Chinese President Xi Jinping landed at Joint Base Andrews Wednesday for a three-day state visit, and Donald Trump was waiting for him at the foot of the red carpet.

That’s highly unusual. US presidents typically receive foreign leaders at the White House.

In fact, with the exception of popes, no president had met a foreign leader on the tarmac since 1962, when JFK went out to greet British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan.

Judging by the media’s reaction, however, you would think Trump bent the knee and swore fealty to his communist overlords.

There was a short clip of US troops on their hands and knees, smoothing the carpet before Xi stepped out of the plane. It went viral. Chinese were gleeful, and Americans were disgusted, at what appeared to be a humiliation ritual… even though smoothing out the red carpet is pretty standard.

The over-analysis continued. When B-1 bombers passed overhead— Trump flinched and Xi didn’t move a muscle— the Twitterverse exploded with commentary about what that means for American primacy.

Then there were hot takes on Xi’s every smile, every Trump fidget. Commentators claimed that Xi speaking Mandarin through his translator was ‘asserting language dominance’ over Trump.

It’s all ridiculous. I honestly don’t remember an event where so much irrelevant minutia was over-analyzed for hidden meaning.

The larger point is that the US is clearly treating China like an equal— something that America does not do for anyone else. When the President of France, or Ukraine, or anywhere else comes to town, the President receives them at the White House.

China, on the other hand, is now a peer… not a superior. But definitely not a junior partner.

The biggest takeaway, though, seems to be lost on everyone… but hit me right between the eyes.

At a formal White House ceremony the next morning, Xi declared that “the Thucydides Trap can be overcome. . .”

The Thucydides Trap, of course refers to the famous ancient Greek historian who wrote of the Peloponnesian Wars between Athens and Sparta. Athens was a declining power and Sparta was the rising power; and the theory asserts that rising and declining powers often go to war against one another.

World War I was an obvious example of the Thucydides Trap. Britain was in decline. Germany was rising fast. War became inevitable.

When Xi made this assertion, most of the media coverage treated his remarks as a wonderful message of peace and reassurance.

BUT NO ONE BOTHERED TO QUESTION HIS PREMISE, i.e. that America is permanently in decline and will be surpassed by China.

Xi obviously likes this analogy because he views China as the rising power… eventually the world’s superpower… and the US as the declining power.

What he essentially said was: America is finished, we’re going to pass you… and while that historically has led to war, I’m going to be super magnanimous and claim that I prefer peace.

Talk about being presumptuous. This guy comes to America’s house and tells everyone that he’s going to dominate?!?

Obviously he believes this— he’s the one who has been steering China for 14 years.

And yes, America is in decline. Between the $40 trillion in debt, Social Security running dry in a few years, foreign central banks dumping dollars for gold, and a Congress too dysfunctional to fix any of it, that much is indisputable.

But America is not in PERMANENT decline.

The problems that the US faces can be fixed with some rational thinking and a few hundred signatures: cutting fraud and waste. Immigration reform. Social Security reform. Regulatory reform to boost productivity growth.

None of this is difficult. But Congress can’t seem to muster the will to make it happen, and voters keep sending the same corrupt idiots to office.

But if you think America has a debt problem, China has even worse debt challenges. Plus their entire economy is run by communist bureaucrats and businesses who ‘innovate’ by stealing other people’s intellectual property.

And that doesn’t even scratch the surface of their biggest challenges.

America needs some sensible politicians to fix its problems. China needs a time machine.

They’d have to go back in time to reverse their one-child policy… or undo decades of communism that created a business culture where screwing up means getting shipped off to a ‘reeducation’ facility.

Say the wrong thing and you get disappeared like Jack Ma, who was the richest man in China until he criticized the regulators in 2020, then vanished for three months, and now gets rolled out for the occasional proof of life.

There’s a reason why wealthy Chinese people leave the country. People who have the means hit the exits.

And, seriously, eight decades later, these guys are still whining about Taiwanese independence. Get over it already!

Undoing all of that requires a complete cultural reset.

So when he boasts about becoming the next dominant superpower, Xi is way over his skis.

America has a regulatory problem. China is literally communist. Nothing happens there without the Party’s permission, and it has to steal every idea it can’t come up with itself.

Yes, China has had a good run for the past ~20 years. America’s has been miserable. But past performance is no indication of future returns.

If anything, Xi’s remarks should shame Congress into finally lifting a finger to do the right thing and pass sensible reform.

And you’d think more of the pathetic press would have the dignity to call that out as well.

Unfortunately, Congress and the media tend to attract the worst people on earth, so don’t hold your breath waiting for either one to find a spine.

Time will tell if America can reverse course… and if China can live up to Xi’s fantasy. But that’s why it makes sense to have a Plan B.

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Song Jian was very good at math.

He was one of China’s top missile scientists, and his specialty was the equations that steer a rocket to its target.

In 1978 Song traveled to Helsinki for an engineering conference, where he came across researchers applying the same kind of math to human beings. Their idea was that a country’s population could be steered toward a target number, just like a missile.

Back home, Song ran China’s population through the model. It took about five minutes on his missile ministry’s computers, and the answer came back: if Chinese women kept having three children apiece, China would top 4 billion people by 2080.

China’s population was about 1 billion at the time.

In 1980 Song’s projection landed on the desks of the Communist Party’s leaders, and by September they had their solution: one child per family, enforced with fines, forced abortions, and sterilizations.

The policy stayed in place until 2016, and China is still living with the results.

Just 7.9 million babies were born in China last year, down from 9.5 million the year before and the fewest in modern China’s history. Deaths outnumbered births by more than 3 million, and the population shrank for the fourth year in a row.

A shrinking population is horrible for an economy. Economic growth comes from greater productivity (like technological breakthroughs). But it can also come from higher population, i.e. MORE people producing more goods and services.

China has fewer workers every year; its working-age population peaked in 2011 and fell by another 6.6 million last year, to about 850 million.

Worse, China’s population pyramid is upside down: four grandparents and two parents lean on one grown child. Already 323 million Chinese are over 60, nearly a quarter of the country.

Sure, there’s AI and robotics. In 2024 China installed more industrial robots than the rest of the world combined. But that might be a partial fix at some point in the future. The shortage of young workers is a huge problem today.

I wrote a few weeks ago that China needs a time machine, because no government can go back and conjure up a bunch of 25-year-olds.

China is trying to raise the birth rate anyway, paying parents about $540 a year for every child under three. But even if that works, a baby born today won’t show up for work until the 2040s.

That leaves immigration as the only way to raise the population and increase the number of young workers in the labor pool.

China has never been a country of immigrants, but they’re desperate enough to try.

Last October they launched the “K visa” for young science and technology graduates. Unlike America’s H-1B work visa, it doesn’t require a job offer.

Before the pandemic China had also become the second most popular destination for African students, behind only France. And last year China promised thousands of scholarships across Latin America and the Caribbean.

No one really wants to live in a totalitarian surveillance state, but the one advantage that China has is value for the money: it offers a high standard of living, while the cost of living is fairly low.

The average production worker at a mid-size or large Chinese company makes about $1,000 a month. In an inland city like Chengdu, a one-bedroom apartment outside the center rents for about $260— about a quarter of the paycheck.

Obviously an American manufacturing worker makes a lot more money, but the typical American rental goes for almost $2,000 a month, almost 8x as much. So there’s a lot more value for the money, i.e. value for the salary, in China.

And for young workers from Africa or the Caribbean, that’s an attractive enough deal that they’re willing to overlook the totalitarianism.

So far the results are modest. The last census counted about 850,000 foreigners living in China, a country of 1.4 billion. It won’t necessarily always be this way, but for now the arrivals don’t come close to filling the hole.

And here’s the flip side: the Chinese who have the means to leave the country are moving abroad.

For a decade China has ranked first or second in the world for millionaires lost to emigration— an estimated 15,000 of them in 2024 alone.

All told, the UN estimates that China loses about 300,000 more people than it gains every year. That’s small for a country of 1.4 billion. But the people leaving are the ones with money and options.

So China has two problems stacked on top of each other: too few births, and more people leaving than arriving. As I said, China still needs a time machine to fix its problems.

America’s problems are nothing like that. Problems that the US faces can be fixed with some rational thinking and a few hundred signatures.

It shouldn’t be hard. But they can’t seem to muster the will to make it happen.

Social Security’s main trust fund runs dry in 2032, which triggers an automatic 22% cut to every retirement check. Every single year, the program’s own actuaries publish a menu of fixes. Congress hasn’t picked one.

The Government Accountability Office, Congress’s own auditor, estimates the federal government loses between $233 billion and $521 billion a year to fraud. Congress hasn’t stopped that either.

None of this takes a miracle. It takes a vote and a pen. And the politicians refuse, which is exasperating.

America’s own population problem is the same kind of unforced error.

China had a one-child policy. America, informally, has a no-child policy. It isn’t written down anywhere. It’s made of prices.

The average age of a first-time homebuyer is now 40 years old— the oldest ever. And with median home prices selling at record levels, those same homebuyers have to scratch together six-figures in savings just for a down payment.

They’re contending with 7% mortgages too, meaning that housing has become completely unaffordable for the young.

The government deserves much of the credit— the National Association of Home Builders calculates that federal, state, and local regulation now adds about $132,000 to the price of a new home, more than a quarter of the total. Each of those rules was signed into law by some level of government, and each can be signed back out.

Then comes the kid. Just having the baby runs about $20,000 in medical bills, and even parents with good insurance pay about $2,700 of that themselves. After that come the diapers, child care, and more.

What a surprise: the US fertility rate is down to about 1.6 children per woman, the lowest ever recorded, and well short of the 2.1 it takes to hold a population steady.

That’s a real problem. But unlike China’s, it’s fixable. Nobody has to invent a time machine. The politicians just have to stop making so many unforced errors.

P.S. Fixable isn’t the same as fixed. Congress has had the answers on its desk for years and does nothing. Hoping the politicians come to their senses is not a plan, and that’s exactly why it makes sense to have a Plan B.

That’s what Schiff Sovereign’s flagship research service, Plan B Confidential, is for— actionable research on second residencies, foreign banking, and legal tax strategies, with boots-on-the-ground reports from more than 120 countries. Click here to learn more.

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Some time in the middle of the second century AD, on the shores of the extremely picturesque Lake Iznik in modern-day Turkey at the site of the ancient city of Nicaea, a boy named Cassius Dio was born into a locally prominent family.

His father was a Roman politician, his mother was Greek, and young Cassius Dio grew up in a bilingual household speaking Greek and Latin at a time when the Roman Empire was at its absolute peak.

There was widespread peace and prosperity— so much so that the emperor at the time, Antoninus Pius, spent his entire 20+ year reign without ever coming within 500 miles of a Roman legion.

His was the most peaceful reign the empire ever had. The imperial government busied itself with foreign trade missions, including to Han China; and with perfecting the delivery of clean drinking water across the empire— a feat that wouldn’t be repeated until 1804.

In short, the Romans had a 19th century standard of living as far back as the 2nd century AD, and this is the environment of wealth and abundance in which young Cassius Dio grew up.

But by the time he was an adult and had followed in his father’s footsteps to become a politician, things had changed.

In the decades between his childhood and adulthood, Rome had taken a turn for the worse. The empire had seen multiple wars, plague, barbarian incursions, and assassinations of several emperors.

At one point the Praetorian Guard had even auctioned off the empire to the highest bidder.

But Cassius Dio knew his history, and he knew that Rome had seen tough times before. There had been the civil war between Julius Caesar and Pompey, the depravity of Caligula, and the insanity of Nero. Yet Rome always came back better and stronger than ever.

So Cassius Dio assumed at first that this time would be no different. Rome was in the midst of difficult times by the 190s and early 200s, but it would recover stronger than ever, just as it had in the past.

It was only later in life, after watching things go from bad to worse that he realized this time actually was different. Rome was not coming back.

And it was at this point that he wrote, rather bitterly in his histories of the empire, “Our history now descends from a kingdom of gold to one of iron and rust.”

This is how we opened our Plan B conference this past weekend in Panama City, Panama— with a historical tale. We told the story of Cassius Dio and explained that, yes, dominant superpowers often go through tough times, and they often recover.

France under Louis XIV went through multiple peasant rebellions and a civil war, yet it recovered and maintained its status as a superpower.

The US went through World Wars and financial crises, and also maintained its status as the dominant superpower.

But sometimes superpowers reach a point where this time really is different. Nothing is certain, and recovery is still possible. But it makes perfect sense to prepare for challenging times ahead.

If the US dollar, for example, loses its status as the global reserve currency, there will absolutely be consequences, and the impact will be widely felt. Ditto for the rising US national debt.

The rest of our event focused ways to mitigate those consequences.

We had attendees and speakers from all over the world, which was quite refreshing. We even had the mayor of Panama City open the event, welcoming our guests at dinner on Thursday night, and come again to our farewell dinner on Saturday night.

It was really nice to see someone of influence in government who was bending over backwards to support anything and everything that our members needed.

My friend and partner Peter Schiff was also on stage with me, and he told the audience where he sees serious cracks in the bond market. This has major implications for the US dollar, the prospect for inflation, and the general future of the United States.

Peter and I both agree that not all is lost. I presented some very simple ideas for the US to get back on track, none of which are remotely controversial.

Bottom line, with the prospect of continued productivity growth from AI, robotics, small modular nuclear reactors, and cheap energy, combined with some modicum of fiscal responsibility, the US can still be OK.

But, at least at the moment, there does not seem to be any interest in Congress to rein in spending and stop the explosion of the national debt.

And this is why having a Plan B is so important. It would be completely foolish to believe that a $40 trillion national debt, the looming insolvency of Social Security, $2 trillion annual deficits, and an annual interest bill that mops up 25% of tax revenue will all be consequence-free.

That’s why we presented so many options from around the world. We had speakers presenting about second citizenship programs, foreign residency, global real estate, tax planning, multiple options for gold storage, as well as some discussion about tokenization and crypto.

We even had bankers from a well-capitalized private bank opening accounts for people on the spot.

This is important stuff. A good Plan B is like an insurance policy— you don’t wait until your house burns down, you get sensible coverage in advance to mitigate specific risks.

The whole point of a Plan B is to be in a position of strength regardless of what happens, or doesn’t happen, next. It’s not complicated, but it takes some sensible and deliberate planning.

For more than 15 years we’ve been providing some of the best research in the world on these topics.

Every month it covers second citizenships, foreign residency, foreign banking, and legal tax strategies, with boots-on-the-ground reports from more than 120 countries and a Rolodex of vetted service providers for when you decide to take action.

So even if you weren’t at our event, make sure you have access to Plan B Confidential. Click here to learn more.

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