You don’t need a numerical advantage to dominate if you have a technological / organizational advantage. The British empire was outnumbered 10 to 1 and still managed to control a large portion of the world for a while.

US government is working overtime to make sure legacy technologies stay around while the rest of the world is investing into the future.

> What's going to replace it? Rapidly aging China?

Using the age profile of a country with over a billion people to dismiss its geopolitical power has no credibility.

More appropriate to point out their (our) lack of domestic chip production and outsourcing of critical technologies.

> What's going to replace it?

I'm not sure if I'm mis-reading your comment, but:

The idea that you "need a single extremely powerful country to replace it or the US will stay in its position" just doesn't add up. I'm not fully sure if that is what you meant but I have seen that argument a few times.

_There doesn't need to be a replacement._

For most of the worlds history there wasn't a single leading world supper power, just regional super powers, or supper powers in specific sectors.

And if we speak about who could become a supper power _after the US stops being one and there isn't one for some decades_. Then there are a bunch of candidates.

E.g. China has a population collapse issues, but due to it's cut throat ruthless government and total population number and lead in factory automation might be from all countries with similar problems by margin the most likely to overcome it without power collapse.

E.g. the EU might have many issues (as it's members has many issues) but the general concept has proven hugely successful. And what people forget is EU is the cherry on top of a huge stack of treaties which can be extended to 3rd parties independent of full EU membership. Like e.g. Canada, which doesn't plan to become an EU member, but might join some of this treaties as result of the non stop hostility from the US. Same for military treaties between NATO members which are independent of NATO like e.g. JEF, which would likely be open for letting Canada join. Anyway way to many words. But the end result may be a world supper power which is not one entity but a complex lossy coupled network of countries.

Then there have been some other cross country unions and countries, which want to gain super power relevance but have so far been too irrelevant due to a combination of corruption, bad luck and sabotage by existing powers etc. But if we speak about going for a few decades without any leading super power and maybe prime canidates harming each other (e.g. a US <-> Chineese war) then they do actually have a chance.

lol… you don’t know anything about the Chinese government if you think they aren’t already preparing for this. And the difference between them and us is that when they prepare for something, they actually prepare for it with real state capacity and planning. You know they are building armies of industrial and humanoid robots for exactly this reason?

Also, sorry but the economist hates China with a passion, you really shouldn’t believe a thing they say on the topic.

Isn't the US also approaching a peak?

https://www.reuters.com/graphics/USA-POPULATION/AGING/gdpzao...

There's so many ways to slice the data, I'm not sure there's an apples-to-apples comparison between US and China. However, it's fair to say both economies face demographic headwinds.