Like much non-fiction published nowadays, Blaming China should have been a long magazine article, not a book. But boil away the alternate futurism and potted history, what remains is a provocative essay on the state of America. Benjamin Shobert argues that the 2016 election resulted from economic uncertainties among the middle class, which hadn’t benefitted from globalization and looks backward unreflectingly on a historical anomaly: America’s economic dominance post-World War II on a planet where no one else was left standing. “Trump is only the beginning,” Shobert writes. “Deeper, uglier, and more irreversible impulses are at work,” he adds. Trade wars? Shobert envisions a real war with China if diplomacy is replaced by belligerent rhetoric.
