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The problem is the sheer size of China. They are bigger than the US and EU combined, by a considerable margin. They are bigger than the entire Western camp in terms of population.
They produce half the world's steel. Their manufacturing is about as large as the next ten countries combined. They've been marching up the value chain, pushing into phones, cars, drones, semiconductors, biotech, everything...
Who needs allies when your economy is so big it has its own gravity well? BRICS is mostly for show, Russia and China are the ones that matter.
It goes to show the ridiculous short-termism and arrogance of Western leaders that nothing was done about this danger back when China was weak. We had Bill Clinton's 'the internet will make them democratic' theory in the 1990s that somehow lasted up until about 2012-14. It's totally unbelievable how stupid and confident they were. Nobody had ever seen the internet make any country democratic in the 1990s, it was an entirely untested theory! But that was the strategy, they literally telegraphed their subversive plan to Chinese leaders in their speeches.
Since then our leaders have been falling into this nightmare as they realize they lack the mental or kinetic power to realize their delusional aims. Joe Biden's hilarious 1990s joke about Russia and China cooperating turned into reality: https://x.com/SonjaEnde/status/1649318054969462788
This is what's so broken about America and the West generally, the people manning the wheel are so hopelessly stupid and confused that they do everything wrong. The EU has wrecked European industry with climatism and regulation, Britain is in a continuous crisis. And Trump certainly isn't helping. It's not written in the Art of War 'when facing a strong enemy, raise tariffs and enter disputes with your closest allies'. It makes zero sense. But he's doing it anyway.
The West is stupid and weak, or at least Americans, because we have rarely been challenged by a near peer country in anything of note. We’re used to being a giant in the room and really don’t have a “lived experience” of being the one on the receiving end, or even not being dominant. It’s easy to spot once you see it: Europe and North America believe they can bring millions of unreformed Muslim fanatics in a refugees and nothing will happen, they believe that Russia will collapse in the first week of the Ukraine war because of course they will. And because of this assumption that because we’re dominant now, we will always be dominant.
Yes, as I said it's people who inherited an empire but never cultivated the attitudes to keep it or rather, they actively consider them gauche and outdated and beneath them.
It's especially very odd to see the sorts of people who read the room enough to know that they should mock Fukuyama or call Western hegemony racist in practice act as if supremacy is a birthright that cannot be challenged (so then why not do whatever you like?).
Actual imperialists at least know that sometimes you have to put the boot to people's necks.
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This gets me every time. Imagine being so confidently wrong. Did he even think about this issue at all, or did he just read a Thomas Friedman book or hear a Tony Robbins speech and decide this was the path?
And that's why I can't take Bryan Caplan or Matthew Iglesias seriously. They want to import 1 billion third worlders into America. Like, dude, what if you're wrong? You can't take this back. You ruined America forever. On a theory.
The precautionary principle is overly applied to well understood domains like climate change and nuclear power.
But it's under-applied to chaotic domains like politics.
Chesterton's Fence is a good heuristic for this. It's probably a bad idea to completely rearrange the demographics of your country on the off chance that "nah... it will be fine!", but does that mean it's a good idea to take action NOW! to avert climate catastrophe? It might be (probably depends on the action), but it's far less clear than the other scenario.
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