It was a moment that barely registered. Remember when a soft-spoken former president offered a thought so precise, so quietly devastating, that most didn’t realize it had already landed.

Former president Jimmy Carter wasn’t trying to make headlines. He was trying to hold up a mirror. His words, addressed to Trump, weren’t really about Trump. They were about us; all of us.

 

His message cut through decades of noise. His words resonated with a poignant truth. While China has spent its time building the future, America has been busy clinging to its past. China constructed cities, railways, schools, and technology hubs. We constructed debt, war zones, and a graveyard of promises.

China has only one military base beyond its borders. It’s in Djibouti; This base was established in 2017 and is used primarily to support anti-piracy operations, peacekeeping, and humanitarian missions in Africa and the Middle East.

 

We have over 750 in over eighty countries. And yet we still call them the threat. This is American propaganda and indoctrination at its finest.

This wasn’t criticism. It was diagnosis. A map of misaligned priorities and squandered potential.

 

 

They laid railways across deserts and mountains. We dropped bombs on bridges in foreign lands. They poured billions into AI, medicine, and education. We poured billions into wars labeled “liberation,” but branded by history as oil grabs and regime change. In the name of freedom, we manufactured chaos. In the name of progress, they manufactured steel, code, and connectivity.

 

And they didn’t stop within their own borders. The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), often referred to as China’s “New Silk Road,” is a global infrastructure campaign connecting Asia with Africa and Europe through roads, bridges, railways, and ports. It’s a strategy of construction over conquest—investing in economic corridors rather than military outposts.

 

While we spent $300 billion trying to bend the world to our will, China spent it stitching the world to their markets. They’re not conquering land; they’re paving it.

 

Meanwhile, the United States has doubled down on economic nationalism. In 2025, President Donald Trump escalated tariffs on Chinese imports, including electric vehicles, solar cells, steel, and aluminum, with some rates reaching as high as 145%. These measures, intended to protect domestic industries, have led to increased costs for American consumers and businesses.

 

The average effective tariff rate in the U.S. rose to 27%, the highest since 1909. This protectionist approach has strained international relationships and diminished the U.S.’s role in global trade leadership.

 

 

We don’t have high-speed trains. Our roads crumble with every thaw and freeze. Our bridges are relics of a bygone era. Our healthcare system bleeds people dry. Our schools are underfunded, overcrowded, and falling behind. But what we do have; what we always have, is the most advanced arsenal on Earth. Weapons pointed in every direction but inward. Never at our own decay. Never at the rot in the beams holding up our society.

 

 

We’ve spent over $300 billion trying to shape the world in our image, forgetting that our image has grown cracked and corroded. If we had used even a fraction of that money to rebuild ourselves; our cities, our schools, our hospitals; we might still believe in American exceptionalism without a trace of irony.

Our infrastructure should be the veins and arteries of a thriving body politic. Instead, we’ve let them clot. Bridges collapse, pipes poison, schools fail. Yet we keep investing in domination over development. Power over people. Presence over purpose.

 

That’s what made Carter’s words so explosive in their calm: the war we’re losing isn’t to China. It’s to our own addiction to dominance. Our refusal to invest in what we can’t control. Our failure to understand that greatness isn’t secured by tanks and tariffs, but by classrooms, clinics, and bullet trains.