This doesn’t actually represent an American decline in space exploration, though.

The NASA/ESA Mars sample return was poorly designed, they basically attached a half baked idea to the Perseverance mission in the hopes that having the mission “underway” would make it easier to fund the rest of the mission. That meant Perseverance was just putting things in tubes and leaving them sealed on the ground at random places around Mars. So that meant they would need to devise another system to go collect them, another system to store and launch them, and another system to return them to Earth. That’s a ridiculous process. The costs exploded, the gambit failed.

China’s was much better planned, having the rover and launch vehicle land together, fully funded from the beginning. However, it’s also much simpler, there’s no picking and choosing what to sample from a wide area, it’s just whatever is available to the lander wherever it happens to land.

And this would not have been the only future mission to deep space. The US is going to land a fleet of drones on Mars. They’re launching a nuclear powered drone to Titan.

The US has led the world in reusable rocket development, satellite constellations, and crewed LEO operations.

The big picture is clear. This one mission doesn’t really say much about the space program in general.

That’s not quite true - Perseverance has tubes for every tube (10) it left behind. The tubes left behind are the backups in case something happened to Perseverance- the main tubes are on board and can be collected all at once when from the rover.