In their latest Foreign Affairs essay, National Security Council official Kurt Campbell and State Department China policy director Rush Doshi argue that the United States is underestimating the strategic threat posed by the People’s Republic of China and must build a vast, integrated coalition to confront it. They present an image of an ascendant, industrially and technologically superior China, one capable of overwhelming the United States unless Washington retools its alliances into a cohesive, scaled-up security and economic bloc. It is, in many ways, a polished version of the same alarmist narrative that has animated American grand strategy since the end of the Cold War—this time with China cast in the role of existential adversary.
The article, brimming with Cold War analogies and triumphant industrial production figures, reads less like an objective strategic assessment than a call to arms from two deeply entrenched architects of the military-industrial consensus. Its intellectual scaffolding is as flawed as its political motivations are transparent. The real threat is not that Washington underestimates China, but that it continues to overestimate the wisdom of its own primacist worldview—and that it does so at the urging of men like Campbell and Doshi, who are deeply embedded in the very networks of defense contractors, Beltway think tanks, and ideological militarism that profit from manufactured crises.
Campbell and Doshi repeatedly invoke China’s scale—its manufacturing capacity, population, and technological production—as the basis for claiming it is the most formidable rival the United States has ever faced. But this selective invocation of scale ignores equally important structural weaknesses in the Chinese system. While the authors begrudgingly mention demographic decline, debt overhang, and an increasingly authoritarian policy climate, they handwave these away with the curious assertion that “two things can be true”: China can be stagnating and still strategically menacing. But even this formulation elides a basic truth, that an economy riddled with inefficiencies and internal contradictions is not well-positioned for global dominance.
What Campbell and Doshi really object to is any narrative that would justify disengagement or strategic retrenchment. Hence the breathless insistence that China’s rise must still be “matched” by American counter-effort. But China is not exporting revolution, building a network of military bases around the globe, or attempting to dominate the Western Hemisphere. Its foreign policy, while often assertive, is overwhelmingly reactive. If anything, China’s strategic goals are regionally focused and deeply risk-averse. The notion that the Chinese Communist Party is plotting to out-industrialize and outgun the United States into submission is Cold War fantasy dressed up in comparative GDP data.
Perhaps most telling is Campbell and Doshi’s emphasis on transforming alliances into a “platform for integrated and pooled capacity” in the military-industrial domain. They call for co-production of ships and missiles with allies, looser restrictions on defense tech exports, and more interoperable industrial bases, all under the guise of strategic necessity. What they are really advocating is the permanent expansion of the U.S. defense-industrial complex into a multinational juggernaut, subsidized by allied governments and legitimized by a shared fear of China.
That both authors have long-standing ties to this very complex should give readers pause. Campbell has held lucrative positions at defense-aligned think tanks like the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), which receives substantial funding from weapons manufacturers like Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, and Lockheed Martin. Doshi, too, cut his teeth at Brookings and similar institutions funded by military contractors and foreign governments invested in a hardline U.S. stance toward Beijing. Their careers and credibility are built on sustaining the very threat inflation they now warn against abandoning.
In this light, the call to reimagine alliances as extensions of defense supply chains is less about security than about profit. By urging the United States to share advanced weaponry, harmonize export controls, and coordinate industrial policy with allies, they are laying the groundwork for a transnational arms industry with guaranteed government contracts and no meaningful democratic oversight. The model isn’t just the Arsenal of Democracy—it’s the Arsenal of Dependency.
Though Campbell and Doshi frame their proposal as one of partnership and mutual scale-building, it is, at root, a plea for a new imperial architecture. Their admiration for “capacity-centric statecraft” and coalition-based hegemony is a thinly veiled attempt to salvage American unipolarity through multilateral militarization. Instead of unilaterally dominating the globe, they propose doing so through a web of co-opted allies, bound not by shared values, but by shared defense burdens.
In their world, Japan and South Korea are to build our warships; Australia and India are to police their regions as “deputy sheriffs.” And all are to accept American oversight of this emerging order. This is not humility—it’s hierarchy in disguise. The command-and-control model may be replaced by a more horizontal-sounding “platform,” but the objectives remain the same: contain China, dominate trade routes, and sustain U.S. global primacy indefinitely.
What Campbell and Doshi fundamentally misunderstand—or choose to ignore—is that the real challenge facing the United States is not China’s rise, but America’s refusal to adjust to a multipolar world. Their vision locks the United States into an arms race against an adversary that is not threatening it, in service of an order that is increasingly unstable and unsustainable. The economic and diplomatic costs of their proposed strategy—tariff walls, investment controls, arms proliferation, and regulatory decoupling—are enormous and will do more to isolate Washington than to restrain Beijing.
Indeed, the very allies they hope to integrate into this new “scale-centric” order are already hedging. Europe is wary of subordinating itself to U.S.-China confrontation. India continues to buy oil from Russia and reject alliance commitments. Southeast Asian states want trade, not tanks. The “coalition of democracies” Campbell and Doshi envision does not exist—nor will it, if Washington continues to treat partners as pawns in its great-power competition game.
The greatest irony of Campbell and Doshi’s piece is that they accuse others of “complacency” while advocating for a path that guarantees perpetual crisis and strategic overreach. True renewal of American power will come not from confronting China at every turn, but from ending the obsession with global dominance and focusing instead on resilience at home.
That means ending corporate welfare for weapons manufacturers, rolling back the militarization of diplomacy, and adopting a more restrained foreign policy that recognizes limits—geopolitical, economic, and moral. A saner China policy would emphasize diplomacy, trade normalization, and targeted engagement. It would accept that China, like any great power, will have a regional sphere of influence, and that co-existence is not capitulation.
Campbell and Doshi do not offer a “new” strategy—they offer an old one, wrapped in pseudo-innovation and defended by vested interests. The real underestimation is not of China, but of the costs of endless confrontation—and of the American people’s capacity to see through it.
