A national security official under Joe Biden who reviewed the document is said to have turned pale on realising Beijing had “redundancy after redundancy” for “every trick we had up our sleeve”, The New York Times reported.
Last year, Pete Hegseth, the defence secretary, said that “we lose every time” in the Pentagon’s war games against China, and predicted the Asian country’s hypersonic missiles could destroy aircraft carriers within minutes.
The US became a military industrial complex state built upon military keynseianism during WW2. This worked well for them because of their unique advantages in the war, specifically being able to stay relatively disengaged while Europe burned, whilst also making immense profits selling weapons fo the allies.
Essentially all of the European spoils of colonialism, the Atlantic slave trade and other economies of dispossession that made Europe rich went to the US as Europe self destructed. It was not unexpected either, the destruction of cultures, societies and peoples with a worldview of white supremacy was bound to bite back at them at some point (all conservative/purity politics eventually do).
There was also a massive brain drain with scientists escaping to the US for safety.
The US has managed to leverage that with 75 years of prominence as the global hegimon (some will argue it only became unipolar with the fall of the USSR) but that was never going to last forever. I wouldn’t underestimate China. America, like all empires do eventually, has become fat and lazy. China is hungry to reestablish itself.
Now, the US and NATO makes up up 80% of global military expenditure so they aren’t going to just fade away but I would look at the US’ massive bet on AGI as a negative sign. If they accomplish it then great, that’s probably another 50 to 100 years of US dominace but the approach reeks of desperation. China has had a much more measured and pragmatic approach to AI. If the bubble pops and the US takes too long to pick up the pieces, China will race ahead. China is already ahead on AI implementation in robotics which will have important military applications in the future as well.