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Real shit has already started. I find the notion that this is the local peak and we'll have some respite unreasonably optimistic. There is, in principle, no reason for the war to not escalate into seven-figure casualties range, global economic issues not to deepen into a new Great Depression (related, h/t @sciuru), the war over Taiwan and subsequent Chinese and Russian collapses not to begin in, like, Q2 2023, then we get first serious AI incidents and global censorship/compute regulation regime, nuclear exchange by 2024, famines by 2025, supervirus plague (many variants currently in development) and what have you – up to and including NGO/Messiah/Basilisk coming. Garbage time is running out, like Nick Land warned us but we didn't listen. «Nothing ever happens» is sooo 2015.
Now as for your analysis, China has its own set of insurmountable structural problems, self-inflicted but at the same time exploited by the US: food dependence (yes, they won't starve outright the moment Malacca is blockaded, but no, they are actually not food-secure, they need to import that livestock feed, fertilizers and everything else and will not be able to pivot to rationing in emergency), chip/tech dependence that'll very painfully restrict their long-term ability to attack Taiwan with its accelerating militarization, collapsing real estate bubble, terrible ecology and soil health, brain drain, spiking dependency ratio plus failing soon at the automation cope (because, again, no chips), being boxed in by American allies, and plain degenerating governance that has unironically fallen in some respects to the lows of Mao era (and none of those problems will be solved by the planned assault on Taiwan). Iran suffers from similar woes (oh look) – and so does every other anti-America country.
There really is no trade-off between helping Ukraine crush Russian imperial ambitions and choking China (or defending Taiwan, or encouraging a revolution in Tehran), and expanding influence in the EU; those efforts load, and load only modestly, completely different non-interchangeable sectors of American economy and state capacity, and accordingly there is no advantage to China from Russia getting into this mess in the form of American weakening. Other modes are also dubious. Resource colony? No, there's no significant advantage here aside from the ability to demand discounts; Russia is already near-maximally dependent on China, and is unable to deliver as much as they need and more than is already delivered. We still don't have a reliable transport route, the «silk road» goes through Kazakhstan which is rapidly losing respect for Russia and drifting out of its sphere of influence; pipelines are fragile, as we've learned recently; construction of new connections has been criminally slow etc. In non-essential trade like fish and other foodstuff, China has been sabotaging trade on the pretext of COVID. Of course Russia has primed the world for blanket sanctions against aggressors. Plus a lot of previous gen Chinese military technology is derived from Russian/Soviet models, so now the free world is getting free training in destroying it. In general, getting your ally diminished is not any sort of 4D strategy (though I would't put it past them to grossly miscalculate). The list of demerits goes on.
But none of this matters in the grand scheme of things. What matters is that Russia and China are in terminal decline because they cannot retain talented people, and the point of no return has been passed some substantial time ago. I am always appalled by economic/political analysis which ignores this and focuses on some nonsense like GDP growth or even trade surplus. Who cares? If you don't have talent you cannot compete; worse yet, you have to allow talentless people to climb hierarchies of competence and power (if only to maintain short-term order and production pace), and they reinforce the culture of underhanded competition that closes off the hierarchy to remaining talent, which accelerates its flight or just rots on the bottom of the society; in the end you have a police state with serfs, and that's less than nothing in our era. Both countries are like men with fatal illness (or gradual blood loss); at times they grasp for panaceas, at times they feel mad rage, and at times they feel better and get complacent, but it already does not matter because the bottom line has been written long ago.
An appropriate Galkovsky quote from 1989:
True to form, he wrote «Jews» and «Anti-Semitism» instead of «Americans» etc. in the original. But this replacement probably only makes things better, and does not change the point.
There are many small corrupt countries in the world. Italy, like 100% of them, does not have IC industry or ASML machines and cannot plausibly seek to acquire them for any reason that's not a transparent «resell to China/Russia». Likewise for individual components.
Respectfully, I still believe you do not realize what modern IC manufacturing entails. Maybe it's your economic mindset where sound investment can always get transmogrified into goods, one way or another, more or less efficiently, because every input is commodified to some extent. One can't just buy a single machine: you need a city-scale stack to begin getting into it, a hefty slice of the global industry. China could do something with just a stepper, could at least try to reverse engineer it (try again, although they've failed before); but not Italy and not Morocco or whatever. Americans believe (incorrectly, IMO) that Chinese IC progress is an issue of existential risk, and will (correctly) parse this deal as sanction evasion, and shoot it down with extreme prejudice, just like they have shot down direct sales.
I have looked into it and the Chinese were making some progress at developing domestic alternatives to the harder bits; e.g. I loved this idea of using a particle accelerator as the radiation source, in place of ASML-style dark magic with a powerful laser beam punching tin droplets (it had been deemed impractical in the past, but so had propulsion landing on Earth...) But as you can see, this is still on the purely academic level; and the Chinese wouldn't be wracking their heads about sci-fi designs if they could make do with a little more corruption. By 2035, perhaps...
The US is not motivated to give them time until 2035.
I am extremely curious as to why nobody bothers or at least has shown the capability to do it. Some madlad from 4chan has apparently burned a github zeroday for NovelAI anime-tiddies-producing model. Frustratingly, only entertainment slop and data of citizens and governments of Bad Countries is liberated by courageous grassroots hackers (e.g. Gosuslugi or this stuff); locked things stay locked when big boys are invested in keeping them under lock and key. Admittedly, current gen AI is either opensource or experimental and mostly useless (far as I can tell), but there's little hope this will change in a year or so, when general models with industrial applications drop.
At least now we can produce dark elf tiddies on demand, while we wait for the winter to come.
As for Galkovsky, maybe we can discuss the nuances of his beliefs about Jews some other time.
I think a wrinkle in your hypothesis, something Dase was trying to say above, is that even this theft only happens because the US et. al. don't/didn't give enough of a shit. Five years ago, nobody would have batted an eye over claims of China stealing IP. In a near-future where China is positioned as the next Soviet Union, however, that might change, to the point where anti-espionage efforts could become downright McCarthy-esque.
I for one think that a serious pivot towards New Cold War politics could very likely starve out social issues of political oxygen, starting at the higher echelons of US politics, and then cascading back down the levels until things like immigration, woke politics, etc. lose their salience.
I think that a serious pivot New Cold War will give big boost to the social issues. As Russia and China position themselves against wokeness and LGBTQ, Western bloc will turn them to the max to show the fascist Russians and Chinese. Anyone standing against wokeness would be seen as Communists and Communist sympathizers were seen in the 1950's.
"You are not gay or transgender yet? Are you a real patriot? Are you Russian agent or Chinese spy?"
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