And then there's just the cluster fuck that is the US defense industry. Who could make aircraft for the US in mass numbers anymore? Boeing can't even figure out if they installed a few bolts, NG can't do basic maintenance without wrecking a plane, LM will get you your aircraft for 5x the initial estimate and a decade late.
The US has the capacity, in the event of conflict, to nullify most if not all of the out-of-region advantage China has in resource extraction, unless China’s build up pre-conflict is sufficient to nullify the global force projection capacities provided by the US Navy and the US Air Force to which China currently has no equivalent or counter beyond its region.
(The US usually presents these capacities as being oriented to protecting free resource flow in peacetime, but they can be directed at the opposite purpose equally well.)
If they decide to start a hot war (say by invading Taiwan) today, then it'd be catastrophic for them. Most of those partnerships would dry up (by being a good excuse to end a bad deal for the partner nations or by force from the US and other nations).
Great Britain historically had a fraction of the population of France and other European powers, but consistently out-produced the rest in ships and projecting naval power.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_steel_pro...
Some people do honestly believe that because god is on 'our' side, the us and constitution were divinely motivated and everything in it was coming from god somehow. All the horrible justifications are still being made today about that stuff.
