You can thank Nixon and all of the other US Presidents that have followed.
Talking to China was not a mistake or a problem. Our demise is not due to diplomacy or trade. Our demise is because we have abandoned our first principles.
We have murdered millions of unborn children, we have stolen wealth from future generations, we are putting an entire current generation into slavery to the government, we have broken the seventh commandment by perverting marriage—to the point of even pretending perversion is normal.
Basically, we have chosen to ignore God. We are Jerusalem in 586 BC, We are Rome in 476, We are Constantinople in 1453.
Repentance is our only option, and may God’s Mercy be upon us. None of us DESERVE it in our individual lives, and as a nation we SURE don’t deserve it.
You can thank a lot of people, unfortunately, including many business ‘leaders’.
IMHO there has been little vision in the US business community for way too long. Instead of ‘where will we be in 5years or 10 years?’, and ‘how can we shape the future?, it's been ‘how can we make our numbers look good next quarter?’. The ‘instant gratification’ approach by day traders and ‘get rich quick’ investors in the markets has contributed to this emphasis on ‘the next quarter’, and has left us without a creative longer term strategy.
For too long now we have been living in a society in which too many think ‘how can I get mine before it all falls apart?’, and this includes some workers, those who don't work because they don't want to (and are gaming the system), and those on the higher rungs of the food chain who have no loyalty to anything other than what they perceive will benefit them. It's a cancerous attitude that has pervaded our culture.
We owe our children better.
If China had a similar government to what we began with, they would have dwarfed us decades ago - bigger populations of Free People tend to do well.