Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Category: End of American Empire Page 1 of 5

China is a Rich Society. No Western Country Is.

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On August 20, 2025

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Chinese and American flags flying together

Saw this recently, from the University of Chicago:


The commentary is a bit of an exaggeration. But not too much.

Now if this was just one data point, it wouldn’t matter, but the bottom line is that funding for universities, including university research, in being massively cut in America and the UK, with issues in most Western countries. It’s not just about the humanities, science is getting hit hard, as is engineering.

As best I can tell, China has opened about 1,700 new universities and colleges in the past 25 years. Those that existed have expanded enrollment. It’s very reminiscent of the post war period in America. And the best of universities are excellent.

Americans are ostensibly rich, yes, but the society is not. A lot of the apparent wealth is false: if it costs one fifth as much to get dental or health care or one tenth as much to buy a good pair of earphones; if it costs one-third as much to buy an electric car, well, all of the extra cost in America goes to GDP, and Americans have higher incomes, but who’s actually richer?

And when you look at Chinese cities and provinces they are building infrastructure massively. The cities are beautifully lit up at night. There is a huge space program, even as the American space program is cut, and cut and cut. There are dozens of EV companies and in general there is competition in most of the cutting edge parts of the society. Coffee is cheaper (which is why Starbucks is getting shellacked in China). Everything is cheaper, there’s more of it and the government and private actors spend money on huge new projects, on research and on infrastructure.

China is a rich society, because they can do things. America’s last real gasp as a rich society was the Apollo program, ever since then, it’s been in retreat. Europe, well, Europe had a good time in the post war period, but since then, despite some success in the 90s and early 2000’s, it’s been in retreat and it has recently chosen the path of de-industrialization and xenophobic isolationism, which is not going to serve it. University cuts in the UK, in particular, have been savage, but Europe, even taken as a whole is behind China, the US, Japan and South Korea in research and technological advancement.

 

 

The Chinese have built massive high speed rail, lead in civilians drones, in robotics and are competitive in AI, which is 20x cheaper to run (more importantly, it uses FAR less energy than American AI, which draws more energy than entire countries.) They are ahead in most material sciences, catching up in civilian aviation (soon they will be ahead), have vastly more shipbuilding capacity, are ahead in missile technology, will soon eat SpaceX’s lunch  in launch costs (no, I will not be wrong about this.)

China does thing. The government is rich. Corporations are not spending all their money in stock buybacks and acquisitions, but are actually competing and trying to create new and better products than their competitors.

The best parallel is probably not post-war America, but pre-WWI America. China has taken the lead from America, there is zero chance of America catching up absent a large meteor hitting China, but they don’t actually spend much on their military. I was shocked to find out that the Chinese military has about 2.2 million soldiers out of a population of 1.4 billion. All of this with a sincere effort to provide a decent standard of living to everyone and a genuine attack on inequality. (Chinese inequality is very high, but it is concentrated in the top 10%, not the top .01%, which is being attacked by the government.)

China is a civilian society, with a civilian economy. It is in a vastly expansive phase, one which could last as much as sixty to eighty years, assuming environmental or international issues don’t derail it. (They will.)

China is where the future is. If you are younger, learn Mandarin. It will be as essential as English was for the past hundred and twenty years.

Hope for the future now rests in China. You may not like that, but it’s just a fact. They’re the country that can actually do things, and whether our problems are fixed, or mitigated (more likely) is up to them, just as for a long time it was up to the US (which failed almost completely, play “I see no evil, I hear no evil” every since 1980.

I don’t know if I for one welcome our Chinese overlords, but it doesn’t matter. They’re here. The West has already lost the race and is retreating into a poorer, more backwards second world situation, similar to the late USSR and Warsaw Pact.

It will end as well for the US and NATO as it did for the USSR and the Warsaw Pact.

***

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Elite Opinion In Canada Begins To Shift From America To China

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On July 16, 2025

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The Globe and Mail is one of the two main “newspapers of the elite” in Canada, and the older of the two. (The other one is the Nation Post). So this article is important:

Canada’s “deal” with the U.S. to drop the digital services tax, which benefits U.S. tech giants such as Meta and Netflix at the expense of Canadian fiscal sovereignty, and the Trump administration’s latest threat of a 35-per-cent tariff on Canadian goods perfectly encapsulate our current predicament: Washington no longer views Canada as an ally, but rather as a subordinate from which to extract concessions. It’s a stark reminder that trade diversification is no longer optional – it’s an urgent national imperative.

 

The rub is that our longstanding subordination to the U.S. is also holding us back from partnering with China, one of the world’s most important economies. To achieve economic sovereignty, Canada must break free from the made-in-Washington narrative that China is an unreliable trading partner bent on world domination. Instead, Canada must forge its own relationship with China – a relationship anchored in Canadian, not U.S., interests.

As the largest economy in the world on a purchasing power parity basis, China is set to be a core driver of future global economic growth. It also now accounts for a third of the world’s manufacturing output, more than all the G7 countries plus South Korea and Mexico combined. And not just low-cost manufacturing, but rather advanced production and world-beating technology. China leads in 37 of 44 critical technologies, from AI to green energy.

Everything said above is correct. I’d add that China is not an existential threat to Canada. They have never threatened our sovereignty the way Trump and the US has, and they never will. They cannot conquer us and are not stupid enough to believe they could, we are too large and too far away.

Of course we’ll have to kiss China’s ass if we want to move towards them. We’ve been very hostile for the last decade or so (we were friendly before that, it’s a policy change made by Trudeau).

I can’t see that kissing China’s ass is any more obnoxious than the deep tongue action we’ve been applying to America’s behind since 1984, with only a brief interregnum under Prime Minister Chretien (who used lips only.) In fact, China is likely to demand a lot less: mostly we have to stop discriminating against them economically (we can and should negotiate some carve-outs) and shut up about Taiwan. Given the size of our Navy our opinion on Taiwan is meaningless, and China isn’t going to Gaza the Taiwanese when they finally do unify, so this isn’t a very big concession.

It should be noted that Chinese military equipment appears, overall, to be superior to American and if we really intend to move away from the US, we shouldn’t be using American military gear. (I hope the reasons are obvious.) Moreover, China’s lead in military technology will just continue to grow.

Canada has three main geopolitical problems:

1) How to disentangle ourselves from America without getting invaded or economically crushed; and,

2) how to regrow our manufacturing capacity, so as to not become a 21st century Argentinian-style basket-case.

3) How not to go down with America.

We also have a number of serious domestic issues, a lot of them coming from American cultural, political and economic influence on Canada. Basically, we’re neoliberals, and we need to stop that, but America is dead set against it.

Anyway, America wants to cannibalize its allies to slow its decline and Canada would be stupid to go along, whether or not we fix our domestic issues.

It’s interesting to see that Canada’s elites are beginning to realize the bind. There is zero chance the Globe And Mail article would have been published if there weren’t powerful people in Canada who want the shift.

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Imperial Presidency Watch: Congress Loses Control Over The Purse

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On July 15, 2025

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So, the Supremes have decided, without even bothering to write an opinion, that the Department of Education can be massively reduced without Congressional approval:

The Supreme Court ruled on Monday that the Trump administration may fire more than half of the Department of Education’s workforce — mass terminations that, in Education Secretary Linda McMahon’s words, are “the first step on the road to a total shutdown” of the entire department.

The Court’s decision in McMahon v. New York, was handed down on the Court’s “shadow docket,” a mix of emergency motions and other expedited matters that the justices often decide without full briefing or oral argument. As is often the case in shadow docket decisions, none of the Republican justices explained their decision.

This is, in my opinion, and in line with most lawyers, 100% unconstitutional.

The McMahon decision is particularly unnerving because it suggests that President Donald Trump is allowed to “impound” federal spending — unilaterally refusing to spend money or to continue federal programs that are mandated by an act of Congress. While McMahon does not explicitly authorize impoundment, it allows the Trump administration to fire so many federal workers, in so many key roles, that the practical effect is to cancel entire federal programs.

Most of the creep of imperial presidency has been Congress giving its powers away: war acts which make it so the president can go to war without Congress, for example, or giving the President tariff authority (which Trump has misused, pretending everything is “national security”) and so on. Some have been unilateral grabs, such as using “signing statements” to change the clear intend of laws.

But this is a Presidential grab that the Supremes are waving thru. Even if they later rule that some stub of the Education department must remain, it’s clearly allowing the President to over-ride spending that Congress has mandated. I am unaware of any reasonable reading of the Constitution that allows this: the President is to execute Congress’s directives and does not have the authority to say “nah, we’re just not going to do that any more.”

Especially of interest here is that the Republicans didn’t bother to explain the ruling and didn’t give it a full trial. They know it’s completely indefensible on legal grounds, and they aren’t even going to try.

Ever since Citizen’s United I have told Americans to get out if they can and if not to prepare for horrific times. Children, we are now at the start of the collapse. Before this it was mostly gradual, but this is the real thing.

I mention Citizen’s  United (which allowed unlimited cash into US elections under the proposition that money is speech) because, of course, smashing the Department of Education while it’s something that Christofacists want, so they can ban books and write fantasy textbooks and fire teachers and Professors for saying things like “gay sex might not be bad,” or “American slavery was terrible” and so on, it’s also about privatizing as much of the education system as possible.

Remember that Trump’s main act, amidst all the Kabuki, was his budget, which slashed four trillion in taxes from rich people while cutting health care for poor people to partially pay for it. Trump’s priority, as per his actions, is to make the rich, richer. (His tariffs, while real, have been TACO: Trump chickens out when rich people start screaming.)

Make the public education shit for poor people, let the middle class have vouchers for some shit “charter” school and the upper class, as always, will send their kids to elite private schools.

A Republic, If You Can Keep It – Benjamin Franklin

Kept it for almost 250 years, but if this stands, if Congress loses its last real power, it’s over. A Republic is something rather specific, a divided form of government. And if one of the three branches has no effective power left, it’s not a Republic, especially since the Supremes, in other orders, are gutting the Judiciary’s power. The end of nationwide injunctions is particularly instructive. And let’s not forget the President’s Gestapo force, ICE, arresting Judges who try to interfere with immigration snatches.

Nothing is over till it’s over. But no one with sense would offer good odds that the US is going to come out of this era as the sort of place anyone with sense would want to live. Say what you will about China, but it’s light authoritarianism and actually delivers prosperity. At this point everyone not in the top 1% is seeing declines in wealth in America, plus you’re losing your civil liberties (citizenship revocation is very likely), plus you’re losing your Republic.

I consider it my duty to try and give a clear picture of the world to my readers so they can make good decisions. Other than the necessity of eating and not dying of exposure, it’s why I write. So… If you can get out. Get out. If you can’t, make preparations for Hell.

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The Middle East Is Hastening Ukraine’s Fall & The End of the European Era

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On June 25, 2025

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The Course of Empire by Thomas Cole

The Course of Empire by Thomas Cole

Rarely spoken of is the effects of the Middle Eastern wars on Ukraine. For a long time, Ukraine got everything it wanted, but since Oct 7th, it has been , or worse, on America’s priority list. Mossad has a great deal of influence in America, just short of control, almost certainly due to a sickening collection of videos and pictures, and Israel has received the first cut off everything it needed: most especially of interceptor missiles.

Even so, the reason that Israel and the US called for a ceasefire and Iran did not (though it accepted one) is that Israel was less than a week from running out of air defense missiles, and as best I can tell, the US could only have supplied about another 7-10 days worth.

What this means for Ukraine is simple enough, they’re being absolutely hammered by Russian missiles and bombs. They don’t have enough air defense, they don’t have enough missiles for the air defense, and there is no reasonable prospect of re-stocking. The West’s larder is empty.

The tempo of Russia advances continues to increase. It’s still slow, but it’s at least eight times as fast as it was a year ago, and as Ukraine runs out of men, weapons and ammunition (Western shortages go far beyond air defense), plus as morale continues to plummet in Ukrainian armed forces, the prospect of “big arrow” warfare grows closer.

As I’ve said before I expect that period will arrive next year. The fighting age male population is decimated, those willing to fight are or will be mostly dead, and Russia will win the war decisively, taking whatever they want to. The only danger of this not happening is Putin accepting a peace offer before that: like Khameini, he is very cautious, doesn’t like war and wants it over. If Zelensky ever gets his head on straight, or is replaced, he’s likely to accept a peace deal much short of what can be accomplished by arms and an unconditional surrender.

This will be a HUGE loss for the West. The first war they have decisively lost on the battlefield in generations. There will be no concealing it, and the inability to ramp up production of weapon systems and munitions will leave the collective West so weak that no one will be able to believe they could win a conventional war against China, or even Russia.

It will, psychologically, be the end of Western hegemony. For almost 400 years the West has been dominant, and since Industrial Revolution, overwhelmingly dominant.

That era is almost over. The economic aftershocks will be huge: the end of American dollar hegemony is likely within five years, ten at the most and the entire world except, perhaps, Canada, the US and Europe, will re-orient to China. The US will even lose South Korea and Japan as reliable allies, indeed, it arguably already has (more on that another time.)

This is a literal epochal period. The “nothing ever happens” fools are missing that this is the end of a literal era: the era of European supremacy (the US is just a European settler state and Britain’s successor.)

The new era will be multipolar only if China wants it to be. They are approaching “America after WWII” levels of industrial and technological power. However, for at time, they will probably allow a multipolar world, as they are smart enough not to want to be a superpower or “world cop.”

Normally this would cycle to a superpower period, but environmental issues are likely to short-circuit normal macro-geopolitical cycles. Everyone will wind up in survival mode, and the question will be who manages this best. Whoever does will lead the next cycle, which will occur long after most or all of us are dead.

So, as best you can, you may as well be interested. You are living in truly interesting times, which come around only every half millenia or so.

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The US Continues to Accelerate Its Decline (+Iran)

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On June 18, 2025

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I wavered between writing another Iran war update and this article, so I’ll say a few things about the Iranian war. There’s evidence that Israeli intelligence networks in Iran and elsewhere are being compromised fast. It appears that:

 

That India, a Hindu/Brahmin supremacist state which is increasingly treating its minorities the way Israel used to treat Palestinians before it went full genocidal, is allied this deeply with Israel is not a surprise. That they were willing to flush their intelligence network down the drain for Israel shows that they’re as stupid as the US.

This will, of course, lead to Indian tech and guest workers being unwelcome, and a massive crash in foreign earnings sent back to India.

Meanwhile, the US is sending vast numbers of planes and supplies to the Middle East. Only B-2 bombers can deliver munitions powerful enough to actually crack Iran’s underground nuclear enrichment. Trump is screaming “unconditional surrender,” the propaganda operation is in full echo of the Iraq war, and it certainly looks like the US is going to enter the war, though Trump is so fickle that nothing is certain until it happens.

Still, my guess is that TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out) rankles with Trump, and since he’s too gutless to stand firm on tariffs, he’ll start a war.

Likewise, as Bush Jr. understood, war-time Presidents are popular. Trump’s polls are atrocious, and he will expect a rally around effect from being a war President to repair them and save him in the mid-terms.

Now, to the larger picture. A US war against Iran, combined with Ukraine and all the munitions sent to Israel, means that the US will not be able to directly fight China or Russia for years.

The non-secret weakness of the US military is how little munitions they are able to produce, a weakness which extends throughout NATO. Western militaries are expeditionary forces, even the American one, intended for fighting non-peer adversaries who are expected to collapse quickly. This means that production of war materials is low.

For example, the US produces the following quantities of air defense missiles every year:

  • Patriot: 500-550, expected to go up to 650 by 2027 (the rate of increase is itself pathetic.)
  • SM-6 (Aegis naval AD): 125-150 a year
  • SM-3 (Aegis again): 20-50  a year
  • Stinger (man-pad AD, important in Ukraine): 600-700 a year.
  • AIM-120 AMRAAM (middle-range A-A): 800-1,000
  • Sidewinder (short-range A-A): 1600-1800 a year
  • THAAD (Air ground for intercepting short- to medium-range ballistic systems; Israel uses these, Ukraine doesn’t): 50-100/year

Numbers for offensive missiles are similar:

  • Tomahawk missiles (sea-launched vs. ground targets): 68-100/year
  • JASSM missiles (long-range precision cruise missile): 200-300/year
  • Javelin anti-tank (man-portable): 1,200-1,500/year
  • MGM-400 ATACMS (ground-to-ground, launched from HIMARS and MLRS launchers): 50-100/year
  • Hellfire (short-range air-to-ground, laser-guided, launched from helicopters): 500-1000/year

Exact numbers are hard to determine for obvious reasons. Stockpiles of most of these missiles (but not all) have been drawn down vastly throughout the Ukraine and Israeli-everyone wars. If Iran is attacked, multiple years’ worth of production will be used up.

This means that China will have complete dominance in the their part of the Pacific, definitely around Taiwan and the first island chain, for years. Indeed, by the time the US re-stockpiles, China will be so far ahead in numbers of missiles that it will be hopeless, and that’s before we get to the fact that China can replenish stocks much faster than the US.

All of this goes without even discussing drones, where China’s lead is astronomical.

Empires do not go gentle into that good night. What the US is doing and enabling is monstrous.

But it is also accelerating American decline.

That is in foreign affairs. Domestically, Trump is systematically destroying the basis of American advancement in tech and science. The idea that private enterprise, which does not do basic research, can make up the difference is ludicrous to anyone who knows how science and tech works. Indeed, the current AI boom is based on university research from the 80s (Granted, it’s from research in Canada (!), a country the US has decided to turn from an ally into an opponent.)

Trump is also dismantling the social welfare system, turning the US into a police state (and not the sort-of-good kind, yes, they exist, China is one of them), massively increasing inequality and basically destroying any remaining social solidarity between Americans.

I can’t think of a more destructive US President except maybe Reagan (but that was long term). Even Herbert Hoover looks good. (He didn’t cause the stock market crash, he just responded badly.) Trump is just so actively malign. He’s not a Russian agent, but the cold war KGB couldn’t have put someone in place who was more damaging, even in their wildest dreams.

So, all of this is awful. But the US’s days are numbered, truly. Unless you are very old, or die an early death, you will see the end of the American Empire and even of American hegemony over the Americas.

***

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The End of America as the Essential Consumer Nation

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On May 26, 2025

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For ages, everyone needed access to the American market. I used to call the US, “the consumer of last resort.” If you wanted to get rich, if you wanted to industrialize, if you wanted to scale, you needed the American market. Europe sold to the US, Japan sold to the US, South Korean and China sold to the US. This requirement is why Japan was forced to sign the Plaza Accords, which basically destroyed their future. Oh, life in Japan is fine now, but it’s no longer the roaring Tiger of the 80s.

But the US has lost its place, which is why China was able to laugh in its face when Trump tried to use tariffs against it. His assumption was that China needed the American market. This was true 20 years ago, maybe true ten years ago, but it’s not true now.

But wait… there’s more!

Not so pretty, is it? And unlike America, Chinese consumers aren’t in debt. Their market isn’t based on a deck of cards or predatory lending meant to lock consumers into never ending debt payments.

Looks a lot like America in the 50s and 60s, actually.

China’s growing fast, and certain respects, they’re growing smart.

China is building nuclear plants 2 to 4 times faster than the West and 3 to 7 times cheaper”

Further, China is building far more renewable energy than anyone else, and MAGidiots beliefs aside, it’s working out just fine for them. Ninety percent of new power in China is renewable.

You can see this on this lovely map:

Indeed, for the first time ever, China’s increasing energy demand happened at the same time as a reduction in CO2 production. If there’s a hope for us on climate change (there really isn’t, but still) it’s that China is the primary industrial power AND its leaders and population aren’t idiots who think climate change is a hoax or that it’s real but ignoring it is good for the economy.

Now this isn’t to say that China’s all wonderful or anything. They have high speed trains and they’re electrifying based on renewable energy and to a much lesser extent nuclear fast, but they still have an insane car-centric society.

Still, they’re more sane than any other major country, by a fair margin.

China is now the world’s largest consumer, industrial producer, ship builder, drone maker, auto manufacturer, leads in about 80% of tech fields, produces more scientific papers and patents than any other country, has 8 of the world’s top 10 research universities (Harvard is the only American university on the list, at , but…. recent events are not promising), the most electricity production and the cleanest energy mix of any major country.

The idea that China and the US have a serious rivalry is laughable. The US has lost. It’s like Britain in 1920. It’s all over, except, possibly, for the shooting.

 

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America’s Military Power Is a Legacy Asset

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On May 19, 2025

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Chinese and American flags flying together

Since the industrial revolution, military power has been largely a function of three factors:

  1. Technology
  2. Industrial Capacity
  3. Population

As time goes by, population becomes less important (see, rise of drones), but it still matters. Think of it as something like Tech x IndCap x (Pop x .5).

The US has a powerful military, though most of the technology is one or two generations old. The general consensus is that Pakistan’s Chinese jets (themselves last-gen tech) out-performed India’s Western jets.

At this point, China is ahead in about 80 percent of tech fields. China has 31 percent of world industrial capacity, and the US about 16 percent, meaning that China has about twice as much. Further, China owns the entire supply chain for many of its technologies, whereas the US’s supply chain is reliant on China.

Finally, of course, China’s share of world industrial capacity is increasing.

A lot of civilian industry can easily be turned into military tech. This is what made the US “the arsenal of democracy” in World War II.

China has about 230x the shipbuilding capacity of the US.

China produces about 20K civilian drones a day. The US produces about 20K civilian drones a year.

The US and Canada combined produce about 12 million cars a year. China produces about 30 million cars a year.

So in a real war, where civilian industry is retooled for military production, well, China is well ahead. In the case of drones and ships, ludicrously ahead.

The US finds itself in a similar position to Japan on the eve of the Pacific War. Japan had a powerful fleet and air force, but it couldn’t replace equipment losses to match the rate of the US, let alone expand its arsenal. If it isn’t a “short victorious war,” the US loses, unless it goes nuclear, in which case everyone loses.

This imbalance is only going to get worse. China has a ridiculously small army of about two million, with a million paramilitary. When you consider its population of 1.4 billion, well, again, China is similar to the US before WW2; an industrial behemoth with an undersize military, but which can be expected to ramp up — fast.

(These numbers are better if one includes South Korea and Japan, or even the EU, but then one has to add Russia to the Chinese side. And the way the US is acting, it’s less and less clear its allies will support it in a shooting war, especially if it starts the war. Never thought I’d say that about Japan, but Trump has really shit the bed with his insane trade war.)

All of this is going to get worse and worse for the US. China is increasing its tech and industrial lead, while the US is systematically de-funding its research sector even as erratic economic policy makes long-term investment in new industrial capacity difficult. China’s civilian airline industry is taking off, its car industry is expanding as the West’s collapse, and it’s the only real player in the drone space.

China doesn’t want a war for the simple reason that the longer they put one off, the easier it will be if it happens — and the less likely it will be to happen, because Americans will be unable to sustain the delusion that they have any chance of winning said war.

The American era is over. It’s even likely that the US will lose control of South America, which it has had since the late 19th century. (Yes, there were theoretically independent nations in South America. Theoretically.) It will be pushed back to its North American stronghold, where it even seems to be attempting to lose effective control of Mexico and Canada, which is an entirely self-inflicted wound, as both nations wanted to stay under the US wing.

Just as the sun set on the British Empire, today it is at the horizon for America, and the long European supremacy is nearly over. The world returns to its normal state, where the Middle Kingdom is the most important and prosperous country in the world.

 

This blog has always been free to read, but it isn’t free to produce. If you’d like to support my writing, I’d appreciate it. You can donate or subscribe by clicking on this link.

“Art of the Cave”: Trump Walks Back China Tariffs For 90 Days

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On May 12, 2025

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Well, maybe. Who the hell knows what he’ll do. Anyway, tariffs are back to 30% on China and 10% on America.

This is exactly what China demanded, for tariffs to go back to what they were before April 2nd.

There will still be a two month trade burp. Ships weren’t leaving China for the US at all, literally zero. Lot of freight companies are about to make a mint, though. So expect some shortages, but nothing worse than Covid, and hopefully lasting less time.

The fundamental problem remains, however, which is that there’s no certainty around any of this, so business people can’t make long term plans, including plans to build or relocate manufacturing. Trump and the US can’t be trusted to stay steady on policy, so avoiding making big plans involving the US makes sense.

The Great Power picture is clearer, however. The US tried to impose its will on China and failed. China wouldn’t negotiate till its pre-conditions were met. The world has two great powers, with the EU bidding to become the third (I think they’ll fail, but that’s what the rearmament is about.)

And, in economic terms, China is by far the pre-eminent great power. It isn’t even close. The era of American hegemony is officially over. The US tried to impose its will on the world and failed.

This blog has always been free to read, but it isn’t free to produce. If you’d like to support my writing, I’d appreciate it. You can donate or subscribe by clicking on this link.

 

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