A few years ago a viral video by ray dalio explained how the USA empire is coming to an end and how china is about to takeover. He had the video translated in many languages. He was a big believer in china's upcoming reign, funny that he'd take the opportunity to exit all his positions in china... fleeing china with impossible speed. Right before china implemented capital flight controls.

funny thing happened as well. eu and north america basically cut ties with china. a very large amount of debt was taken on to make china irrelevant. ironically, the debt is the justification for usa's demise.

But now china is also having a major demographics collapse from their 1 child policy and they've fallen into a wealth of nations trap.

China will escape from middle income development, but china was plundered and its going to take awhile for them to recover.

these puff pieces always seem to overlook that China's economy is based on as much BS and debt as that of the US

the West is fed a diet of skylines and HSR but whistles passed the unemployment, the debt, the state intervention...

there's nowhere to run...if you live on planet Earth, you live on planet Debt

As Charlie Munger might note, leadership in the U.S. has long been incentivized to focus on very short-term financial results.

There do seem to be parallels to America's rise to the dominant global power. In particular, they have so much of the global manufacturing infrastructure, like the US did after WW2 destroyed much of Europe's, and I don't see a way for the US to compete with China's cheap labor and agglomeration economies. And they are generating more and more of the research in high-value sectors, kind of like the US scooping up all of the physicists during the war.

There are other roadblocks that the US didn't have to be sure, their very top-heavy population pyramid and they have less arable land (which probably doesn't matter so much except in wartime or as a national security concern). It still feel like the only things that might derail the current trends are internal social unrest or a major war.

The consensus is that Trump blinked and folded, XI knows he won, and the outcome of the trade war will not be the big and beautiful deal Trump speaks of. China has managed to avoid most of the U.S. trade tariffs by pivoting to factories across Asia.

The current administration doesn't have a playbook, or at least one they can stick to. Their entire strategy is created on the fly and typically without any thought. America's adversaries are celebrating; they can finally sit back and watch the President and the MAGA party cede power and influence while weakening America and Democracy in general.

-Independent.

I wonder what everyone else thinks about this claim made by the article:

> The enduring strength of a state-dominated Chinese system that can pivot, change policy and redirect resources at will in service of long-term national strength is now undeniable, regardless of whether free-market advocates like it.

The writer claims that a command economy gives them an advantage over a free market economy. Top-down production targets and price controls didn't really work for the Soviet Union, but maybe the more immediately-available and granular data available nowadays makes it feasible? The US already has a way to encourage production through various methods (e.g. subsidies). It seems to me the real difference is not the economic system, but that the Chinese government is less beholden to existing interests (that aren't the CCP). The US seems to often be unable or unwilling to accept the temporary pain of a big change, even if it would be better off in the long-term.

There is a third very likely possibility that neither and no one will dominate. Dominating anything is getting harder not easier.

Everyone is going to struggle cause Complexity is rising like at no time in the past, and our limitations to juggle it all, get more and more apparent by the day.

Covid/GFC gave everyone great hints that systems are seriously struggling to cope.

If the U.S. becomes irrelevant in the future, which seems increasingly likely, it will be due to the gross incompetence of American leadership and their ignorance of international markets and business. It's astonishing that a nation that built the modern world and dominated global markets is now retreating from that legacy, led by someone who appears to misunderstand it entirely and instead pines for the failed policies of the 19th century. This is a recipe for disaster and long-term irrelevance.

Importantly, China's rise is not a result of its command economy, and America's decline is not because it embraces open markets. The issue lies in leadership, vision, and the ability to adapt, not in the fundamental structure of a free-market system.