Shaun Rein on how America's containment policies of China are backfiring

Containment policies don't work.  Now one of your previous guests, John Mearsheimer, has said he's 100% all-in on trying to contain China.  I think this is one of the most foolish, stupid policies that America could do.  One, as I've shown, Chinese companies have invested so much on innovation themselves, that they're now as good, if not better than the United States.  If America can build it, you can be sure that China eventually can, too.  It's either bigoted or stupid to say that Chinese can't catch up to Americans because China has the money, it has the government support and it has the STEM intellectual brains to try to catch up.  

Two, it hurts American companies like Intel, like Nvidia.  Nvidia has said that now their former client, Huawei, is now one of their biggest competitors.  So this was another mistake from the Mearsheimer school of thought of trying to contain China.  

And then third, more importantly, when you look at the bigger picture, I think a lot of countries in the Global South - I like to call them the Global Majority - they feel that the United States is bullying China and they're worried that they, too, could be bullied.  The United States went from being the liberators in the world, the good guys - they liberated the world from the Nazis, they liberated the world from a form of communism during the Soviet era that was not very productive economically - now they're really almost like triads or mafia, forcing other countries to follow whatever the United States wants.  And I think the Global Majority is angry at what the United States is doing.  I'll give an example: Malaysia has invested billions and billions of dollars because they want to be a base or locus for data centers.  But in his last week as president, Biden slapped export bans on high-end semiconductor chips to Malaysia.  And so Malaysia's plans over the last five years are gone...

So I think you're starting to see a deterioration of America's prestige, power and dominance in the world because people view them as bullying China and bullying other countries like Malaysia.  And that's why I start to see countries starting to move closer to China's orbit.

~ Shaun Rein, "Why China Brushes Off Trump's Tariffs," Thinkers Forum, March 1, 2025