America: The Real Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon › Victor Davis Hanson

[mystery-ak]

America: The Real Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon › American Greatness
Victor Davis Hanson


One American view of China—now increasingly popular on the Left and the Right alike, especially among the hate-Trump crowd—is that the communist colossus will be forever ascendant, with continued astonishing levels of food production, ship construction, and industrial output. In this pessimistic view, China will soon replace America as the world’s predominant power. We are, supposedly, like an exhausted British Empire circa 1945, and China is the new version of the postwar American powerhouse.

Yet even Beijing’s miraculous 30-year leap out of poverty into first-world affluence and Westernized power is hardly the same as parity with the US. In truth, Trump held almost all the cards at the current summit and will do so again when Xi Jinping visits the US this autumn. According to nearly every historical measure of power, the US leads China by sizable margins—in wealth, economic output, fuel, food, and military strength.

China has roughly four times the population of the US, but produces only about 60 percent of our total GDP. A crude way of looking at this asymmetry is that one US citizen accounts for 40 percent more goods and services than his four Chinese counterparts. Americans enjoy a per capita GDP (roughly $95,000) over six times higher than China’s (roughly $15,000).

We are the largest oil and gas producer and exporter in history; China must import 11 to 12 million barrels of oil every day. The US is also the greatest food exporter in history; China, for all its miraculous increases in agricultural productivity, still must import 30–40 percent of its food, a number that keeps rising as China becomes more affluent and more diverse in its food consumption.

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https://amgreatness.com/2026/05/19/america-the-real-crouching-tiger-hidden-dragon/

[IsailedawayfromFR]

Excellent piece as usual for VDH.

I particularly like

Finally, the Ukraine and Iran wars have taught the world that cheap drones can sometimes nullify missile defenses and are nearly as effective as $100 million combat aircraft and $4 million missiles. The US is now rapidly incorporating the data from these two wars and will soon deploy a vast fleet of its own air, surface, and submarine drones.

[BobfromWB]

Excellent piece as usual for VDH.

I particularly like

Finally, the Ukraine and Iran wars have taught the world that cheap drones can sometimes nullify missile defenses and are nearly as effective as $100 million combat aircraft and $4 million missiles. The US is now rapidly incorporating the data from these two wars and will soon deploy a vast fleet of its own air, surface, and submarine drones.

None of them including the astounding combat system that integrates all of it, will be from the Ukraine. None of them will be cheap, none of them will be battle tested like the drones and systems from Ukraine.

Some will be from a company backed by Eric Trump, if that's any clue.

[The_Reader_David]

Later in the article than the bit quoted, VDH writes, "American universities’ science, technology, engineering, and mathematics departments dominate global rankings." 

Given his attacks on science funding and universities in general, one might think Trump was acting as an asset for the CCP in that regard.

The justification for those attacks, wokeness and biased "climate science", should be addressed not by cutting the NSF and NIH budgets, but by seeing to it that they actually fund science, not nonsense like mathematics conference for women and requiring that any program funding research that bears on public policy also fund a "red team" effort led by the most eminent critics of the dominant view in the field.

[jafo2010]

With what I have read in recent months, I dispute the commonly worded estimate of China's population.  It is possible they may have a population as small as 400 million.  China's rather dishonest portrayal of its population may just be the dragon attempting to portray itself as a greater threat than it is.

However, the USA has failed miserably in protecting the interests of the American people, of this nation with its continued nurturing of the communist state.  On one hand, they are our greatest enemy, on the other, we have 400,000 Chinese nationals in our universities right now, many as part of the vast majority of foreigners holding graduate positions in our universities versus US citizens.  If that isn't anti American, I do not know what is.

Congress long ago should have demanded a minimum of 60%+ of grad positions be occupied by US citizens.  Universities have long been dumping on this country, and it will have an adverse impact in time, one I fear will not be reversed.
 
Our republic was lost with the fixed election in 2020, our education system is not worth used TP, from K to grad school.  We are graduating students whose only achievement is knowing nothing.  LITERALLY!  They know nothing, they have next to zero critical thinking, cannot solve simple math in their heads or on paper, they have zero lnowledge of history, geography, writing, etc.  We have dumbed this nation down successfully and flooded it with tens of millions of people with extremely low IQs, all in preparation to become part of the globalist vision of being a controlled state.  When does it end?

[BobfromWB]

With what I have read in recent months, I dispute the commonly worded estimate of China's population.  It is possible they may have a population as small as 400 million.  China's rather dishonest portrayal of its population may just be the dragon attempting to portray itself as a greater threat than it is.

However, the USA has failed miserably in protecting the interests of the American people, of this nation with its continued nurturing of the communist state.  On one hand, they are our greatest enemy, on the other, we have 400,000 Chinese nationals in our universities right now, many as part of the vast majority of foreigners holding graduate positions in our universities versus US citizens.  If that isn't anti American, I do not know what is.

Congress long ago should have demanded a minimum of 60%+ of grad positions be occupied by US citizens.  Universities have long been dumping on this country, and it will have an adverse impact in time, one I fear will not be reversed.
 
Our republic was lost with the fixed election in 2020, our education system is not worth used TP, from K to grad school.  We are graduating students whose only achievement is knowing nothing.  LITERALLY!  They know nothing, they have next to zero critical thinking, cannot solve simple math in their heads or on paper, they have zero knowledge of history, geography, writing, etc.  We have dumbed this nation down successfully and flooded it with tens of millions of people with extremely low IQs, all in preparation to become part of the globalist vision of being a controlled state.  When does it end?

It ends when China, through stealth, takes over America, and the Chinese Old Guard realizes their dream of living in a country with clean water and clean air. Low IQ imported people will be put in Uyghurs style camps.