Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.

Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. I’d like to talk today about China. It seems to be on everybody’s mind, but explicitly on President Donald Trump’s mind.

That’s the one common denominator that explains his interest in Panama and not to turn over our key transit from East to West Coast to China. China has no business there. And same thing with Greenland.

He’s worried about the Chinese having access to the Arctic Circle. He’s worried about their trade surplus. He’s worried about circumventing unfair trade by assembling their products in Mexico. He’s worried about them sending raw product of fentanyl.

He’s worried about their surrogates, the sort of mad pit bulls, like North Korea and, increasingly, Iran, that he cuts the leash every once in a while and says—he being China—”Go to it. Cause chaos.”

He’s worried that China is intimidating countries in the Pacific and in Asia. Some of our strongest friends—Australia, South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, Vietnam. Saying things like, “The United States is in decline. You better cut a deal.”

Essentially, they’re like Japan in 1940 and they’re trying to re-fashion something like the Japanese East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. That was a mercantile system aimed at the West, which soon they were to be at war at.

So, is it all depression? No. What Trump is saying is, for us to stop this, we’ve got to balance our budget. We can’t spend $3 billion a day on interest. If we’re gonna do this, we have to have trade parity. We can’t keep running up a trillion, a trillion and a half dollars in trade surplus.

And when he looks at us at home, he says, the ESG, this environmental, social, governance, that we don’t look at productivity in stocks but whether they’re politically correct or DEI and woke, that’s anti-merit—it doesn’t work. The Chinese love it. We will not be competitive.

If we look at the border, you can’t have an open border with 30 million illegal aliens. That is a drag on productivity. You have to have security.

So, what he’s doing is, in all these areas, is identifying the threat that China poses and why we, with an open, transparent, and capital society, can achieve our preeminence or guarantee our preeminence, if we make changes.

And it’s not necessarily a pessimistic picture. I’ll just give you some statistics.

Yes, China has 2,000 fighters. We have 1,500. But fighters aren’t the only story. There are bombers, there are logistic planes, there are intelligence planes. When you look at all of the U.S. Air Force, we have about 1,500 more planes. And we have over 500 fifth-generation fighters. I think they only have about 60.

Yes, they are building 200 times more ships than we are.

Remember, we built the largest navy in World War II that turned out, by 1945, larger than all the navies in the world. We were building a liberty or freedom mercantile vessel, big 10,000-, 12,000-ton vessels, every five days. We built 3,000 of them. We built 120 carriers of different classifications.

So, we were the shipbuilder and now China is. But when you actually look at our fleets, we still have 11 fleet carriers and Navy groups around them. They are over 100,000 tons. They’re all nuclear. China has two and it’s building a third. We have about 85 to 87 submarines. They have about 60. But every one of ours is nuclear. Not theirs. They only have about six or seven.

If you look at all of these statistics on economics, they have 1.4 billion people. We have about 335-340 million people, but we produce one and a half times of nominal gross domestic product as China. So, one American produces one and a half times more goods and services than his four Chinese counterparts.

If you look at per capita income, we’re still ranked sixth in the world. China’s 73. Americans have a lot more purchasing power per capita than Chinese.

So, what Trump—let me put this all together in conclusion. China is ascendant and we are static. Trump comes in and he’s looking at things at home that will restore our global preeminence—fiscal discipline, secure borders, merit-based education, energy development. And he says, “Right now we still have the lead. And we will maintain this lead. But if we continue down the trajectory we’re on, we’re gonna be in big trouble.”

Final note. We have 5,500 deliverable nuclear weapons. China has about 500. But they’re billing six or seven a month. And they want to get up to 1,000 in five years and then keep going.

So, what Trump is doing, again, is he’s saying, “Right now our system is much superior—energy, agriculture, productivity, GDP, per capita income. But the trends in the future are not good. And if we don’t change, our rival will dominate the world. And I’m not gonna let that happen on my watch.”

And I think that explains a lot of his, otherwise, sometimes, inexplicable worries, from Greenland to Panama, to the border, to our universities.

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