I think it’s just a matter of proportion. Numbers. China has nearly 100 million more registered drivers that the US has total population. As resources come to parity I think it’s kind of impractical to try to out-compete a country that has nearly 4X the population on purely a numbers basis. Pick strategic areas of research that are of deemed importance and compete efficiently and with smarts.

Sure, even if the US was number 3, I would be asking, “guys, let’s get it together.” But countries like India and China are going to make their contributions known on the basis of size alone. If these countries had similar per person resource allocation as the US does, I wouldn't be surprised if they generated 3-5x the output.