The proper way to have achieved one of the largest threats to future economic dominance would be to invest in future tech.
Much of what you are seeing for China’s coming dominance is just that.
They subsidized research and development. Care to take guess at how many failures there were ?
They did this in EV’s but more importantly the tech that makes them feasible. Starting with the battery tech.
CATL may seem the dominate player right now, but even they have their own internal competition. BYD.
BYD started out as a battery co, and got into the EV market for they were a leading innovator of battery tech without a good market, so they helped create it.
China leads the world in energy dense battery tech. and seeing the future need for material for that, manipulated the needed material in advance.
You can see the US trying to catch-up after the play was near over in a mineral deal with Ukraine. Who does this help ? At what cost ?
I know many of those on the right might say how many failed solar projects we wasted money on. But it drives the tech forward.
Nobody seems to fault Elon Musk for so many failed rockets before they finally got it right and dominate in advance for it.
So he understands it. Why don’t you. The money invested is actually tiny in compare to the benefits achieved.
So, even if now you realize the woes of our ways,
You have an opportunity to catch-up in the battery market with sodium-ion batteries.
No, SIB’s will likely never have the energy density needed for a EV or a aircraft, but they have many more uses like power grid storage. Where the energy density does not need to be that high. They do not travel and the weight does not really matter. There is no monopoly on SODIUM !
This is just a example of just one thing that would have made a difference.
Back in the 90’s the government put up a million dollar prize for the first tech co that could produce a teraFLOP.
That is a computer math co-processor that could preform 1000 million floating point calculations per second.
You enjoy the result of that drive today even if you can’t see it.
Money well invested. Many co’s were trying and failed, but someone did it.
We are 1000 times past that now.
You can’t walk around with only a stick.
You gotta have plenty of carrots.
Tax breaks are normally given to incentivize behavior. Even though we now hand them out to our political friends.
That is not an investment in our future. Just free cheese ! No return on investment.
Big Energy has promoted this mindset for failure because they would be the looser. And they have the money to do it. But/And they could have done it themselves.
No carrots to do otherwise.