A Wake-Up Call for the West
We Misread China’s Rise and The Cost Is Growing
For decades, Western leaders assumed that deeper economic integration with China would produce stability, openness, and shared prosperity. Instead, those policies helped accelerate China’s wealth accumulation and strategic leverage.
In Sleeping With the Enemy: What the White House Still Misses on China, independent political observer Edouard Prisse examines the political, economic, and media assumptions that shaped Western policy toward China—and the consequences of those assumptions today.
This book argues that prevailing free-trade orthodoxies and elite consensus have obscured the long-term risks of economic dependence. By revisiting the decisions, predictions, and narratives that shaped public understanding, Prisse challenges readers to reconsider what the West believed about globalization—and what those beliefs may have cost.
Meet Edouard Prisse
An Independent Observer Global Thinker
Edouard Prisse is an independent European political observer with a multidisciplinary background. He holds an MA in Dutch law and an MBA from INSEAD Business School, developed in partnership with Harvard University. His work draws on expertise in economics, law, mathematics, and physics.
Having studied the ideas of John Maynard Keynes and worked as both a business consultant and legal adviser, Prisse focuses on the power structures that shape international trade and policy. His analysis explores the forces that influence global markets, including the long-term implications of trade agreements involving China.
The Debate the West Avoided
Sleeping With the Enemy: What the White House STill Misses on China
Edouard Prisse offers a bracing critique of the political and media assumptions that have underwritten Western approaches to China in the era of deep economic integration. Arguing that prevailing free-trade orthodoxies have accelerated China’s wealth accumulation and strategic leverage, Prisse contends that the West has subsidized a rival’s rise while misreading the long-term consequences for its own economic and political autonomy. Moving across policy choices, press narratives, and influential commentary, the book catalogs the errors, illusions, and confident but unfounded predictions that shaped public understanding, and asks how elite consensus formed and persisted even as warning signs mounted.
Prisse also examines claims of organized, covert influence and misinformation efforts designed to blur the risks posed by China’s expanding power, raising pointed questions about information environments, institutional incentives, and the production of “common sense” in foreign economic policy. Serious in its stakes yet deliberately accessible in style, the book invites scholars and general readers alike to reconsider what the West thought it knew about globalization, and what those assumptions may have cost.
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What Readers Are Saying
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Don’t Ignore the Warning Signs
Rethink the Assumptions
The debate about China’s rise is no longer theoretical. Decisions made over the past several decades continue to shape the economic and political landscape today.
In Sleeping With the Enemy, Edouard Prisse challenges readers to reconsider the ideas that guided Western engagement with China and to reflect on what those assumptions mean for the future.
Why This Book Matters Now
A Critical Perspective on the Future
China’s expanding economic influence has become one of the defining geopolitical developments of the twenty-first century. Understanding how Western policies and narratives contributed to that transformation is essential for evaluating the choices that lie ahead.
This book offers a clear and accessible analysis of the ideas, incentives, and institutions that shaped those policies—and why revisiting them matters now.
