50-CLAPS. America needs to get its head out of its ass.

we are like the rich trust fund baby who has never needed to stomach real hardship and thus is ill equipped when the need arises.

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A tiny quibble. you end with some examples of the USA behaving badly. They are all true, but by the numbers they are tiny compared with China. If one wants to bash the USA, you probably need to look at larger numbers. e.g. total dead in Afghanistan after our long war there. These are not as clear as giving LSD to our citizens, but these numbers are comparable to the scale of things that China does.

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For what it is worth, I think the writing is on the wall. China *will* eclipse the USA, nothing to be done about that. So:

The USA should re-orient itself around being the freedom-loving, lower-corruption, number-2 that all nations want to be best friends with.

Mind you... we presently SUCK at this too. We need to keep our dick in our pants so to speak, which is very hard for America it seems. Still this *IS* a thing that the USA could theoretically change. While keeping China from Eclipsing us is simply not in the cards.

(Of course we could also still improve our infrastructure so we are not dropping like a ROCK relative to China)