[jnmandal]

Without entering (and winning) some kind of major conflict, this was always going to happen.

Two things are important to think about.

1. Power should be measured in relative terms not absolute. (For a good treatise on this, read Paul Kennedy's Rise and Fall of the Great Powers). The US would have to be keeping up with China, India, and rest of world to maintain its previous pole position.

2. Great nations/empires generally become so at least partially through population growth. This can be organic or engineered (ie: continuously conquering more and more territory) but rising dominance almost never coincides with demographic stagnation, which the US is experiencing. This population plateau has been accurately predicted by the US Census for my entire lifetime.

Also nothing about this decline is unusual or unexpected. This is the course of empire, which is not a new concept.

[ksec]

>Power should be measured in relative terms not absolute.

I would argue everything should be measured in relative terms. More often than not this is not the case.

>The US would have to be keeping up with China, India, and rest of world to maintain its previous pole position.

This is the biggest problem I see. US is not keeping up. Nor its willingness to compete. Taking the US dollar as world reserve currency for granted. Along with host of other benefits ( and responsibility ) that came with it.

There are signs that we may see a global market recession next year. And China may benefits even more.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46273326

[smallmancontrov]

> Taking the US dollar as world reserve currency for granted.

It's the exact opposite: US citizens got fed up with the domestic problems created by Triffin's Dilemma and wanted out.

Remember, the "imperial revenue" in our model doesn't get helicoptered into the economy, it pumps assets. Stocks, bonds, and real estate. Your share of the imperial loot is proportional to the value of the assets that you own, and worse, even if you don't have a big house and fat brokerage account you still have to compete with people who do and they're going to bid up the price of anything that doesn't have highly elastic supply. Health care, housing, and education are the ones creating problems. America got a great deal, but most Americans got a raw deal: costs went up, income didn't, misery ensued.

Pumped bonds allow (force, really) the government to run deficits (homework: what breaks if they don't? It happened in Clinton's term, you can go and check) and to some extent that distributes the money. There's the whole services narrative which held that the services sector would pump hard enough to backfill manufacturing, but it never did. The people who got the door slammed in their face are no longer convinced that the door is their path to prosperity and now they want to tear the whole thing down.

If you want to hear an actual economist talk about this, see "Trade Wars are Class Wars" by Klein and Pettis.

[alchemist1e9]

Demographic stagnation? compared to who? everything is relative and I don’t think US demographics has it at a disadvantage over EU, China, Japan, South Korea, does it? So then who is left to take seriously as a competitor?

[maxglute]

High skill demographics. PRC is going mint more STEM in next 20 years than US is set to increase population, all sources total. That's more or less locked in from past 20 years of births. In relative terms, PRC is going to have OCED combined in just STEM, excluding all the other technical skilled workforce. It's the greatest high skill demographic divident in recorded history, in country with superstructure to allocate talent. All the rapid catchup PRC made in last 10 years was built on fraction of highend human capita they will have.

That PRC talent cohort are going to stick around 2060/70/80s. Past that, it's hard to extrapolate, but ~50 years with that much talent advantage can build very durable advantages. Meanwhile the population PRC sheds is overwhelmingly going to be the old, undereducated etc, think 200m rural farmers left behind by modernization that bluntly is net drag on economy/system, but they're also relatively cheap to caretake vs US silver obligations.

Short of AGI, US is not a serious competitor vs PRC in terms of skilled demographics that sustains strategic hegemonic advantages, at least not in our lifetimes.

[jnmandal]

Compared to itself. Same phenomenon as in Japan. Rising powers almost never have this issue.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver_tsunami

[rchaud]

There is an unspoken alternative for dealing with being out-populated by rival states. That is to reduce their populations through sanctions, blockades, starvation and outright war. These methods have been used by the Soviet Union in Ukraine, Germany/USSR in Poland, Imperial Japan in China, Belgium in the Congo. It continues to happen today, most openly in Palestine.

[kamaal]

>>That is to reduce their populations through sanctions, blockades, starvation and outright war.

Speaking as Indian, Our population growth happened when we were poor, and masses were uneducated/illiterate.

I have one more theory that- Population growth happens when poor people have access to lots of carbohydrates. Plus having lots of children is somewhat akin to having meat robot automatons whom you can send for physical work and make money.

If you want to use sanctions to do reduce population it doesn't work in the modern era. Poor people eat well and make babies.

[OgsyedIE]

An important caveat to #2. Rising populations can only be leveraged into more power if they can be channeled into import substition. Countries where import substitution is suppressed can not gain power.

[IAmBroom]

> Countries where import substitution is suppressed can not gain power.

What does that mean? Seriously; I can't make sense of it.

[throwaway5465]

China has grown old before it grew rich. The past decade has been one of a collapsed houehold sector (and birth rate below the already gloomy concensus back in 2010), general deflation, and bright lights and conspicious technology achieved only through throwing government spending at ritzy projects - centrally planned growth and waste. Being unable to escape the domestic security agenda will forever neuter global aspiration, from currency to technology.

India is yet to harmonise widespread organisation.

Relative gaps are smaller, but the persistance of gap is never more entrenched than ever.

That is not a decline. It is however a Great Game, not played with nations but with ideology and where the US and China are quite aligned. That game is less visible until it is seen.

[IAmBroom]

> India is yet to harmonise widespread organisation.

I've always said that if India got a unified national language they would become a nearly instant world power.

Imagine an India where English was mandated in every public school - and every child, regardless of caste (which officially doesn't exist...), attended school. English, because it's more internationally useful than Hindi, and doesn't have the same ethnological competition (Hindi vs Bengali vs Tamil vs <297 others>).

Then imagine that, now that all of India can actually speak to each other, they get their shit together, and build a truly functional national highway system. Top it off with a safe railway system, complete with modern trains. Enough trains that you don't have to ride on top. (OK, I'm starting to dream big.)

One generation later India is a dominant world power. Pakistan is completely fucked, sure, because Delhi will never get over their petty sibling hatred. But India can start power-brokering between all other nations.

[smallmancontrov]

The "centrally planned growth is hollow and doomed" narrative doesn't seem to fit China like it fit the USSR. Did the USSR ever make 80% of the stuff in your home?

As for making friends, the US empire is highly atypical in its "friendliness" and it's entirely plausible that its successor will revert to the mean.

[pointlessone]

> Without entering (and winning) some kind of major conflict, this was always going to happen.

If only there was a conflict somewhere with a perieved superpower, maybe a nuclear country or something that would be relatively easy to win without even entering into a direct altercation. Oh, wait!

America could’ve easily won the war in Ukraine by just ging away a bit more weapons, specifically long range missiles. It could even just tell European countries to give their long rhange missiles in exchange for a resupply for some plausible deniability.It could’ve been a bit more generous with intelligence.

Unfortunately, America elected Trump. A person who doesn’t believe in anything that doesn’t directly concern him. If it doesn’t benefit (or hurt) him personally it might as well not exist. Which make it easy to sway his foreign policy. Russia is actively trying to buy him and he thinks it’s great. It’s going to be a very fast decline of American influence as more and more countries around the world will see that it takes very little to buy an american president, allegedly the most powerful person in the world. And if any petty dictator can buy him, what worth is his power?