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Ah. Very well, carry on winning then. This is what the Chinese call spiritual victory. Seriously though…
Literally what does it matter? Why do you even mention this? "Kill some dudes" is not a meaningful military objective.
that would hit so hard if war proponents didn't move through different war objectives.
Some did get fulfilled. I'm personally partial to this specific Truth:
This, as far as I can tell, has come to pass in its entirety. Iran has chosen new great and acceptable leaders (Mojtaba Khamenei and his team); Trump even wants to meet with him. The US and allies will aid Iran in reconstruction, granting Iran (and Oman) authority over the Strait, making it economically bigger, better, and stronger than ever before. Iranian military-industrial complex is fine (estimates for missiles and drones suggest they're not halfway done, whereas you are out of interceptors) and will be upgraded, given that there are no terms prohibiting that (which there were in Witkoff&Kushner's draft). The nuclear question didn't move much from their "surprising proposal" you responded to with assassination of Khamenei's family, and they had a decades-old fatwa on nukes to begin with. Americans acknowledging Iranian regime's legitimacy and committing to "not deploy any additional forces in the region" is as close to UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER for a superpower as one could imagine.
Yes, I imagine so.
I fear that I am going to be repeating, until the end of time, that just because you read something in a newspaper doesn’t mean it’s true.
What I mean is, knowledge in the fog of war is unfalsifiable. The real information about how many interceptors America has is classified. So is the information about how many of them we used. It would take a lot of scrutiny to prove that what’s floating around on the internet has any credibility. A lot more scrutiny that what I’ve seen on social media.
I remember, for example, when Russia was going to run out of bullets weeks into its invasion of Ukraine. Or when Hillary was so far ahead of Trump that she didn’t even have to think about him anymore.
So when we start factoring out these unfalsifiable rumors, it seems pretty obvious to me who won. America can threaten Iran at will and they have no meaningful way to retaliate. Their only recourse is to attack shipping on the Strait, which can strain the global economy but is not nearly as dramatic of a lever as had once been imagined. America is in such a different weight class from Iran that we have to start inventing hopes that maybe America’s super weapons ran out of ammunition and the Iranian rockets will definitely blow something up next time, any day now.
This gap will grow as America is the only power capable of building into Space and the AI frontier.
That's not how wars work, though. You lost in Korea, in Vietnam, in Afghanistan, and in every occasion you enjoyed vast military superiority by the end. "We can kill them, they can't kill us" is simplistic and part of the problem, which is a bronze age savage's theory of victory coupled with an actually cost-sensitive political and economic system.
As for interceptors, I find the alleged exhaustion rates plausible despite "classified" noise from your India-tier corrupt officials, for the following reasons: corrupt people are generally untrustworthy; we know 21st century America is generally subpar at physical production; we know that some arms sales were frozen and THAADs were harvested from Korea; we know that interception rates have declined over the war, esp. in Israel; we know the bases are wrecked.
I won't even argue the facts again (China is about 5 years behind in space and 8 months in AI). On priors, why do you believe this is even plausible? You must know that you have fewer people than China, fewer highly intelligent people, lesser talent allocation to STEM, less industrial capacity, less energy, less cutthroat markets, less… pretty much everything, except some legacy IP. Is this just blind patriotism?
I think they’re a little further behind than that but let’s take this a step farther.
Consider all of the technologies that constitute global power, or that will. Nuclear, Satellites, rockets, rare-earth metals processing, silicon chip design, quantum computing, drones, artificial vision, robotics, energy dominance, etc. etc.
America is dominant or competitive in all fields. America was first to rockets that can catch themselves in the air. America was first to AI. America leads in biotechnology and robots. America leads in space.
China is still behind. They have developed with incredible speed but they have to maintain that pace to keep up. They have, to give them their due, genuine leads in a few fields. They are winning on rare earths and drones, they have the best solar and batteries. They now manufacture the most ships. But they are not producing bombers as advanced as anything made in America. They don’t yet have the rockets to colonize space. They can’t actually replace America’s role at the center of global security.
Not to mention that, fundamentally, China’s rise has been parasitic on America’s wealth. America protects the sea lanes that Chinese vessels rely on. China’s industrial rise doesn’t happen without America handing over the blueprint. Their genuine scientific advancements are still plagued by a culture of cheating and inefficiency that is worse than anything in the Replication Crisis.
China can grow out of this if they have the time. Do they have the time?
Maybe within five years they can replicate SpaceX rockets. But Elon is already pushing the frontiers again with data centers in space and AI. So in five years China might still be three years behind. Maybe in eight years they’re two years behind. Etc.
But China’s continued success is not assured. The fundamentals actually look quite mixed. China’s population is starting to age and even shrink. Capital continues to flee. Tariffs and trade deals are going to erode China’s marginal efficiencies in bulk manufacturing.
I think the likeliest outcome is a kind of China 1970s, or maybe like Japan in the 90s. Population turnover and changing economic fundamentals produce a decade of stagnation. Stagnation produces social malaise (if not unrest). And then China’s progress keeping apace with America stalls. This is already happening — American growth has started outpacing China these last few years. It doesn’t take much for China to stall.
I think this is much likelier than a dramatic shooting war or global conflict. I think it’s unlikely that America faces these same challenges. America is passing through a period of reform and is likely to come out the other side stronger.
Nobody else is even a competitor. Russia is too small to compete on all fronts. Europe is not going to begin building next-generation tech. India is not going to catch up. South America and Japan will be American satrapies. Europe too for that matter.
I keep coming back to space because it’s so stark: Because of SpaceX America is going to build dominance where no one can follow. If you run a mining operation in the Congo or an oil tanker at sea, you plug your operation into Starlink and everything runs through American computers. It’s better than the petrodollar. America wins again.
Yeah China has more people but so what? When has sheer numbers made the biggest difference? Besides, America has access to the smartest talent from Japan, Europe, Latin America, etc. Elon Musk was etc. etc. Everybody wants to live in America for its cities, its beaches, its money, etc. etc. etc.
We’re still having this debate in English. My Swedish friends all speak English. The Germans all care about Trump. Nobody is learning Chinese. Nobody cares about Xi Jinping. America makes the world, China copies America, not the other way around.
At worst it's been symbiotic. Your whole economy is parasitic, which you market as "center of global security", "reserve currency" and what not. Do you honestly believe you could afford these investments without decades of China exporting deflation via cheap manufacturing? You'd run into a couple more financial crises without their "parasitism". Well, they even helped you exit the real one in 2008, at some cost.
Stealth bombers and heavy lift rocket vehicles as a means to provide "the center of global security" is a funny phrasing. We're in 2026, the DoD is renamed to the "Department of War", could we drop the euphemisms? After Greenland, too. You also make systems like THAAD, but we've seen how it goes. It's maybe the center of global security for one specific Middle Eastern nation. Just having a heavily militarized industry is not much of a flex.
Are we still doing this Zeihanite nonsense? You demonstrably can't unilaterally unblock the "sea lanes" when they're threatened by Houthis and Iranians. Moreover you're now the primary cause of those sea lanes getting blocked in the first place. It's a pure protection racket. And as you say, they make vastly more ships than you do. They could escort their own ships if need be, which Trump admitted.
Well, it certainly helped, especially while they were a nation of uneducated peasants with like $900 per capita GDP (1999). As time goes, this argument loses its luster.
No, their R&D is quite efficient now. I routinely see smaller teams on lower budgets getting more done than in the US.
This is cope, sorry.
First, Japan didn't just fall into "stagnation" and "malaise". It was a functionally non-sovereign country which you deliberately fucked over with these "trade deals", incapable of providing its own security, dependent on imports of food and energy (not in a cute "would have to ration" way, in a "shutdown in 6 months" way), and it had a contagious real estate bubble collapse. None of these features are shared with China. Actually I often say that Americans drawing this analogy are telling on themselves. They helplessly lost several industries to a tiny island nation they had previously conquered, and instead of an existential crisis, their takeaway is… "we're invincible, China will be the same"?! Are you serious? Japan with nukes and 12 times larger population would have rendered you irrelevant by 2000s.
Second, no. This "has started outpacing" is largely a function of exchange rates, which China is alleged to suppress for RMB. In national currency terms the cumulative growth has been about equal since 2020. That's really good performance for the US stage of development, admittedly. But at some point they fully deflate their real estate bubble, and you notice that their industry and R&D have been growing quite a bit faster.
More to the point, you seem to not engage with the core fundamentals that matter: your clown government and your simply insufficient talent pool.
Pretty much every time. This is the story of America and Japan, too. Americans do have this strange conception of themselves as a plucky underdog who miraculously wins by Just Being That Good. But even the Soviets barely had an edge in population, probably had none if you exclude assorted Central Asian dependents, and were burdened by a suicidal economic doctrine. This isn't the case with China.
I'm telling you, this isn't enough. This entire list of rabble is just too small, they barely produce talent. Add India, add whatever, it's all just not enough smart people. The only real argument is brain draining China itself, which seems to be going worse lately.
Yes, Trump is more charismatic. Your Swedes and Germans care about Trump. But why should anyone care what Swedes and Germans care about? Trump spits on them. He cares about Xi's opinion.
America sure would like to try to copy some of China, it's just actually hard.
I don't know, this really doesn't feel coherent to me except as anger about America. I don't think you don't understand how the global economy works, I think you're just denying it for some sort of quixotic reason. It's as if you need America to be the Great Satan. When America invented all of the categories we are debating in the first place. America has an insufficient talent pool? America invented the talent pool. America perfected university educations for working-class people while China was trying to starve them. How many Chinese are alive today because of Norman Borlaug? We can debate this in English on an American website built using American technologies transmitted across American cables built under the protection of American ships. You're speaking English because of America. Your webpages are speaking Javascript, because of America.
America is parasitic? You wouldn't even be here without America. This is like the pyramid complaining that the ground is beneath it.
If you want, it's possible to be critical or even very critical of American leadership, lots of people are. But when you step through the looking glass it's a little ridiculous. China's industrial rise doesn't happen without America creating the global market, letting China in, supplying China with energy and raw materials and capital and IP. China still sends a quarter of a million students to American universities every year. What's the harm in admitting that? You can still criticize America for fighting bad wars in the Middle East or prognosticate China's eventual supremacy. Unless your precis is simply that you hate America. Because, otherwise, it's not coherent to argue that America is parasitic on the world because all we have are our ships and China's ships are better anyways.
Notably, this didn't happen.
Well, what happened next? What's the next part of the story? Did it work out for Japan? Does Japan rule the world now? Did America ever have a political reckoning over the economic policies that lead to outsourcing?
America + Europe + Japan + whatever is larger than China. America + India is larger than China. You are failing to advance any consistent standard of analysis except that you believe America must be inferior.
I write in English because this is a forum with the norm of speaking English, you speak no other languages, and I'm willing to talk to you. It's a bit ridiculous to inflate your sense of importance on these grounds. Believe it or not I continue to exist when I don't speak with you or engage with any other American.
America created this, that, all very fair, most of it very valuable. That's about what could be expected from a European society that gets a whole new continent for a frontier and faces no credible threats, but I guess the institutional achievement of Founding Fathers shouldn't be dismissed either. A century or two of unchallenged exponential growth can go a long way. As it stands though, what difference does all this boasting make for the present moment? Does it slow down your decline in share of new drugs developed, for instance? No, the "global economy" doesn't really depend on you, this isn't 1950s when everyone else who matters was bombed to hell or in a semi-colonial shithole condition. No you're not protecting the sea lanes, this just isn't a thing that is happening, you're contesting them. No, you're not making the rest of humanity a favor by printing debt and sucking out capital; it's just something you can afford to do. You're a big and important player, with lots of soft and hard power, that has developed solipsism and near-religious delusions about its potency, primacy and destiny, and about how much silliness it can actually afford in mistreating other nations.
This is disturbingly grandiose and sounds like a Marvel villain's monologue. Your culture has processed the abstract opinion about hegemony into tacky merchandise, into propaganda. This might have sounded authentic in the last century and, objectively speaking, sounds over the top today, in this largely Made-In-China physical world. But identity can be a lagging indicator.
Seriously speaking I don't really think either China or the US are "parasitic"; you started this. China used your IP and capital, which it could not create ex nihilo or procure elsewhere (or at least not that fast). You used cheap Chinese labor, for decades, to allow your own abundance and rent-seeking on your legacy. They had a choice (poverty, slower technological progress, worse security), so did you (higher inflation, perhaps even recession, political turmoil). Nobody chose otherwise out of charity; and neither situation would have been catastrophic. You grossly overestimate the baseline of Chinese capability and the volume of the exchange (look up historical FDI for instance). They speedran to rockets, satellites and thermonuclear weapons without American input and with very little Soviet one; they could have built modern China without you too.
Archetypal specific case: General Motors sold Magnequench to Deng Xiaoping's family, because GM, and by extension America, chose cutting costs and maximizing profit over controlling the rare earths/magnets supply chain in the long term. The Chinese could not "steal" it or "parasitize" on it; they paid the fair price, on the terms of the game you have designed, the game you are clearly so proud of. Now here we are, where REEs and magnets are something China has a chokehold on, developing on the open ambition preceding that acquisition by years. It's simply entitled to act as if they've gotten the better deal, or as if they had less right to what they got out of it.
Tragically, no, Americans are still riding that high.
What I'm trying to explain, in very simple words, that for the first time in your not so long history of independence you have a peer competitor, and on most meaningful metrics it's bigger than you. This has never happened before, you were only ever dunking on underdogs, you don't have a concept of "a bigger power than the US". Obnoxiously celebrating how you've never had a reckoning after Japan, rather than reflecting on how close it was with merely post-war Japan and what this fact says about absolute American capability, just goes to show you don't really grasp this very simple and important quantitative detail.
No. If you want a consistent standard, how about this: still fewer intelligent people and less industry. For example, Meituan alone outperforms India, Japan and most if not all of EU in AI. In electricity production, this entire list combined is maybe 20% above China, and good luck making any use of India. You don't have a sense of scale for what's going on.
P.S.
I have actually looked it up. In nominal USD, the US is up 46% between 2020 and 2025. China did 38% and if we account for the exchange rate, just 30%. So that's something. One can tell a story about GDP divergence here. The issue is that they've had <5% inflation and you had 25-29%. So in terms of "real growth" (anchored to 2017 dollars), the US can report 13% and China ≈32%. Your "real GDP" is $24.2T, not ≈$32T.
I don't put much stock in these numbers, anyway. The point is, you can tell any story with numbers if you know how to spin them (this is still very basic, one could counter with analyzing debt structure or "true purchasing power" or whatever), and I think your, Shakes, information environment provides you with a diet of exclusively self-congratulatory spins.
I do speak other languages and in fact even speak a little Chinese but I'm trying to make a larger point: China is supposedly on the cusp of global dominance, OK, where are all the people learning Chinese? Globally, who is actually adapting to a future of Chinese supremacy? Mostly people are continuing to learn English as their lingua franca, even though there are billions of Chinese people who could be unlocked by learning Chinese. It's not a small language. But you don't see people adapting themselves to a future of Chinese domination because in their bones nobody believes this is coming.
Well again I'm making a bigger point that this is passing over: America invented the modern world (ok, America invented a lot of the modern world) and it is continuing to invent the world of the future. Planes trains and automobiles. Nuclear weapons and the power grid. Satellites and rockets. Cell phones and social media. Now it's AI and Falcon.
It's fine or whatever if China is going to lead in material sciences and building ships and you can draw the trendline and predict, China will overtake America in the future and America is decadent and gay. Ok, but America is still inventing the future, observably, I can see it. And if we're debating in these terms, it is not the case at all that China is obviously poised to take over the future and America can't do anything but sit in the corner and watch. It is very much open to debate. And it's very reasonable of me to notice that America is continuing to grow, China faces deep structural problems, America still leads where it counts, and nobody is learning Chinese.
Obviously I don't mean to call China "parasitic" in some kind of moral sense. I am noticing the fact that their industrial development was bootstrapped by the existence of Western economies that modernized first. They didn't have to invent the modern university system, or capital markets, or automobile factories. They merely had to copy what had already been done. In many (many) cases they stole IP. They used cheap peasant labor to arbitrage western economies that had modern labor laws and unions. This is not to deny China the incredible progress they have made modernizing, but to notice that at no point has China actually been in the driver's seat. They still have a tremendous way to go. This is the difference between what Peter Thiel called "Zero to One" and "One to Many". They have not provably developed a Zero to One culture. That's something that can't be copied. It has to actually be developed on Chinese soil on its own terms. And it's reasonable to notice that most of China's development is merely copying what the West has produced first. And it's reasonable to notice that Chinese science still has deep structural problems that have to be overcome.
At the same time sure yes China is starting to develop some culture of innovation and progress. But it isn't a given at all that China will successfully develop a true culture of science that surpasses what has existed in the West. It's actually an open question. And what happens when China's population begins to age and the economy stagnates and someone has to replace Xi Jinping? What happens when tariffs from the West and export restrictions eat into the easy margins China has enjoyed while industrializing until now?
Right, so what? America also has companies that outperform India, Japan, and all of the EU in AI. Partly because more and more of the world speaks English (not Chinese) and anybody so inclined can move from Europe to America if they want to work at the cutting edge of Artificial Intelligence. The reverse, Europeans moving to China to work at the cutting edge, is much more rare.
It was never close at all. Moreover, Japan was even an ally. At the time that Japanese auto companies were disrupting Detroit, American soldiers were stationed in Okinawa. Japan competed with America because America allowed it to happen, because that is the global system America set up.
You proclaim that China is larger than America, but China is not larger than the global system at which America is the center. Yes, America is the center. It is a leaky system and there might be lots of cooperation with China i.e. German companies are happy to interface with Huawei instead of AT&T. But China has to begin to replace America in ways that are conspicuously not happening. I.e., people would still rather conduct trade in the dollar and not the renminbi. People would rather conduct business in English and not Chinese. People would rather hire graduates from Stanford and not Tsinghua. Nations rely on American ships to protect the global sea lanes, not Chinese ships.
China exists within a world which the Americans created and has not even properly begun to contest and replace America. It will take a generation or more for China to mature into this task, if it is ever ready, if it can ever be ready. On balance it is actually extremely likely they will fail.
Well I understand why people here would think that but my "information environment" is mostly panicans predicting that the United States is doomed, that Trump has failed, that America is declining forever, and reading lots of books. I promise that my views are actually bespoke and of my own creation and not merely the dumb talking points of whatever low-grade MAGA podcaster it is presumed I downloaded this week.
Well I disagree with your point because people who matter do. Russian elite is supposedly hiring Mandarin-speaking nannies for their children. American elite – Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos, Trumps – do the same. Some random Africans do. TraceWoodgrains did, like a quarter of this forum did. Hell, you did to an extent. High agency people learn Chinese. An average American isn't doing international business and needn't even be verbal or numerate (or independently physically mobile) to live a good fat life, so of course there's little demand for Mandarin in those circles. But Germans thought similarly, and where are they now? China is kicking them out of their main industrial markets, for all their racist hubris about "German quality" and, I bet, smug sense of superiority when they heard a Chinese engineer humbly speaking German just to accommodate them. A lesson in there.
More boringly, we live in an age where technology seems certain to make multilingualism a rather worthless skill. Real-time AI translation is getting really good.
And what beyond AI and Falcon? That's your last frontier now. They're roughly where you were in 1980 in GDP per capita, and yet the technological gap has shrunk to about 5 years. The best current Chinese AI model is 6-8 months behind. They have a Raptor 2 class engine in testing, will probably land a rocket this month, and also show a Blackwell-level AI training cluster. They're even building fighter jets faster than you now, and people with a clue say that copes about J-20 or J-35 being junk or "not really 5th gen" will get people killed. It just, I dunno, it doesn't look intimidating. Pull out some other rabbit out of this future hat. The entire US is becoming an overleveraged bet on transformative AGI, and I'm not sure <12 months of lead will be enough for… whatever it is the plan is.
That is true but in practice American countermeasures mostly amount to tariffs, more tariffs on third parties, subsidies, export controls, and hare-brained attempts to rally or strongarm the "allies". Which is rather amateurish and primitive compared to their model of governance. Americans acting != Americans acting effiiciently.
Have you considered that one reason China copies good stuff from the West/US but the opposite doesn't happen is simply that you can't, even if you honestly try, which you often don't because of hubris and brainwashing that prevent you from the recognition of a shortcoming? You're not a very adaptive society. You can't copy meritocracy, because it's at odds with democracy. You can talk about "wake-up calls" for decades but can't develop industrial policy that isn't just picking winners or corruption with extra steps, so you cope that this is what they do too. You can't have a decent drone manufacturer even after years of handwringing about the natsec threat of DJI. You can't form a non-primitive theory of how subsidies work, and you are still coping about "cheap peasant labor" after their wages grew 17x and the competitiveness didn't budge. Your solution to your fentanyl epidemic was begging China to help out on their end. You can't copy the "don't start pointless wars with no theory of victory" trick, and you've even lost the basic Western technology of recognizing failure instead of saving face. You famously can't build the high speed rail system or the secure quantum communication network, though I agree that's unnecessary. Over roughly 8 years of the trade war and "decoupling", more of "friend-shoring", you've become more dependent on their supply chains for your core, singular Hail Mary bet against them, but not the other way around, and your elites are still confused as to what is happening and believe the solution is more Being Tough On China. It's hard for you to reform the FDA the way they did their reforms – though you are trying, yes you are reacting to copy Chinese policy, yes there is a "we much copy the Chinese" mindset in some strata already. I think there'll be more of that; Trump clearly envies Xi in many ways, and one of his few great personal qualities is that he's not invested in saving face for the nation of the United States or for the American people, his ego is too big to care about you, so maybe he'll succeed somewhat just to make simself look good on merit of fixing the mess. But again, hard without meritocracy, surrounded by mediocre sniveling viziers. Trumpism is a very Oriental phenomenon.
I wouldn't worry about their science. It's well-funded, it has a path to commercialization and it's flush with talent. That's everything that made American science great, except more so.
I wanted to call out an inconsistency but actually if you think they're far behind in AI, I guess this makes sense. America will have AGI and a new century of greatnessl the Chinese, being incapable of Real Progress, will have a "demographic crisis". Nevermind that they're running circles around the entire world in robotics.
Well that's plausible, if pointless except for getting to China. then they'll raise their own export controls (as they already do sometimes) and keep exporting to the entire rest of the world, watching as "the West" collapses like a house of cards, I guess. We've seen a small scale test with Nexperia. I repeat, this is insane hubris. The reason China is relevant today is their own productivity owing to human capital and adequate governance, not some charity from the West and certainly not minor market access tricks.
Just the point that their talent is not particularly valuable. They don't produce a lot of talent. Just how it is.
This is more tryhard grandiosity and frankly close to "But I did have breakfast this morning" reasoning. You lost Detroit auto industry not because you casually permitted it to happen out of some leonine generosity towards an ally. The Japanese just were better and took it away. They were getting likewise better in chips. That you have imperial means of compelling Japan is irrelevant for purposes of the argument because you don't have such means in China, nor soldiers in Shanghai. So the real comparison you should make is to "how would we fare if we could NOT compel Japan AT ALL".
This is, hilariously enough, a very traditional Chinese posture, almost word for word. They tried this thing with tributary states, it was net negative. The job of the champion is to be able to bear all the costs of hegemony alone, only then do the vassals feel emboldened to contribute; if the champion retreats, he risks provoking a rout. You've already retreated a few times in the last 2 years. You're the center of a world-system where a treaty-bound ally can deny his airspace to your air force. This isn't a system you own or control, it's just something you earn rent on.
China has replaced the US as the physical center of the industrial civilization over the last generation. That is strength, that is what is hard, and that, not sentimental bullshit in the European manner about attractive culture, is what made the US the 20th century superpower. Factories, cities, jets, ships, rockets, Silicon Valley, exponentially growing material abundance. You also mentioned "cities" above, do you really think they still envy your cities? Does anyone outside, like, Latin America? One by one, these check boxes are getting filled. You need to keep making new ones.
I'm really unsure about this, any statistics? Which people? I only recall that time Stanford students stole an AI model built by Tsinghua students, shallowly obfuscated and rebranded as their own for clout. That, too, is a perk of being the center of the World. Indeed, no such people would think of trying to enroll in Tsinghua. I bet they love America.
On balance they have, conservatively, 2x your industrial capacity, 3x intellectual and (very conservatively) no less capable governance or markets. Unless you show some unprecedented overperformance, it's wholly their game to lose.
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