>>2656142Perhaps this would be true if one did not take into account the military side of things. If you’ve followed the military developments of either side, China and the US are already in a new Cold War arms race, and US officials and elites, like Palmer Luckey, are quite openly talking about preparing for direct open warfare against China. Because China, being the industrial exporter country, naturally has a massive logistical military advantage over the US - and in a couple decades a technological one as well, if Chinese innovation keeps ramping up and US engineering keeps declining. If the US does not confront China, both militarily and in every other area, what’s stopping Chinese CPC elites from seizing Taiwan and hegemony over Asia, which would allow them to effortlessly outmuscle the US economy? This is not to mention efforts to build alternative parallel systems for the world economy like BRICS, which explicitly exists to bypass and undermine the US dollar, and could lead to the dollar slowly being phased out of China over time even if no kinetic conflict occurs.
There will ultimately have to be a decoupling, which the recent trade wars are a sign of moving towards, because there is no other way the US can stop China from toppling its position as world hegemon. The whole dollar/military hegemony thing is a very fragile structure. If one of those is lost, the other will soon follow, and then America collapses entirely in a similar fashion to the USSR. China is threatening America on both those fronts at the same time.
As such they are right now both engaging in 5th generation warfare against each other - direct economic trade wars with tariffs and restrictions, maneuvering for dominance on the geopolitical stage with allies and trade partners, cyber attacks, media PR wars to make Americans unwilling to see China as an enemy or to encourage Chinese to become traitors. All of these are advantages to be seized to decide the outcome of open warfare before it begins. Whether it does ever actually begin, like it never did between the US and USSR, depends on if either side is reckless enough to take the risk, or if one side gains a clear enough advantage for certain victory(most likely China in 10-20 years based on trends).