US soft power will decline, and regional powers and China will fill the vacuum. Europe can slow the US fall by actively welcoming China to bid on US port access, thus making everyone play nice a few more years, but we need to look for a soft line of Chinese power in the Philippines around 2050. Saudi Arabia can still collapse into a caliphate at some point, but Israel will remain a propped up power blocking Iran no matter what. If trump sold nuke secrets to SA that will be a really tense area, and Europe and Israel will have to keep them from any uranium from Iran or others.

China should definitely push space partnerships in the coming years with Europe and Russia, and while SpaceX will be hard to beat, they will face subsidized competition to keep them from being the only game in town, requiring you to drink a cup of US crazy with every launch. So space launch costs will go down (by SpaceX continuing and other countries subsidizing), ISS will deorbit, China will build a moon base, America will talk about how dumb that is because they didn’t do it.

China will become a co-leader of research with Europe, it will become common for US grad students to leave the country to go to good schools in their field.

[–] Netrunner@programming.dev 3 points 2 hours ago

There is nothing currently stopping countries from taking down satellites of private citizens