Th narrative of "the west doesn't manufacture anything" is greatly oversold. The US makes more steel than it did 40 years ago, for example. Sure, we make fewer hairs and t-shirts, but it's natural for that stuff to chase lower labor costs. We're also an agricultural powerhouse.
Now, for sure we have fallen a bit behind in making chips, but that may change.
Because we hit max depth, I'll respond to your bizarre fever dream about the Millennium Challenge and some hypothetical war with China. The only things that matters in a war between nuclear states is that both sides view it as too terrible to entertain. Nuclear subs mean that the US always has the option to deal a killing blow even if everything else fails. And if it comes to that, nothing else matters anyway, so why worry about it?
They can go on fancifully pretending to plan for 500 years from now, and we'll continue to innovate, live well by comparison, and at the end of the day there's relatively little reason for us to have a major conflict.
I mean I think you hit the nail on the head with nuclear, and I hope the war won't go nuclear. But the war will result in the complete impotence of the USA. China will become like the British empire: its influence will be everywhere. The USA will have no influence. In 50 years, at the outside, the USA will have a worse standard of living than China. China will out innovate us. Out sell us. Out market us. Out maneuver us. We've lost the Philippines, but that's ok because its far away. We'll keep saying that until Mexico is part of the Chinese empire.
The point is that the war wont go nuclear. It'll say conventional, and that's why we'll lose. We won't have the bottle to pull the trigger. Think you can bluff the Chinese? Lol. "Oh, we are really sorry that you aircraft carrier got sunk in an amazingly tragic accident involving our hypersonic missile test. That is terrible." "Ok, but this is the fifth time, if it happens again we'll nuke you, we swear."
Really the only conclusion I can form from the USA's willful inaction is that the politicians are already bought and paid for.
>and at the end of the day there's relatively little reason for us to have a major conflict
That's exactly what will be said in the USA. "Well, they've put missile bases on these man-made islands, but that's little reason to go to war." "Well, they've bought and paid for contracts that would previously go to US companies through bribery and corruption (or rather spending more on bribery and corruption than we did), but that's little reason to go to war." "Oh, they sunk a carrier and they're really sorry about it, but that's little reason to go to war".
One day the world will be China's, and the USA will have spent fifty years repeatedly, impotently, drawing lines in the sand.
Put another way: The Soviets had nukes, but by the 1980s we'd beaten them. Products all over the world had Made in USA written on them. US products, US money all over the world, protected by US military technology. Now swap Russia with USA, and USA with China, 1980 with 2040. 2030?
>>...at the end of the day there's relatively little reason for us to have a major conflict.
...at the end of today. <<FTFY
today, there is not, but autocratic regimes create their own reasons to have major conflicts. They are expansionist, and will keep at it until stopped. Moreover, the longer they are allowed to engage in bad behavior, the larger the conflict that will be required to fix the problem. CCP already has a long history with expansionist actions in Tibet, HK, Taiwan, the 9-dash line, is running concentration camps for Uyghurs, and working it's Belt and Road plan to capture poorer nations in debt traps. Yet their rhetoric is all about how the US is being the aggressor when it practices Freedom Of Navigation exercises in international waters, or is "interfering in internal affairs" by working w/Taiwan.
They will not let these topics go until they win, and they will always find new excuses to expand. Their excuses for current expansion are 100% bullsh*t, why would you expect them to not make new ones when convenient? It's their standard mode of operating.
If you think this will somehow end by itself, you make many wrong assumptions about how autocracies work, or you know something that no one else does about how to stop this, and should share it in the interest of world peace.
That's ridiculous. We're churning out new ideas in biotech, medicine, media, finance, automobiles, airplanes, batteries, some solar stuff, and on and on. We have a huge, dynamic economy that does a lot of things really well. We've uncovered some major issues in the last two years but we've done better I think than one might have expected under the circumstances. I think in particular the rapid development and production of multiple vaccines in record time displays our capacity to innovate and manufacture complex goods.
It's impossible to know what's coming in the distant future, but it doesn't feel like any of our problems are insurmountable.
When WWIII happens it wont matter how many weapons you have at the start of the war. What will count is how fast you can make more weapons. That's all that matters. The war ends one one side runs out of weapons (or soldiers but China has a bit of a lead there). We can't even make new cars when supply from China is reduced. If you think having aircraft carriers is going to matter then you've not been paying attention. [1] The future is technology. Technology requires chip manufacture. That happens about 100 miles off China's coast, or rather, in China's opinion, on a Chinese owned island 100 miles off the mainland.
We are actually getting quite behind on some of that stuff that you mentioned. Boeing is a shell of it's former self, having been hollowed out by the financial types, and can't launch a new aircraft without killing hundreds or a new spacecraft without an order of magnitude more time and money vs SpaceX. China absolutely leads the world in solar cell production, and of course most critical microchip production is offshore.
WWII was won largely on American manufacturing prowess. As the war started in Europe, we had a grand total of 39 tanks. But American manufacturing might was focused on the war effort. Liberty ships launched at a rate of two every three days. 25-35K tanks rolled off the US assembly lines every year, while the Germans could produce only 3K, 5K, 11K, and 18K in 1941-44, respectively. Etc., etc, etc.
However, right now, the US produces barely any microchips, which are pretty much critical to every technology.
Worse yet, having a shortage of conventional technology, such as smart weapons shortens the time to the point where the choice becomes to escalate to nukes or lose.
But thank you for providing a fine example of the "it'll be fine" sort of myopia that brought us to this mess -- it always feels nice to look at our advantages and think everything else is a tail risk. But when the tail risk happens, it's over.
It isn't myopia at all to think that near term conventional large-scale nation-state warfare is unlikely. I'm well aware that industrial giants of the last half century aren't as dynamic as they once were, but it hardly matters. We have tons of talent and capacity, it isn't unlikely for newer and better companies to be built.
The only important thing where we seem to be at a serious disadvantage is in chip fab, but there are several companies looking to break ground on new facilities in the US in the next few years.
Trying to hand-wring over an unlikely war seems unproductive. There are two major powers today, and we have an extant model in living memory for how to keep tensions below a critical level. The Chinese plan to compete with the West via the Belt and Road initiative seems unlikely to lead to anything other than economic conflict.
Belt & road, ya, that isn't a big threat yet, but the ongoing relentless expansionism is a real threat. They have never stopped, and barely slowed down.
Sure, continued appeasement can 'keep the peace'. But it will be at the cost of sacrificing Taiwan and everythign in the 9-dashed line to the fate of Tibet, Hong Kong, and the Uyghurs. And then whatever else nearby that they will decide to fabricate a claim for. And so forth, and so forth, and so forth.
That is the bargain that authoritarians always strike - constantly cheating around the edges - what's mine is mine and what's yours is up for grabs.
So, people not thinking strongly or long term can argue that "it's unlikely", "it's not worth a conflict", etc. Meanwhile more territory and people fall under authoritarian control.
If it is unlikely, it is because people want to keep their heads in the sand and appease instead of make current conflict. It's a fools game
Now, for sure we have fallen a bit behind in making chips, but that may change.