The cracks are showing. The US empire is in decay. What will the world look like once it’s no longer able to bully everyone? What do we have to look forward to both inside and outside the imperial core?

The US must have been thinking about China at least since 1990. Now they fumble the hardest when they need to be the wittiest? I don’t buy it. The US are prepairing to contain China. At best they have AI and robotics first and retake global productions. But I expect a war. It’s difficult to say what the winner will do with a most likely radioactive world. I would expect that there is no need for disinformation, especially if robots do the policing. So those people who survive will have a physical constrained, but intellectually rich life. However, without AI and destroyed knowledge from bombing the civilization centers, technology will fall back to the 1960s or even 1860s, but with internet.

They are fumbling now because of their hubris, overextension, and the contradictions of the system. In the '90s, they believed that exposing China to capitalism would naturally and inevitably cause the fall of the Communist system, so they threw the doors wide open. 2001 is when China joined to the WTO and also when…9/11 happened, crippling and distracting the Western empire for over two decades. When Hillary neocon Clinton became Secretary of State in 2016, she unveiled with much fanfare the “pivot to Asia”. The Obama administration spent the next 8 years trying to replicate the EU and NATO in Southeast Asia. (TPP and the Quad). Trump-1 came into office and immediately withdrew the US from the TPP. He did some blustering and flailing around with tariffs, which people seemed to think constituted containment of China at the time. Biden came into office and he and the other Western leaders sabotaged and escalated their way into the Ukraine war. (Read up on the Istanbul process before you get annoying in the replies, Libs). You can read The New Atlas for excellent analysis about how this is a substrategy for Chinese containment, which is an argument that I agree with. However, it had the effect of once again paralyzing, weakening, and distracting the Western imperial alliance. Now we are in Trump-2. He committed perhaps the worst foreign policy blunder in the history of the US empire when he went on the attack against India with tariffs to try and separate them from Russia. This blew black in the most spectacular fashion by driving them closer to Russia and kicking off a rapprochement with China that is still bearing diplomatic fruit to this day. Therefore, we can say that Trump spectacularly destroyed the overall strategic plan for the Asia Pacific region by single-handedly preventing TPP and the Quad ever coming into force. At the present day, the empire is struggling to extricate itself from Ukraine without having a Kabul / Saigon moment. The Western armories are bare, having sent everything they can spare and very much they could not spare in a desperate attempt to turn the tide of the proxy conflict. The F35 fighter jet program is STILL NOT OPERATIONAL ACCORDING TO THE PROGRAM’S OWN DEFINITION. By contrast, at the 80-year commemoration parade, the Chinese unveiled no fewer than a dozen new weapon systems, many a generation or more ahead of their US counterparts. They are failing everywhere and cannot admit it. A humiliating defeat in Ukraine is inevitable, now the only question is whether the Russians will end up with Odessa. American warships are powerless against Chinese hypersonic cruise missiles. Japan tried to ramp up the rhetoric on Taiwan only to get slapped down by the US. We are witnessing the death throws of a caged wounded animal with suicidally inflated ego. Unfortunately, this caged animal also has nuclear weapons, so it’s a very dangerous time for all of us.

We are also seeing peak China. Their demographic problems will be a severe drag going forward. It’ll be a multi-power world, not a Chinese hegemony.

First off, the Chinese don’t seek global hegemony like the European powers, no matter what the projection and propaganda says. (This is far too big of a topic for short comment but the Chinese have never done Roman-style imperialism in all of their history. Also, according to my research, China hasn’t made a new territorial claim in over 70 years, since the KMT era) Second off, I did some comparisons on this website. I honestly wasn’t sure what I was going to see but China’s pyramid is better than all the “developed” countries and it really blows their East Asian neighbors out of the water. Therefore, I don’t buy the argument that China is doomed by its demographics, unless we are saying that all the peer comparison nations are even more doomed. I happen to believe that the Chinese are right and we are entering a new Chinese century, with the Middle Kingdom at the center of a prosperous and powerful Asia. They are on the cusp of completely defeating “containment”, and have built an industrial ecosystem unlike anything the world has ever seen.