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I am well aware that losing is a live possibility, and I know exactly what losing would look like. Losing means a Guangxi Massacre in every American town and city. Losing means obliteration; losing means being consigned to the graveyard of civilizations. Still we press on.
Given that your deepest yearning is for technology to liberate us from life as it has existed hitherto, it is unsurprising that you find these values to be unintelligible.
It's not clear what must happen for the world to end up like this, but America is a nation of dreamers; I suppose you can effect even this result if you keep pressing on. However, my optimistic theory of American loss is that due to constant bluffing and irresponsible policy epilepsy the USD loses its status as reserve currency, your fraudulent markets deflate, your internal racial contradictions bloom, and after a while you get a lot quieter and less obnoxious as your living standards crash down to roughly Polish level, which is actually very neat and, given your current course, more than you deserve. The traffic to your shores dies down, as mandated by the Great Leader Donald Ieyasu Trump; the rest of humanity, free of the loathsome star-spangled yoke, peacefully trades and gets richer, while you lick your wounded pride and dream of revenge.
A median scenario is that you simply accept the existence of a bigger guy on the block (bloodlessly, or after trying your luck one last time in the South China Sea) and retreat to your hemisphere, living much the same lives as today.
And I suspect that you know this. But it's too painful to imagine such a world, a boring high-probability world where the sky didn't fall, but you're no longer the uncontested Main Character Nation. Visions of massacres and genocides are anesthetic in comparison, they return you to the familiar domain of Marvel movies. Any Avengers-Level Threat, by laws of narrative, ultimately gets defeated, so there really aren't any stakes or hard decisions to make this way.
That should be Iemitsu if you are looking for whoever enacted sakkoku.
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I would happily accept either of these worlds. Certainly they sound much better than where things seemed to be heading as of last year.
I try to be more positive lately.
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