The reality is, our political and corporate elites made a deal with the devil two decades ago, because the $ to be made off-shoring manufacturing and gaining access to Chinese markets was too good to pass up. They lied to the public that China posed no economic or military threat going forward, and that our glorious free markets would inevitably lead to a bottom-up liberalization of China.

Instead, we've played ourselves for absolute suckers, and as China's economy and military muscle continues to rapidly expand and the rest of the world is increasingly dependent on its products and markets, they're beginning to throw their weight around. All the pearl-clutching over Trump's tariffs and attempt at a renewed industrial policy (however poorly executed) elided the question of what exactly anyone else was proposing to do, with the default being the continuation of business-as-usual.

People need to wake up and realize China is a far greater geopolitical threat than the USSR ever was. They have a massive population and they've melded together free-ish market strategic industrial capitalism with a totalitarian panopticon state unlike anything the world has ever seen. Their military is rapidly catching up with if not in some areas surpassing our own, and we're sitting on our asses arguing over idiotic domestic squabbles assuming the unipolar post-cold war world will continue on forever. Because Muricuh!

Frankly, thank god this is finally bleeding out into popular culture, because maybe average citizens will start to realize what a straight-line projection of our current situation is going to look like in a decade or two.