The most successful eras of 'western style capitalism' actually looked a lot more like the model now being applied by China than what you see in the west today. Today the west has been captured by bankers and rentseeking corporate cronies who now direct our governments. The British Empire rose by combining the governments military and diplomatic power projection with the ingenuity and cunning of the private sector in a powerful collaboration of wealth creation. This is how the Chinese are now operating. The wealth of nations is always built via a combination of state led strategy and private sector innovation. Today it is the US military who are mired in outdated military thinking and equipment and the axis of China and its tributaries who are innovating, developing and increasingly applying asymmetric technologies and tactics. Rare earths are essential to so many of the high tech and military products of modern technology especially military equipment that without assured and reliable access to them the west is completely fucked. China knows this and so does Trump. Trump is now begging China to resume shipments to US military sector manufacturers and China is still saying fuck you- we will only supply orders where it is clearly proven the end destination/application is not military.

WW3 is already well underway and its not mostly on a direct military conflict level but much more at the mercantile supply chain control level- and that is where China enjoys a significant advantage. China has won the trade war and is now progressing toward capturing tertiary institutional and protocols control.

Rare earths are not the only strategic supply chain now absolutely dominated by China- China dominates price competitive manufacture of multiple strategic technologies including PV solar, robotics, nanotech, EVs, drones, batteries and much more. The west has been blinded by its obsession with financialisation- the strategy which relies upon the wests legacy control over and hegemony in banking and finance. That legacy hegemony is very swiftly lost if China builds alternative protocols and others who want to/need to trade with China adopt them. And this is already happening. Virtually every nation on earth now must trade with China or suffer considerable economic disadvantage. The west forgot that trade is the basis of wealth creation and that financialisation is a layer above physical productivity that ultimately still relies upon physical products, supply chains and markets. Bitcoin has been captured by this corrupt financialisation narrative in the west and is now almost exclusively seen as and used as a speculative commodity- not a MoE for the trade and payment for real goods and services. As a speculative commodity Bitcoin is isolated from the real economy and poses no challenge and provides no alternative to the MoE hegemony upon which fiat money derives its strategic leverage and power.