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Half of congress in the 80s had literally fought Japan in the Second World War, anti-Japanese hostility was far from purely economic.
China was at best a secondary antagonist in the Cold War (and no longer after 1972). Korea is little remembered, before the memory of almost all living Americans and the present state of North Korea means that most people have no idea of how involved the PLA was. So the last ‘real war’ that was USA vs China was what, the Boxer Rebellion?
It could change if Xi panics and decides to abandon the slow game for Taiwan (which would be surprising) by staging the most audacious possible invasion involving a first strike at American bases, but even in the event of a ground invasion (unlikely) I consider that relatively unlikely.
Some grand global game of competition in which AMERICA NUMBA ONE just doesn’t really exist in the minds of most Americans in the way it does for the Chinese or even for, say, the French. American identity is tied to more amorphous things that don’t really have anything to do with global affairs like the Wild West and country music. A Dane or Swiss will gladly lecture you on why Denmark or Switzerland is the best country on earth (both would be mostly correct). Americans don’t really do that except in a very tongue in cheek Team America World Police way and even that is mostly limited to the middle class.
Italians abroad will talk about Ferrari and Columbus and pasta. Americans abroad don’t really lecture anyone about Google and Microsoft and Chevron. It’s not shame in the German way, but it’s not really pride either; global economic and cultural hegemony just isn’t central to American self-conception.
Americans don't do that because we don't need to. We know we're number one, we know everyone else (especially the French, who hate it, but excepting the Chinese) knows we're number one, and there's no point in arguing about it.
Honestly, I think the "We're number 1" mentality is integral to American's self-conception, but it doesn't necessarily need to be on wealth/power. We were happily number 1 in Liberty for a long while without any corresponding wealth, and that high will sustain us long after our global dominance ends.
I wish I could agree. That is a future that previous generations would have been fine with, but modern Americans continue to value liberty less and less. See the steady attempts to carve away at the first, second, fourth, fifth, sixth, eighth, tenth, and fourteenth Amendments.
Just to mention a few.
The whole "private property cannot be seized" has to be one of the greatest missteps by the founders of the USA. There are lots of times where taking private property makes total sense (like income tax for example), even the US's current civil asset forfeiture regime leaves a lot to be desired.
What sort of actual beneficial policies would be prohibited by the 5A?
Also, it's "cannot be seized except for a public purpose and after paying just compensation". That's a fairly big omission IMO.
Currently there's an incentive for people to act in dodgy ways to make money because unless the fact that they acted illegally can be proven to a criminal standard (high bar) the worst that can happen to them is that the proceeds of their acting in a dodgy way can be taken away from them, which is a probability less than 1 event. Hence there's some non-zero probability they'll get to keep the proceeds of their dodgy behaviour so the expected value not accounting for the time it takes to set up and run the dodgy scheme is positive as the worst that can happen to you unless you're extremely stupid and write down "I'm going to do this illegal thing to make a lot of money" and mail it to the police is that you're put back on Square 1 where you started as if you'd never done the illegal thing in the first place. The incentives are lined up towards making people want to do dodgy things.
With a proper civil asset forfeiture scheme you can have rules like "if we prove to a certain standard that you did something bad then we're not just going to take the money you made through your illegal actions, we'll also come after a portion of the rest of the wealth you own" which can make the expected value of dodgy behaviour negative because now you're not just risking wasting your time and effort when you do something illegal but rather you're risking actual bankruptcy which helps to keep people's incentives to not do illegal but profitable things aligned.
Frankly I kinda doubt you are familiar with civil asset forfeiture in the US of A. Governments in the US seize an insane amount of goods through civil asset forfeiture (I believe some estimates have placed it as more than all the value of goods stolen in the United States). And the government here can seize property without proving the owner did anything illegal. In my humble opinion, this creates its own bad incentives and the proper direction is to make civil asset forfeiture harder, not easier.
You guys are confusing civil asset forfeiture, in which the US files a suit in rem and merely fining someone, in which the US files a suit against the defendant.
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