They're playing the long game while we're playing the "whose dick I have to suck to get a better position in the next 5 years" at every level of the hierarchy both politically and industrially.
We moved all our factories there thinking they'd work for cheap and stay peasants forever. Meanwhile their education seriously leveled up while ours stagnated (at best) or declined. In the meantime they also mastered manufacturing techniques, and now they're slowly taking the lead over pretty much everything. Couple that with an authoritarian regime still viewing the world through the historical long term prism and you get a pretty good combo. We ended up losing the mass, know-how and innovation capabilities, all at once in ~50 years.
I hope we never have a hot conflict with them because all their drones/3d printing/thermal vision/&c. companies will produce more kamikaze drone in a day than we'll produce in a year.
You're not totally wrong, except the US didn't lose it's talent. Instead it all went to software and finance, which pay drastically more, with much comfier working conditions, and much more generous benefits then becoming a machine tool maker.
The US is an advanced, mature, economy. Our children three generations back aspired to never don a blue collar. We would lead the world at the absolute cutting edge, and delegate the rest to lower economies. That's what we did, and that's what we have. So now we just argue about the need for people to go back and do dirty work, but ain't nobody volunteering to give up their $150k/yr hybrid job to make $80k commuting 5 days a week to process engineer job at scary health hazards factory. Ain't no VC funding an e-bike factory when an e-bike picker app costs 1/1000 the cost and can be done with a team of 5 people and scaled to 50 million users.
Totally agree on those points too, but I think you're giving US companies too much credit when you say:
> playing the long game while we're playing the "whose dick I have to suck to get a better position in the next 5 years"
5 years is generous. I'd say a year at most. Just keep delivering gold statues to the White House in order curry favor for a little while longer; meanwhile, keep chasing the profits at the expense of longevity, as required by law for public companies.
We moved all our factories there thinking they'd work for cheap and stay peasants forever. Meanwhile their education seriously leveled up while ours stagnated (at best) or declined. In the meantime they also mastered manufacturing techniques, and now they're slowly taking the lead over pretty much everything. Couple that with an authoritarian regime still viewing the world through the historical long term prism and you get a pretty good combo. We ended up losing the mass, know-how and innovation capabilities, all at once in ~50 years.
I hope we never have a hot conflict with them because all their drones/3d printing/thermal vision/&c. companies will produce more kamikaze drone in a day than we'll produce in a year.