I think China played the primary role in COVID destroying the world as we know it, but we’ll have to be more patient than the excruciatingly patient Chinese to punish them. China essentially boiled the American frog over the last 4 decades by taking advantage of our “perpetual growth paradox” approach towards business. Substantial year over year growth became the expectation for American businesses and China was a conduit to lower costs, so we started relying heavily on them for manufacturing to the point where even components in critical military equipment and infrastructure are made in China with unknown hardware backdoors that could shut that equipment down if a hot war broke out.
China is our friend as much as a drug dealer is to a junkie. They kept life cheap long enough for us to get addicted. The solution is to use the same “boiled frog” approach toward breaking away from them, but at a quicker pace because the Chinese government is temperamental and prideful. The moment they catch on that significant change is occurring, they’ll turn the screws on us in an attempt to inflict as much damage as possible as quickly as possible. There is no diplomacy, there are no beneficial deals to be done. It’s a deal with the devil every time, so we need to find Jesus, so to speak. The moment we stop playing ball is the moment they turn overtly hostile, economically first. But if we can position ourselves well enough, we mitigate the damage and let them flail until they burn out, much like post-Soviet Russia has been doing.
It needs to be done, but we still lack the willpower, both politically and economically, to do it. To borrow from a popular phrase uttered during the last major global conflict, we’ll do the right thing after exhausting all other options.