And to a large extend the USSR failed because of its inability to compete with the West financially. Reagan's policies broke them financially.
With China, the policies have been to enrich and empower the world's largest communist nation, probably the dumbest and most dangerous US foreign and trade policies in our history.
The policies have created the richest communist nation and the richest communist party in history.
I agree. Reagan used capitalism to destroy the USSR. The CCP watched this happen, and learned from it. It would be expected that they would do this, of course. So they used what we don't have - top down totalitarian control of workers and industry, in combination with their form of 'controlled' capitalism, in which they control labor costs and keep them below ours, and subsidize whole industries to help them to outcompete ours. It's not 'genius'. It's what any totalitarian government would do to avoid being defeated the way the USSR was in the Cold War.
Of course, our feckless, pathetic political class let them do this - some of them making money from deals made along the way.
As a society, it's past the time that we should have realized that those people who ascend in politics are generally the worst and most incompetent people we could possibly put in office - including, and to some extent in particular, those non-practicing lawyers who went to overrated Ivy League law schools. Our academic 'elite' institutions have become training grounds for pinheads. We would do well not to select our office holders from this group, and we've had plenty of evidence to support this notion.
“With China, the policies have been to enrich and empower the world’s largest communist nation, probably the dumbest and most dangerous US foreign and trade policies in our history.”
Thank you Nixon and Kissinger.
And idiotic policy today is still determined by their thinking.
Foreign policy establishment is the swamp and dedicated to stasis more than any other swamp group.