By Qamar Bashir
When a member of Congress asked who now holds the advantage between the United States and China, Kurt M. Campbell did not search for diplomatic shelter. He answered plainly—“China, China, China”—and added that America is in a more fragile position. That exchange distilled a wider realization in Washington: the contest is no longer about who has the cleverest idea, but about who can pair ideas with scale, speed, finance, and supply chains that actually deliver.
Across robotics, autonomous systems, shipbuilding, critical minerals, and the green-energy stack, China has assembled an industrial machine that converts plans into production with few seams. The United States still leads in many forms of research and in the highest tiers of AI hardware and software. Yet too often these strengths sit on islands that are hard to connect to the physical economy. China, by contrast, works from the factory outward. It absorbs a technology, replicates it at home, pushes costs down, and then ships it to the world. That pattern—learn, scale, export—now runs through much of its economy.
This is evident on factory floors. China has built the world’s largest base of industrial robots and the domestic suppliers to keep adding more of them, allowing factories to iterate quickly and standardize quality. It shows up in the air as well, where Chinese drones dominate civilian markets and where military variants have spread to buyers that find Western systems unaffordable or unavailable. Autonomy at scale is not just a technical feat; it is a logistics and training advantage that compounds year after year.
The imbalance is even clearer at sea. Chinese yards deliver commercial ships at a rate that American yards cannot currently approach. Those deliveries are not only commercial statistics. They translate into maritime resilience, sealift, and the capacity to replace hulls fast if a crisis damages them. Industrial power is not an abstraction; it is a queue of vessels sliding down the ways, month after month. America’s shipbuilding base, meanwhile, is thin, specialized, and expensive to expand, which leaves the country reliant on time it may not have.
Beneath these visible platforms lies a quieter source of leverage: rare earths and allied magnet materials. Modern electronics, precision weapons, wind turbines, and electric drivetrains all depend on them. China does not merely mine a large share of these inputs; it processes and refines them, and it manufactures the magnets that sit at the end of the chain. When Beijing tightened export restrictions, markets felt the tremor immediately. U.S. officials have pressed China to ease those curbs and have worked to rally partners to reduce concentration risk. That effort is prudent, but it also acknowledges the present reality—critical stages of the chain are outside American control.
It is here that the familiar American toolkit—tariffs, export controls, and the weaponization of data and finance—meets its limit. Measures of this kind can unsettle smaller or more fragile economies; they have done so repeatedly in the past. They are far less effective against a state with a continental-scale market, deep foreign-exchange reserves, a disciplined industrial policy, and broad capacity to substitute or reroute flows when pressured. China has spent years preparing for that pressure by localizing essential inputs, building parallel financial pipes, and hardening its digital and data regimes. A country that can supply so much of its own demand and anchor so many others’ supply is not easily forced to change course from the outside.
That is why the question posed in the hearing—will punitive tariffs work this time—lands differently today. Tariffs can raise Chinese costs at the American border, but they also raise costs for American producers who rely on Chinese inputs at every intermediate step. If the response from Beijing is to ratchet controls on minerals, chemicals, or magnet materials, the downstream impact is immediate: delays, higher bills, and quality slippage as firms scramble for substitutes. The economic effect accumulates in quieter ways as well. Investment decisions are deferred; projects are redesigned; factories operate below capacity. The result is slower growth and a steady erosion of credibility in the claim that America can out-produce its rival where it matters most.
Washington sees this bind and is examining ways to mine, process, and manufacture more of these inputs at home. That path is necessary, but it is not quick. Permitting, capex, skilled labor, environmental safeguards, local consent, and shared infrastructure mean any serious build-out takes well over a decade to mature. Even then, the unit costs will be markedly higher than those produced by an ecosystem in China that has already reached enormous scale. The arithmetic is straightforward: if domestic inputs are several times more expensive than imported ones, consumers pay more, manufacturers lose margin, or both. And if China chooses to restrict intermediate goods while America is still scaling its replacements, the squeeze is immediate. It is the classic choice between the devil and the deep sea.
None of this argues for resignation. It argues for realism. Treating China as an equal party in the global economy does not mean conceding strategic ground; it means recognizing that coercive instruments will not deliver quick or clean wins. A better first step is to lower the temperature of the tariff war by restoring duties toward earlier baselines and by limiting new restrictions to genuinely narrow security cases with clear, auditable justifications. That would not end competition. It would simply replace a spiral of retaliation with rules that both sides can plan around, which is the precondition for any serious industrial strategy at home.
De-escalation abroad must be matched by seriousness at home. The United States needs a long-horizon, bipartisan program that outlasts election cycles and that treats production as a national capability, not a slogan. That means modernizing ports and shipyards so output can compound rather than stall; accelerating permitting without waiving environmental standards; building regional hubs for magnets, specialty chemicals, and advanced components with public-private risk sharing; aligning procurement with delivery so firms are paid to produce, not to promise; and investing in workforce pipelines that can staff mines, mills, fabs, and yards. Recycling and re-use should be embedded from the start so domestic supply is not only larger but also more resilient when prices swing.
The same principle should guide the data front. The United States can and should protect sensitive datasets and core algorithms, but it should avoid broad regimes that punish neutral commercial activity or force partners to choose camps. A narrower, predictably enforced set of rules will better protect security without undermining competitiveness. Data is valuable because it flows; policy that freezes it indiscriminately tends to reduce American firms’ reach more than it constrains China’s.
Some will hear this and worry that stepping back from the tariff cliff signals weakness. The opposite is true. It signals confidence that America’s real advantage lies in the combination of research excellence, entrepreneurial depth, and an open capital market that can scale new industries when the ground rules are stable. Tariffs and blunt data controls may temporarily bruise a competitor, but they rarely build capacity at home. Capacity is built by patient investment, steady rules, and a clear list of priorities that does not change with each headline.
Campbell’s answer in the hearing was a snapshot of the present, not a verdict on the future. China’s strength today rests on a disciplined link between strategy and production. America’s path back runs through the same link. It will not be achieved by trying to bludgeon a rival that has already insulated itself from the tools that once worked on others. It will be achieved by lowering the noise, rebuilding the sinews of industry, and competing on the only terrain that decides enduring power: the ability to design, build, and deliver at scale. If the United States chooses that course, it will find that fragility is not fate. It is a diagnosis—and like any diagnosis, it is most useful when it prompts the right treatment.
About Writer:
Press Secretary to the President (Rtd)
Former Press Minister, Embassy of Pakistan to France
Former Press Attaché to Malaysia
Former MD, SRBC | Macomb, Michigan, USA
