America: The Real Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

America has repeatedly been declared a dying empire, yet every rival—from Nazi Germany to the Soviet Union to China—has ultimately fallen short of US power and resilience.

One American view of China—now increasingly popular on the Left and the Right alike, especially among the hate-Trump crowd—is that the communist colossus will be forever ascendant, with continued astonishing levels of food production, ship construction, and industrial output. In this pessimistic view, China will soon replace America as the world’s predominant power. We are, supposedly, like an exhausted British Empire circa 1945, and China is the new version of the postwar American powerhouse.

Yet even Beijing’s miraculous 30-year leap out of poverty into first-world affluence and Westernized power is hardly the same as parity with the US. In truth, Trump held almost all the cards at the current summit and will do so again when Xi Jinping visits the US this autumn. According to nearly every historical measure of power, the US leads China by sizable margins—in wealth, economic output, fuel, food, and military strength.

China has roughly four times the population of the US, but produces only about 60 percent of our total GDP. A crude way of looking at this asymmetry is that one US citizen accounts for 40 percent more goods and services than his four Chinese counterparts. Americans enjoy a per capita GDP (roughly $95,000) over six times higher than China’s (roughly $15,000).

We are the largest oil and gas producer and exporter in history; China must import 11 to 12 million barrels of oil every day. The US is also the greatest food exporter in history; China, for all its miraculous increases in agricultural productivity, still must import 30–40 percent of its food, a number that keeps rising as China becomes more affluent

Excellent as always article by VDH! What I find particularly enlightening is how VDH reminds of us supposedly imminent predictions we had to suffer in the past, and how they relate to modern predictions of U.S. doom and gloom:

A communist Russia on the move, we were told, starting in the late 1940s, would destroy the US.

The Soviet Union, we were further warned, was taking over the globe, as an unstoppable communism seemed to spread unchecked through Latin America, Africa, and Asia to our doorstep in Cuba.

Next, Japan, Inc. was also supposed to bury us in the 1980s, as confident, rich Japanese investors bought up the iconic Pebble Beach Golf Course, Rockefeller Center, and Columbia Pictures.

Then, at the beginning of the millennium, it was the European Union’s turn to be the next supposed wave of the future, with America once more relegated to the past.

Oh how quickly we'd forget if not for people like VDH reminding us how often the supposed experts of America's demise are always in the wrong.

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