Our Seriousness Will Be Measured in Silicon

On Edward Luce, trade wars, and the cost of collective amnesia.

USA China Tariff Conflict as US and Chinese trade war or American tariffs as two opposing cargo freight containers as an international economic dispute over import and exports concept. Courtesy of iStock by Getty Images.

The geopolitical competition of our time is unfolding across new frontiers: artificial intelligence, strategic resources, the return of hard-nosed alliances, and the urgent need for digital literacy among citizens. These forces, once fodder for speculative fiction, are now shaping the real-world contest for global influence. This week, Financial Times columnist Edward Luce offered a sobering diagnosis of U.S.–China dynamics in his piece on Trump-era trade brinkmanship, the tech arms race, and how American strategic incoherence is ironically advancing Beijing’s ambitions.

Luce’s central provocation?

Despite lacking any real appetite for military confrontation with China, Donald Trump has managed to fuel its ascendancy through erratic trade policy and deregulation of key technologies like AI. By overplaying America’s hand in areas where it lacks leverage (such as rare earth supply chains), and underinvesting in its long-term economic resilience, the U.S. is walking itself into a tech Cold War it’s not structurally prepared to win.

(Generative AI)

More interestingly, Luce expands his critique beyond Trump to the systemic misreadings by the American foreign policy establishment: the false belief that economic liberalization would birth political freedom in China. The smug assumption that authoritarianism precludes innovation is prevalent. The Manichean framing of U.S.–China relations as a zero-sum contest for global hegemony is baked in Cold War memory. These weren’t MAGA delusions but bipartisan orthodoxies.

But what struck me most about Luce’s piece wasn’t just the policy critique. It was the implicit question: What kind of citizenry underwrites a credible global strategy? Because systems don’t just run themselves. They’re built, maintained, and often corrupted by the people in them.

Yesterday, I offered some respectful criticism of centrist media outlets like The Bulwark for their struggle to engage with the racial and ideological foundations of late-20th-century conservatism. Yet, I also find value in their foreign policy coverage, perhaps because the movement has long excelled at understanding international threats, while ignoring the domestic rot that enabled the movement’s original sins.

Take Jonathan V. Last, for instance, a writer whose systems-oriented analysis resonates deeply with me. He recently argued that America’s global standing is intimately tied to the seriousness of its citizenry. If we elect leaders who treat civic life like a glamourized dodgeball Super Bowl, full of spectacle, devoid of substance, why should allies trust us, or adversaries fear us?

Geopolitics, in that sense, begins at home.

There’s a dangerous demagoguery surrounding trade and deindustrialization today, a narrative full of nostalgia and grievance, but rarely grounded in strategic reality. It reminds me of how the South often explains imperialism in clear-eyed terms, but falters when confronting the moral stain of slavery and the class hierarchies it calcified. You can’t critique the empire without facing the plantation.

Likewise, we must reckon with the costs, and yes, the benefits, of decades of American trade policy. That many can’t, or won’t, speaks to a lack of civic education and a myopic view of the world from the ground up. Luce’s essay highlights the geopolitical risks of sleepwalking through the AI age and stumbling into confrontation with a techno-authoritarian power. But beneath that, he’s issuing a subtler warning: that our dysfunction is not just strategic, but civic, epistemic, and even moral.

Because systems are made of parts. And those parts vote. And if the parts are outdated, uneducated, or unserious, then the system, however sophisticated on paper, will fail when it matters most.