Ma Siwei (马四维)
The New York Times (《纽约时报》) recently ran an article advancing a “superpower suicide” theory. What is “superpower suicide”? Unlike human suicide, it is not a single act—hanging, jumping—after which all is over. It is a succession of policy choices that each appears reasonable in isolation but, taken together, systematically weakens a nation’s capacity.
A modern great power’s hard-edged competitiveness rests on five things: fiscal creditworthiness (the ability to finance at low cost on a sustainable basis); productivity and human capital (the compounding of science and education); predictable rules (the credibility of law and institutions); alliances and reputation (external leverage and cost-sharing); and social coordination (the ability to make hard but correct decisions in a crisis). When those in power treat tariffs as a universal key, science as a target, the budget as a hostage, and allies as bargaining chips, these five foundations loosen one by one—that is “superpower suicide.” As the Times put it, this is a shocking act of superpower suicide: never before has a global leading power voluntarily dismantled the very system that undergirded its leadership, especially when that system continued to deliver enormous benefits.
In October 2025, the statistics showed that U.S. federal debt had officially passed 38 trillion dollars—no abstraction, but a turning point at which interest payments crowd out all public investment. According to the Department of the Treasury (财政部) and multiple independent bodies, this milestone arrived both faster and more violently than expected; interest expenses over the next decade are widely projected to far exceed those of the previous one. Meanwhile, the federal government is in its third week of shutdown, courts and key security agencies have begun to furlough staff or halt operations, and some of the most vulnerable families have seen food assistance interrupted. These are the direct consequences of “coordination failure”: political factions wield appropriations as a cudgel, with the result that borrowing costs rise, public services erode, and investment is “eaten” by interest. Debt is not original sin, but gambling with shutdowns and the brink of default accelerates the depreciation of national power.
From the vantage point of productivity and human capital, an economist at The New York Times (《纽约时报》) put it bluntly: tariffs are not merely a tax on trade; they tear apart the “adhesive” that stabilizes international relationships. When you threaten new levies at will and constantly reset rules, firms downshift long-term investment and global collaboration networks; this is an invisible tax on productivity. Worse, “rectification” and cuts aimed at the research system choke off the oxygen to the knowledge and talent machine built over decades. In February, a Nature (《自然》) editorial argued that second-term policies were taking a “sledgehammer” to science and international mechanisms; Times reporters’ coverage of a “gold standard” executive order drew warnings from thousands of scientists that it would destroy research independence and credibility. This is not a war of ideologies; it is self-harm at the source of growth. Since World War II, the partnership between federal research support and research universities has been the engine of America’s comprehensive power; strangling science is strangling the future.
The credibility of predictable rules and institutions is being unraveled by a president’s ever-shifting “supreme instructions,” decreed one day and revoked the next. A “rules-based order” is no moral slogan; it is the “infrastructure” that minimizes transaction costs. If unilateral, variable policies like tariffs become normalized, it is tantamount to hanging a red light that can flash at any moment over every supply chain. Once rules devolve into “whoever has the bigger fist decides,” others begin preparing “spare tires”—diversifying currencies, settlement systems, standards, and supply chains to reduce risk—and the bill comes back to U.S. consumers and firms. Recent modeling by scholars at the Brookings Institution (布鲁金斯学会) and the Peterson Institute for International Economics (彼得森国际经济研究所) points to the same conclusion: broad-based tariffs raise domestic prices, depress real wages, and invite retaliatory duties; net fiscal gains are far smaller than the headline revenue.
As for alliances and reputation, they are already threadbare. History is unambiguous: great powers provide “public goods” because partners trust their commitments and are willing to share costs. Today’s picture is a two-way tug. On one side, the NATO summit raised defense-spending targets and reaffirmed collective defense; on the other, presidential hedging on Article 5 and mercurial deal-making compel allies to keep “patching” their security calculations. Military operations in the Middle East and against Iran push the United States back to expensive hard-power front lines, while withdrawals from UNESCO (联合国教科文组织) and the WHO (世卫组织) concede ground on the battlefield of soft power and rule-shaping. Over time, this hot-and-cold posture converts deterrence into uncertainty and discounts reputation into a risk premium.
The social coordination on which America depends has already been stalled for weeks by senseless hardball over a shutdown. Social coordination is the ability to reach a minimal consensus on hard problems. A shutdown is a stress test: the issue is not that the money is gone, but that the mechanisms of voting and compromise have been hijacked. Using appropriations bills and the debt ceiling as political weapons not only disrupts frontline public services; it shortens and dampens the expectations of firms and households—an invisible source of recession. Fiscal discipline is not synonymous with austerity; real discipline means restarting regular budget procedures with common sense and setting a credible medium-term path for spending and revenues. Otherwise, compound interest will devour education, research, and infrastructure; in time, state capacity shrinks to a “triad” of emergency management, social insurance, and defense, with everything else reduced to slogans.
Placing the foregoing into the New York Times (《纽约时报》) framework of “superpower suicide,” the problem is not the rightness or wrongness of any single policy but the directional error of the combination punch: tariffs inject inflation and uncertainty into the real economy (with U.S. firms and consumers footing the bill); the research system is squeezed by politicization and “budget starvation”; international institutions are treated as hostile externalities; the domestic budget is treated as a bargaining chip; diplomacy treats allies as variables and adversaries as a stage. Each move can find its tactical brief, but in first-principles terms they jointly erode America’s three comparative advantages: low funding costs, the spillovers of knowledge and innovation, and international leadership grounded in rules and credibility.
Although the Times’ “superpower suicide” thesis is not sensationalism, reducing every structural difficulty to a single administration risks ignoring deep inertia—population aging, sticky medical costs, educational stratification, the fragmentation of local finance, political polarization, and perverse incentives in primary elections. These will not vanish under any White House. The keys to self-rescue are not only in foreign policy and trade but in domestic institutional “rehab”: rebuilding trust between the professional bureaucracy and the scientific community; repairing the incentive structure of budget politics; restoring policy predictability so that firms and households dare to make long-term decisions. In other words, do not substitute “performative toughness” for “infrastructure-style patience.”
The core of the issue is not toughness per se, but whether policies are predictable and sustainable. Tariffs can be a tactical lever, but they must serve a strategic path that is clear, verifiable, and reversible—for example, anchoring timetables, transparency, and exemptions in multilateral or mini-lateral agreements, rather than playing a child’s “mystery serial” in which new duties and exemptions appear at whim. Industrial policy can support critical links, but it must be matched with research investment, talent flows, and competition policy, to avoid turning “protection” into an expensive and inefficient internal loop. As for public finance, the real core is to restart regular appropriations, craft a bipartisan medium-term fiscal framework (moving both the spending and revenue levers), bend the debt path back into a controllable range, and keep interest from eating the future. Otherwise, 38 trillion is just a mile marker, not an endpoint.
In sum, a nation’s lifeline is its state capacity. State capacity is the product—not the sum—of credit, knowledge, rules, alliances, and coordination. Treat these five variables as multipliers rather than addends, and you see why “suicide” can look so sudden: if any multiplier shrinks, the product shrinks; if any approaches zero, the result approaches zero. That is the logic of national suicide. The United States has not reached that point today, but direction determines destination. If we wish to avert “superpower suicide,” we must turn each multiplier back toward strengthening national power: return debt and budgeting to the tracks of common sense; let science and universities remain engines of growth; return trade to predictable rules; make alliances instruments of cost-sharing rather than targets of grievance and extortion; and teach Congress and the White House to make sufficiently good compromises in an imperfect world. Only then can the country avoid stepping onto the path of self-destruction.