The Theory of American Decline
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
In particular, China's budget for accelerator R&D literally has another zero at the end of it compared to the US. They are building their own competing facilities to the ones in the US such as x-ray free electron lasers, synchrotron light sources, and ion colliders. In my own speciality, china has probably one of the top three groups in the world for ultrafast electron diffraction.
I have also seen researchers who came to the US from china return to their home country to take advantage of the better funding situation. Interestingly, we in the US are prohibited from collaborating with them because accelerators are considered advanced technology related to national defense. With how fast they are growing, I absolutely believe that they could become the center of scientific research for the next few decades.
Plus, outside of China, the US is competing with top groups across Europe. Speaking with some of those researchers, people just are not incentivized to make the trip to the US and set up their research here anymore.
In terms of research impact, accelerators are our most powerful probes of matter. If you're a chemist, a materials scientist, a biologist, a medical researcher, or any other number of specialists, then you probably want to use an accelerator for your work. Think of them as kind of the foundation of all modern research going on in these fields. It's to the point that one in three Nobel prizes in medicine, chemistry, and physics in the past ~fifty years benefited from an accelerator in some way.
If you want to know what a protein looks like, it's done at an accelerator. If you want to get time resolved structural information about a chemical reaction, accelerators are how it's done. If you're a company or the military and want to optimize a new super-alloy, you do that at a particle accelerator. Most modern research where you want to know what matter looks like on an atomic scale is done at particle accelerators. Not just for pure science, but for industry.
I work at a synchrotron light source and our facility is over-subscribed to the point where we only accept something like 10% of users. Part of that is also industry users who travel from across the world to our facility. During the Covid-19 shutdown, my facility was still operating and being used to study candidate treatments and vaccines.
Besides R&D, accelerators are used in industry, medicine, and security/defense. Food sterilization is done with accelerators. Future semiconductor fabs are expected to rely on accelerators to produce the XUV light needed for advanced photolithography. Most modern ICs use ion implantation at particle accelerators. Accelerators are being studied for fusion/fission power generation. They're used to treat cancer and are also a predominant source of some medical radio-isotopes.
The reason accelerators are important and every major region in the world has one or is building one(including unexpected places like Africa and South America) is because a surprising amount of research and development across many fields can not be done without them.
Look what infrastructure spending has done for Asia.