The Great Abdication
How We Handed China the Century While Burning Our Own House Down
The Chinese didn't beat us. We shot ourselves in the face and handed them the gun.
While you watched Netflix and argued about pronouns, the United States committed spectacular self-sabotage. Not a bang. A thousand bureaucratic cuts, bleeding out what mattered.
Paul Krugman called it a "reverse Sputnik moment." He was being polite.
Sputnik 1957: We panicked and built NASA. China's rise: We defunded our scientists and told universities to kiss the ring.
That's not a reverse Sputnik. That's civilizational suicide.
The numbers don't lie.
China already won the economic war. Not "winning." Won.
In purchasing power—the only metric that isn't a lie—China passed us years ago. While we tweeted, they built. While we cut the NIH budget, they doubled R&D. While we protected coal jobs that don't exist, they installed more solar capacity last year than we have in total.
China's chip sector is catching up so fast that sanctions might already be meaningless. In tech terms, they're one product cycle away.
We responded by freezing scientific funding. We turned the National Science Foundation into a political petting zoo. This isn't incompetence. This is targeted demolition.
I spent forty years in tech. I watched Digital Equipment die because the beancounters couldn't see past quarterly earnings. I watched companies eat themselves because an MBA decided R&D was an expense.
Now I'm watching the United States do the same.
When you cut science funding, you're not saving money. You're eating your seed corn. When you tie research to political compliance, you ensure mediocrity. The best minds don't stick around for loyalty oaths. They go to Shenzhen.
Every STEM PhD we train becomes Beijing's asset when our visa policy kicks them out. We educate them. We show them our methods. Then we mail them to China with a bow on top. The bean counters count tuition. China counts scientists.
PrumpTutin didn't just damage our reputation. He convinced us to lobotomize ourselves.
The trade war was theater. The tariffs were taxes on our own people. The real crime was the systematic destruction of U.S. scientific leadership. You don't recover from that in a generation.
While PrumpTutin was tweeting about crowd sizes, China built the world's largest radio telescope. While he held rallies, they graduated more engineers than we graduated people. While he called climate change a hoax, they cornered the market on the technologies of the next century.
This wasn't stupidity. This was sabotage. We let it happen because he made the right people angry.
