The Belt and Road initiative gets a shot in the arm. No tarrifs, free trade, lower cost finance with fewer encumbrances. Efforts to establish the Renminbi as a second reserve currency have been quiet, but these trade alliances and alternate banking arrangements are already making it a possible reality. US perception is that belt and road was unpopular and a failure, but its little different from US economic imperialism. The amount of money flowing through BRICS and the rise of China as the world's largest creditor is testament to this.

Cheaper weapons have shown to be effe tive in holding off a technologically superior force, and China is both great at producing them and happy to sell them to spec.

The US not being able to produce weapons at a fast enough cadence to refill the stockpile is an indicator that US weapons manufacturing is currently unsustainable, and prohibitively expensive. Both are weakness.

The US has shown that it cannot maintain moderate effort on two fronts. Not only is it financially almost unable to do so, only by the good graces of being the reserve currency, it would significantly struggle to maintain distributed engagements - this is military intelligence if an adversary wanted to engineer multiple conflicts requiring US attention globally to spread the US thin.