The “allied scale” strategy proposed by Rush Doshi and Kurt Campbell, which could have the power to unite the U.S. and its allies in an economic bloc to counter China, is likely doomed by U.S. domestic politics. As allies might demand trade concessions that cost American jobs in politically sensitive areas, the resulting backlash would unravel the bloc. With this, U.S. leaders should consider more cooperative approaches toward China instead.
Rush Doshi, keynote speaker at the 2026 SCCEI China Conference, laid out an eight-point blueprint for transforming U.S. alliances into an engine of shared economic and industrial capacity.
With the second Trump administration’s initial attempt to counter China unilaterally through more aggressive tariffs and export controls ending with a TACO due to the Chinese counteractions, some members of the U.S. foreign policy establishment have begun to propose alternative U.S. approaches for competing with China. Two veterans of the Biden administration foreign policy team, Rush Doshi and Kurt Campbell, proposed an alternative strategy of allied scale. Observing that China’s economy is, in key relevant aspects, already larger than the U.S., and China benefitting from economics of scale that the U.S. cannot match on its own, Doshi and Campbell proposed the creation of an integrated global economic and trade bloc to counter China similar to the Cold War Western Bloc. This bloc, potentially composed of U.S. treaty allies in Europe and Asia as well as some countries that sometimes cooperate with the U.S. such as India, would have the combined economies, manufacturing capabilities and populations well outstripping China. That would enable the U.S., together with these countries, to contain China’s rise through shared economic and other restrictions thus leading the U.S. to continue dominating the world for the foreseeable future.
The allied scale strategy has proven quite popular within the U.S. foreign policy establishment, with growing numbers of foreign policy elites currently outside the Trump Administration making similar points or declaring their support for it. Its combination of hawkishness towards China with deep multilateral cooperation with key U.S. allies, a combination that illustrates both an obvious differentiation from Trump’s behavior towards many of these countries and an intuitive explanation for his key failures vis-à-vis China, is likely to lead the allied scale strategy to be quite appealing to many Democratic party centrists and even some tough-on-China progressives. It may eventually figure quite prominently in the Democratic party’s 2028 foreign policy debates and perhaps the platform of the eventual democratic candidate in those elections. Indeed, one likely 2028 Democratic contestant, Rahm Emmanuel, has already come out with very similar proposals.
The key question is whether the allied scale strategy is actually feasible for a future non-Trump U.S. president to enact. On the surface that may seem to be the case. While many U.S. allies, both at the public and elite levels, have been deeply alienated by the second Trump administration’s behavior towards them, many of them also have growing concerns with China’s economic policy or their relations with China are in a deep crisis. The political elites of many U.S. treaty allies also have deep ties with U.S. elites and fond memories of successful pre-Trump cooperation. Given these factors one cannot exclude the possibility of some U.S. allies seriously considering such a bloc if proposed by a future non-Trump U.S. president.
The key problem however with the feasibility of the allied scale strategy is domestic. To enact the allied scale strategy in practice would require a future U.S. president to impose significant economic costs on some key segments of the U.S. public, potentially making it politically unsustainable in the medium term even if it somehow gets off the ground. China would likely perceive this bloc coordination as highly hostile economic activity given the identity of the proposers and state promoter, the fact that it would be its declared target, and the potential economic (and perhaps later security) consequences from it. China would not therefore be expected to sit idly by, and could try to penalize would-be joiners in order to discourage this bloc’s formation. Once formed China would likely be wary of economically interacting with the bloc members in a way that could inadvertently harm itself and would try to deter additional joiners through penalizing existing bloc members.
That said, would-be joiners of such a U.S.-led anti-China bloc should be aware of potential Chinese retaliation, likely including the loss of much of their Chinese export markets. Despite complaints of growing imbalances in bilateral trade, these export markets remain quite large with, for example, the EU, exporting about 200 billion Euros of various goods to China in 2025. Likewise, the plausible possibility of another Trump-like president winning a future U.S. election and breaking any related agreements will remain. With this, would-be joiners to such a U.S.-led bloc may demand significant up-front economic concessions from the U.S. to make sure that they are at least certain to gain overall in the short-term from joining. Indeed, Doshi and Campbell themselves expect such U.S. concessions as being needed to create such a bloc.
Such economic concessions to bloc joiners could harm some Americans, especially ones located in politically sensitive areas. One key component of any economic concessions to joiners would be the full removal of Trump's tariffs on their exports to the U.S.. However, given skyrocketing U.S. debt (now reaching 40 trillion dollars) and budget deficits, tariff removal will come at the loss of highly needed U.S. government revenue, revenue that will instead likely need to come either from highly unpopular domestic tax increases or maintaining equally unpopular cuts to domestic programs. Relatedly, although the initial imposition of these tariffs has probably led to some U.S. job losses, after four years of being shielded by Trump-imposed 10-25% tariffs, much of the U.S. economy will have adjusted to them. Some U.S. manufacturers' profit margins, and U.S. workers jobs, will become by 2029 highly dependent on this tariff wall. Accordingly, the removal of Trump’s tariffs for U.S. allies for bloc building purposes would likely lead to visible short-term job losses within the U.S.
Any further U.S. trade concessions to bloc joiners would also significantly increase international competition for non-tariff dependent U.S. manufacturing. Given that the Biden administration’s domestic reindustrialization push intentionally focused on swing states, as well as on areas hurt by previous trade shocks, such increased international competition could cause increased job losses, and highly visible factory closures, exactly in the most politically sensitive areas and among segments of the U.S. public most aware of this potential issue. Indeed, the very origins of the decline of what is known nowadays as the American “rust belt” are in part from the expanded market access the U.S. gave Japan in the 1950s and 1960s that was designed to prevent Japan from increasing its trade with then Maoist China, access leading to increased Japanese exports and competition with U.S. manufacturing. Likewise, reduced trade barriers and increased U.S. market access in the post-Cold War led to significant losses of U.S. manufacturing jobs to other countries (and likely would-be joiners) aside from China.
Due to these likely domestic impacts, the construction of such an anti-China bloc would be political poison for a future Democratic president that attempts to create it. Domestic resistance in the U.S. to making such trade concessions even to U.S. allies, much of it focused in politically sensitive areas, could undermine these plans. Alternatively, there’s a high chance it will force the U.S. government to offer economic concessions too small to be worth the risk for would-be joiners leading them to reject it. Even if such resistance is temporarily overcome, and such concessions are made, it could generate an “allied scale shock” in the short and medium-term that will generate a significant political backlash against said president in key states just in time for their (or their successors) reelection efforts. Consequently, their Republican successor, rising to power with the aid of such a backlash, will then be strongly incentivized to scrap the economic concessions (and this bloc) regardless. Trying to start with a few small gradual steps, as Campbell and Doshi propose in one of their pieces on this topic, would not prevent this issue. While the small steps may indeed be feasible without triggering domestic opposition, for such a coordinated effort to work, the bigger, costlier, measures will eventually need to be brought to the table. Once that happens, the domestic opposition will be triggered leaving it, at best, with a few small foundation stones but without most of the planned structure.
Given these domestic constraints, the allied scale strategy for competing with China is likely doomed to fail. American politicians preferring a politically viable alternative to Trump’s foreign policies towards China should seriously consider instead giving other, more cooperative, strategies with China a chance- as the UK, one of the prime examples of Doshi and Campbell, gave to a rising U.S. at the turn of the 20th century.
