JOEL KOTKIN: Wars are won on the factory floor.
China, the most important ally of Tehran’s beleaguered mullahs, cannot be easily dismissed. Since its accession to the World Trade Organisation in 2000, China has grown to the point where it boasts as many factory exports as the US, Japan and Germany combined. In 2023, the Middle Kingdom forged roughly half the world’s steel and became the world’s largest automobile market – including for electric vehicles, whose batteries are linked to an industrial economy that’s highly dependent on coal-burning power stations. It also accounts for more than half of all shipbuilding.
The impact has been devastating on the West. Europe’s industrial sector continues to decline, shedding one million manufacturing jobs between 2019 and 2023. In the US, a study by the Economic Policy Institute found that China’s export surge alone cost up to 3.7million American jobs since 2000. Between 2004 and 2017, America’s share of global manufacturing fell from 15 per cent to 10 per cent, even as its reliance on Chinese inputs doubled, while those from Japan’s and Germany’s fell.
Unlike Japan in the 1980s, whose growth threatened American industries, China’s rise is directly tied to power projection, with substantial investment in space, robotics and other technologies with military uses. By contrast, the US struggles to supply its own forces – and those of its closest allies – with basic ammunition. Until recently, it has even relied on China-based industry to produce key parts in areas as sensitive as submarine production.
Without a full-scale industrial revival, the West risks following the disastrous path of Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan and the Soviet Union – all of which were ultimately overwhelmed by superior industrial and technological power.
Flashback: War Factories: YouTube Documentary Series Explores How the Allies’ Assembly Lines Pulverized the Axis.