“Underestimating China: Why America Needs a New Strategy of Allied Scale” published in Foreign Affairs (April 2025), Kurt M. Campbell and Rush Doshi argue that the United States risks complacency by overestimating its long-term advantage over China. The authors contend that despite recent economic headwaves, China remains the most formidable competitor the U.S. has faced—economically, technologically, and militarily.
They critique Washington’s recent shift toward triumphalism, remarking that while China’s growth has slackened, it continues to command massive scale: twice the manufacturing output of the U.S., the world’s largest navy, and leading positions in pressing technologies like hypersonics, electric vehicles, and nuclear energy. They argue that scale —not just size is the key to strategic advantage, and China has already achieved it.
Campbell and Doshi retain that the U.S. cannot match China’s scale alone. Instead, it must hearth a radically new approach to alliances—one that treats partners not as dependents, but as co-creators of military, industrial, and technological might. This includes combined production, pooled markets, coordinated export controls, and joint innovation. Only through such a tactic of “allied scale” can the U.S. counterpoise China’s systemic advantage.
The authors caution that U.S.’s unilateralism embrace—especially the “America First” doctrine in fact downplays alliances—it will soon replicate Britain’s decline during larger industrial rivals a century ago. Contrarily, a cohesive democratic bloc could outdo China across key indicators.
The article concludes with the notion that the challenge is not China’s rise exclusively, but America’s response to it. If the U.S. fails to reimagine alliances as a platform for collective scale, it may find itself outdone by an opponent that is not just rising—one already towering.
For India, this article suggests an opportunity to be a central player in a U.S.-led coalition designed to counter China’s strategic scale, putting its congruity to use. Additionally, contributing industrial capacity, technological innovation, and regional deterrence, with which India can help build the kind of integrated alliance architecture the author’s advocate. In this emerging strategy of allied scale, India should actualise not just as partner—but as a pillar in preserving global balance.