| How could the US be left behind as a second-tier player? There's no scenario where that happens short of total collapse. It'll have 400 million people in an integrated single market, with the dominate culture in a liberal democracy. The rest of the world isn't actually ever going to learn Mandarin the way it has English. The language is far too difficult for that to occur and there's very little benefit to doing so. Which is also why that isn't happening right now despite China having the world's #2 economy. The growth of Mandarin outside of China is almost non-existent. Liberal democracies in Europe are going to take their marching orders from an authoritarian dictatorship? Zero chance of that. China's system is fundamentally incompatible with liberal values, it will always cause an us-vs-them conflict. China's authoritarian, repressive system will also not allow it to ever become culturally dominate. Few countries will accept the requirements that come with that pact. Just their lack of any gradient of free speech guarantees they can never become culturally dominate. There are no other great powers in Western culture that can supplant the US. Germany, the UK and France are not suddenly going to increase their populations by 4x or 8x such that they'll become enormous powers with massive economies (and able to pay for a powerful military with global projection). Canada and Australia are also out of the running from the start due to that. Japan hasn't had economic growth in decades and has a declining population with an even worse government debt situation than the US. They have no military of consequence. Nothing about their situation looks primed to change any time soon. South Korea looks to have a potent future, however their population is far too small to become a superpower. India has a GDP per capita of $2,000. Their biggest worry has to be getting caught in the low income trap, not even the middle income trap which is what China is about to get stuck in. India could do most things right and still not be a superpower 40-50 years later. It'll take two decades for them to catch up to where Russia is at today in global positioning when it comes to politics / influence / military, and Russia is now very far away from being a superpower. So who else is left? Nobody. It's the US and China with everybody else a million miles away. Countries with liberal values - which is nearly every single high GDP per capita country - are all going to align with the US perpetually, so long as it remains on the liberal democratic side. That liberal alignment is political, economic and military. China has no real allies other than North Korea. Being a superpower without having all the advanced, liberal, rich countries as allies, leaves you as a paper superpower boxed in at every turn; whereas the US can project globally nearly at will precisely because it has so many alliances with other advanced, liberal, powerful nations. |