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