And you don't need to defeat China to prevent China's access to resources. You just have to be able to dissuade the world's ship owners, even Chinese ones, from doing business with China, which an aircraft carrier battle group is really good at.

Only if you are prepared to interdict all shipping in the Sea of Japan. That will hit Korea and Russia as well. Now, Korea you can live without, but unless Russia actively collaborates in your embargo - and they have no particular incentive to do so - China can run their commerce under Russian cargo manifests and in Russian bottoms (the Vladivostok Global Shipping Company and the East Siberian Industrial District Consolidated Import/Export Company would suddenly become the most productive enterprises in the world...). So you'd have to be prepared to interdict Russian-flagged vessels sailing out of Vladivostok. The Russians will not be happy about that.

You're talking about a generalised confrontation with all of Asia here.

You're right about Russia and Korea, but it's still the same catch-22 situation.  If China invades Korea, but has no access to the resources it needs, then famine occurs in Korea as well as China, so Korea will always stick with America, and Chinese contesting power with America is off the table.

No, it means that Korea will not be the ignition point of such a conflict. But once the conflict does escalate to the point of naval blockade

So if China were to get cozy enough with Russia to be able to secure resources without a need for ocean transport (just as the US was able to do (and Napoleon was not) without worrying about England in the 19th century) then, yes, you have a scenario for the end of the empire.

It's not a matter of being cozy - if the Americans join Israel and Somalia as state sponsors of piracy and target Russian-flagged vessels, they're going to get a lot more cozy than they are real fast. It's a matter of building the relevant infrastructure. It's a question of whether the infrastructure to transport enough crop far enough can be built fast enough for the Chinese political system to survive a blockade.

There is no inevitability in China's rise here,

I actually agree with you on that.

What is happening right now to strengthen China's hand is that American industry is being moved to China. Mechanically, what happens is that China sells industrial goods to the US at discounted prices (through a variety of means, including but not limited to maintaining currency discounts) and uses the proceeds to buy the raw materials that make up the American colonies' tribute, in order to power Chinese industry. The reason that China is trading with the US rather than buying raw materials directly from the producers is that by discounting against the Americans, they incentivise the movement of the American industrial base to China (at the cost of selling their products for less than the full value).

It is always in the US' power to stop this process by changing policy away from favouring finance and towards favouring industry.

If and when that happens (and I predict that it will happen when the US runs out of civilian industry to ship overseas, because they will be understandably reluctant to ship their armaments industry overseas), the game changes. Then China no longer has any incentive to sell stuff to the US at a discounted price, and every incentive to deal bilaterally with the American colonies.

China then faces opportunities and challenges. To take the opportunities first, they can nationalise the Chinese-based holdings of transnational companies with relative impunity, since the only reason that those transnats are currently being treated according to the American rules is the prospect of them moving more of their operations to China. In the face of determined industrial policy, that prospect radically diminishes. The Americans are going to piss and moan about that, just as the British bitched a lot when Putin renegotiated their transnats' fraudulent Yeltsin-era contracts. But like the British, they will suck it up, because the alternative - a generalised trade war with all of Asia - is more expensive.

China can also begin to demand the full price for their goods from the Americans - they won't need to be hyper-competitive anymore, because there is no serious prospect of getting more of the American industrial plant (and for the same reason, they can always erect trade barriers to avoid losing what they have).

The challenge - and where the Americans can make monkey business for China - will be diverting colonial tribute from the American colonies to China while no longer paying the Americans a cut. But they are not entirely powerless here. The Americans keep their colonies not by virtue of military superiority - they have the capacity to wreck a colony, but not really to conquer it in any useful condition. Mostly they keep their colonies in line by bribing the local strongmen and then saddling them with unpayable debts... both activities denominated in US$ (and the way the Americans have traditionally saddled their colonies with unrepayable debts has been by building infrastructure projects with revenues in local currency but financed by loans denominated in US$ - but there's no reason why the Chinese can't play that game too).

Take away the post-Bretton Woods monetary system, and you take away the American empire.

- Jake

If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.