I was really delighted when, serendipitously, my adviser Gao Shanwen caused a stir in Washington in December by stating that although our official growth figure is “close to 5%,” in the past two or three years the “average might be around 2%.” I feigned distress and threatened to punish him, in what we call “please don’t throw me in the rice paddy.”

As the new American president’s advisers, isolationists, super deficit-hawks, the anti-military Left, journalists, think-tank creatures, and academics have concluded that China is, or shortly will be, on the ropes, I hit the chess clock. Now I’ll sit back as the president—who wants his ships to be “beautiful,” thinks nuclear weapons appropriate to counter-insurgency, and has declared that he has “the best brain”—finds confirmation in his belief that Guānshuì (tariff) is the most beautiful word in the dictionary.

For then he is likely to hold back on military spending, believing that—given our debt and housing crisis—if he can choke our exports he can checkmate our military build-up and my ambitions for it. He thinks like a real-estate developer, and there is less chance that he has read the Sun-tzu Bing Fa (Sun-tzu’s The Art of War) than that every night he travels to and from the moon.

In the Americans’ rush to spend assumed advantages before collecting them, they forget that dictatorships often resort to war specifically to overcome domestic crises. And they overlook the ability of the party to allocate resources despite great suffering. Not only is this what we can do, it is what we have always done. The China hands in America insist that a brake on our actions even greater than that of the economy is our dread of economy-driven instability. Quite so, but they do not sufficiently credit the decade and a half of computer- (and now A.I.-) abetted social control that they themselves spend so much ink in detailing.

I’ll have free rein while, in pursuit of its entertainments, America fails to repair a military severely diminished in recent wars. China will drive for parity where it is not yet attained—and then superiority—in nuclear forces, naval fleets, space, cyber, quantum computing, and directed-energy weapons.

There are people in Congress, in shallow think tanks, and on their retirement farms in the provinces, who try to draw attention to what is happening, but they don’t stand a chance against the weight of dominant opinion and the voices that both the president and the public want to hear. I’m grateful for this Musk character, who, perhaps because he has more than ordinary income and sits on the president’s shoulder like a parrot, is said to be charismatic. I don’t find him so. I myself am not charismatic: charisma is the portion of fools, those who serve it and those who eat it.

He says, “Some idiots are still building manned fighter jets like the F-35.” He would rely on the autonomous aircraft just beginning to mature and, rather than feathering them into manned fleets, abandon America’s only production of fifth-generation aircraft. We didn’t steal F-35 technology for nothing. Remember how easily Israel made Iran’s air defense disappear? The fourth-generation plane in U.S. production, the F-15EX, has the radar cross-section of a box truck. The F-35 has that of a mosquito. To be effective, the semi-autonomous Collaborative Combat Aircraft now in development require the F-35, and will for a long time. Imagine, the United States of America not producing any first-line fighter planes, sort of like Vatican City. I like that.

***

Our navy will soon surpass the U.S. navy. We have more ships now and a capacity to surge-produce, like the U.S. in World War II, 20 times greater than America’s. Not only will we have as many full-size aircraft carriers, but our type 076 amphibious ships, unlike the American equivalents, have the ability to launch standard fixed-wing aircraft, meaning that we will have—again, like the U.S. in the Second World War—fleets of “jeep carriers,” which just in themselves can resolve the question of carrier vulnerability and the “hi-lo” debate.

The Americans never came to grips with the naval hi-lo debate of the 1970s: i.e., many less capable, less vulnerable ships versus fewer of those more capable yet more vulnerable. The heart of the question lay not between the two approaches but in whether or not to spend the money for the only effective resolution—to adopt both. Now many voices recommend submarines and long-range aircraft to protect Australia, the Philippines, Taiwan, and Japan—islands that, with our balanced navy, we will dominate. Submarines have small ordinance loads and cannot even begin to match the offensive capacities of carriers. Long-range aircraft are even more limited, and with their distance-dictated low sortie rate, we will knock them out of the air.

Yes, carriers are vulnerable to our DF-21 missiles, but rather than finding ways to protect and, as we have, multiply them, the Americans seem to want to give up, as if ships were never meant to go in harm’s way. Because in the nuclear age homeland bases will be off-limits, a war in the Pacific will be a naval war, which is why I am delighted that they want to limit their navy. They’ve come to think that carriers are outmoded, but you can’t adequately project power throughout the world from under the sea or with parsimonious bomber sorties from North Dakota. And they’re not worried about our carriers, because they think we don’t want to project power. May they continue to think that.

Of such foolishness there are many similar examples. They were once a serious, sober, and courageous people. Now they embarrass even me. But I’m happy to let them believe that economies are the final arbiters in the struggle between nations and systems. One needs a strong economy to produce a strong military. We have always known this. But we know as well that once military production and resolve have achieved escape velocity the economy recedes into the distance and the complexion of history is reddened by war.

A version of this essay first appeared in The Wall Street Journal.