U.S.-China Rivalry in a Neomedieval World
the future of the U.S.-China rivalry will bear little resemblance to the titanic struggles of the past two centuries. U.S.-China peacetime competition appears headed to unfold under conditions featuring a high degree of international disorder, diminishing state legitimacy and capacity, pervasive and acute domestic challenges, and severe constraints imposed by economic and social factors that are vastly different from those that industrial nation-states experienced in the 19th and 20th centuries.
[…] As this report will show, U.S.-China rivalry is likely to be more profoundly shaped by a general attenuation or regression of key political, societal, economic, and security-related aspects of modern life.
[…] New technologies, values, and ideals will emerge and change societies in ways that have no historical precedent. But the impact of modern and postmodern change is likely to pale next to the overall trajectory toward regression. Accordingly, the neomedieval era will be characterized by a blend of some modern features but, more profoundly, by the resurgence of preindustrial features
My expectation is that anything like what RAND describes here eventually leads to something like civilizational collapse absent a singularity of some kind.
Their analysis also broadly agrees with my biases and some recent research I've done that I haven't written about here yet.