Technology

I mean, the US is facing two fundamental problems.

The first is simply that China has more people. Which means they've got more professionals and more researchers and more engineers capable of experimenting on and solving problems of R&D. There's no real solution that the US has to close that gap except to hope their Unis / Firms can brain-drain off the most productive members of the Chinese workforce. And given the paranoia Americans have over espionage, we're no longer able to do that.

The second is that Americans are not, themselves, willing to invest in R&D at the rate of their Chinese peers. We stopped doing that shit in the 60s and 70s, and have been functionally coasting on our exigent R&D ever since. So now that China's reached post-80s technology, they're going to surpass us purely on momentum even without a strict numerical advantage of workers.

Nothing the US did, in terms of foreign policy, was going to change either of those factors. The Chinese population isn't going to stop producing exceptionally advanced scientists and engineers and the US economy does not have the capacity to vacuum them all up even if we'd wanted to. The US foreign policy can't do anything to advance our domestic agenda, because that would require a degree of central control over the domestic economy that we are ideologically unwilling to assert.

So these fumbles might accelerate our fall from grace, but everyone in the State Department and the Pentagon can see where this shit was heading going back to the Clinton Administration. The problem was that we fixated so hard on petroleum as the premier energy source of the 21st century, we lost track of what the Chinese could just as easily accomplish with Australian coal and domestic hydro and - now it seems increasingly - domestic solar, wind, and nuclear. So we pissed away all our resources playing tug-of-war with the Levant and its neighbors while the Chinese economy accelerated straight past us into the 21st century.