Great Britain and New China-the analogies

History doesn't repeat itself identically, but the similar things drive civilizations.
England ruled the world between 1600 and 1900 not by virtue of their superior intellect, numbers or ferocity.  They controlled the seas, their technologies and training allowed them to isolate their competitors.  They manufactured the key products, ships and their weapons, and they controlled the key technologies embodied there.
Today, manufacturing is the technology that embodies power.  Those who control it, control the shipping and by dispersing or withholding it, they can similarly isolate their enemies. 
The English enslaved much of the rest of the world and shared power with the rest.
Today, the balance of power is shifting with manufacturing and the technology is following it.  Already, the world could be controlled out of Asia, but the Asians are too wise to exploit this too quickly.
Instead, the workers are slowing finding themselves reduced to service industries.  There is no work for the people, they lose skills and become a burden where previously they were need to maintain manufacturing.  They become a liability that the governments must support further weakening them.  We see this in Europe today.
The key, however, lies not in war with China since all we can hope to do is to ensure there is nothing for anyone.  Instead, we must recognize that manufacturing must be spread and we must control technologies here and in Europe and we must compete with china now.  But we must not just fight china in the factory, we must win the war of ideas.
What we are doing now is we are focused on a very short sighted approach to war.  We are fighting without having ideas which are needed to survive as a species.  If we cannot have better ideas, a better underpinning, then it does not matter who wins, because the victory with be short and pyric.
However, for purposes of this entry, what we can see is that England ruled the world and now we are losing that to China.  We need to decide today whether we want to allow that to happen without a fight, for the decision is no longer within our power exclusively.