If President Joe Biden’s trip to Asia—marked as it was by his comments on the defense of Taiwan, announcements on a proposed new regional trade pact, and meetings with leaders who exhibit similar levels of concern about a rising China—has shown the persistence of American global power, it has also revealed something of equal importance: Beijing’s failure to translate economic might into political dominance, even in its own backyard.

Biden today concluded a summit of the leaders of the Quad—a security partnership including Australia, India, Japan, and the United States—who issued a joint statement chockablock with references to promoting democracy, a rules-based global order, and peaceful resolution of disputes. That came a day after Biden announced the formation of the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework, a partnership with 13 countries as diverse as South Korea, Vietnam, and New Zealand. Notably absent from all of this was China. Biden’s trip exhibited Washington’s continued ability to rally other nations behind its standard, and in initiatives overtly targeted against the region’s supposedly rising superpower.

The script wasn’t meant to read this way. As China grew in economic importance, its smaller neighbors would, the thinking went, inevitably and inexorably be drawn into its orbit, while U.S. power would correspondingly fade, ushered along by its own political divisions and percolating isolationism. Events of the past decade seemed to prove the assumption: As China acted more assertively in the region, Washington’s efforts to cling to primacy appeared to falter. President Barack Obama’s “pivot” to Asia concluded with a thud when Donald Trump pulled Washington out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership economic pact. (The other 11 members inked the deal anyway.) And Trump, beyond his bellicose and inchoate trade war against China, largely ignored the region, save for a couple of fancy dinners with Kim Jong Un.

Meanwhile, Beijing appeared to fill the void. China is at the center of another Asia-wide trade pact, called the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, which came into effect in January, while its infrastructure-building Belt and Road Initiative has funded railways, ports, and power plants from Pakistan to Laos. Beijing has also muscled aside its rivals in the South China Sea, steadily turning its contested claim to nearly the entire waterway into a fait accompli, and consolidated its hold over disputed territory also claimed by India. As the U.S. withdrew from Afghanistan last year, Beijing, having fostered sound relations with the Taliban, seemed poised to become the country’s new patron. Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, China also tried to win early plaudits through “vaccine diplomacy,” eagerly shipping its homemade jobs to neighbors. China was winning.

But as China seeks to expand its power, it seems to become more isolated. Biden’s new economic framework has attracted countries across ideological lines (from Communist Vietnam to democratic Australia) and some nations that try to carefully balance the two powers, such as Singapore. Beijing hasn’t weakened American bonds to its chief allies in the region—Japan, South Korea, and Australia. If anything, Washington appears to be drawing more countries to its side of the table, such as India.

All of this exposes the abject failure of Chinese foreign policy. Despite their constant pledges of “peaceful development,” China’s leaders have scared many of the country’s neighbors. New Delhi, historically no fan of Washington, has felt threatened by Chinese hostility over disputed borders. Beijing’s intensifying intimidation of Taiwan—with Chinese jets buzzing dangerously close to the island—has alarmed the region. Politicians in Canberra and Seoul have certainly not forgotten the economic coercion Beijing employed against them to compel changes in their policy. China’s bullying in the South China Sea has irked those with competing maritime claims. The Philippines, a longtime U.S. friend, has been trying in recent years to strengthen ties to China but, frustrated by Chinese shipping crowding into waters claimed by Manila as an exclusive economic zone, a Philippines foreign minister last year tweeted a very undiplomatic “GET THE FUCK OUT!”

Of course, to maintain its influence, Washington will have to follow through on its new initiatives. In that, Biden is already constrained by politics back home. The new economic framework is not a trade pact aimed at reducing tariffs, a sop to grumbling in the U.S. that trade with Asia costs American jobs. The deal’s focus on environmental and labor standards alone, critics contend, will water down its value and appeal. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce found it “disappointing.”

But that misses the geopolitical point. The goal of the framework is to ensure that Washington is “writing the rules” on crucial economic issues such as digital business and climate change, a way to solidify American influence against Beijing’s efforts to refashion the norms of the global system in its own favor. The agreement will also focus on securing supply chains—bad news for China, which has been alienating foreign business with erratic “zero-COVID” shutdowns, support for Moscow in its invasion of Ukraine, and human-rights abuses. The framework just so happens to bring together most of China’s chief Asian competitors when it comes to being a base for production(India, Indonesia, and Vietnam) with the countries that invest in and operate those bases (Japan, South Korea, and the U.S.). That can potentially further encourage international companies to relocate their supply chains out of China. And then there is the sheer symbolic value of Biden rocking into town and attracting leaders from across what is supposed to be China’s home turf into a new economic initiative.

For China, the message is clear: Get a new foreign policy. Beijing seems to believe that its economic weight will eventually compel the rest of the region to flock to its flag. But there is little sign of that happening. South Korea exports far more to China than the U.S., but that didn’t stop its new President Yoon Suk Yeol from hosting Biden on his Asia tour before any summit with Xi Jinping. Nor is China even offering all that much on the economic front these days. Beijing’s longtime policy direction, “reform and opening up,” offered the hope of greater cooperation, and thus profits for foreign investors and other countries. Xi has replaced that with the more insular and nationalistic “self-sufficiency,” a campaign to replace imports with Chinese alternatives.

Beijing will have to woo the world with more than money. Chinese leaders are attempting to promote their own values and norms—of the authoritarian persuasion—on the global stage. That’s won China some support in forums such as the United Nations. But its immediate neighbors seem far more concerned about the threat created by Beijing’s expanding power and aggressive use of it than they are about American finickiness over human rights.

There is little indication, however, that Xi and his foreign-policy team have any intention of softening their stance on key regional issues. Biden’s success may, if anything, prod them to lash out further. A commentary in Xinhua, China’s official news agency, was quick to deride Biden’s economic framework as a “big scam” based on “sinister intentions” meant to “undermine regional stability,” before complaining about China being left out.

This shift—of China’s neighbors opting for tighter ties with America—may progress more and more if Beijing doesn’t change course. Its neighbors would much rather be on good terms with Beijing than bad, and most governments in the region will attempt to balance their relations with both great powers. At the same time, the message to Xi should be loud and clear: As in Europe, where Vladimir Putin’s aggression is uniting the rest of the region against him, so too in Asia is an aggressive China entrenching, not weakening, American power.

Some propositions are so obvious that no one takes the time to defend them. A few such propositions are that human life is good, that people can and often do provide more benefits to the world than they take away, and that we should design society to support people in leading lives that are good for themselves and others.

These ideas came under attack, sometimes subtly and sometimes overtly, by environmentalists in the 20th century who were worried about overpopulation. Although major organizations have abandoned population management as an explicit policy goal, the underlying fear that too many people are running up on the limits of too few resources and Well shouldn’t someone do something about that? has never fully been rooted out of American political thought. It is alive and well among NIMBYs. Of all the objections people raise to new housing and infrastructure, perhaps the most risible is that their community is already too crowded. Some even suggest that municipalities should limit housing supply explicitly to combat population growth.

At a recent Palo Alto city-council meeting, one resident argued against pro-housing policies, saying, “Does it make sense to be planning for more people? … More people on the planet spells more consequential implications for climate change, loss of biodiversity, stress, war, famine, etc. At a time when humans are in major ecological overshoot, doesn’t it make more sense to plan for a reduced population, plan for reducing population, not increasing it?”

[Jerusalem Demsas: Community input is bad, actually]

Invariably, the problem is always other people. The man behind the organization that sued UC Berkeley to reduce its enrollment, Phil Bokovoy, told The New Yorker that he opposed building more housing in Berkeley in part because “I don’t think we’ll be able to tackle climate change unless we tackle population growth and rising living standards over a huge part of the world.”

Lest you worry that this is a California-specific brain disease, let me reassure you that this antihuman thinking has permeated discourses all over the nation—and the world.

But population growth is not the problem that so many people seem to think it is, not least because of the global decline in fertility; arguably, declining population growth is the real population-related concern of the century. And even if it were a concern, the policies that NIMBYs support not only fail to create a climate-conscious built environment but actually make fighting climate change more difficult.  

Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 book, The Population Bomb, catalyzed overpopulation concerns among the American public. Ehrlich, a Stanford biologist, also served as the first president of the group Zero Population Growth (ZPG). As the historian Keith Woodhouse recounts in his book, The Ecocentrists, “The group’s goal was an end to population growth; the means, troublingly, were not yet specified. Within three years [of its founding in 1970], ZPG had thirty-two thousand members.”

The Population Bomb opens not with a depiction of overconsumption by high-income Westerners but with the author’s memory of a taxi ride with his wife and daughter “one stinking hot night in Delhi.” Ehrlich describes the “crowded slum area” and proceeds to detail, in prose dripping with disgust, the view from his cab window of people just living their lives: “People eating, people washing, people sleeping. People visiting, arguing, and screaming. People thrusting their hands through the taxi window, begging.” This goes on and culminates in the almost-too-on-the-nose admission: “All three of us were, frankly, frightened.”

As Ehrlich’s family gawked at Delhiites, the U.S. was emitting 18.66 tons of carbon per capita to India’s .33, meaning that the average American was emitting 56 times more than the average Indian. If Ehrlich was genuinely concerned about overconsumption, why is the opening image of his book that of poor, brown people and not the suburban car-centric sprawl that characterizes his home country?

The book’s main argument is that an increasing population will run out of resources and if steps aren’t taken to reduce the population, then scarcity will make the world poor. In particular, Ehrlich was concerned about the world running out of food, and he foretold that mass starvation events would mark the waning decades of the 20th century.

Ehrlich’s dire predictions have been wrong time and again. Hunger and undernourishment have declined since The Population Bomb was released. To emphasize how alarmist his predictions were, a brief aside: In 1969, the author predicted that “by the year 2000 the United Kingdom will simply be a small group of impoverished islands, inhabited by some 70 million hungry people, of little or no concern to the other 5-7 billion inhabitants of a sick world,” later adding, “I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.”

As careful students of history know well, England still exists.

To say that overpopulation skeptics were simply wrong is too generous. Twentieth-century critics on the left saw the movement for what it was: In the 1970s, New Left activists and Students for a Democratic Society both criticized ZPG and overpopulation mania. The latter group, Woodhouse writes, “accused ZPG of reckless simplification, reasoning that by treating all people as a single flat category, population activists ignored not only human difference but also human value.” New Left activists specifically called out the underlying racism of ZPG’s project: “ZPG says that there are too many people, especially non-white people, in the world … that these people are terrifying and violent, and that their population growth must be stopped—by ‘coercion’ if necessary.”

[Read: The next century’s big demographic mystery]

One legacy of this intellectual tradition is the modern xenophobic anti-immigration movement. The Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), founded by John Tanton, was instrumental in advocating for strict immigration controls. (To get a flavor for the callousness of this group, check their website, which tells visitors “How to Report Illegal Aliens.”)

Tanton was president of ZPG from 1975 to 1977 and, as the historian Sebastian Normandin and the philosopher Sean A. Valles wrote in a 2015 paper, FAIR “began as a 1979 offshoot of ZPGs Immigration Committee, following ZPG approval of the proposal in 1978.” While the blend of “1960s ecology and neo-eugenics” seems “idiosyncratic or even fringe today … their influence remains.” The authors conclude that “today’s immigration restrictionist network was built and led by—and in some cases is still led by—a network of conservationists and population control activists.”

Tanton’s anti-immigration views were not just compatible with his concerns about overpopulation, they were born out of them: As Jason Riley wrote in 2019 for The Wall Street Journal, “Opposition to immigration, legal or illegal, was simply a means to that end.”

What should be obvious, but apparently is not, is that opposing immigration actually reduces the U.S.’s ability to cultivate and take advantage of brilliant people who could develop the technological advances to save the planet. (Thirty-seven percent of American Nobel Prize winners in chemistry, medicine, and physics from 2000 to 2020 have been immigrants.)

A growing population means more people generating more ideas, but also more interactions among different people coming from different perspectives. These two effects can sound trivial but actually do lead to more and better ideas. The economist Hisakazu Kato argued in 2016 that “a large population will generate many ideas that could bring about rapid technological progress.”

Overpopulation concern-mongers not only underestimate the ability of people to help solve the problems of climate change; they also fail to accept that neither resources nor human needs are fixed. The idea that resources will “run out” implies that human ingenuity will remain stagnant. But it doesn’t. Norman E. Borlaug won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 (just two years after The Population Bomb was published) for helping Mexico become “self-sufficient in grain” by developing “a robust strain of wheat—dwarf wheat—that was adapted to Mexican conditions.” He then worked in India and Pakistan to introduce dwarf wheat to the countries’ agricultural landscape and became known as the father of the “Green Revolution.”

As Gregg Easterbrook noted some years ago in The Atlantic, Ehrlich had written in 1968 that it was a “fantasy” that India would “ever” feed itself. But “by 1974 India was self-sufficient in the production of all cereals.” Borlaug himself was concerned about population growth, but instead of pursuing an anti-humanist agenda, he turned to technological innovation to save countless lives.

The economist Julian Simon, a longtime critic of the overpopulation activists, bet Ehrlich that the price of five metals would fall from 1980 to 1990. As The New York Times noted in Simon’s obituary, Ehrlich believed that “rising demand for raw materials by an exploding global populace would pare supplies of nonrenewable resources, driving up prices.” Simon won the bet.

If the overpopulation alarmists of the 1970s had really wanted, above all, to protect the environment, they should have promoted the development of dense, energy-efficient communities.

The evidence is clear, and has been for some time, that density is good for the environment. As UC Berkeley researchers argued in a 2014 paper, “population-dense cities contribute less greenhouse-gas emissions per person than other areas of the country,” and “the average carbon footprint of households living in the center of large, population-dense urban cities is about 50 percent below average, while households in distant suburbs are up to twice the average.”

But the people worried about other people don’t have a pro-density history; quite the opposite.

As the urban planner Greg Morrow detailed in his 2013 dissertation, overpopulation activists fought for the very legal frameworks that would keep cities low-density and worsen suburban sprawl. Morrow noted that in the early 1970s, the UCLA professor Fred Abraham, then-president of ZPG of Los Angeles, argued that “we need fewer people here—a quality of life, not a quantity of life. We must request a moratorium on growth and recognize that growth should be stopped.” Morrow added that “the Sierra Club (L. Douglas DeNike) agreed and suggested ‘limiting residential housing is one approach to lower birth rates’ and recommended ‘a freeze on zoning to limit new residential construction.’”

Half a century later, NIMBYs who cite overpopulation concerns when opposing new housing say they are afraid of overcrowding on their streets and in their parking lots. Some continue to invoke the global South as a dark warning for the future. In an interview with Slate’s Henry Grabar, Bokovoy, the Berkeley anti-growth activist, warned that his city could end up like “Bangkok, Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur” if more students are allowed to attend the local UC campus. In Trussville, Alabama, the president of a local homeowners’ association played all the hits as he stated his opposition to the inclusion of multifamily housing in a new development in his area: “You’re bringing that many more people with that many more cars,” he complained. “We envision this side of town as spacious properties, higher home values … not having crowded streets.”

We have, of course, discovered an elusive technology to allow more people to live on less land: It’s called an apartment building. And if people would like fewer neighbors competing for parking spaces, then they should rest assured that buses, trains, protected bike lanes, and maintained sidewalks are effective, cutting-edge inventions available to all.

Perhaps you’re pessimistic about technology’s ability to help solve the big environmental problems we’re facing. You may not trust that technology could ever be sufficient to reduce carbon emissions, or that our political systems could make that technology widespread.

If that is the case, think for a second about what it would take to slash the population down by several billion. (Ehrlich himself recently put the optimal number at 1.5 to 2 billion.) The only way to do this is to kill people, limit the aid you give to sick people, and/or stop new people from being born.

Some believe that the third approach could be adequate, and achieved simply by providing people with contraceptives. But survey data show that women are actually having fewer children than they would like, so providing more family-planning services is not going to cut the population by four-fifths.

[Derek Thompson: Why U.S. population growth is collapsing]

NIMBYs and overpopulation skeptics share a sense that the world is too full, that their communities are for the people who already live there, and that new people—immigrants from abroad or the next state over—are simply burdens. And in doing so, they create the world they imagine: unacceptable rates of homelessness, a country lagging far behind its peers in building mass transit, and declining trust.

“I think once you get past this idea that NIMBYs are simply curmudgeons or busybodies then you start to realize why this attitude toward growth today – which in the context of the present housing crises and cost of living crises seems so ridiculous – actually has very firmly embedded ideological roots within…liberalism and thus why it’s so difficult to root out among people who consider themselves liberals,” the historian Jacob Anbinder explained to me.

Between a politics of scarcity that demands inhumane policy interventions and a politics of abundance, it’s not much of a choice, but it’s one that population skeptics have to make. Enough with the innuendo: If overpopulation is the hill you want to die on, then you’ve got to defend the implications.

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