The US is undermining its own (and everyone else's) economy just fine, no imaginary assistance from China necessary.
The role of the US was always to purchase cheap Chinese hardware, slap some modestly better software on top of it and the rest of the world happily would pay for that as a whole package. But with the US increasingly becoming isolationist, the rest of the world is starting to wonder why do we need the US as a middleman at all, so the US had to invent a whole new reason for the rest of the world to rely on it: AI.
Of course, the problem with this idea is that while everyone was perfectly happy with the previous arrangement, nobody else in the world gives a shit about AI. It's scary, it takes the coolest things we used to enjoy doing and turns into mush, it destroys our local culture by making us all rely on English, everything bad (like layoffs) gets blamed on AI and so on and so on. And when you combine that with the rest of the stupid foreign policy decisions, many would find joy in witnessing the US economy crumble to the ground. Pointing the blame to China instead of to your own reflection in the mirror is just an easier pill to swallow.
This is spot on. The US under MAGA are actively dismantling their once leading position in IT as well as defence. I guess it is hard to see as a US citizen but from outside this is clear as glass.
I’m not American, sir. But I disagree with your analysis. I think you’re looking back over too short a timescale.
Trivialise it all you want, but the world is vastly different from what it was at the beginning of 2025 and I don't think you or anyone else can deny that in any way.
What happens next remains to be written, but so far this new order seems to be leaning heavily towards China and to a lesser extent the EU. Not because of anything those two have or have not done, but because of what has up-until-that-point been widely considered to be world's number one superpower losing its damn mind. I don't even have to come up with a list of examples to prove my point, we both have pretty much the same list in our minds already.
Instead, I'll just quote the President of the United States from a little over 24h ago:
> I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation. I don’t think about anybody.
AI is just another in a series of slaps to everyone's faces by the US. If it has some legitimate long-term use (which according to me is still an open question, although to many others it is not), thank god the US does not have as significant of a moat as necessary to fully control it, as the crux of it is easily replicable (albeit expensive).
> The role of the US was always to purchase cheap Chinese hardware, slap some modestly better software on top of it and the rest of the world happily would pay for that as a whole package
Curious where Intel, AMD, Nvidia, etc are in your "cheap Chinese hardware"?
And by "role", do you mean doing the majority of the R&D behind the modern hardware we all use?
That's just Chinese hardware with extra steps. If you don't believe me, feel free to look up the list of CEOs that are in China right now as a part of the US delegation.
As for the R&D part, Huawei is still pretty much indistinguishable from any other phone. I could buy one right now if I wanted to. It has shittier software though.
USA is not becoming isolationist. Venezuela, Cuba, Iran, threats to Greenland and Canada are not isolationists. They are the opposite of it - interventionist to the max.