In early August 2026, ITIF — a Washington technology-policy think tank — released the sixth report in its "Mobilization for Techno-Economic Warfare" series. The wording is hawkish, dripping with menace. But look closely at whom the report actually means to act upon, and the likeliest target is America's own allies: first paint China as terrifying, gather the Western family under one roof — then lure them in and bleed them.
Free flow inside, strict exclusion of China outside — a NATO for trade.
I. Globalization Has Run Its Course — Drought on One Side, Flood on the Other
The report's diagnosis is that globalization has reached its end: press on with free trade, and the West will lose its industrial base entirely, surrendering all command of the global techno-economy. The theoretical ground the authors leave unspoken is the Stolper–Samuelson theorem of international trade: abundant factors and scarce factors — one side dies of drought, the other drowns in flood. Once most manufacturing has been offshored, the industries that remain are hard to hold on to either; deindustrialization creeps on, and a country slowly turns into a resource economy — precisely the path recorded in "The Fall at Triple Speed — The EU's 17-Year Plunge in Economic Share Mirrored Against 19th-Century China."
Free trade, then, is not the historical norm — protectionism is. Free trade only holds under the general peace and rule of a dominant empire. The United States never had a free-trade tradition to begin with: it was the unipolar moment after the Cold War that made it the sole hegemon and turned it into globalization's loudest champion, even though its share of manufacturing had already peaked by the late 1970s. That is also the backdrop of Francis Fukuyama's "end of history." Today everyone is busy flogging Fukuyama, and ITIF pinpoints exactly where he went wrong: free trade presupposes a world without strategic competition; once trade relations are established, the state is supposed to retire and hand power to capital. That is what Fukuyama implied, and it was the psychological basis on which America once backed China's entry into the WTO — let the hard shell of the state dissolve, so capital can feed.
II. China Refused to Fade Away According to Script
ITIF attributes the breakdown of globalization to the Chinese government's refusal to fade away per that script: exploiting the WTO's openness to subsidize domestic industry, forcing technology transfers, keeping barriers in place and restricting market access; cultivating national champions that wage price wars to crush purely market-driven firms; and, through the dual-circulation strategy, reducing dependence on the outside at home while engineering dependence on Chinese supply chains abroad — rewarding alignment with dependence and punishing countries that "eat the rice and smash the pot." Trade becomes a weapon for advancing national interest in geopolitical play.
From that reading, the report asserts there is no win-win between China and the developed Western world: keep free trade going, and China grows stronger while the West grows weaker. The security risks of free trade, therefore, must be taken seriously. In the blunt phrasing of Chinese netizens: poor, you practice protectionism; rich, you preach free trade — both are instruments. It is a living specimen of the historical pattern described in "Why First Movers Urge You to Tear Down Walls — The Double Standard of Protectionism": first movers rise behind protective walls, then urge everyone else to demolish them. Today the United States wants to learn China's tools of intervention while continuing to wield free-trade rhetoric against China itself.
III. Free Flow Inside, Strict Exclusion of China Outside
Since China's industrial strength already stands in a class of its own — no single country can withstand it — the West must band together. The report's proposal is a "Strategic Technology-Economic Agreement": a NATO for trade, covering the one billion people of the Western camp. Internally: mutual preferential market access, market integration, reciprocal investment, cooperation in R&D and production, talent mobility, and a unified stance (no signing agreements with China). Externally: barriers, investment screening, export controls, enforcement crackdowns, import bans, restrictions on China's overseas R&D, and shared business intelligence among members.
The trade NATO would cover one billion people of the Western camp; the small club excludes 80% of the world's population; America's manufacturing share had already peaked by the late 1970s.
The camp is far from monolithic: the United States already has trade frictions with its allies, many partners are unwilling to make an enemy of China, and the countries of the Global South live off selling resources — they can hardly attend, for now, to semiconductors, artificial intelligence and quantum computing, the industries of national power. So the report designs a tiered system — member states, partner states, observers — arrayed around a core it does not need to name: the United States.
IV. "Dear America — Please Summarize China's Success in Your Own Words"
Why America at the core? Because even free flow inside the camp still requires an absolute ruler. The prescription the report writes for that ruler is: abandon neoliberalism, return to state developmentalism, with five basic principles — economic construction at the center; cultivating globally competitive large enterprises (make them stronger, better, bigger); effective government intervention (an enabling state combined with an effective market); focus on goals rather than process (the "cat theory"); and transcending the dialectic of capital and labor (only grow the cake bigger, and it can be divided well).
Every one of these sounds familiar. As the video essayist put it, it is like a teacher asking "Little Mei" to summarize "Old Zhong's" recipe for success in her own words — a near mirror-image replication of the Chinese experience. On one hand, America attacks China in mercantilist rhetoric for breaking the rules; on the other, it prescribes itself government subsidies, capacity siphoning, engineered technology dependence and long-arm jurisdiction — drawing allies' high-end industries and capital out of their homelands and into America, hollowing out allies' industrial bases through state intervention.
What the allies inside the camp face, then, is not a hegemon offering a security umbrella, but a mercantilist empire that leverages technological monopoly, energy advantage and financial supremacy to drain their blood.
V. Security From America, Prosperity From the World
The allies are not fools either. They once accepted American control over their security and diplomacy because the bargain kept paying: security from America, prosperity from the world — and a crucial part of the world is the Chinese market. Now they are asked to cut out the enormous Chinese market in exchange for abstract "economic-security protection," with their leading firms' technology exports, R&D direction and capital operations all subject to the US government — destined to become vassals of America's tech giants. Exclude China, the world's largest industrial production base, and many links must be rebuilt at duplicate cost — expensive, inefficient — with high inflation and high debt close behind. And this small club of one billion people from the developed democracies alone, anti-China on the surface but pro-America in substance, is wholly disconnected from the development aspirations of the Global South.
At its close, the report lists three likely sources of opposition to the trade NATO — all of them domestic American factions: those who favor engaging China, those with mysterious confidence in America, and those who only want to improve themselves rather than beat China down. The attitudes of other countries are never considered — I am going to drain you dry; what business is that of yours? But the question remains: if the United States treats trade as a zero-sum game with its own national interest at the center of everything, will other countries truly consent to join an alliance built to drain them?
America's confidence rests on commanding international discourse and thereby manufacturing security threats: the security instinct reaches down into humanity's deepest reptilian brain, and cooperation and development must wait their turn. Moreover, the political media, the financial elites and the personal and family interests of the target countries are already bound to the dollar system — they have little stake in their own countries' physical industry or ordinary people. "The Sky-High Bill of De-Sinicization — The West's $23.6 Trillion Supply-Chain Rebuilding Dilemma" tallied what the West would pay for decoupling; this essay tallies what each ally would pay individually — and the two ledgers point in the same direction, toward one conclusion: the cost of this road lands, in the end, on the allies themselves.
VI. Cutting Off Development Hits Harder Than Invisible Security Threats
How does China break through? Compromising one-sidedly in the security domain will not undo these countries' binding to America. The old saying — "they respect power but not kindness" — has reason behind it. What must be amplified is the logic between geoeconomics and regime survival: today, most states possess no divine right of kings; they must speak in the language of performance legitimacy. A cutoff of development poses a threat to livelihoods that ordinary people can see and touch — and it is often more immediate than those invisible, intangible so-called security threats.
But China must never openly manipulate security threats the way America does. The right course is to keep expanding the coverage of China's industrial system and technological standards, and to build common development into a flagship public good, establishing a symbiotic relationship with the Global South — which amounts to raising the economic and political cost, for these governments, of decoupling and betrayal.
When that day comes, the small hemisphere America has gathered will be a rich man's castle — advanced in technology and finance, inefficient in manufacturing, exorbitant in the cost of production and living. The great hemisphere China has united will be a boundless sea of the people — enormous capacity in the real economy, supply chains woven deep, and a demographic dividend that endures.