Chinese landed a booster today.
The Chinese seem to be treating this decade as a make-or-break decade industrially speaking. They have several fast followers, such as in the area of AI, several strong incumbents, such as in batteries and solar, and several global leaders, such as EV and biology. The goal of the fast followers is to catch up and surpass. The goal of the strong incumbents is to continue scaling and to produce advantages for other areas of the economy. The global leaders job is to take China abroad as a quality brand. If all these areas come together, there won't be an area the US has a decisive lead in by the end of the decade. At that point, the threat of great-power war likely dissipates.
There are a lot of economic challenges they have to meet. Youth unemployment seems like a big issue. Aside from the usual "30 days to collapse" stuff about China, that does seem to be an issue they have to deal with. Perhaps giving people jobs with these large initiatives is the solution to that problem. Perhaps they'll find another solution to it. If UBI is the solution, perhaps they'll be the first to implement it? Perhaps they'll think of something else.
In the US, I don't think a war is likely, nor do I think reindustrialization is likely either. I think the AI drama is more dramatic than it needs to be. There are lots of practical applications right now. There are likely going to be more in the future. If there was an understanding that the government was going to take care of the people, or even liked the people, I think there would be less turmoil in the US over this issue. I think our political issues will come to a head. Could be exciting! At some point the ability of the US to project power and pay for it's excesses (which we're all familiar with) will come to a head and there'll likely be a clash. Some sort of brown-socialist SV-Zionist clash. Infinity brown people + UBI vs SV + flock cameras kind of thing. It'll be pretty ugly, but at some point these sorts of politics will lose their relevance too. Eventually, America is going to have to establish an identity and make things again, and I doubt any foreign faction is going to have huge purchase on that, because their messages ring hollow without a reserve currency to play with.
Overall I doubt the US is going to be the world power by 2040. If we get some more freedom to do stuff, that'll be nice, and fine, fundamentally.
This is all a product of the US's inability to make a political solution to it's problems in the 2010s. I don't think it will. I simply think it'll find itself in a new world in 2040 that'll drag it back to reality. It'll certainly exist, I'm not pessimistic in that sense. I just think the kudzu that's wrapped itself around the tree won't disappear until winter.
If anyone has a more optimistic take, I'm happy to hear it.