There is plausibly some advantage from delay yes. For one thing even if you don’t have any preference for which side wins the race, making the gap larger plausibly means the leading country can be more cautious because their lead is bigger, and right now the US is in the lead. For another thing, if you absolutely forced me to choose, I’d say I’d rather the US won the race than China did (undecided whether the US winning is better/​worse than a multipolar world with 2 winners). It’s true that the US has a much worse record in terms of invading other places and otherthrowing the governments than China, but China has not had anything like the US’s international clout until recently, so it’s unclear how predictive past behaviour on China’s part is of future behaviour. And on the other hand, China is, while apparently well-governed in many ways, very authoritarian, which I think is bad. (Although the US may be about to go less than fully democratic, it would have to fall far to be as authoritarian as China, though it does imprison a much higher % of its population than China I think.) I generally would not want to see authoritarianism win out in some general sense, even if China itself might be a more restrained actor than the US in many ways.
Yeah, maybe I am using the word Nat Sec wrong, but my sense is that US intelligence agencies were involved in at least some of the history I was mentioning. I am very much not an expert on that history, but I recall Matt Yglesias recommending this (which I haven’t read to be clear): https://​​en.wikipedia.org/​​wiki/​​The_Jakarta_Method I don’t think Yglesias is particularly at all expert of particularly reliable on this stuff either, but I do think he generally has a fairly (civic) nationalistic pro-US point of view, so if the book persuaded even him that the US did a lot of bad stuff in Indonesia and elsewhere during The Cold War, it probably marshals quite a lot of evidence for that conclusion, and probably isn’t too partisanly tankie.
There is plausibly some advantage from delay yes. For one thing even if you don’t have any preference for which side wins the race, making the gap larger plausibly means the leading country can be more cautious because their lead is bigger, and right now the US is in the lead. For another thing, if you absolutely forced me to choose, I’d say I’d rather the US won the race than China did (undecided whether the US winning is better/​worse than a multipolar world with 2 winners). It’s true that the US has a much worse record in terms of invading other places and otherthrowing the governments than China, but China has not had anything like the US’s international clout until recently, so it’s unclear how predictive past behaviour on China’s part is of future behaviour. And on the other hand, China is, while apparently well-governed in many ways, very authoritarian, which I think is bad. (Although the US may be about to go less than fully democratic, it would have to fall far to be as authoritarian as China, though it does imprison a much higher % of its population than China I think.) I generally would not want to see authoritarianism win out in some general sense, even if China itself might be a more restrained actor than the US in many ways.
Yeah, maybe I am using the word Nat Sec wrong, but my sense is that US intelligence agencies were involved in at least some of the history I was mentioning. I am very much not an expert on that history, but I recall Matt Yglesias recommending this (which I haven’t read to be clear): https://​​en.wikipedia.org/​​wiki/​​The_Jakarta_Method I don’t think Yglesias is particularly at all expert of particularly reliable on this stuff either, but I do think he generally has a fairly (civic) nationalistic pro-US point of view, so if the book persuaded even him that the US did a lot of bad stuff in Indonesia and elsewhere during The Cold War, it probably marshals quite a lot of evidence for that conclusion, and probably isn’t too partisanly tankie.