as others answer the same inquiry vis a world with a radically different US involved.

I don't know where this will take us--what do you foresee?

I welcome your thoughts. I do recommend Janan Ganesh's provocative piece. Please send me any ideas you have.

Thank you for your time. I especially appreciate those who support this column as paid subscribers. You make an incredible difference.

Be well and be safe. FIN

Jana Ganesh, “Tariffs won’t bring back America’s unipolar moment”, Financial Times, 12 February 2025.

“Secretary of Defense Mark T. Esper Message to the Force on Accomplishments on Implementation of the National Defense Strategy“, Defense.gov, 7 July 2020, retrieved at https://www.defense.gov/News/Transcripts/Transcript/Article/2266872/secretary-of-defense-mark-t-esper-message-to-the-force-on-accomplishments-in-im/