I kinda prefer well-balanced mutual dependency. This current wave of sinophobia is seriously worrying. Even in the darkest days of the Cold War, the Soviet Republic and NATO countries had significant trade relations, providing not just economic benefits but a stabilising mechanism identical to MAD in principle, but with far less actual MADness in a worst case.<p>China's ascent is going to happen. And contrary to this relentless US campaign to escalate, I cannot even come up with what exactly the US considers China's agression? Is all this talk of everything up to and including war seriously proportional to the thread that is... China being chosen to build some 5G infrastructure?<p>The British saw their Empire crumble after investing hundreds of thousands of lives and evenly distributing an entire Island's worth of forest in hull-shaped carcasses at the bottom of the world's seas. For that, they were left with nothing but a decent long drink and three cricket teams to lose against. Luckily, they have something not entirely unlike a deep-seated sense for civility and took it with some humour and only minor collective psychosis.<p>Is the end of the American Empire going to be a Republican Id in a total meltdown of nationalistic rage set off by this seemingly unavoidable narcissistic injury that China's ascend represents?<p>The prospect of America with diminished economic and cultural power, completely losing the optimism, openness, and sense of responsibility that carried it through the 20th "American" century, and retaining only the brute power of its oversized military as the only remaining source of agency is, frankly, terrifying.