Why Decoupling From Communist Is the Rational Choice
History moves through phases—agriculture, manufacturing, services—and the West advanced through all three faster than any civilization in recorded history.
That acceleration is what created modern prosperity.
The New World began with three unshakable advantages:
We could feed our people.
We were nearly impossible to invade.
And we could trade with everyone.
That triad—food security, physical security, and open commerce—created a civilization built on surplus and optionality.
Compare that to the rest of the world:
China has one ocean, a coastline boxed by rivals, and farmland that depends on imported fertilizer.
Africa’s rivers are long but impassable; its coasts fractured by terrain.
Russia owns vast flatlands but almost no warm-water ports.
England, for all its maritime power, sits within reach of every continental war.
Geography shaped destiny.
The New World could grow, secure, and trade at will.
The Old World had to survive through control—of people, of neighbors, of access.
That’s why when the United States and the broader Western alliance industrialized, it did so faster than anyone else in recorded history.
Agriculture to manufacturing to services—each phase completed in a fraction of the time it took empires that had existed for millennia.
The earliest Asian nation to compete on that trajectory was Japan.
Even then, Japan was a latecomer; most of Asia had thousands of years of civilizational history but only recently entered the modern economic sequence.
The West’s rapid transition wasn’t luck—it was structure as well: rule of law, open markets, individualism, and a culture that rewarded invention over imitation.
Each milestone—industrialization, the computer, the internet—was a product of that architecture.
So when China claims that “decoupling is irrational,” it’s speaking from a framework that depends on keeping others tied to its pace.
From their standpoint, slowing the frontier makes sense; it buys time.
From ours, allowing that drag/drift is the irrational act.
The East slows your technology to cripple your progress (social engineering + raw materials).
Imagine a civilization that has survived for thousands or even billions of years. It has experienced countless cycles of rise, drift, and decay.
Because if we continue the same pattern—innovation compounding on innovation, AI, quantum, energy, and biotechnology following the same curve as the steam engine and the transistor—the gap will become unbridgeable.
The Paradox of Late Arrival
And here’s the deeper irony:
By the time China finally achieved its few decades of rapid growth,
it had already become a dying society.
A shrinking workforce, collapsing birth rates, and the disappearance of demographic momentum—the very conditions that make growth unsustainable.
They’ve sprinted to the middle of the race only to discover the track is ending beneath them.
That’s the ultimate limit of command economies: they can imitate speed,
but they can’t replicate time.
Decoupling Is Continuity
Decoupling isn’t regression; it’s preservation of tempo.
It means continuing the rhythm of progress that built the modern world,
while others stall under the weight of their own contradictions.