(e.g: sanctions against Russia backfiring, Ukraine being a US quagmire, or a fantasy that decline will mean a great awakening of the masses to seize the moment for a second Civil Rights movement or even revolution)
A state of decline can still be kept afloat through debt and intimidation. With receding rewards and profits of being the imperial core, this system of domination and exploitation can , like a dying sun, become more intense, destructive, and normal.
Think of how much in the past twenty to thirty years has been normalized in the US: school shootings, police shootings/murder and abuse of power by police, state, and federal government. Spying on its own citizens, extrajudicial assassinations and black sites. The list goes on.
A state of decline can find a new grounds of sustainability for its capitalist engine through more overt adopted fascist strategies and tactics against labor and enemies, foreign and domestic.
Is decline a good thing in this context? Would a state of decline transmute the volatility of the state to revolutionary moments seized by a neo-nascent American communist front?
These are just some background thoughts I've been having in my mind when I skim the website, forgive me if the tone comes off as :reddit-logo: :debate-me-debate-me: but I found the insight of some of the posters here quite helpful and astute and was hoping for some of thst collective wisdom.
Some of the stuff about how China is now as powerful as the US is overstated. China is way behind the US in many important areas, like computing and AI and nuclear might, and is not catching up.
I think that depends on how you measure power. The US basically doesn't produce anything other than weapons and debt traps at this point. Our manufacturing sector is a rounding error compared to China.
China has enough nuclear might to kill everyone in America and Europe I think anymore would just give diminishing returns
Computing is an area where China is very much playing catchup still, but arguably China has already pulled ahead in AI research.
As for nuclear might, if we're talking about weapons China's nuclear arsenal is pretty unknown go outside observers. That said, China has advanced hypersonic delivery vehicles so even the low count of 200 warheads is quite something if they can't be intercepted and can get to their targets shockingly fast.
That's the copium we are discussing.
The most cited AI research mostly comes from the US and its allies: Germany, UK, Australia, Canada, France. "Earlier reports that China may have overtaken the US in AI R&D [the one you posted] seem to be highly exaggerated if we look at it from the perspective of citations."
If you know anything about Chinese AI research culture, it's very focused on impact factor, moreso than the US, and they're still not outputting a third of what the US is by that measure.
The nuclear superpowers remain Russia and USA.