China

For all the talk about artificial intelligence and quantum supremacy, the fate of civilizations still depends on breakfast. ChatGPT can’t grow corn. Empires rise on stomachs as much as on silicon. And America’s food system – long dismissed as safe and self-sufficient – has quietly become a front line in the US-China rivalry. We act as if lunch is inevitable, but Beijing knows that food is power. A new report from the America First Policy Institute should wake us up. Washington long treated agriculture as a post-political space where globalization could do no harm, and was therefore happy to let much of the nation ship its growth to China. As Ambassador Kip Tom and Royce Hood argue, China has thus taken over critical pieces of the US agricultural system and food supply.

China’s naked weaponization of rare earths brings to mind Mao Zedong’s "four pests" campaign, the old tyrant’s fanatical effort to exterminate all flies, mosquitoes, rats and sparrows, which turned into a spectacular piece of self-harm. Sparrows were always an odd choice of enemy, but Mao and his communist advisors reckoned each one ate four pounds of grain a year and a million dead sparrows would free up food for 60,000 people. The campaign, launched in 1958, saw the extermination of a billion sparrows, driving them to the brink of extinction. But the sparrows also ate insects, notably locusts, whose population exploded, and the ravenous locusts wreaked far more damage to crops than the sparrows ever did, hastening China’s descent into the deadliest famine in human history.

Donald Trump went nuclear. Before his meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping at an air base in South Korea, he ordered the Pentagon to test atomic weapons on an “equal basis” with China and Russia. Was Xi impressed? Probably not. While Russia expressed indignation, China did not permit itself to be distracted by Trump’s nuclear shenanigans. Instead, Beijing aimed to obtain economic concessions from a prideful Trump, which it did. From the outset, Xi sought to bring Trump down a peg, declaring that “both sides should consider the bigger picture and focus on the long-term benefits of cooperation, rather than falling into a vicious cycle of mutual retaliation.” Trump seems to have absorbed the lesson.