You are correct, and this is America's, and West's predicament.

If you can't do this, you can't do this.

And you certainly wouldn't be able to do even more painful things which are truly needed for the West to have any chance to put the genie back into the bottle.

China, and Russia have effectively conditioned the NATO countries over the decades into "self-beneficial inaction." Now, seeing words like yours proves their strategy worked.

This is still a massive improvement over the Cold War, though.

Aside from the small detail that we appear to be losing, this time.

It's a funny kind of losing. It looks more like "not totally dominant" to me, which may be confused with losing by people who've not experienced that.

What has the US really lost? No territory, no people; there's no stream of refugees to the "winning" Chinese side.

We just got done dealing with four years of leadership by a (possibly unwitting) agent of a foreign power, installed with the help of holes in our IT infrastructure. Our sovereignty and capacity for effective self-governance are severely compromised, at this point. That's more important than loss of territory or people, in the long run.

>"We just got done dealing with four years of leadership by a (possibly unwitting) agent of a foreign power"

Trump was anything but. Your writing just makes no sense.

It's a matter of figuring out the process. You can swap sets of things based on how easy it is to achieve similar enough economics elsewhere or elsewise.

This isn't some insurmountable problem. Yes, there are scenarios where you go "too fast" and raise too many prices too quickly and piss people off. Or, you go slower and make it more palatable.