https://us10.campaign-archive.com/?u=9116789a51839e0f88fa29b83&id=646c7b19aa&e=a7192bc790
"PS: Just two months after you argued (in June) that “America’s attempt to ‘get tough’ with China could accelerate its own relative decline,” the US Treasury has officially designated that country a currency manipulator. America, you’ve said, “will never reclaim the standing it had in 2000, and it probably cannot even recover the tenuous but still solid geopolitical position it enjoyed in 2016.” With this latest move, has the US reached the point of no return?
BD: As Adam Smith once wrote, “there is a great deal of ruin in a nation.” There are rarely true points of no return. Moreover, in this case, China faces serious problems of its own, relating to governance, inequality, and development. It is also on the frontlines of the slow-moving but dire climate crisis, in a way that the US is not.
That said, the US will not recapture its position as the triumphant leader and guide of global progress that it was at the end of Bill Clinton’s presidency, or even as the wounded but still-preeminent global power it was at the end of Barack Obama’s presidency. This will be true, even if the forces that elected Donald Trump are as scotched as the supporters of Republican California Governor Pete Wilson were after he declared Hispanics the state’s Public Enemy #1 back in the 1990s. It will be true, even if Trump’s successor goes on a global apology and listening tour, and the US works very hard to become its best self.
Whatever happens, the US can hope only to be one power among several. The world is in desperate need of mechanisms that can underpin the provision of global public goods in such a multipolar world."
