The latest news keeps vindicating my points.
While the U.S. is losing ground to China in an expanding range of critical domains, it has built a much more lucrative business model.
It now turns to leverage allies' psychological inertia and geopolitical path-dependency to squeeze and extract them like "blood bags".
Keeping allies scared and dependent means cornering them into buying overpriced US weapons, US energy, and US technology. Unfortunately for countries like India, they have gone from being courted to being invoiced.
What turns out can be very absurd--the U.S. acts like a developing country that demands help from "a developed India". Instead of helping Make in India exports, America is extorting India to buy from it and to invest in it.