To give him the benefit of doubt, he might be choosing his arguments based on what he expects his readers to understand. Skimming some of the comments to that article suggests that even this simplified example might have been of excessive inferential distance to some readers.

The "let's hope the first superintelligent belongs to the US" could be steelmanned as "let's hope that the values of the first superintelligence are based on those of Americans rather than the Chinese", which seems reasonable given that there's no guarantee that people from different cultural groups would have compatible values. (Of course, this still leaves the problem that I'd expect there to be plenty of people even within the US who had incompatible values...)