There’s an incredible talk from Jake Sullivan talk where he admits that the whole free market bullshit they’ve been promoting can’t actually compete with what China is doing. It’s an absolutely amazing read. Some choice quotes from it:

last few decades revealed cracks in those foundations. A shifting global economy left many working Americans and their communities behind.

The People’s Republic of China continued to subsidize at a massive scale both traditional industrial sectors, like steel, as well as key industries of the future, like clean energy, digital infrastructure, and advanced biotechnologies. America didn’t just lose manufacturing—we eroded our competitiveness in critical technologies that would define the future.

He also opined that the market is far from being able to regulate everything, and “in the name of overly simplified market efficiency, entire supply chains of strategic goods, along with the industries and jobs that produced them, were moved abroad.”

Another problem he identified is the growth of the financial sector to the detriment of the industrial and infrastructure sectors, which is why many industries “atrophied” and industrial capacities “seriously suffered.”

Finally, he admitted that colonization and westernization of countries through globalization has failed:

Much of the international economic policy of the last few decades had relied upon the premise that economic integration would make nations more responsible and open, and that the global order would be more peaceful and cooperative—that bringing countries into the rules-based order would incentivize them to adhere to its rules.

Sullivan cited China as an example:

By the time President Biden came into office, we had to contend with the reality that a large non-market economy had been integrated into the international economic order in a way that posed considerable challenges.

In his opinion, all this has led to dangerous consequences for the US led hegemony:

And ignoring economic dependencies that had built up over the decades of liberalization had become really perilous—from energy uncertainty in Europe to supply-chain vulnerabilities in medical equipment, semiconductors, and critical minerals. These were the kinds of dependencies that could be exploited for economic or geopolitical leverage.

Today, the United States produces only 4 percent of the lithium, 13 percent of the cobalt, 0 percent of the nickel, and 0 percent of the graphite required to meet current demand for electric vehicles. Meanwhile, more than 80 percent of critical minerals are processed by one country, China.

America now manufactures only around 10 percent of the world’s semiconductors, and production—in general and especially when it comes to the most advanced chips—is geographically concentrated elsewhere.

At the same time, according to him, the United States does not intend to isolate itself from China.

Our export controls will remain narrowly focused on technology that could tilt the military balance. We are simply ensuring that U.S. and allied technology is not used against us. We are not cutting off trade.