by Joe Lombardo

The United States is preparing for a war with China. U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and many other US officials have stated that they expect to be at war with China by 2027. They claim this is in response to China’s aggression, especially towards Taiwan. But China, the UN, and most of the rest of the world, including the U.S., recognize Taiwan as a province of China, and China has not threatened their own island province. Additionally, the U.S. claims of Chinese aggression are at odds with reality. In the past fifty years, China has not attacked another country or dropped bombs on anyone; yet the U.S. has had military operations against seventy-two countries in the past twenty-five years alone. In the past twenty years, the U.S. has dropped 337,000 bombs on various countries for an average of around forty-six per day. China has not dropped a single bomb on another country during this period. It is the U.S., not China, who is aggressive.

The U.S. military budget has recently grown to more than one trillion dollars, about 40% of the total military budgets of all countries combined. The U.S. has surrounded China with military bases and Navy vessels. The U.S. has eighty military bases in Japan, around 28,000 troops in South Korea, and a large and growing presence in the Philippines, which includes the recent introduction of Typhon missiles that can hit most Chinese cities and can carry nuclear warheads.

The U.S. has framed its aggression towards China in what it calls its “Pivot to Asia.” This policy, announced by President Obama, shifted U.S. military resources from Europe and Western Asia to the so-called “Indo-Pacific region” with the goal of militarily surrounding China. In 2021, under the Biden administration, the U.S., the UK and Australia formed the AUKUS security partnership, an agreement focused on Australia acquiring nuclear-powered attack submarines, stationing U.S. and UK attack submarines in Australia, and the development of electronic warfare capabilities. The Chinese government stated at the time that AUKUS is “severely damaging regional peace” and that it showed a “cold-war mentality.”

After World War II, the U.S. was the undisputed power in the world, both militarily and economically. Countries in Europe and Asia had been destroyed by the war and needed to be rebuilt. The U.S. used its position to create political, economic and military institutions that placed it in a privileged position at the center of world capitalism. It was the “American Century.”

But the world has now moved on. The capitalist need for an ever-increasing rate of profit led the U.S., and its European allies, to increasingly move their industry out of their own countries to areas of the world where they could get cheaper labor and more favorable conditions for their manufacturing to make higher profits. During this period, they changed from an industrial capitalist model to a financial capitalist model, while China increased its industrial production by leaps and bounds. The U.S. has lost its monopoly over production. Today, the country with the most manufacturing in the world, by far, is China. It had around 31.2% of the global manufacturing output as of 2024, and the U.S. came in second, with 15.9% of the global manufacturing output. Most of the European capitalist countries have also deindustrialized.

The Ukraine war has laid bare a remarkable reality: Russia has been able to outproduce all of Europe and the U.S. in manufacturing shells, missiles, and other weapons, and is therefore winning the war.

Unlike in the U.S., where increased profits mean more billions for the billionaire class and nothing for the working class, China used its growing economy to build advanced infrastructure, housing for the people, and virtually eliminated poverty in the country while building a massive middle class. China has now surpassed the U.S. in GDP at purchasing power parity.

The U.S. has used its vast economic power to bully the world into supporting its political and economic policies, and has backed up its bullying with a vast military network that includes around 1000 foreign military bases, about twenty times the number of foreign bases of all other countries combined. Today, the sun never sets on the U.S. military. The U.S. has also weaponized its economic might through sanctions and tariffs. It has sanctioned over forty other countries simply for seeking sovereignty and independence from U.S. imperialism and its economic institutions. To survive and prosper, many of these countries have come together to build new economic institutions such as the BRICS that will allow them their sovereignty, and allow them to develop and advance economically. In addition to China being a founding member of BRICS, China has moved ahead with its Belt and Road Initiative to build infrastructure and trade agreements with countries around the world, which can greatly benefit them as well as China. The U.S., however, sees this as a threat to its hegemony that it is preparing to go to war to preserve.

The U.S. empire is ending. Its domination of the world is being challenged, and rather than peacefully accepting the loss of its hegemonic privilege and power, it intends to bring the world to the brink of annihilation.

As always, as the U.S. moves towards war, propaganda by the U.S. media is playing a big role. The U.S. media falsely portrays China as an oppressor of its people domestically, especially minorities, and a security threat to the U.S. and to China’s neighbors. We have also heard the false narrative that China’s trade practices are “unfair”—that they have stolen trade secrets and intellectual property, and that they have been involved in currency manipulation to make Chinese goods more competitive. Donald Trump has imposed high tariffs on China based on such claims. The most recent tariffs were initially set at 145%, much higher than on any other country in the world. They were only lowered when China retaliated with similar tariffs on the U.S. that caused financial chaos in U.S. markets. As of this writing, the harsh tariffs have been delayed for an additional ninety days until November 2025 while Trump tries to figure out what to do.

Although the narrative from the U.S. government has varied in its policy towards China—between pro-engagement and outright hostility—it seems that the U.S. media is always in lockstep with the U.S. administration. This is because the U.S. media is tightly controlled. When the Clinton Administration passed the Telecommunications Act of 1996, it resulted in a massive deregulation of the telecommunications industry. This caused a tremendous consolidation of the media in the hands of a few major corporations that control the narrative we hear. This process led to fewer alternative views in the corporate media and tighter control over social media.

It is also important to note that the U.S./Israeli genocide against the Palestinian people has shown the world what horrors imperialism and Zionism are capable of. These genocidal policies are an implied threat to all other countries: if they oppose the U.S. or Israel, they may suffer the same fate. As people around the world see the reality of Gaza, and as they protest in the streets in numbers that we have not seen in decades, the Western imperialist countries are cracking down on domestic civil liberties, making it more dangerous for their people to protest against U.S. and European government policies, as well as against all wars—not just the war in Palestine, but NATO’s proxy war in Ukraine, and the aggressive moves towards China by the U.S. and its allies.

It is clear that there is a widening gulf between the positions of the Western governments and their people, which allows us the possibility to build a movement against war today as we have not been able to do in many years. As the U.S. moves towards war with China, we must prepare to fight to stop them, by demanding that the U.S. bring its troops home, close its foreign military bases, end all sanctions, and cut the military budget and use the money for human needs.

***

Joe Lombardo is a long-time peace and labor activist, and the coordinator of the United National Antiwar Coalition (UNAC).