The U.S. president is coercing its allies to coordinate the policies related to critical minerals to weaken China’s influence in the global market and create a more “safe and reliable” supply chain for the United States.

“The old is dying and the new cannot be born,” the Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci wrote in the early twentieth century. We seem to be living in a similar interregnum today, likewise marked by “a great variety of morbid symptoms,” including, not least, the breakdown of global supply chains and the return of inflation. The only way forward is to support the development of new markets, industries, and institutions. But who will finance this effort?

Industrial and supply chains have become the main theater of competition between China and the United States. America’s technology war will be deliberate, intense and long-term. For this reason, China must be strategically prepared for a protracted fight.

It’s not in China’s best interests to be trapped in a bilateral tit-for-tat with the United States. We can do better by reaching out constructively to other developed countries. We will win the contest if we can do this.

A ban on the export of advanced chip manufacturing equipment to China by the Netherlands and Japan, imposes sweeping restrictions. The ban aims to contain China’s semiconductor industry and further widen America’s tech lead. But it’s not going to work.

America’s efforts to reduce reliance on Chinese supply chains may limit China’s economic options in the short term. But this is not sustainable. In the long term, the rise of the Chinese economy cannot be stopped.

Export controls are central in economic competition between the U.S. and China. A new U.S.-led multilateral export control regime could further entrench efforts to exclude China from accessing Western technology.

Washington wants to build a “small chip world” for itself that is decoupled from global supply chains. This is pure fantasy. The act can neither help the U.S. achieve a secure supply chain nor rejuvenate its domestic chip manufacturing sector. And it won’t slow China down either.

China’s economy has weather the pandemic as well as any other nation’s has in the last few years, but the future seems uncertain as the world order is reshuffled as borders and regulations return to pre-outbreak norms.

China’s fundamentals are resilient and robust, and the trend points to normalcy and growth. Trade is up, inflation has been controlled, and while the U.S. Fed’s rate hike pushed many currencies down, the Chinese yuan has remained stable.