While the initial burst of prosperity helped to fuel fantasies of a long peace dividend, and the End of History seem credible, the costs of Chimerica have become more obvious in the past decade. A famous paper by David Autor, David Dorn, and Gordon Hanson showed that Chinese-driven American job losses contributed to falling household earnings and the break-up of marriages across interior regions of the United States. These misfortunes probably correlated with other social pathologies such as child maltreatment and drug abuse.

And even where Chimerica produces benefits — cheap consumer goods — there are diminishing returns. As Chairman Xi Jinping continues to undo the reforms of his predecessors and reasserts the primacy of the Chinese Communist Party, America’s economy becomes partly subjected to every idiocy cooked up in the CCP’s ideological hot house, including China’s latest attempt to control the Covid-19 pandemic via state surveillance and coercion.

We are also hurtling headlong into a serious decline of the Chinese workforce, which peaked in 2011 at nearly 925 million. Estimates in 2021 had the Chinese workforce shrinking by 35 million over the next five years alone. That is a loss of more people than are full-time workers in the United Kingdom, almost as many as are in Germany.