Behold the latest chapter in the tedious, unending saga of global hegemony, a spectacle so profoundly stupid it almost makes one long for the relative dignity of the Black Death. The world’s two largest economies—the United States, a theme park of its own faded glory, and China, a sprawling surveillance apparatus with a manufacturing addiction—are squaring off in what the breathless hacks of the mainstream press call an 'almighty trade clash.' I call it a pathetic displays of two geriatric titans fighting over who gets to rule the graveyard of the 21st century. The question posed is whether China can 'fight America alone.' The real question is why any of us should care which brand of authoritarian consumerism eventually suffocates the planet.

In Washington, the political class has reached a rare, terrifying consensus. Whether they wear the blue tie of performative empathy or the red tie of mask-off greed, the mission is the same: blame the 'Yellow Peril' for the fact that the American dream was sold off for parts decades ago. The Biden administration, in its infinite wisdom, has decided that the best way to save the planet is to make sure nobody can afford an electric vehicle unless it was bolted together by a disgruntled worker in a swing state. They’ve slapped 100% tariffs on Chinese EVs, pretending this is about 'fair competition' and not about shielding domestic auto giants who spent the last twenty years lobbying against fuel efficiency while churning out three-ton emotional support trucks for suburbanites. It is the height of American narcissism to demand a 'green transition' while simultaneously ensuring the most affordable green technology remains locked behind a wall of protectionist spite.

On the other side of the Pacific, the CCP is doubling down on its own brand of delusional grandeur. Xi Jinping has pivoted to 'New Productive Forces,' a charming euphemism for flooding the world with cheap high-tech junk because the domestic Chinese property market is currently a smoking crater. Having realized that you can't build an economy entirely on empty apartment complexes in cities no one lives in, Beijing has decided to manufacture its way out of a systemic collapse. They expect the rest of the world to simply lie down and accept a tsunami of subsidized lithium batteries and solar panels, all while they tighten the internal screws on a population that is increasingly wondering where the 'miracle' went. China isn't fighting for 'free trade'; they are fighting for the right to be the world’s primary supplier of planned obsolescence.

Let’s analyze the sheer, unadulterated hypocrisy of the American position. For forty years, the U.S. preached the gospel of neoliberalism, demanding that every developing nation tear down its borders and expose its industries to the 'magic of the market.' Now that the monster they helped create—by offshoring every middle-class job to Shenzhen to satisfy the quarterly earnings calls of a few ghoulish billionaires—has finally grown big enough to bite, they’ve suddenly discovered the virtues of industrial policy. It turns out the 'invisible hand' is actually a middle finger pointed directly at the Rust Belt. The American Right screams about 'sovereignty' while their donors' portfolios are inextricably tied to Chinese labor, and the American Left wrings its hands over 'human rights' while checking their iPhones for the latest outrage manufactured in a factory with suicide nets. They are all, without exception, frauds.

China’s position is no less absurd. They claim to be the champions of globalism and the 'Global South,' yet they operate the most sophisticated digital iron curtain in history and use debt-trap diplomacy to turn half of Africa into a collection of resource-extraction outposts. They speak of 'win-win cooperation,' which in Mandarin apparently translates to 'we win now, and we win later.' The irony of a nominally Communist state being the most aggressive practitioner of state-sponsored hyper-capitalism is lost on no one but the most committed party loyalists and the western academics who get paid to overlook it. They aren't 'fighting America alone'; they are fighting the reality that their model of infinite growth on a finite planet is just as broken as the Western one.

What we are witnessing is a divorce between two toxic narcissists who are still forced to share the same studio apartment. The supply chains are so deeply entangled that a true 'decoupling' would result in a global standard of living comparable to the late 1700s, yet both sides must pretend they are ready for war to satisfy their respective domestic audiences of angry, misled rubes. The American consumer, meanwhile, is the ultimate loser—denied the technology of the future to protect the profits of the past, all while being told that their skyrocketing cost of living is a patriotic duty. We are being asked to choose between a declining empire that has lost its mind and a rising one that never had a soul. Personally, I’m rooting for the asteroid. It’s the only player in this game that isn’t trying to sell us a subscription service to our own obsolescence.