[MtnClimber]

VDH ping

[sauropod]

Bkmk

[Maine Mariner]

I remember the same comments about the rise of Japan and the decline of the USA in the mid 1980’s. To hear the chatting classes talk we would all be speaking Japanese by the year 2000. Once the again the experts were proven wrong.

[Jonty30]

The Chinese will look at you with a straight face and say “we think in centuries” as they plunge into a demographic crisis caused by one-child policy started 40 years ago.

[ClearCase_guy]

Trump is engaged in a grand global strategy which will remove China as a super power or near peer. Venezuela, Iran, Cuba, tariffs, re-shoring industry — everything Trump is doing will hurt China. Combine that with China’s demographic trouble (lots of old people and much fewer young people), and the growing social unrest in China, and we may be looking at a future in which China is no longer much of a nation.

And then who can challenge us? Europe? Russia? I think it will be like 1946 all over again. Decades of American dominance and prosperity.

[FLT-bird]

If you look at GDP at Purchasing Power Parity, China's economy is closer to the size of the US economy if not slightly larger. By the same measure, the US doesn't really spend 6 times as much on Defense. Those are just nominal terms. Everything is cheaper in China and that includes soldier's pay and military equipment. So the US is not really as dominant as VDH is saying here. That being said, his point about the demographics is true. China is aging very rapidly and that will spell the end of rapid economic growth for them. There will be fewer workers and more old people who will have to be taken care of. It is also true that Trump has been taking out their proxies and it is furthermore true that their air defense systems failed miserably in both Venezuela and Iran when they came up against US air power. It is also true that America is the world's largest agricultural and energy exporter and America still has the most advanced technology of any country in the world. Furthermore, yes, China really does have a ring of smaller powers around it which view it as a threat and which are therefore happy to align with America to contain it.

[Sicon]

As far as leverage goes, tomorrow the US could deny visas and green cards to hundreds of thousands of Chinese students and technicians, effectively aborting China’s fifty-year effort to absorb and replicate US technology.

So why don't we?

[Brian Griffin]

“Nine in 10 families in China own a home.”

https://www.cnn.com/2026/05/17/china/china-homeownership-rate-tested-intl-hnk

[Carry_Okie]

Oh please, with our ignorant and wussified young men? Unless we fix our schools China will eventually eat our lunch, despite their catastrophically stupid management overhead.

[PGalt]

Thanks for posting. VDH BUMP!

[piasa]

Was just looking through the sale flyer for my local grocer.

One ear of sweet corn is a full dollar.

That is insane.

[simpson96]

VDH is a treasure.

[Harpotoo]

Watch your ass,-)

[Tell It Right]

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.