Balaji - This country will win the future (and how they'll do it)

KEYPOINTS

• 01

  The century may be China versus the Indians.

  Asked to bet on one country to dominate the future, Balaji Srinivasan names China — then adds that by around 2040, the century may be defined as centralised China against India and the international Indian diaspora. That would echo how the second half of the 20th century was the US against the USSR. He stresses it's a historical analogy, a scenario rather than a certainty, and he doesn't put extremely high weight on it. But he argues that the civilisations rising after generations of being laid low are China and India.

• 02

  The number one power can fall fast.

  In 1913 the British Empire was 'the big dog,' if rickety. Then came what Balaji treats as a 30-year war from 1914 — a 'giant bar brawl across continents' including the invasion of Manchuria. In that 'final four showdown' of Japan, Germany, the US and USSR, plus France and the UK, Britain was knocked down to third or fourth by 1950. Few in 1913 predicted it. But Alexis de Tocqueville, in 1835, foresaw Russia and the Anglo-Americans each holding 'the destinies of half the world,' extrapolating from growth trajectories and sheer land.

• 03

  The US resembles late Britain or the 1980s Soviet Union.

  Balaji isn't a bull on the 'American empire.' He sees a rickety edifice cracking inside and out, like the late USSR with its Solidarity strikes, Gorbachev's reforms and alternating crackdowns, until it fell over. Possible triggers, none certain: hyperinflation, military defeat, or both. One scenario is 'financial secession,' where cities and states refuse the old debts. He points to state attorneys general coordinating and the interstate compacts revived during the pandemic as states building that muscle. Places leaning into the future — Texas, Florida, Colorado, Wyoming, perhaps New York City under Eric Adams — may do well.

• 04

  From USA to 'America,' as USSR became Russia.

  When the Soviet empire ended, the ambitious players of the global 'great game' left. What remained was Russia, a culture you might love for Pushkin, nationalist rather than universalist. Balaji expects the US, after any collapse, to become 'America': baseball and hot dogs, not hundreds of bases worldwide. That's closer to the late-1800s commercial republic; global empire was a mid-century development. Isolationism is growing on both left and right, and an empire, he argues, is either expanding or contracting.

• 05

  China plays the world's best home game.

  Look at Shanghai and Shenzhen before and after, the bullet trains, the infrastructure: China built the country in 40 years and became the world's manufacturing powerhouse. It took years of mockery as uncreative and kept its head down while building a treasury, a military and infrastructure across Africa. Balaji lists its human-rights record — Falun Gong, Tiananmen, Hong Kong, the Uyghurs, tech founders, Taiwan — and says people must hold two ideas at once. You have to respect a rival realistically before you can compete. He doubts that China can't build a blue-water navy: it ships to the entire world and knows logistics. WeChat beat Facebook, and its Groupon equivalent was more innovative than Groupon.

• 06

  Building big requires building small.

  Why could a democratic 1950s America build, when today's can't? Balaji's answer isn't authoritarianism but culture. Mid-century Americans were acculturated to the assembly line, punching clocks and executing physical work. Today we hit keys on keyboards. China is arguably the only society still deeply acculturated to factory work. Offshoring manufacturing has non-obvious consequences. Governments allocate billions yet can't build a bus lane or bullet train because nobody involved has built anything. Like hiring software developers without knowing software, they can't call out 15 layers of subcontracting and graft.

• 07

  China's weakness: it's terrible at English-language PR.

  Following Ross Douthat's idea of a 'Chinese decade, not a Chinese century,' Balaji says China excels at persuasion on its own internet, which has 'root': every node ultimately folds into the Communist Party. But it can't make its moral case in English, so it relies on hard power and money. Power causes fear, and fear causes bandwagoning: China's neighbours are as nervous of it as Russia's are of Russia, but more so. The scale is reversed from WWII. The Allies outnumbered Nazi Germany's 70 million about five to one; China's 1.3–1.4 billion outnumber the US's 330 million about four to one.

• 08

  India is the Goldilocks base.

  China is dangerously competent, Balaji says, and the US state dangerously incompetent; India sits in the middle. It's competent enough to keep the lights and internet on — 4G LTE reached almost a billion people in about five or six years — but not so competent it threatens anyone. Its nuclear deterrent is enough to defend itself. Infrastructure has improved dramatically in about a decade, with modern highways and traffic lights, and he says Chennai is cleaner than San Francisco. Meanwhile, the US and India almost seem to be switching places.