> I'm puzzled why we talk about "US decline" when we're pretty much creating paeans to marginal energy construction.

It's literally just a mind virus and folks hear it on the news and like the Chinese hypersonic missiles they just hear some capability or reporting and then don't know what to do with it except to parrot it.

They don't think about China's lying down culture [1], for example, ghost cities and over-building doesn't seem to phase them [2] (communism tends to waste a lot of money and drive economic inefficiency), China's over-capacity for manufacturing and now struggling to find markets for goods [3], local corruption, disappearing of folks who disagree with their government, and more. Even with respect to infrastructure. Yea they built a lot. Good luck maintaining it at an affordable cost. China has more manpower to do literally throw bodies at the problem, but economic physics will still win out and China's declining population and demographic crises and xenophobic culture don't help.

Now, with that being said, China has done some absolutely amazing and wonderful things. But we shouldn't confuse China's progress with a corresponding American decline. Instead, the more sophisticated model is looking at both American and Chinese progress while other nations, and the EU are struggling.

  [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/03/world/asia/china-slackers-tangping.html
  [2] https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/09/sp-i-china-property-slump-worse-than-expected.html
  [3] https://www.ft.com/content/6822f01a-147a-4b04-a9d6-edeefc25d0d8?syn-25a6b1a6=1

Yeah I see that we're entering a multipolar world, where China and the US form 2 dominant poles but other countries/alliances like India and the Gulf States create stiff competition. A world with more prosperity for more people seems good to me.