Xi Jinping Could Save America With One Simple Announcement
When Pope Leo XIV ascended to the loggia of St. Peter's Basilica two weeks ago, he was bathed in the shadow of a long-gone empire. The throne of St. Peter is in Rome because that was the center of the world in the time of Jesus; the Church speaks the language of a civilization that peaked two millennia ago.
Echoes of the ancient Romans still whisper to all of us. Our laws are filled with Roman ideas. Our calendars were designed by Romans, the days and months named after their gods and emperors. Our architecture, measurements, and government are Roman-infused hand-me-downs. If you want an idea to sound more sophisticated, you talk about it in Latin—that's what our doctors, lawyers, and scientists do.
All of which serves as a reminder that a mighty fallen civilization can have a long afterglow. And that should be some comfort to America as we slouch into our age of decline.
Alaric may not be at the gates, but the signs of decay are hard to ignore. Americans have become substantially less educated and pay much less attention to the world. We elect parasitic leaders who feed us facile "member berries" about restoring our former "greatness" while actually wrecking our credit, undermining the scientific research that forms the foundation of our prosperity, dragging down our democratic freedoms, sending the world's investment fleeing pell-mell away from us, and sapping our very brains. We've become anti-social, unhappy, and cantankerous, and like anyone struggling through a depression, too down to do much about it.
So there's a little consolation in the prospect that the afterglow of American economic, intellectual, and military power from the last century could keep our descendants relatively well off for generations to come, the way the eastern Roman empire persisted for 1,000 years after the sputtering decline that culminated in the sack of Rome.
But what if we don't want our grandkids merely to coast on the dynamism of our grandparents, aimless scions of an old fortune?
History suggests that there may be a way to spur us to start creating new fortunes again: face an existential threat.
Of course, that didn't work for the Romans, whose internal rot had progressed too far. But it did work for the ancient Greek city states that preceded them. The threat posed by the Persian empire forced them into rapid growth and evolution. In the case of Athens, this threat led to the invention of democracy, flourishing commerce, and a flowering of literature, philosophy, and science—innovations that passed to the Romans, and thence to us. Facing a deadly enemy can really work; in this case, creating a powerful enough impetus to continue shaping societies 2,500 years later.
Still, while threats can be great motivators, we don't exactly want to get into an actual shooting war. What about a proxy, then? In the same way that you can substitute a vaccine for a living, deadly virus in order to kick your immune system into gear, could we provoke a robust national response by getting challenged to a different kind of world competition?
What if we could get into another space race?
The SpaceX Starship rocket launches from Starbase, Texas, as seen from South Padre Island on May 27, 2025.
The SpaceX Starship rocket launches from Starbase, Texas, as seen from South Padre Island on May 27, 2025.
Sergio FLORES / AFP/Getty Images
From the Soviet Union's 1957 Sputnik launch through America's 1969 moon landing, the space race was an unmitigated boon for the United States. This gladiatorial competition generated literally incalculable economic growth and improvements in our well-being. It gave us basically the entire computing and information technology sector, plus all kinds of products that we buy, sell, and use to this day, such as—and this is just a short list of examples—sneakers, LED lights, home insulation, camera phones, smoke detectors, and artificial limbs. It gave us national purpose. It renewed our pride.
Of course, even if such a competition is just what America needs, we can't launch a race without a competitor. And let's face it—we're unlikely to do it under President Donald Trump's reckless scientific destruction. We need a foil, a real rival to jolt us into action.
That's where Xi Jinping could solve our problems in a stroke. What would happen if he announced that China would be the first nation to land a human on Mars, and would do so in the next ten years?
Would Trump respond? You better believe it. Nothing riles him up like losing to China and looking like a chump, especially since he's already publicly committed to being the first to get to Mars. And once a few tech titans explain to him the mind-boggling fortunes theoretically available in space mining, that the race to Mars is really a race to develop the capabilities to start exploiting asteroid wealth, and that a single asteroid (Psyche) has an estimated value of $100 quintillion—orders of magnitude more than the entire global economy—do you think this highly transactional, avaricious president might start to get interested?
Would American industry respond? See above. Not to mention the lure of the hundreds of billions in federal contracts that would become available once the U.S. government got into it.
Would the American public respond? Very likely. Two-thirds of Americans, including 80 percent of Republicans, already support maintaining America's lead over China in artificial intelligence. Imagine how they would feel about losing the biggest technical competition in history.
And would it work? Would America get a new infusion of innovation, focus, and economic vitality? Considering the research required for next-generation telecommunications and computing equipment, materials science, botany, and electricity generation and storage that would be supercharged by a second space race, it's hard to see how it wouldn't pay off in very visible ways, and very quickly.
And by the way, it's also hard to see how China wouldn't gain just as much, especially given its growing economic challenges and desire to, according to the Congressional Research Service, "boost growth and productivity by investing in innovation, education, digital infrastructure, advanced manufacturing, and emerging technologies." Sound like a prescription for a space race?
In the brilliant streaming series For All Mankind, Hollywood made a compelling case that the entire world would have been better off if the Soviets had beaten the U.S. to the moon in 1969 and given us the motivation to keep the space rivalry going.
We can never know. But we can be pretty confident that in 2025, that kind of kick is exactly what we need, what China needs, and what the world needs. Your move, President Xi.
Matt Robison is a writer, podcast host, and former congressional staffer.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
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