There are two different versions of the great-power competition that Washington is waging against Russia and China. One is the version portrayed by the U.S. political and media establishment, which acts like Washington’s modern rival superpowers are eventually going to be subdued like the Soviet Union was. The other is the reality of the conflict, where Russia and China are strengthening their military alliance unlike was the case after the Sino-Soviet split, Russia is assured to win the proxy war with Washington’s puppet state Ukraine, and China has already arguably ended U.S. military primacy in the Indo-Pacific while making the Belt and Road Initiative’s success assured. Then there’s the facet that the U.S. ruling class really doesn’t want to talk about: the longtime and accelerating decline of profits for American capitalism. As the Marxist economist Michael Roberts wrote in 2016, “the overall US rate of profit has four phases: the post-war golden age of high profitability peaking in 1965; then the profitability crisis of the 1970s, troughing in the slump of 1980–2; then the neoliberal period of recovery or at least stabilisation in profitability, peaking more or less in 1997; then the current period of volatility and slight decline.” Since then, the destabilization of U.S. capitalism has predictably sped up; in this last year, the country’s largest companies reached their lowest quarterly revenue point in more than a decade.