The Foreign Affairs piece on China's economic model is one of those rare analyses that actually cuts through the usual Western cope. Beijing didn't rise by magic or superior central planning. It rose because it got plugged straight into Western markets, technology transfers, and capital flows that the liberal order kept wide open. Now the same system is being weaponized against its creators, and the bill is coming due faster than Brussels wants to admit.

The core trap is exactly as laid out: China's growth model runs on suppressed domestic consumption and massive overinvestment in production capacity. Ordinary Chinese households capture too small a share of the pie, so factories churn out far more than the internal market can absorb. The surplus gets dumped abroad, subsidized by the state, whether we're talking EVs, solar panels, machinery, or steel. This isn't free trade. It's mercantilism with Chinese characteristics, and it is already triggering the predictable backlash: tariffs, anti-dumping probes, friend-shoring, and quiet efforts to rebuild supply chains that don't run through Guangzhou.

Europe is sleepwalking into the worst version of this trap. Cheap Chinese imports feel like a win for consumers in the short term, but they are hollowing out industrial competence, skilled jobs, and the ability to produce critical goods at home. Lose your own manufacturing base and you don't just become dependent on Beijing for widgets. You become dependent for the strategic means to defend yourself. That is not an economic problem anymore. It is a security problem with Chinese characteristics, especially when you remember that Beijing, Moscow, Tehran, and Pyongyang have been tightening their axis while we pretend separate bilateral deals will contain it.

The irony is brutal. The very openness that let China industrialize at warp speed is now being eroded by China's own behavior. The more aggressively Beijing floods markets and displaces competitors, the faster those competitors raise barriers and duplicate production elsewhere. Beijing is burning the bridge it used to cross the river, all while still needing Western consumers to keep its factories running. That is not master strategy. That is a structural contradiction dressed up in nationalist slogans and Xi Jinping photo-ops surrounded by red flags and ceremonial guards.

For Ukraine this matters directly. We are building our own defense industry at wartime speed precisely because we cannot afford strategic dependence on any single supplier, least of all actors aligned with the Moscow-Tehran-Pyongyang supply chain that keeps feeding our enemy. Europe should be doing the same instead of debating how many more subsidized Chinese EVs it can absorb before its own industrial base collapses. The choice is no longer abstract: subsidize your own productive capacity and protect critical sectors, or become the world's largest captive market for a rival civilization that views your openness as a weakness to exploit.

The post-appeasement era is here. Moscow taught us the hard way what happens when you let imperial revisionists rewrite the rules while you chase short-term margins. China is simply playing the same game at global scale. Time to stop pretending the rules still favor the open society that created the pie everyone wants to carve up. Either the West rebuilds its industrial sinews and strategic autonomy, or it learns the expensive way that gratitude for past growth does not buy immunity from future predation.

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