The US would greatly benefit from substantially closer relations with China.
With Trump visiting China this week, this question seems especially relevant, and it’s the reason that I brought it up. The US would reap major benefits from an alliance with China, and the reason the alliance does not exist in the first place - ideological differences - is actually one of the most compelling reasons for closer relations.
Mutually beneficial trades between two countries are defined by comparative advantage - each country produces a good more efficiently than the other, so they are able to find mutually beneficial terms and trade. Both countries help each other through their comparative advantages.
Just as two countries reach the most productive trade because each produces something the other can’t produce as efficiently, two countries form the most productive diplomatic relationships when each brings capabilities the other lacks. China is authoritarian and demands cohesion, giving it state capacity that the US cannot replicate. This makes it by far the best country in the world at rapidly building out infrastructure because it can marshal resources extremely efficiently due to a lack of democratic friction - but it also can struggle to innovate for the very same reason. Meanwhile, the US is democratic and highly capitalist, making it the greatest innovator in the world - but infrastructure buildout is slower, and bureaucracy often prevents things from being done.
Ideological conformity across alliances, meanwhile, results in a far less symbiotic dynamic. The US-Europe relationship is the clearest example. Both are democratic, capitalist, and bureaucratic, meaning that Europe duplicates American strengths while also duplicating American weaknesses. Europe doesn’t fill gaps in US capability; it just follows the US lead with less money and less willpower. NATO has effectively become a subsidy program where the US provides security and Europe free-rides on it while lecturing Washington about norms and values. The US-Israel relationship follows a similar pattern: enormous American investment for negligible strategic return, justified almost entirely by ideological alignment rather than material complementarity.
Beyond just this, there is also the Taiwan question: Taiwan, as the world’s leading computer chip manufacturer, carries increasing geopolitical and economic weight. The US spends billions trying to reshore chip fabrication it may never replicate at TSMC’s level, while China also pours resources into building parallel supply chains from scratch. Both sides are wasting enormous amounts of money on redundant capacity, driven entirely by tense US-China relations. Closer US-China relations resolve this entirely. Taiwan stops being a flashpoint, TSMC operates as a shared asset, and both countries benefit.
None of this is to say that a US-China alliance would be easy. The ideological difference that makes the relationship complementary also makes it harder to navigate. However, low-maintenance is not the same thing as high-value. The US-Europe alliance is easy because we are ideologically similar, but it doesn’t provide much value to its beneficiaries, especially the US. A US-China partnership would require more careful management, but the potential upside would dwarf anything the current alliance structure provides.