A Look Back at Our Coming War with China

China doesn't need a war to become 'Number One'. China will become 'Number One' anyway, because it's just arithmetic. China is growing faster than the US, so eventually it will overtake the US and take the 'Number One ' slot automatically. A war would only slow China down, so China will avoid a war as much as possible. That may be foolishly construed as 'weakness'.

The US knows that the only way to remain 'Number One' is to stop China by warfare. Unfortunately the US is no longer the US of 1942 but merely the US of 2023.

So yes, the US and China will go to war, a war that the US is no longer capable of winning because it no longer has the manufacturing capacity it once had, and it only has a quarter of China's military-age population.