The Best President China Ever Had
On Bullshit, Bombs, and the Long Game Beijing Is Winning While Washington Sets Fire to Its Own Treasury
There is a species of dishonesty more corrosive than the lie. The liar, at least, retains a perverse respect for the truth — he knows what it is and labours to conceal it. The far more dangerous creature, as the philosopher Harry Frankfurt observed, is the bullshitter: the man who speaks without the slightest concern for whether what he says corresponds to reality. The liar plays a game against the truth. The bullshitter has abolished the game altogether. He is not on the other side of the chessboard; he is using the pieces to prop open a window.
One might have supposed that a republic of three hundred and forty million souls, possessed of the finest universities on earth and a constitution designed by men who read Montesquieu for pleasure, would be proof against such a figure. One would have been wrong. The United States of America is now prosecuting a war in the Middle East whose stated justifications change by the hour — regime change, nuclear pre-emption, seizure of oil, the protection of protesters who are now being bombed alongside their oppressors — and the man directing this enterprise has declared victory twelve times in thirty days while requesting more troops. This is not policy. It is performance art funded at a billion dollars a day.
And ten thousand kilometres to the east, in Beijing, no one is laughing. They are far too busy winning.
The Arithmetic of Distraction
Let us begin with what is known, because facts — those unfashionable articles — still matter to serious people even when they have gone out of style in Washington.
The first six days of Operation Epic Fury cost American taxpayers $11.3 billion. The war is now in its fifth week. Estimates place total expenditure north of $200 billion when indirect economic disruption is included. Brent crude has surged more than fifty per cent. The Strait of Hormuz — through which one-fifth of the world’s oil passes — is effectively closed. Fertiliser prices are spiking. American gas prices leapt thirty-five cents in a single week. The OECD has slashed its global growth forecast and doubled its inflation projection for major economies.
The United States is now spending more per week on destroying Iranian radar installations than it spends per year maintaining its national parks.
Meanwhile, China has set its 2026 growth target at 4.5 to 5 per cent. Goldman Sachs projects 4.8 per cent — comfortably above consensus. Chinese real exports grew roughly 8 per cent last year despite American tariffs exceeding 100 per cent on certain goods. Beijing’s current account surplus is rising. Its share of emerging-market exports is expanding. Its R&D spending as a proportion of GDP is climbing toward 3.2 per cent. Its Five-Year Plan doubles down on technological self-reliance, manufacturing competitiveness, and the systematic displacement of foreign suppliers in critical industries.
China is not watching the war. China is taking notes — and filling orders.
The Patience of Civilisations
The strategic mind of the Chinese Communist Party does not operate on the electoral cycle. It does not think in tweets. It does not declare victory before lunch and request reinforcements by dinner. It thinks in five-year plans, in generational transitions, in the patient narrowing of a gap that, measured in purchasing-power parity, is already closer than most Americans would find comfortable.
Beijing understands something that Washington has forgotten, or perhaps never learned: wealth is not destroyed by enemies; it is dissipated by the choices of its possessor. Every dollar that the United States converts into a Tomahawk missile and fires into a Persian desert is a dollar that does not fund semiconductor research, does not train an engineer, does not build a bridge, does not reduce a deficit that is already forcing the OECD to issue inflation warnings. The missile costs two million dollars. It destroys a radar array that Iran will rebuild — quite possibly with Chinese components — for a fraction of that sum. This is not strategy. This is a man setting fire to banknotes to light his cigar.
China, by contrast, is doing what productive civilisations do. It is investing in its own capacity. It is building. Even through a grinding property downturn, even through deflationary pressure and a demographic headwind that would paralyse a less disciplined state, the Chinese government continues to cradle its industrial base, to channel capital into the sectors that will define the next century — artificial intelligence, advanced manufacturing, green energy, quantum computing — and to ensure that the machine does not stop. The downturns are real. The problems are genuine. But the direction is unwavering.
And here is the essential asymmetry: when the United States has a downturn, it starts a war. When China has a downturn, it starts a stimulus programme. One of these approaches compounds national strength. The other depletes it. The mathematics are not complicated. They are merely inconvenient.
Who Wins, Even If He Wins
Grant, for the sake of argument, the most optimistic scenario. Suppose the war ends next week. Suppose Iran capitulates. Suppose the Strait reopens, oil prices retreat, and the president declares — for the thirteenth time — that victory has been achieved.
Who benefits?
Israel benefits, certainly. The destruction of Iranian missile capabilities and the assassination of the Supreme Leader represent genuine strategic gains for Tel Aviv, purchased largely with American blood and treasure. The Gulf states benefit, in so far as their existential anxiety about Iranian aggression is temporarily relieved — though the damage to their own infrastructure from Iranian retaliation has been real, and the memory of American allies being struck by missiles while Washington dithered over its “fifteen-point list” will not fade quickly.
But the United States? What does America gain?
It does not gain territory. It does not gain trade. It does not gain a market. It does not gain an ally — Iran under any successor regime will remember this, and the region’s populations already disapprove. What it gains is a bill. A very large bill, denominated in dollars, in depleted munitions stockpiles, in strategic petroleum reserves drawn down, in diplomatic capital spent, in alliances strained, in the credibility of a nation that launched a war during active negotiations and then changed its explanation for doing so every forty-eight hours.
Now suppose the war does not end next week. Suppose ground troops go in. Suppose Iran becomes the next Afghanistan — a country more than twice the size of Texas, with eighty-eight million people and mountainous terrain purpose-built for insurgency. Then even Israel suffers, because the regional instability that follows an American quagmire benefits no one except arms dealers, propagandists, and patient competitors willing to wait for the fire to burn out.
In either scenario, China grows. It grows because it is not spending. It grows because its competitors are distracted. It grows because the gap between the world’s largest economy and the world’s second-largest economy narrows every single year that America chooses munitions over microchips, every single year that the Pentagon consumes a larger share of the budget than the Department of Energy, every single year that the richest nation in history behaves as though its wealth were infinite and its enemies were the only threat worth addressing.
The real threat to American supremacy is not in Tehran. It is in the compound interest of Chinese investment measured against the compound waste of American adventurism.
On the Nature of the Bullshit
Frankfurt’s insight was not merely academic. It was diagnostic. The bullshitter, he argued, is more dangerous than the liar because he undermines the very framework within which truth and falsehood can be distinguished. When a man says the war will last four weeks and then five weeks later requests ground troops; when he says victory has been achieved and then threatens to obliterate civilian power plants; when he says Iran has agreed to most of his demands and Iran says no direct talks are occurring; when the justification shifts from nuclear pre-emption to regime change to oil seizure to humanitarian protection within the span of a single news cycle — this is not lying. Lying requires a stable counter-narrative. This is something worse. This is the systematic destruction of the conditions under which rational policy can be made.
And rational policy is precisely what China does make. One need not admire the Chinese system — and there is much in it that deserves no admiration — to recognise that its leadership class operates with a coherence of purpose that the current American administration does not. Beijing’s goals are stated, measured, and pursued with an institutional consistency that spans decades. Washington’s goals change between the morning press briefing and the afternoon Truth Social post.
The bullshitter does not know he is the best president China ever had. That is rather the point. He is indifferent to the question. He is indifferent to all questions that cannot be answered with applause.
The Long Game Has No Audience
There is something almost admirable — in the way one might admire a natural disaster — about the sheer wastefulness of it all. Two hundred billion dollars. Fifty thousand troops deployed. Carrier strike groups burning six and a half million dollars a day in operating costs. Munition stockpiles depleted to levels that compromise readiness in the Pacific — the one theatre where the strategic competition with China is not theoretical but existential. And for what? For a country that the United States does not intend to occupy, does not intend to rebuild, and cannot convert into a trading partner.
China does not need to outrun America. It merely needs to keep walking while America sits down to set things on fire. Every war that does not serve the national interest — and this war, whatever its moral pretensions, does not serve the American national interest — is a gift to every competitor with the patience to accept it.
Beijing has patience. It has been a civilisation for five thousand years. It can wait another thirty.
The productive man does not envy the strong man. He outlasts him. The nation that builds outlasts the nation that bombs. The empire that invests in its own citizens outlasts the empire that invests in other people’s rubble. This is not ideology. It is arithmetic. And arithmetic, unlike a presidential statement, does not change between breakfast and lunch.
Donald Trump is the best president China has ever had. He does not know it. He would not understand the claim if it were explained to him. And that, as Frankfurt would observe, is the most perfect form of bullshit there is: the kind that is not even aware of its own indifference to reality.
The liar hides the truth. The bullshitter has lost it altogether. And somewhere in Zhongnanhai, men who have not lost it are smiling — quietly, patiently, and with compound interest.