China has a huge demographic decline also.
I think the future willbe tightening up existing resources rather than just conquest of new ones until demographics begin to change. China might go full gene engineering in a few years and add factory babies, not sure where they are on that tech.
“China has a huge demographic decline also.”
That’s a good point, but not the only factor. China’s population has been stable for a while now, but as they have industrialized their resource consumption per capita has skyrocketed.
In the last 30 years China has increased its resource consumption 10x. To get to a South Korea level of development they need to increase that another 10 times.
A bottomless need for the world’s resources and the need to control them will dominate the next 50 years of geopolitics.