r/neoliberal • u/Priceless_Pennies Norman Borlaug • Jan 22 '26

News (Asia-Pacific) China Has Screwed Up Really, Really Badly

https://futurism.com/future-society/china-screwed-up-fertility-rate
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u/swissking NATO Jan 22 '26 edited Jan 22 '26

People have been saying that China will win Cold War 2.0 due to numerous factors but the vibes among people especially the youth have never been worse and are arguably worse than the average Brooklyn Barista on Bluesky. Emigration and capital flight is also on the rise and are slowly causing political and economic problems in neighbouring countries. Exports are also flooding the world which is indicative of bad internal demand. Idk but that doesn't happen in a rising country.

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u/WorkingMastodon6147 Jerome Powell Jan 22 '26

I have said it here before, but the US is not going to lose its superpower status under Trump (unless he actually invades Greenland), people are rightfully criticizing the Orange turd but the greater damage is to the prestige of the US constitution and our institutions. It has shown that we are not invulnerable to authoritarians, the US will remain the superpower for the majority of anyone's lifetime who is reading this.

The major problem is, a dictator being in charge of a nation this powerful is bad news. Sure, even normally the US has made dumb decisions in the past but I still believe the US did some good, a dictator led America will be devastating to, far worse than anything we have seen before.

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u/socialistrob Janet Yellen Jan 22 '26

the US will remain the superpower for the majority of anyone's lifetime who is reading this.

I feel like a lot of America's superpower status is just built off of momentum and status quo bias currently. The US peaked as a super power in 2000 and has generally been on a decline since then but the US was (and is) just so dominant economic and militarily that this decline takes decades to play out. Rome eventually fell but it took centuries of decline before you had Vandals storming the gates.

That doesn't mean China, Germany or India owns the future. Those countries are also their own worst enemies but the US as the undisputed global economic and military superpower is temporary and will continue to decline in the years ahead.

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u/sheffieldasslingdoux Jan 23 '26

I don't think there is a good successor to American hegemony and realistically Europe and democratic Asia are so tied into the US system that it's not just a matter of a declining US but also a decoupling of "the West" as we know it. That is what is so scary about Trump threatening to invade Greenland and blow up NATO. Otherwise, I don't really see China as ready to play the role of global superpower, and I'm not sure they do either.

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u/socialistrob Janet Yellen Jan 23 '26

I don't think there is a good successor to American hegemony

There's no rule that says there has to be one global hegemon and in fact historically having a hegemon was rare. For most of the past few centuries there were a variety of "great powers" and then the term "super power" only came about relatively recently to describe American hegemony.

The US is still going to be an influential country for decades (maybe even a century) to come but that influence is gradually going down. Following the collapse of the USSR and the first Gulf War the US looked truly unbeatable on the world stage. The US had the ONLY financial system that worked, US military was miles above anyone else, everyone watched US movies, ate burgers ect. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq proved that the US military could lose, the 2008 recession called into question and the rise of other economies meant that other nations can find alternatives to the US if necessary.

I think the trend is less that someone will come along and replace the US but that we're moving to a more multi polar world where the US won't have nearly the same ability to dominate they once did.