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https://ericzuesse.substack.com/p/why-us-global-hegemony-might-be-achieved  

https://theduran.com/why-u-s-global-hegemony-might-be-achieved/  

Why U.S. Global Hegemony Might Be Achieved

10 June 2026, by Eric Zuesse. (All of my recent articles can be seen here.)

On June  9th, “Events in Ukraine” headlined “Dawn of Spacewar: Comparing Ukrainian and Russian drone statistics: performance and production”, and described serious ways in which Musk’s SpaceX 10,000+ satellites in space and his decision to cancel Russia’s access to his network, constitute a roughly decade-long technological catch-up challenge to Russia, which challenge — in conjunction with Musk-friend Peter Thiel’s Palantir — poses an increasing threat from Ukraine against Russia, and might prevent a Russian victory. What had been a missile-led war is now a drone-led war, and the Ukraine-Palantir alliance (backed up by Musk’s SpaceX) is turning it against Russia.

Those 10,000+ SpaceX satellites in orbit result directly from SpaceX’s current monopoly over fully reusable satellite-launch rockets. This is what has turned the Ukraine war from what it had been during 2022-2024, an almost inevitable win for Russia, into now a stalemate heading in the direction of an ultimate Ukraine-NATO victory.

Therefore, today, I had the following conversation with ChatGPT:

——

“Does SpaceX have any competitor on reusable launch-rockets?”

——

Yes. SpaceX is still the clear leader in reusable orbital rockets, but it no longer has the field entirely to itself.

The strongest competitors are:

Company	Rocket	Reusability Status	Competitive Position
Blue Origin	New Glenn	First stage reusable; booster has now been successfully landed and reflown	Closest current competitor to Falcon 9/Falcon Heavy
Rocket Lab	Neutron	Reusable first stage planned; first flight expected in 2026	Intended as a direct Falcon 9 competitor
Stoke Space	Nova	Designed for full reusability	Still in development
Relativity Space	Terran R	Reusable design	Not yet flown

The key distinction is that SpaceX has achieved routine reuse. Falcon 9 boosters have flown hundreds of times collectively, and boosters are now reflown as a matter of course rather than as experimental demonstrations. Barron's recently reported that SpaceX has completed hundreds of booster reflights, far beyond any other launch provider. 

Blue Origin is the only company that has so far demonstrated orbital-class booster reuse on a vehicle that can genuinely compete for major commercial launches. Its New Glenn booster has landed successfully and been reflown, making Blue Origin the nearest practical rival today. 

For the future, many analysts view Rocket Lab's Neutron as potentially the most serious long-term challenger to Falcon 9 because it is being designed specifically to compete in the medium-lift reusable market. 

For fully reusable systems comparable to SpaceX's Starship, however, SpaceX remains essentially alone. Other firms are pursuing that goal, but none has yet flown a fully reusable orbital launch vehicle. 

So the short answer is:

• Falcon 9: yes, SpaceX now has emerging competitors, especially Blue Origin and potentially Rocket Lab.
• Starship: no, SpaceX still has no operational competitor in the fully reusable super-heavy-lift category. 

——

“Why none in China nor in Russia?”

——

Neither China nor Russia is absent from reusable-rocket development, but both are substantially behind SpaceX in operational reuse.

Russia

Russia's launch industry has several disadvantages:

1. Legacy infrastructure
• Russia inherited a large launch industry from the Soviet Union that was built around expendable rockets such as the Soyuz and Proton.
• Existing factories, supply chains, and launch facilities were optimized for disposable rockets, reducing incentives for radical redesign.

2. Lower investment

• Russia's space budget is much smaller than the combined resources available to SpaceX through commercial launches, Starlink revenues, and U.S. government contracts.
• Economic sanctions and the war in Ukraine have further constrained access to some technologies and financing.

3. Limited commercial market

• SpaceX became reusable partly because it had a large and growing launch manifest.
• Russia's commercial launch share has declined significantly over the last decade, making it harder to justify massive investment in reusable systems.

Russia has proposed reusable projects, including concepts related to the Amur-SPG, but none has yet reached operational status.

China

China is actually much closer than Russia to becoming a significant reusable-launch competitor.

Several Chinese companies are actively pursuing Falcon-9-style recovery:

• LandSpace
• Space Pioneer (Tianbing)
• iSpace China
• CAS Space

China's state program is also developing reusable variants of future launch vehicles.

Why China still trails SpaceX

The biggest reason is timing.

SpaceX began serious work on vertical booster landing more than a decade before most competitors. The first successful Falcon 9 booster landing occurred in 2015, and SpaceX then accumulated years of real-flight experience. Reusability is not just an engineering problem; it is also an operations problem. The company learned how to inspect, refurbish, relaunch, and repeatedly fly boosters at high cadence.

China is now attempting to compress that learning curve into a much shorter period.

Could China catch up?

Possibly.

China has:

• a very large industrial base,
• strong government support,
• rapidly growing commercial space firms,
• and a large domestic launch market.

Many analysts think China is the most likely country to produce a serious Starship-class competitor during the next decade.

Why no Russian equivalent of SpaceX?

The deeper reason may be institutional rather than technical.

SpaceX combines:

• Silicon-Valley-style risk-taking,
• a large private capital base,
• substantial government contracts,
• and the freedom to repeatedly fail while testing.

Modern Russia has produced excellent spacecraft, engines, and missiles, but it has not yet produced a company with that same combination of financial resources, commercial demand, and organizational flexibility.

So if you ask which country is most likely to challenge SpaceX in reusable launch systems, the answer today is probably China, not Russia.

——

“Is China developing its own competitor to America's venture-capital sector?”

——

Yes, but not in the same form as the U.S. venture-capital (VC) system.

China has spent years trying to create an innovation-financing ecosystem that can rival the U.S., but it has generally relied more heavily on state-guided investment funds than on the private VC model that emerged in places like Silicon Valley.

The American model

The U.S. VC system is characterized by:

• Large pools of private capital from pension funds, endowments, wealthy individuals, and corporations.
• High tolerance for failure.
• Investors seeking very large returns from a few exceptional successes.
• Relatively independent investment decisions.

Firms such as Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, and Accel became major drivers of U.S. technology growth.

China's approach

China does have private venture-capital firms, but it has increasingly emphasized:

• Government-guided funds ("guidance funds").
• State-backed industrial investment vehicles.
• Strategic targeting of sectors such as semiconductors, AI, robotics, batteries, and aerospace.

These funds can be enormous. Some operate at national, provincial, and municipal levels, collectively managing hundreds of billions of dollars.

Rather than asking "Which startup might become the next Google?", policymakers often ask:

• Which technologies are strategically important?
• Which supply chains should China control?
• Which industries reduce dependence on foreign technology?

Strengths of China's model

China's system can:

• Mobilize very large amounts of capital quickly.
• Support long-term industrial goals.
• Finance projects that may not produce immediate profits.
• Coordinate investment with industrial policy.

This approach helped China become a leader in sectors such as:

• Electric vehicle industry in China
• Batteries
• Solar manufacturing
• Some areas of AI and telecommunications

Weaknesses

The tradeoff is that state-directed investment can:

• Allocate capital inefficiently.
• Support politically favored firms that are not technically superior.
• Encourage overinvestment in fashionable sectors.
• Be less willing to fund disruptive ideas that challenge existing priorities.

The U.S. system, while often wasteful and speculative, has historically been very good at generating unexpected breakthroughs.

Is China succeeding?

Partially.

China now has one of the world's largest startup ecosystems and a substantial VC industry. However, many observers argue that it has not yet reproduced the unique combination of deep private capital, entrepreneurial freedom, and tolerance for failure that characterizes the U.S. VC sector.

In aerospace, for example, China has produced several private launch companies, but none yet resembles SpaceX in terms of private financing, operational autonomy, and scale.

So the answer is:

• Yes, China is actively building a competitor to the U.S. innovation-financing ecosystem.
• No, it is not simply copying American venture capital; it is developing a hybrid system in which private investment exists but state-guided capital plays a much larger role.
• Whether that hybrid model can generate SpaceX-scale breakthroughs as consistently as the U.S. VC system remains an open question.

——

“What about venture capital in Russia?”

——

Russia has a venture-capital sector, but it is much smaller than those of the United States and China, and it has struggled to produce a comparable pipeline of high-growth technology companies.

Before 2022

During the 2000s and 2010s, Russia developed a modest VC ecosystem around cities such as Moscow and Saint Petersburg.

Notable institutions included:

• Yandex
• VK (formerly Mail.ru)
• Russian Venture Company
• Skolkovo Innovation Center

There were successful startups, but the ecosystem remained relatively small compared with Silicon Valley.

Structural challenges

Russia faced several constraints:

1. Smaller pools of private capital
• Russia has far fewer large institutional investors willing to commit money to high-risk startups.

2. Weaker exit markets

• Venture capital depends on IPOs and acquisitions.
• The U.S. offers deep public markets such as the NASDAQ.
• Russian public markets have historically been much smaller.

3. Brain drain

• Many highly skilled engineers and entrepreneurs have preferred to build companies abroad, especially in the United States, Europe, or Israel.

4. Political and legal risk

• Investors often place a premium on predictable legal protections and property rights.
• Concerns in these areas have tended to reduce foreign VC participation.

After 2022

The effects of sanctions, financial isolation, and reduced access to Western capital have further weakened Russia's venture ecosystem.

Foreign VC investment fell sharply, and many startups lost access to:

• Western investors,
• Western customers,
• international stock exchanges,
• and some technology supply chains.

As a result, Russian venture financing has become more domestically focused and more dependent on state support.

Comparison

A rough qualitative ranking today would be:

Country	Venture-capital strength
United States	Dominant global leader
China	Very large, partly state-directed ecosystem
Russia	Small ecosystem, increasingly state-supported

Why no Russian SpaceX?

One reason is that SpaceX required an unusually rare combination:

• billions of dollars of patient capital,
• a large commercial launch market,
• substantial government contracts,
• deep engineering talent,
• and a founder willing to accept repeated failures.

Russia possesses strong aerospace engineering capabilities, but it has not had an equivalent venture-capital environment capable of supporting a privately funded company through years of costly rocket-development failures before profitability.

Consequently, Russia's space sector remains centered around large state-linked organizations such as Roscosmos rather than a privately financed company analogous to SpaceX.

—————

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.