“The scale of China’s transformation poses what might be called the intellectual challenge of acknowledgement. Even those of us who have followed China closely, who pride ourselves on seeing past Western prejudices, have found it difficult to fully absorb what we are witnessing,” he noted in The Ideas Letter in October last year.
He argued that there is slowly some recognition of the global transition of power and that it is raising uncomfortable questions about the strength and resilience of Western societies.
“Seeing a rival building, educating and innovating at the scale that China has done casts US dysfunction into sharper relief. Every infrastructure breakdown, every squabble over basic funding, every government shutdown feels more noticeable in contrast to China’s rapid and extensive transformation.”
The day of reckoning will inevitably come if the two countries continue their present trajectories but writers such as Kaiser are still in the minority and have not influenced mainstream US thinking, especially in politics.
Mr Trump’s actions are more indicative of a country that believes it is still in triumphalist mode. But because it is not as dominant as before, it will find that its actions no longer produce the expected results.
THE TELLTALE SIGNS OF DECLINE
At the beginning of decline, a country behaves as if it isn’t but will quickly find out the limits of its falling influence.
This is what is happening regarding US action in Venezuela and Greenland. There are three telling indications.