Editor's note: Radhika Desai, a special commentator on current affairs for CGTN, is a professor of political studies at the University of Manitoba in Canada. The article reflects the author's opinions and not necessarily the views of CGTN.

In Foreign Policy, Kishore Mahbubani, a distinguished fellow at the Asia Research Institute of the National University of Singapore, recently returned to an argument he has long been making: The U.S. should accept that it cannot stop China's rise, not least because efforts to do so are hurting the U.S. far more than they are harming China.

Unfortunately, however, the U.S. appears constitutionally incapable of heeding such sage advice: Like a psychotic, it seems unable to deal with realities of the sort Mahbubani is pointing to.

In its most recent and rather comprehensive version, co-authored with Tony Chan, the president of the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, and Ben Harburg, a member of the board of directors of the National Committee on United States-China Relations, Mahbubani lays out the case in considerable detail. The continuation of Donald Trump-era antagonism towards China by the Joe Biden administration in an effort to stall China's technological advance is bound to fail and join the long line of such efforts since China's world-historic 1949 revolution. Since then efforts have been made to prevent China's access to the whole spectrum of advanced technologies – "nuclear, space, satellite, GPS, semiconductor, supercomputer and artificial intelligence." China has always been able to overcome such barriers, develop its own technologies and often end up with even more advanced technology, whether in the case of satellites, GPS or, most recently, advanced semiconductor chips.

Moreover, Mahbabuni et al point out, that China had the ability to retaliate, if not by denying the U.S. advanced technology (though that day may come) at least by preventing the U.S. from having key raw materials, such as gallium and germanium. Not only can China extend such bans to more minerals, but the U.S. would find it difficult to cope with the consequences: New mines take time to start producing in any volumes as Mahbubani et al suggest. Moreover, the U.S. is just not geared for such a focussed social effort. 

Further, these authors argue that the advanced chip export ban is harming U.S. chip producers to an extent not appreciated: For many leading chip producers, like Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, and Broadcom, China is a huge market, accounting for anywhere between 20 percent and 60 percent of their revenues. Without these revenues and profits, these companies have less to invest in research and development and thus are in danger of losing their technological edge. No wonder such companies have indeed been lobbying the U.S. government to stop these self-mutilating measures. Worse, China accounts for such a large proportion of world demand for semiconductors that it cannot be replaced and the U.S. faces the inevitability of its "allies" breaking ranks and continuing their exports to China.

Finally, and very interestingly, Mahbabuni et al make another quite original argument. Given that U.S. hostility to China has been as much about stalling its technological advance as it has been about changing China internally, they point out that it is an "act of remarkable hubris for [the U.S. as] a 250-year-old Republic (with one-quarter of China's population) to believe that it could transform a 4,000-year-old civilization to its liking."

However, surely here, Mahbabuni and his co-authors concede too much to the U.S.'s own self-image. The U.S. agencies give too benign, not to say condescending, an interpretation of the U.S.'s goals towards China. In reality, decades of U.S. engagement with China had aimed to permanently subordinate China to the U.S. as a producer of cheap low-wage goods and U.S. hostility to China began when the illusory nature of this aim became clear.

Moreover, Mahbubani et al themselves reveal why it would take a miracle for the U.S. to heed their advice: "One fundamental problem is that domestic politics in America are forcing American policymakers to take strident stands against China instead of pragmatic positions.”

The simple fact is that the U.S.'s domestic politics are not just experiencing a temporary derangement from which they can be expected to recover and return of sanity. The U.S. political derangement is long-term, persistent and mounting. It is the result of four decades of regressive neoliberal policy that has created a financialized, unproductive and increasingly unequal society which, in turn, has deepened social division and that, in turn, is today keeping U.S. politics in the stalemate that some have likened to First World War trench warfare where the lines don't budge despite intense, destructive fighting causing horrific levels of casualties and fatalities.

The only way out of this political mode is for a vast social movement of ordinary U.S. citizens to exercise democratic control over a government that has been serving the country's 1 percent at the expense of its 99 percent for too long.

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