No, that is exactly what you were getting at:

> China played the smart long game and took advantage of America's...

Zero sum games imply that if there is a winner, there has to be a loser. That one country takes advantage of another.

That's not my framing, that's literally what happened/is happening.

I think they're saying America ended up positioning itself as the loser because they framed things as a zero-sum game. Which of course is a generalization, neither America nor China is a monolith, but I can certainly see some presidencies of the last decades leaning more into this attitude than others.

“If you assume everyone only has hammers, you'll end up getting screwed”, or something like that.

Yes, thank you.

> I think they're saying America ended up positioning itself as the loser because they framed things as a zero-sum game.

I didn't bother responding earlier, and I'm not sure why I'm responding now because I don't think "because they framed things as a zero-sum game." explains anything, and it sounds like something that sounded like a retort but offered without any evidence means nothing.

Just like how not everything is a zero-sum game, not everything is a debate where one side tries to "win" where every exchange is an aggressive retort trying to disprove the other's point. I was trying to clarify what I suspected the intent was.

If even the suggestion of considering different points of view feels like an attempt to disprove your own position, then that mainly says something about how you are approaching this exchange.