In his hugely influential 1992 bestseller, The End of History and the Last Man, the political scientist Francis Fukuyama famously asserted that “history” as the German philosophers Hegel and Marx understood it—that is, the evolution of human societies—had come to its conclusion. Liberal democracy and free-market capitalism, although they might never be adopted in every country, represented the end point of millennia of ideological development and transformation. Fukuyama called the United States a “post-historical” country, positing that it had long ago finished its political evolution and was merely waiting for China and other countries to draw back from the historical dead-end of authoritarianism.

The subsequent spread of this philosophy among the United States’ intellectual, political, and business elite was remarkable. In particular, a conviction that the Internet and free trade would attract benighted countries toward liberal democratic capitalism became commonplace. “By joining the [World Trade Organization],” U.S. President Bill Clinton asserted in March 2000, “China is not simply agreeing to import more of our products. It is agreeing to import one of democracy’s most cherished values: economic freedom. The more China liberalizes its economy, the more fully it will liberate the potential of its people.”

Instead, since China joined the WTO in 2001, it has seen its economy grow 1,400 percent under a one-party state-capitalist system. It has, since 2010, become the world’s largest exporter while systematically violating the WTO’s foundational principles. The Chinese government steals intellectual property through cyber-operations and human-intelligence recruitment. It forces foreign companies operating in China to share their technologies with local firms. It also spends ten times what the United States does to subsidize domestic firms. Since 2012, when Xi Jinping became the country’s paramount leader, China’s domestic politics have grown significantly less liberal, and state authorities have exploited greater connectivity and advanced technology in an ever-expanding effort to surveil and police its citizens.

If the evolution of China’s political and economic systems was merely disproof of Fukuyama’s thinking, that would be striking enough. But China’s movement away from liberalism and laissez-faire economics is only half the story. The other, more striking half is that the United States has become much more like China. As the U.S. and Chinese economies have deepened their integration, a phenomenon the historian Niall Ferguson has dubbed “Chimerica,” American politics have also moved in a distinctly illiberal direction. And China’s rise has played a major part. Compelling studies have linked the so-called China shock, in which an exodus of manufacturing jobs devastated many U.S. communities, to an abrupt rise in U.S voter polarization and demands for robust political action. In the 2016 presidential election, both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump singled out China’s rise as a principal cause of U.S. economic malaise.

Fukuyama did not foresee such a development. But the U.S. turn toward illiberalism would hardly have surprised another twentieth-century thinker: the jurist and political historian Carl Schmitt. Schmitt came to prominence in the failing German Weimar Republic of the 1920s and then to notoriety after supporting and assisting the rising Nazi dictatorship. It is his version of history that is currently playing out in the United States. And it is by his principles that the Trump administration is turning the country in an ever more authoritarian direction.

Since Trump’s first term, the White House has increasingly relied on untested or dubious assertions of presidential authority—such as executive orders based on “emergency” or “national security” threat designations—in order to shield U.S. industries and jobs from rapidly growing Chinese competition and to protect the United States against Chinese government efforts to steal its data and intellectual property, infiltrate its critical networks, make it dependent on Chinese entities, and undermine its defense capabilities. Under Trump’s second administration, such practices have expanded well beyond what had previously been justified by the economic and security threats posed by China. Such authority is now used indiscriminately to impose sweeping global tariffs, sanctions, export bans, and investment restrictions; issue........

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