
History is a heartless teacher. Three hundred years before Christ, Carthage was a prosperous commercial empire dominating the Mediterranean, sustained and protected by the world’s most powerful navy. Rome was an ambitious, expanding land power stymied by its weakness on the seas. Their interests collided in Sicily—which, being an island, favored the naval advantage of Carthage in any conflict.
War commenced in 264 B.C. The historian Polybius recounts how the Romans copied a captured Carthaginian quinquereme and used it to build their own powerful fleet. The story may be apocryphal. The results were not. Rome went on to win a string of naval victories. And they did it by employing a decisive technical innovation: the corvus, a ramp carried by Rome’s warships that allowed infantry to board and seize enemy vessels. A treaty ended the war on Roman terms in 241 B.C.; a treaty that Rome promptly violated to further expand its empire. A century later, it wiped Carthage off the map.
History never repeats itself. Drawing too close a parallel between ancient and modern conditions can be an exercise in melodrama. But the patterns of human thought and behavior that create history repeat themselves all the time. Carthage had a great naval history with vastly more combat experience. But it failed to evolve in naval technology and tactics, and that complacency, that overconfidence, led to disastrous results from a shrewd and determined opponent.
All of which is worth remembering today in the wake of January’s DeepSeek surprise.
DeepSeek, a Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) research firm, released its R1 model for generative AI on January 20. Marc Andreessen, a leading Silicon Valley venture capitalist and adviser to President Trump, promptly described it as “AI’s Sputnik moment” and “one of the most amazing and impressive breakthroughs I’ve ever seen.”
The genius of DeepSeek’s R1 model is obvious: It performs better than, or nearly as well as, major U.S. AI projects. It uses fewer, less expensive chips and open-source software. It demands less training time. And thus it dramatically reduces costs, a fact that immediately erased nearly $1 trillion in value from companies in the U.S. stock market tech sector. Its other element of genius—as the Wall Street Journal noted on January 29—is the way it relied on creative shortcuts, used young, inexperienced engineers, and outfoxed U.S. export controls to access advanced American chips.
One might reasonably conclude that the Chinese are smarter than we thought, or we’re dumber than we thought, or both. Time will tell. But what’s inescapably clear, right now, is that China’s leadership class knows and exploits the vulnerabilities of American politics, culture, and economic dominance exceptionally well. And Wang Huning’s book, America Against America, helps to explain why. Over the last three decades, it’s played an important role in how China sees the United States as a competitor for global power.
In 1988, Wang, then a scholar at China’s Fudan University, spent six months traveling across the United States, visiting thirty cities, twenty universities, and various other public and private centers and persons of influence. In 1991, he published the results: America Against America is his collected observations of American life and institutions, the reasons for U.S. success and the warning signs of American decline, targeted for a Chinese audience. An English language version of the book, independently published, appeared in 2022. Its significance is simple: Wang went on to become the chief political theorist of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). He ranks among China’s senior-most leaders.
Reading America Against America is a mixed experience. The translation often feels awkward. The physical presentation is poor. The text looks like a three-hundred-page typewritten term paper bound in a soft cover. And as a bonus feature, there’s no table of contents or bibliography. The substance, nonetheless, is invaluable. The title captures the book’s central thesis: Despite its many strengths, the United States has growing, internal contradictions that undermine its long-term prospects, a lesson from which China needs to learn. Wang’s comments are very far from the mechanical zealotry of Mao’s Little Red Book. His analyses are wide-ranging, sophisticated, sobering, and—given the Marxist-Leninist credentials of the author—generally fair.
For a U.S. and especially a Christian audience, the meat of the book is “Chapter XI: Undercurrents of Crisis.” Wang sees an excessive American emphasis on individualism, money, and privacy as hollowing out the basic cell of society, the family, which in his words “has disintegrated in the United States.” Family breakdown, accelerated by the widespread availability of drugs and an ongoing sexual revolution, cripples the culture’s attitudes toward children and the elderly. It also feeds the anarchic nature of teen life. This, Wang argues, is compounded by a U.S. standard of high school education that’s “surprisingly poor.” And it’s made worse by an overall education system that fuels ignorance “about the classic works of Western history” and “traditional Western values,” while failing to produce qualified people and thus handicapping the nation’s future.
Ironically for an author who’s presumably irreligious, Wang sees a key source of American decline in the nation’s “spiritual crisis” and a damaged core value system. Left unaddressed, this makes it “inevitable that the whole society will fall into chaos” and moral confusion, leading to “an unstoppable undercurrent of crisis.”
Whether Wang is correct in many of his comments is almost irrelevant. In the words of China analyst Nathan Levine, “observation and assessment of Western civilizational strength or decline [now] helps to shape almost every aspect of China’s policies, both foreign and domestic.” And under Xi Jinping, the CCP—effectively the state religion—“has made cultivating a civilizational ‘spirit of struggle’ central to its mission while judging the West’s loss of the confidence to defend itself to be a fact of historic significance.” Chinese ambitions include a fundamental reshaping of the world order to China’s advantage and vigorous competition with the United States for global leadership in every sector, including technology. DeepSeek is just one example. China’s aggressive hacking of U.S. infrastructure is another.
It’s worth noting that the backbone of American power-projection is its navy. And U.S. naval sources acknowledge that Chinese shipbuilding capacity is now more than two hundred times greater than that of the United States. The U.S. commercial fleet, which would bear the burden of resupplying any forward naval activity in the Pacific, has dwindled to less than 1 percent of the world fleet, which China already dominates. And as of 2020, Chinese battle force ships totaled 355 to an American total of 296. By 2035, at the current buildup rate, the gap between those figures will widen substantially.
These numbers can obviously be misleading. The quality of China’s naval production and leadership is unproven, and China too has significant internal problems. But while America’s leadership class was absorbed in DEI, abortion access, gay and transgender rights, social “equity,” ignoring the border, deriding populism, and trying (unsuccessfully) to hammer a stake through the heart of Donald Trump’s career, China—was not. Complacency, history teaches, has consequences. It may be America’s turn to learn that lesson.
Trump for Women
On Wednesday, President Trump signed an executive order titled “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports.” It requires…
Give the National Endowment for the Arts Back to the Public
For decades, Americans have become increasingly alienated from the American arts establishment. The main source for their…
Manners, Methods, and Greatness
Browsing Footprints in Time, the memoirs of Winston Churchill’s longtime private secretary, John Colville, I found a…