The signs of American collapse are everywhere. The Russians are out-producing not just the US, but the West in missiles, tanks and drones. The Chinese have a larger navy than the US and can build three ships in the time it takes the US to build one, and yes, their domestic arms industry is larger and more productive than America’s. They and the Russians are also ahead technologically in missiles, and arguably drones. (America has more expensive larger ones, but Ukraine shows what works is swarms of smaller ones.)
What’s really damning is the Western inability to ramp up production for the Ukrainian war. The Russians vastly increased production, the West hasn’t and can’t. De-industrialization is real.
I’ve gone over this in a number of articles, but the bottom line is that China is the largest trade partner of most of the world, is providing the loans for much of the world (at cheaper interest rates); is doing far more development work and so on. It is aligned with Russia. Major conferences are now lead by China: both the Iran/Saudi deal and the major Palestinian peace effort—and neither were discussed in English. They’re equal in most techs and catching up in those they are behind in like semiconductors, satellites and commercial aircraft.
But it’s the naval bit I keep coming back to. China will have a much, much larger navy than America: it already does and the American navy is shrinking while the Chinese one is growing.
The rise of China has been concealed by inertia and by the overhang of dollar being the unit of trade, but everyone is going to see and acknowledge this soon, especially as trade is increasingly settled in local currencies and alternatives to the Western banking system grow.
It just doesn’t make sense to go to the US any more if want most goods, military gear or even to move up the industrial chain. (See “How to use China to make your left wing government successful.”)
It’s all over but the shooting. In Thucydides Trap, Graham Allison’s book and article, he notes that usually the rise of a new power leads to war, sometimes multiple wars.
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We’re about a thousand dollars out from the first reward, the first four chapters of my book “Creation of Reality”, which will be published right after we make the goal.
On a personal level, this feels weird, in that all the things I’ve been warning about for decades are now happening. De-dollarization, industrial hollowness leading to military incapacity, and the Global South abandoning Europe and American en-masse.
Slowly, then quickly.
I mean, it’s not weird, these things were obvious. But 30 years is a long time in a human life. To see it all happening now, just as I (and others) predicted feels really weird.
Same as climate change: for a long time we were warning, and not it’s here in ways only fools can deny. Exactly as predicted. I always said it would happen sooner and worse than the IPCC claimed.
The Chinese are going to get in the neck, of course. They’ll get lead-trace and then be gutted by climate change and ecological collapse like everyone else. Their time in the sun will be brief.
It’s Chinese bad luck to make it to the top of the industrial heap at the moment when the entire industrial stack is about to become impossible to maintain. They played by the industrialization rules, and they’re going to die by them.
Still, unless the North China breadbasket gets wiped out an early inundation, the Chinese will probably hold on longer than most. Big if, though. My money is that a big inundation will hit far sooner than most models say.