Recently, China’s embassy in Washington posted an AI-generated video mocking President Donald Trump’s proposed Shield of the Americas summit. The point was to paint the United States as paranoid, overbearing and desperate to cling to influence in Latin America.
The video was cheap, Chinese Communist Party propaganda. But it was also revealing.
Beijing no longer feels the need to hide its contempt. It is comfortable jeering at the United States in public, and specifically its influence in the Western Hemisphere, a region Washington once treated as its uncontested strategic backyard. That shift should concern Americans far more than the video itself.
Today, under President Donald Trump and Secretary Marco Rubio’s leadership, an economically stable and secure Western Hemisphere is now a key national security priority of the United States. Most notably, that includes confronting and limiting the expansion of Chinese influence in the region.
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China has spent years extending its reach across Latin America through ports, power projects, mining, telecom equipment and digital infrastructure. That influence is not just commercial but political. It creates dependency, builds leverage and gives Beijing a foothold in America’s backyard. It also creates significant national security threats to the American people.
Now add artificial intelligence to the picture.
China’s use of AI propaganda is more than a gimmick. It’s a reminder that Beijing sees this all-important technology not only as a business opportunity but as an instrument of state power.
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Those are the real stakes. Not who posts the cleverest video on social media, but who builds the hardware, writes the standards, controls the networks and supplies the systems that everyone else will depend on in an AI age. Washington has started to grasp this, though not always gracefully. One sign is the way policymakers have begun looking at technology dealmaking through a national security lens.
Take Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s acquisition of Juniper Networks that the Department of Justice cleared and the U.S. intelligence community blessed. It received regulatory scrutiny, as mergers should, but few antitrust concerns existed. However, the broader question was whether the United States could afford to hobble one of its own networking players while China continues backing its national champions with the full weight of the state.
That does not mean every merger should get a free pass because China exists. It does mean Washington has to stop pretending this is a normal market contest between firms operating on a level playing field. It isn’t. American companies answer to shareholders and regulators. Chinese firms, in the end, answer to the state, their intelligence apparatus and its strategic ambitions.
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That matters in telecommunications. It matters in AI. And it matters in every layer of the digital economy, which is growing inseparable from geopolitical power.
The same logic applies to semiconductors, cloud capacity, export controls and secure communications networks. These are often discussed as technical policy issues. They are not. They are the plumbing of power. Countries that control them shape the choices of countries that do not.
Beijing understands this well. That’s why it subsidizes key industries, protects its own firms, pushes its standards abroad, and uses state media and diplomatic channels to attack American initiatives before they gain traction.
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The mockery aimed at President Trump’s Shield of the Americas follows that pattern. It is not a serious argument. It is narrative warfare: make U.S. efforts look absurd, make Chinese expansion look normal and encourage the notion that America is in retreat.
That is how influence erodes. Not all at once, but piece by piece. The real threat facing the American people is a global political and cultural elite that believes Beijing is the future and Washington is too divided, slow or unserious to compete.
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The answer is not to imitate China’s propaganda machine. America does not need better AI taunts from its embassies. It needs strategic seriousness.
That means investing in domestic technological strength, building trusted alternatives with allies, and making sure regulators understand that market structure and national power are no longer separate questions. It also means recognizing that America cannot defend its position in the world while treating the tech sector as if it’s politically neutral.
China’s joke only works because Beijing believes the United States still does not fully understand the nature of the contest. It’s time the U.S. proved them wrong.
Because the countries that build the systems of the future will not just dominate markets. They will shape the political, military and economic order of the world for decades to come.
