Yeah, in Europe we simply don't have the money.

And with an aging population and stagnant/declining productivity that seems unlikely to improve in the future.

If anyone is going to overtake the US, it will be China.

Sounds same as China? No money, aging population? Not sure how the Chinese Universities are doing, but the international ones seem struggling (they pay foreign faculty 5–10x more, by law). Not so sure about the next 5 years. Could be messy.

Not investing well in education, health and infrastructure is one of the causes of the decline of Europe, and stagnant productivity.

Its not even so much as money not being spent, as money being spent badly. In the UK money is wasted on having too many universities and too many undergraduates. There are badly thought out commercial research subsidies. Schools are driven my metrics in a large scale proof of Goodheart's (Campbell's ?) law.

Why is this even an "if" at this point? China's EV industry has overtaken the US's. They are at worst only slightly behind in AI -- all of the best large open weight LLMs are from Chinese companies, and there are more major Chinese LLMs chasing SOTA than western SOTA LLMs.

Literally everything the second Trump administration has done in office has made the Chinese much stronger in every possible way, and the USA much weaker.

The USA isn't completely doomed if we can get past the current madness somehow. However, while I don't know what post-Trump America looks like, the USA has permanently ceded political and technical leadership. Trump has sealed the US's fate.