I have written several articles on postings related to politics. A list of links has been provided at the bottom of this article for your convenience. This article will, however, address different aspects of these political events.

While some projections indicate that China’s economy could become the world’s largest, it is not clear if it will replace the U.S. as the sole superpower. Most analyses suggest a future defined by intensifying competition rather than a clear replacement. The U.S. currently maintains advantages in key areas such as innovation, alliances, and per-capita wealth, while China faces significant economic and demographic challenges. 

Key points of comparison

	United States	China
Economy	• Nominal GDP: Projected to remain the world’s largest in 2025 at approximately $30.5 trillion. • Per Capita GDP: Significantly higher, reflecting a more productive and wealthier population. • Innovation: Retains a leading edge in cutting-edge areas like advanced semiconductors, software, and AI, supported by a system that fosters innovation.	• Nominal GDP: Projected to reach about $19.2 trillion in 2025, but its growth has slowed. • Per Capita GDP: Much lower, ranking 73rd globally, and faces challenges in boosting consumption. • Innovation: Though rapidly advancing in fields like AI, it still lags the U.S. in key foundational technologies.
Military	• Defense Budget: Allocates the largest military budget in the world, estimated at nearly $900 billion in 2025, to maintain unmatched global presence and technological superiority. • Alliances: Has a robust network of global alliances that amplify its military and geopolitical influence. • Capabilities: Emphasizes advanced technologies like stealth aircraft, next-gen naval fleets, and cyber capabilities.	• Defense Budget: Growing rapidly, with a budget of over $266 billion in 2025, but still far smaller than the U.S.’s. • Alliances: Lacks a comparable global alliance structure, though it has growing ties with nations like Russia and Iran. • Modernization: Concentrates on regional dominance, with significant progress in hypersonic missiles, naval expansion, and drones.
Soft Power	• Global Influence: Maintains the top ranking in soft power, though its reputation is showing signs of erosion. • Values: A decline in public perception of its governance and values was noted in a recent 2025 index.	• Global Influence: Rose to second in global soft power rankings in 2025, surpassing the UK. • Engagement: Has made targeted improvements in international relations and communications.
Challenges	• Domestic Issues: Grapples with political polarization and economic uncertainty. • Foreign Policy: May face headwinds if it adopts more isolationist policies.	• Demographics: Faces a rapidly aging population and shrinking workforce, which could strain social welfare systems. • Economy: Must manage a property sector crisis, high debt levels, and the transition toward an innovation-driven economy. • Geopolitics: Confronts global skepticism of its growing power and unresolved regional issues, such as with Taiwan.

The evolving nature of superpower competition

Rather than a simple handover of power, many analysts foresee a future shaped by sustained and intense strategic competition. China’s growth has already reshaped the global economy, but its path to sole superpower status is clouded by deep-seated internal challenges. The U.S. still holds structural advantages, but how each nation adapts to its respective domestic issues and changing global dynamics will determine the future balance of influence. 

What is a Superpower?

To answer the question presented in the title, one must first understand that our history is quite lengthy, and second, every global power throughout our history has failed; it is the order of things. We are still new in that role. So we have plenty of time to screw up. Will China replace us? One thing is sure: we will eventually be replaced by another country. Will we last as long as the Roman Empire? Who is to say? It is not looking good. I have included a short list of previous superpowers and their history, and what happened to them.

The concept of a “superpower” has evolved from historical empires to modern nations, with key examples including the British Empire, the Mongol Empire, and the United States. The term specifically refers to the United States and the Soviet Union as the two superpowers following World War II, until the USSR’s collapse in 1991 left the US as the sole superpower. Today, China is often considered an emerging or established superpower, challenging the United States’ dominant position. 

Historical superpowers

• Mongol Empire: At its peak, it was a superpower that controlled much of Asia, the Middle East, and parts of Russia.
• British Empire: The most powerful unitary authority in history from the 19th century, supported by the Royal Navy, with territory across the globe.
• Other major empires: Other empires like the Roman, Spanish, Ottoman, and Sassanian Empires also held significant global influence at various points in history. 

Modern superpowers

• Post-WWII era: After World War II, the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union were initially considered superpowers. However, Britain’s decline and the Cold War led to the U.S. and USSR becoming the two dominant powers.
• Cold War: The period of rivalry between the U.S. and the USSR, marked by an arms race but no direct war between them, solidified their status as the world’s two superpowers.
• Post-1991: Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the United States emerged as the sole superpower, sometimes referred to as a “hyperpower”.
• Current landscape: China is increasingly described as an emerging or established superpower, representing a significant challenge to the United States’ global dominance. Other nations like India are also considered emerging powers due to their growing influence. 

The Super Powers of Each Century: A Historical Overview

First Century: Roman Empire

The Roman Empire, centered around the Mediterranean, was the preeminent superpower of the first century. Under emperors like Augustus and Nero, Rome consolidated power, expanding its borders across Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. Roman law, engineering, and culture profoundly influenced Western civilization. The Pax Romana, a period of relative peace and stability, allowed for economic prosperity and the spread of ideas.

Second Century: Han Dynasty

The Han Dynasty (206 BCE – 220 CE) in China marked a golden age of Chinese civilization. By the second century, the Han Empire was at its zenith, with vast territories and a highly developed bureaucratic state. The Silk Road facilitated trade between China and the West, spreading goods, culture, and technology. The Han Dynasty’s advancements in science, technology, and governance laid the foundation for future Chinese empires.

Third Century: Sassanian Empire

The Sassanian Empire (224-651 CE) emerged as a dominant power in the third century, succeeding the Parthian Empire in Persia. Under rulers like Shapur I, the Sassanians engaged in frequent conflicts with the Roman Empire, controlling significant portions of the Near East. The empire was known for its architectural achievements, advancements in medicine, and the promotion of Zoroastrianism as the state religion.

Fourth Century: Gupta Empire

The Gupta Empire (c. 320-550 CE) in India is often referred to as the Golden Age of India. This period saw significant achievements in arts, science, and literature. The Guptas promoted Hindu culture and fostered a renaissance in Indian society. Innovations in mathematics, such as the concept of zero, and advances in astronomy and medicine highlighted the intellectual vibrancy of the Gupta period.

Fifth Century: Byzantine Empire

The Byzantine Empire, the continuation of the Roman Empire in the East, was the dominant power of the fifth century. Under Emperor Theodosius II and later Justinian I, the Byzantines preserved and enhanced Roman law, architecture, and Christian theology. The construction of the Hagia Sophia and the codification of Roman law (Corpus Juris Civilis) are testaments to Byzantine contributions to world history.

Sixth Century: Sui Dynasty

The Sui Dynasty (581-618 CE) reunified China after centuries of fragmentation. Although short-lived, the Sui’s achievements were significant, including the construction of the Grand Canal, which facilitated trade and communication between northern and southern China. The Sui laid the groundwork for the Tang Dynasty’s flourishing by restoring central authority and infrastructure.

Seventh Century: Arab Caliphate

The Arab Caliphate, under the Rashidun and Umayyad Caliphates, rapidly expanded in the seventh century, establishing one of the largest empires in history. The conquests spread Islam across the Middle East, North Africa, and into Spain. The Caliphate became a center of learning and culture, preserving and enhancing knowledge from the ancient world, including Greek, Persian, and Indian sources.

Eighth Century: Tang Dynasty

The Tang Dynasty (618-907 CE) is considered one of China’s greatest eras. The eighth century marked the height of Tang power, with cultural and technological advancements that influenced neighboring regions. The Tang capital, Chang’an, became a cosmopolitan hub of commerce and culture. The dynasty’s support for Buddhism, poetry, and painting left a lasting cultural legacy.

Ninth Century: Abbasid Caliphate

The Abbasid Caliphate (750-1258 CE) represented the Islamic Golden Age in the ninth century. With its capital in Baghdad, the Abbasids oversaw a flourishing of science, mathematics, medicine, and philosophy. Scholars like Al-Khwarizmi and Al-Razi made groundbreaking contributions, and the House of Wisdom became a renowned center for knowledge and translation.

Tenth Century: Byzantine Empire

The Byzantine Empire saw a resurgence in the tenth century, often referred to as the Macedonian Renaissance. Under emperors like Basil II, the empire expanded its territories and strengthened its economy. The Byzantines preserved classical knowledge and Christian theology, influencing the Orthodox Christian world and the broader medieval European context.

Eleventh Century: Song Dynasty

The Song Dynasty (960-1279 CE) in China was a period of economic and technological innovation. The eleventh century saw advancements such as the invention of gunpowder, the compass, and movable-type printing. The Song’s commercial revolution, with a thriving urban culture and trade, positioned China as a global economic powerhouse.

Twelfth Century: Holy Roman Empire

The Holy Roman Empire, a multi-ethnic complex of territories in central Europe, was influential in the twelfth century. Under emperors like Frederick Barbarossa, the empire sought to consolidate its power against the Papacy and other regional powers. The Holy Roman Empire played a crucial role in medieval European politics, culture, and the spread of Christianity.

Thirteenth Century: Mongol Empire

The Mongol Empire, under Genghis Khan and his successors, created the largest contiguous land empire in history in the thirteenth century. The Mongols’ military prowess and administrative skills facilitated the integration of diverse cultures and economies. The Pax Mongolica ensured safe passage along the Silk Road, promoting trade and cultural exchange between East and West.

Fourteenth Century: Ming Dynasty

The Ming Dynasty (1368-1644 CE) in China marked a return to Han Chinese rule after the Yuan Dynasty. The fourteenth century saw the consolidation of Ming power, the rebuilding of the Great Wall, and the establishment of a strong central government. The Ming also sponsored naval expeditions under Admiral Zheng He, extending Chinese influence across the Indian Ocean.

Fifteenth Century: Ottoman Empire

The Ottoman Empire emerged as a dominant force in the fifteenth century, capturing Constantinople in 1453 under Sultan Mehmed II. This conquest ended the Byzantine Empire and established the Ottomans as a major power in Southeastern Europe and the Middle East. The Ottomans’ military, architectural achievements, and administrative efficiency shaped the region’s history for centuries.

Sixteenth Century: Spanish Empire

The Spanish Empire became a global superpower in the sixteenth century, driven by exploration and colonization of the Americas. Under monarchs like Charles V and Philip II, Spain amassed vast wealth from its colonies, fueling the European Renaissance and the spread of Christianity. The Spanish Armada and territorial expansions made Spain a formidable maritime power.

Seventeenth Century: Mughal Empire

The Mughal Empire in India reached its zenith in the seventeenth century under emperors like Akbar, Jahangir, and Shah Jahan. The Mughals unified much of the Indian subcontinent and promoted a rich cultural synthesis of Persian, Indian, and Islamic traditions. Architectural marvels like the Taj Mahal exemplify the empire’s grandeur and artistic achievements.

Eighteenth Century: British Empire

The British Empire expanded dramatically in the eighteenth century, establishing colonies in North America, the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia. The Industrial Revolution, coupled with naval supremacy, enabled Britain to dominate global trade and politics. The empire’s impact on the world was profound, spreading the English language, legal systems, and cultural practices.

Nineteenth Century: Russian Empire

The Russian Empire emerged as a major power in the nineteenth century, extending its territories across Eurasia. Under leaders like Alexander I and Nicholas II, Russia played a crucial role in European geopolitics, particularly during the Napoleonic Wars and the Crimean War. The empire’s vast resources and strategic position influenced global dynamics.

Twentieth Century: British Empire

The British Empire remained a dominant force in the early twentieth century, although it faced challenges from rising powers like the United States and the Soviet Union. The two World Wars, decolonization, and shifting global dynamics eventually led to the decline of the British Empire. However, its cultural and political legacy continued to shape the modern world.

Twenty-First Century: The United States

The United States emerged as the preeminent superpower in the twenty-first century, with unmatched economic, military, and cultural influence. American innovation in technology, entertainment, and science, along with its role in international organizations, underscores its global leadership. The U.S. continues to shape global politics, economics, and culture in profound ways.

Twenty-Second Century: ????

Predicting the superpower of the twenty-second century is speculative, as it will depend on numerous factors including technological advancements, geopolitical shifts, and economic developments. Potential candidates could include a resurgent China, a united European Union, or a coalition of nations addressing global challenges collaboratively. The future superpower will likely need to navigate complex issues like climate change, resource management, and technological innovation to maintain its dominance.

In conclusion, each century has seen the rise of a superpower that has left an indelible mark on history. These powers have driven human progress, shaped cultures, and influenced the course of world events. As we look to the future, the dynamics of global power will continue to evolve, reflecting the ever-changing landscape of human civilization.

The 5 Greatest Superpowers of All Time

While the world has known many great empires, the list of superpowers is shorter. It is much harder for a state to become and maintain superpower status because that requires an overwhelming dominance over all its rivals. As with lists, there is no way to include everything that deserves a mention, and I have admittedly left out strong contenders like the Ottoman Empire, the Persian Empire, the Spanish Empire, the Arab Empire, the Mauryan Empire and the Tang Dynasty. Here are five of the greatest superpowers in history:

Roman Empire

The Roman Empire—which reached the height of its power in the second century—was by far the dominant power in most of the ancient world. Though its power did not reach as far as India and China, the Roman Empire’s prowess was unquestioned in the Middle East and Europe. It covered almost all the major population centers and civilizations of antiquity, including Greece, Egypt, the Levant, Carthage, Anatolia and Italy. The population of the Roman Empire at its peak was about 60 million, dwarfing all its neighbors and comprising a large portion of the world’s population. The empire’s size meant that it did not need to trade much except to acquire luxury resources (silk, lapis, spices, incense and so on).

The empire was by far militarily dominant over its neighbors, with the partial exception of the only major organized state that bordered it—Persia, whose power was still nowhere equal to Rome’s. While Roman legions could and did ravage Persia’s heartlands, there was no chance that a Persian army could reach Rome. Rome’s legions were essentially undefeatable in pitched battles with its enemies. Rome ultimately fell not because of external threats, but due to continuous civil war, economic depredations and an over-reliance on mercenaries.

Mongol Empire

The Mongol Empire was the world’s largest land empire. The empire’s rise is all the more amazing because a group of Mongol tribes numbering no more than a million managed to conquer empires that were literally hundreds of times bigger. This was achieved through outstanding tactics, mobility, incorporation of the technology of the conquered peoples and logistics (favorable to pastoral peoples like the Mongols).

The warlord Temujin united all the Mongol tribes by 1206 at the age of fifty, at which point he was acclaimed the universal ruler (Genghis Khan). After conquering northern China, he wrecked Central Asia when Mongol ambassadors were killed there, a personal affront to Genghis Khan. The subsequent conquest of Central Asia from 1219 to 1221 and Iran wrecked that region and is one of the most brutal events in history. Though contemporary chronicles exaggerated figures, probably 15-50 million people in this region died (most of the population of Central Asia). Genghis Khan’s heirs ruled an empire that went on to conquer most of Eurasia, including much of the Middle East, parts of Eastern Europe, China and Russia. The empire ushered in a brief period of peace and trade across much of the world. Ultimately, however, despite some setbacks in Japan and the Levant, the real threat to the Mongol Empire’s dominance was rivalry between its rulers, and the empire fragmented into four khanates, which in turn collapsed or were conquered. The legacy of the Mongol Empire lives on in the fact that 8 percent of the world’s men are descended from Genghis Khan.

British Empire

The British Empire grew out of the colonial and trading ventures of Great Britain in the eighteenth century, and by the early twentieth century, it had become history’s largest empire, covering a quarter of the world’s surface—so large that the “sun never set” on it. At its height, over a fifth of the world’s population lived in it.

Unlike previous great empires, the basis of Britain’s power was its navy, which it could use to strike far and wide. This allowed Britain to enforce freedom of navigation and oppose slavery and piracy, making the world a safer place. Instead of seeking to control vast inland territories for resources, the empire depended on trade and control over strategic chokepoints—Suez, Malacca, Aden, Hormuz, Gibraltar were all British. This made Britain very wealthy.

Britain’s empire was very diverse and included territory on all the world’s continents, comprising a vast array of cultures. More so than other empires, it ruled over a heterogenous population, giving it time to evolve and perfect ways to rule multiple regions either directly or through local rulers. British rule extended to places as different as India, Egypt and Canada.

Soviet Union

Perhaps it was inevitable that a country with the size and resources of the Soviet Union would become a superpower. The Soviet Union inherited most of the population and territory of the Russian Empire, an empire that had grown so large through conquest so as to be called the “prison of nations.” The basis of Soviet power was its enormous size that made it difficult to knock out in war, as Hitler discovered.

This huge, resource-filled landmass could be marshalled to weather and defeat foreign armies. The Soviet Union’s huge land army, backed by nuclear weapons, was a juggernaut that was unstoppable via conventional battle. The Soviet Union’s geographical advantage also led many in the West to fear that, based on the Heartland theory of geopolitics, whoever controlled the Eurasian heartland could then control Eurasia and thus the world.

Soviet power continued to grow ever greater because of its obsession with security. Thus, Soviet armies continued to roll on and on in order to keep their enemies as far away from the homeland as possible. This culminated in the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe and much of Northeast Asia.

United States

The United States became the first true global superpower in the aftermath of World War II. At the end of that war, America was home to half of the world’s GDP, a proportion that was never before and has never since been matched by any one country. For four decades, the Soviet Union rivaled it, but the United States was always stronger because of its economy, geography and alliances. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, militarily and technologically, it has enjoyed almost total dominance in the air and seas, as well as a conventional land advantage.

The United States combines some of the best features of previous superpowers. It controls an enormous, continental-sized, resource-rich territory like the Soviet Union and has a strong military that can wreak total havoc on its enemies like the Mongols. Like the Roman Empire, America really has no military rival. Most importantly, though, America—like Britain—has built its power on the basis of a nonfinite, nonterritorial resource (commerce), and like Britain, America has a superb navy that can access all the world’s major sea routes.

However, we should remember all superpowers ceased to be such at some point, and most often due to internal events. Even the greatest superpowers, no matter how dominant economically and militarily, should remember this.

The Inevitable Superpower: Why China’s Dominance Is a Sure Thing

To debtors, creditors can be like dictators. Governments in financial trouble often turn to the International Monetary Fund as supplicants, and acting at the behest of its own major creditors, the IMF often imposes tough conditions on them. After the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s, Mickey Kantor, U.S. trade representative under President Bill Clinton, called the organization “a battering ram,” because it had served to open up Asian markets to U.S. products. During the 1956 Suez crisis, the United States threatened to withhold financing that the United Kingdom desperately needed unless British forces withdrew from the Suez Canal. Harold Macmillan, who, as the British chancellor of the exchequer, presided over the last, humiliating stages of the crisis, would later recall that it was “the last gasp of a declining power.” He added, “perhaps in 200 years the United States would know how we felt.”

Is that time already fast approaching, with China poised to take over from the United States? This is an essential question, and yet it has not yet been taken seriously enough in the United States. There, this central conceit still reigns: the United States’ economic preeminence cannot be seriously threatened because it is the United States’ to lose, and sooner or later, the United States will rise to the challenge of not losing it. China may be on its way to becoming an economic superpower, and the United States may have to share the global stage with it in the future. But, the argument goes, the threat from China is not so imminent, so great, or so multifaceted that it can push the United States out of the driver’s seat.

Thus, the economist Barry Eichengreen concludes in his recent history of different reserve currencies, Exorbitant Privilege, “The good news, such as it is, is that the fate of the dollar is in our hands, not those of the Chinese.” And in December 2010, as he was leaving the White House as President Barack Obama’s national economic adviser, Larry Summers said, “Predictions of America’s decline are as old as the republic. But they perform a crucial function in driving the kind of renewal that is required of each generation of Americans. I submit to you that as long as we’re worried about the future, the future will be better. We have our challenges. But we also have the most flexible, dynamic, entrepreneurial society the world has ever seen.” In other words, if the United States can get its economic house in order, it can head off the Chinese threat.

But such views underestimate the probability that China will be economically dominant in 20 years. And they reveal a one-sided, U.S.-centric perspective: that world dominance will be determined mostly by the actions of the United States, not those of China. In fact, the outcome of this race is far more likely to be shaped by China.

THE WORLD IN 2030

Broadly speaking, economic dominance is the ability of a state to use economic means to get other countries to do what it wants or to prevent them from forcing it to do what it does not want. Such means include the size of a country’s economy, its trade, the health of its external and internal finances, its military prowess, its technological dynamism, and the international status that its currency enjoys. My forthcoming book develops an index of dominance combining just three key factors: a country’s GDP, its trade (measured as the sum of its exports and imports of goods), and the extent to which it is a net creditor to the rest of the world. GDP matters because it determines the overall resources that a country can muster to project power against potential rivals or otherwise have its way. Trade, and especially imports, determines how much leverage a country can get from offering or denying other countries access to its markets. And being a leading financier confers extraordinary influence over other countries that need funds, especially in times of crisis. No other gauge of dominance is as instructive as these three: the others are largely derivative (military strength, for example, depends on the overall health and size of an economy in the long run), marginal (currency dominance), or difficult to measure consistently across countries (fiscal strength).

I computed this index going back to 1870 (focusing on the United Kingdom’s and the United States’ economic positions then) and projected it to 2030 (focusing on the United States’ and China’s positions then). The projections are based on fairly conservative assumptions about China’s future growth, acknowledging that China faces several major challenges going forward. For starters, its population will begin to age over the coming decade. And its economy is severely distorted in several respects: overly cheap capital has led to excessive investment; the exchange rate has been undervalued, which has led to the overdevelopment of exports; and energy is subsidized, leading to its inefficient use and pollution. Correcting these distortions will impose costly dislocations. To take account of these costs, I project that China’s growth will slow down considerably: it will average seven percent a year over the next 20 years, compared with the approximately 11 percent it has registered over the last decade. History suggests that plenty of economies—Germany, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan—grew at the pace I project for China after they reached China’s current level of development. Meanwhile, I assume that the U.S. economy will grow at about 2.5 percent per year, as it has over the last 30 years. This is slightly optimistic compared with the Congressional Budget Office’s latest long-term growth forecast of 2.2 percent, a forecast that the CBO lowers occasionally because of the negative impact of the country’s accumulating public and private debt and sustained high unemployment on the U.S. economy.

The upshot of my analysis is that by 2030, relative U.S. decline will have yielded not a multipolar world but a near-unipolar one dominated by China. China will account for close to 20 percent of global GDP (measured half in dollars and half in terms of real purchasing power), compared with just under 15 percent for the United States. At that point, China’s per capita GDP will be about $33,000, or about half of U.S. GDP. In other words, China will not be dirt poor, as is commonly believed. Moreover, it will generate 15 percent of world trade—twice as much as will the United States. By 2030, China will be dominant whether one thinks GDP is more important than trade or the other way around; it will be ahead on both counts.

According to this index and these projections, China’s ascendancy is imminent. Although the United States’ GDP is greater than China’s today and the two countries’ respective trade levels are close, the United States is a very large and vulnerable debtor—it hogs about 50 percent of the world’s net capital flows—whereas China is a substantial net creditor to the world. In 2010, the United States’ lead over China was marginal: there was less than one percentage point difference between their respective indices of dominance. In fact, if one weighed these factors slightly differently, giving slightly less weight to the size of the economy relative to trade, China was already ahead of the United States in 2010.

China’s ascendancy in the future will also apply to many more issues than is recognized today. The Chinese economy will be larger than the economy of the United States and larger than that of any other country, and so will its trade and supplies of capital. The yuan will be a credible rival to the dollar as the world’s premier reserve currency.

What is more, the gap between China and the United States will be far greater than expected. In 2010, the U.S. National Intelligence Council assessed that in 2025, “the U.S. will remain the preeminent power, but that American dominance will be much diminished.” This is unduly optimistic. My projections suggest that the gap between China and the United States in 2030 will be similar to that between the United States and its rivals in the mid-1970s, the heyday of U.S. hegemony, and greater than that between the United Kingdom and its rivals during the halcyon days of the British Empire, in 1870. In short, China’s future economic dominance is more imminent and will be both greater and more varied than is currently supposed.

STRONG LIKE A BULL

Martin Wolf, the Financial Times columnist, has used the term “premature superpower” to describe China’s unique ability to wield power despite being poor. According to my projections, however, by 2030, China will not be so badly off. Rather, its GDP per capita (in terms of purchasing power parity) will be more than half that of the United States and greater than the average per capita GDP around the world. Still, China’s economic dominance will be singular: unlike in the past, when the dominant powers—the United Kingdom and the United States—were very rich relative to their competitors, China will be just a middle- or upper-middle-income country. And can a country be dominant even when it is not among the richest?

There are three plausible reasons for thinking that it cannot. First, a relatively poor country might have to subordinate its hopes of projecting power internationally to its need to address more pressing domestic challenges, such as achieving higher standards of living and greater social stability. Second, it might not be able to reliably raise the resources it needs to project power abroad. Military assets, for one thing, have to be financed, and poorer countries have more difficulty taxing their citizens than do rich countries. Third, a poor country can have only so much influence abroad if it does not have soft power, such as democracy, an open society, or pluralistic values. The leadership that comes with dominance lasts only if it inspires followers: only those who stand for something that commands universal or near-universal appeal are inspiring. Likewise, only a rich country—one on the economic and technological edge—can be a fount of ideas, technology, institutions, and practices for others.

That said, even if dominance is generally inconsistent with poverty, one can be dominant without being among the richest countries. Even a middle-income power, which China is likely to be by 2030, can be internally cohesive, raise resources for external purposes (such as military expenditures), and possess some inspiring national ideals. In fact, despite China’s relatively low per capita GDP today, it is already dominant in several ways. China convinced the African countries in which it invests heavily to close down the Taiwanese embassies they were hosting. With $3 trillion in foreign reserves, it has offered to buy Greek, Irish, Portuguese, and Spanish debt to forestall or mitigate financial chaos in Europe. (“China is Spain’s best friend,” said Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero in April on the occasion of the Chinese president’s visit.) China has also used its size to strengthen its trade and financial relationships in Asia and Latin America: for example, trade transactions among several countries in both regions can now be settled in yuan.

Above all, China’s exchange-rate policy has affected economies throughout the world, hurting developing countries as much as the United States: by keeping its currency cheap, China has managed to keep its exports more competitive than those from countries such as Bangladesh, India, Mexico, and Vietnam. Yet these countries have stood on the sidelines, leaving Washington to wage a crusade against Beijing on its own—and for that reason, it has not done so very successfully. China, meanwhile, has been able to buy off the opposition. Although many countries chafe at seeing their competitiveness undermined by an undervalued yuan, they remain silent, either for fear of China’s political muscle or because China offers them financial assistance or trading opportunities. Even within the United States, few groups have really been critical. China is a large market for U.S. companies, and so it is the liberal left, not the holders of U.S. capital, that has condemned China’s exchange-rate policy, on behalf of U.S. workers.

Even if China is unlikely to muster anytime soon the kind of dominance that naturally inspires or might be necessary to build international systems and institutions like those the United States created after World War II, Beijing is already exercising other forms of dominance. For example, it can require that U.S. and European firms share their technology with Chinese firms before granting them access to its market. And it can pursue policies that have systemic effects, despite opposition from much of the world. Its policy of undervaluing its exchange rate is a classic beggar-thy-neighbor strategy that undermines the openness of the world’s trading and financial systems while also creating the conditions for easy liquidity, which contributed to the recent global economic crisis. Chinese dominance is not looming. In some ways, it is already here.

DROWNING BY NUMBERS

Can the United States reverse this trend? Its economic future inspires angst: the country has a fiscal problem, a growth problem, and, perhaps most intractable of all, a middle-class problem. Repeated tax cuts and two wars, the financial and economic crisis of 2008–10, the inexorable growth of long-term entitlements (especially related to health), and the possible buildup of bad assets for which the government might eventually be responsible have created serious doubts about the U.S. public sector’s balance sheet. High public and private debt and long-term unemployment will depress long-term growth. And a combination of stagnating middle-class incomes, growing inequality, declining mobility, and, more recently, falling prospects for even the college educated has created big distributional problems. The middle class is feeling beleaguered: it does not want to have to move down the skill ladder, but its upward prospects are increasingly limited by competition from China and India.

The United States’ continued strength comes from its can-do attitude about fixing its economic problems and its confidence that sound economic fundamentals can ensure its enduring economic dominance. Most notably, the United States affords unique opportunities for entrepreneurship “because it has a favorable business culture, the most mature venture capital industry, close relations between universities and industry, and an open immigration policy,” according to the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, an academic consortium that studies entrepreneurial activity worldwide. In a 2009 survey, GEM ranked the United States first in the world in providing such opportunities. Nearly all the major commercially successful companies that have made technological breakthroughs in the last three decades—Apple and Microsoft, Google and Facebook—were founded and are based in the United States. In fact, it was by finding new and dynamic sources of growth in the 1990s that the United States was able to head off the economic challenge posed by that era’s rising power, Japan. Today, optimists argue that the United States can replicate that experience with China. It is true that if the U.S. economy were to grow consistently at a rate of 3.5 percent over the next 20 years, as it did in the 1990s, investor sentiment and confidence in the dollar as a reserve currency could be buoyed.

But some key differences today should dampen any such hope. The United States headed into the 1990s with far less government debt than it will have in the future. In 1990, the ratio of public debt to GDP was about 42 percent, whereas the COB’s latest projected figure for 2020 is close to 100 percent. The external position of the United States was also less vulnerable two decades ago. For example, in 1990, foreign holdings of U.S. government debt amounted to 19 percent; today, they are close to 50 percent, and a majority are in China’s hands. In the 1990s, the country was also considerably further away from the date at which it would have to reckon with the cost of entitlements.

And then there is the United States’ beleaguered middle class. Over the last 20 years, several related pathologies that have squeezed the American middle class, such as a stagnating median income, have become more entrenched and more intractable. Even a 3.5 percent growth rate, which would be well above current expectations, may not be adequate to maintain confidence in the U.S. model, which is based on the hope of a better future for many.

In other words, the United States cannot escape the inexorable logic of demography and the fact that poor countries, especially China, are catching up with it. China, which is four times as populous as the United States, will be a bigger economy as soon as its average standard of living (measure in per capita GDP) exceeds one-quarter of the United States’. By some measures, including my own, this has already occurred, and as China continues to grow, the gap will only widen. A resurgent United States might be able to slow down that process, but it will not be able to prevent it. Growing by 3.5 percent, rather than 2.5 percent, over the next 20 years might boost the United States’ economic performance, social stability, and national mood. But it would not make a significant difference in its position relative to China in the face of, say, a seven percent growth rate there.

These projections undermine the dominant belief that the United States’ economic preeminence is its own to lose. It is China’s actions that will largely determine whether the differential in growth between China and the United States is modest or great. China can radically mess up, for example, if it allows asset bubbles to build or if it fails to stave off political upheaval. Or it can surge ahead by correcting existing economic distortions, especially by moving away from an export-intensive growth strategy toward one that develops demand at home. The United States’ range of action is much narrower. If the United States is unlikely to grow significantly slower than by 2.0–2.5 percent, it is even more unlikely to grow faster than by 3.5 percent. This is the curse of being at the frontier of economic development: both the potential downsides and the potential upsides are limited.

Even if the United States grows fast—say, by 3.5 percent—other countries, such as China, may grow faster, too, leaving the basic picture of their relative economic power unaffected. In fact, when the pace of technological innovation in leading countries, such as the United States, quickens, the new technologies become quickly available to poorer countries, providing a stimulus to their growth, too. Even more important than producing new technologies is having the human capital and the skills to use them. According to the National Science Foundation, in 2006 there were nearly twice as many undergraduates in science and engineering in China as in the United States. This differential is likely only to grow. Despite having a considerably worse educational system than the United States, China seems well positioned to absorb new technologies. There were six times as many peer-reviewed scientific publications in the United States as in China in 2002—and just 2.5 times as many in 2008. The ability of rich countries to stay ahead in terms of growth is inherently limited because China is better able to absorb and use new technologies. China’s technological sophistication is growing: the United States, Europe, and Japan export very few products that China does not also export. More generally, if growth in the United States slows, China’s growth might be unaffected, but if it accelerates, China’s growth might, too. Either way, the United States cannot pull away.

BACK TO SUEZ

Even a resurgent United States could not exercise power and dominance over a rising China. China is already able to do what the rest of the world does not want it to do. Might it soon be able to get the United States to do what the United States does not want to do? Is another Suez crisis possible?

In 1956, with sterling under pressure because of Egypt’s blockade of the Suez Canal, the United Kingdom turned to the United States for financial assistance, invoking their “special relationship.” But U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower refused. He was furious that the British (and the French) had attacked Egypt after President Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the canal, just as he was campaigning for reelection as the man of peace who had ended the fighting on the Korean Peninsula. He demanded that the United Kingdom comply with a U.S.-sponsored UN resolution requiring the prompt and unconditional withdrawal of British troops. If it did not, Washington would block the United Kingdom’s access to resources from the IMF. But if it did, it would get substantial financial assistance. The United Kingdom agreed, and the United States supported a massive financial package, including an unprecedented IMF loan worth $1.3 billion and a $500 million loan from the U.S. Export-Import Bank.

Now, imagine a not-so-distant future in which the United States has recovered from the crisis of 2008–10 but remains saddled with structural problems: widening income gaps, a squeezed middle class, and reduced economic and social mobility. Its financial system is still as fragile as before the crisis, and the government has yet to come to grips with the rising costs of entitlements and the buildup of bad assets in the financial system, which the government might have to take over. Inflation is a major global problem because commodity prices are skyrocketing as a result of rapid growth in emerging markets. China has an economy and a trade flow twice as large as the United States’. The dollar has lost its sheen; demand for the yuan as a reserve currency is growing.

Much as in 1956, when Washington was suspected of orchestrating massive sales of sterling in New York to force the British government to withdraw its troops from the Suez Canal, rumors are swirling that China is planning to wield its financial power; it has had enough of the United States’ naval presence in the Pacific Ocean. Beijing starts selling some of its currency reserves (by then likely to amount to $4 trillion). Investors grow skittish, fearing that the dollar might collapse, and bond markets turn on U.S. government paper. The United States soon loses its AAA credit rating. Auctions for U.S. Treasury bonds find no buyers. To maintain confidence, the U.S. Federal Reserve sharply raises interest rates. Before long, interest rates substantially exceed growth rates, and the United States urgently needs cheap financing. It turns to oil exporters, but the friendly autocrats of yore have been replaced by illiberal democrats of various Islamic persuasions, ranging from moderate to extreme, and all with long memories of U.S. intervention in the Middle East. Much as for Greece, Ireland, and Portugal recently, seeking help from the IMF seems unavoidable: defaulting on U.S. debt obligations would be fatal to the effort to preserve what is left of the United States’ global role.

But by this time, China, already the world’s largest banker since 2000, controls the spigot. Although it, too, deems that an IMF bailout is necessary, it has a precondition: the withdrawal of the United States’ naval presence in the western Pacific. The request has bite because China, as the IMF’s largest contributor and a benefactor to many of its members, can easily block the United States’ request for financing. By then, China may even have acquired veto power thanks to the governance reforms scheduled for 2018.

Some will say this scenario is pure fantasy. After all, the United States could easily withhold financing from the United Kingdom in 1956 because doing so had no serious consequences for the dollar or the U.S. economy. But if tomorrow, China sold, or just stopped buying, U.S. Treasury bonds, the dollar would decline and the yuan would appreciate—the very outcome that China has steadfastly been trying to prevent. China is unlikely to suddenly undermine its mercantilist growth strategy and risk large capital losses on its stock of foreign exchange reserves. Others might say that even if China were willing to do so, if the U.S. economy were depressed, the Federal Reserve might be only too happy to buy up any U.S. Treasuries dumped by China.

But all this leaves out that China’s incentives might be very different in the future. Ten years on, China might be less wedded to keeping the yuan weak. If it continues to slowly internationalize its currency, both its ability to maintain a weak yuan and its interest in doing so may soon disappear. And when they do, China’s power over the United States will become considerable. In 1956, the United Kingdom’s financiers were dispersed across the public and private sectors. But the Chinese government is the largest net supplier of capital to the United States: it holds many U.S. Treasury bonds and finances the U.S. deficit. Leverage over the United States is concentrated in Beijing’s hands.

Of course, the prospects of a dollar devaluation would probably be less painful for the United States in this hypothetical future than the prospects of a weakening sterling was for the United Kingdom in 1956. Back then, a devaluation of sterling would have inflicted heavy losses on the currencies of the United Kingdom’s former colonies that held large sterling-denominated assets. These colonies would have sold their sterling assets, weakening their economic links with the United Kingdom. Preventing this was important to the government in London in order to preserve what was left of the British Empire. A devaluation of the dollar would be less of a problem partly because the United States’ foreign liabilities are denominated in dollars.

A repeat of the Suez crisis may seem improbable today. But the United States’ current economic situation does leave the country fundamentally vulnerable in the face of China’s inescapable dominance. The United Kingdom was playing with a weak hand during the Suez crisis not just because it was in debt and its economy was weakening but also because another great economic power had emerged. Today, even as the United States’ economy is structurally weak, its addiction to debt has made the country dependent on foreigners, and its prospects for growth are minimal, a strong rival has emerged. China may not quite be an adversary, but it is not an ally, either. Macmillan’s 1971 prophecy that the United States might decline “in 200 years” betrayed a mechanical interpretation of history: it projected enduring dominance for the United States, much like his own country had enjoyed. But China could accelerate the patterns of history—and make the United States confront its decline much sooner than Macmillan anticipated or even than most people expect today.

This Is Why America Is Losing to China

A lot of people think that we are already living in a Chinese century — that the American empire is retreating and Chinese power could dominate the future — through technological mastery, military prowess and a Great Leap Forward in artificial intelligence.

I tend to be pretty skeptical of this scenario: America has outlasted challengers before and China seems to me to have remarkable strengths, yes, but also serious weaknesses.

My guest today makes a compelling case that Chinese power could really be poised to surpass our own.

Dan Wang is a keen observer of contemporary China, and his new book,” Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future,” argues that the Trump administration’s current trade war is wrongheaded or too late, and that American pre-eminence can be preserved if we imitate the things that China is getting right.

Below is an edited transcript of an episode of “Interesting Times.” We recommend listening to it in its original form for the full effect. You can do so using the player above or on the NYT Audio app, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.

Ross Douthat: Dan Wang, welcome to “Interesting Times.”

Dan Wang: Thank you for having me.

Douthat: We’re going to talk about the Chinese model and how it compares to the American model — strengths, weaknesses, conflict, coexistence. But I want to start by talking about your own experience.

You were in China from 2017 through 2023. You were a technology analyst, you were a writer, you wrote an annual letter about what you saw in China and you traveled a lot.

So I want you to start by telling us a story or giving us an image or a place that you visited or saw or experienced that you looked at and it made you think: The 21st century is going to belong to China.

Wang: Here’s a vision from 2021. In the summer of 2021, China’s borders were closed because of Covid and I was living in China’s richest city, Shanghai.

My life was full of ease and full of beauty. You are never very far away from a subway station. They’re constantly expanding their subway stations. Shanghai had about 500 parks in 2020, and by the end of 2025 the city government declared that it will have about a thousand parks.

It has all of the big skyscrapers that are so iconic in China. But below these skyscrapers, you also have a lot of these wonderful noodle shops and dumpling shops that I love to frequent.

So Shanghai is a highly functional city. I would say much more functional than New York City.

But I was feeling a little bit cooped up in Shanghai. I wanted to go see the great countryside and the rest of the country throughout the provinces. So I decided to take two friends and go on a lengthy bike ride in China’s southwestern province of Guizhou. This is a land where a local said, “Not three feet of land is flat, not three days go by without rain and not a family has three silver coins.”

China’s fourth-poorest province, I was surprised to see, had much better levels of infrastructure than one could find in much wealthier places in the United States, like New York State or California.

We saw very tall bridges all around us. We saw a guitar-making hub. We saw a lot of fancy new roads that were a cyclist’s dream. And it was only afterward when I realized how bizarre it was that China’s fourth-poorest province — about the level of G.D.P. per capita of Botswana, much less than Shanghai or Guangdong — was able to build all of these things.

It is a province with 11 airports, 50 of the highest bridges in the world and brand-new, spiffy highways — and that’s because China was just building a lot in its equivalent of a South Dakota or West Virginia.

Douthat: So your experience was basically like being in the New York of China and finding it more pleasant and beautiful and civilized than our New York, and then going out to China’s West Virginia and discovering that it had far better infrastructure than the richest American states?

Wang: That’s right. The cities in China are, I would say, quite a bit better than the cities in the U.S. Here in New York, we have these subway lines that are screamingly loud. Have you ever heard these metallic screeches once you’re in the subway stations?

We’re sitting here in the offices of The New York Times, just across from Port Authority Bus Terminal. The governor of New York announced that they’re going to refurbish the Port Authority Bus Terminal. Hooray. And it’s going to take years.

Douthat: And if you’ve been in the Port Authority Bus Terminal, it’s like Hercules cleaning out the Augean stables to say you’re going to refurbish it.

Wang: Let’s clean out those stables. And Shanghai is able to clean out those stables, and the Chinese countryside is also superbly built up.

Douthat: So China builds and the U.S. doesn’t, and one of your arguments is that this reflects a fundamental difference in our elites and who rules our respective societies. China is a society of engineers: It’s ruled by engineers; the Communist Party is filled with engineers. And America is a society of lawyers.

What does rule by engineers mean, and what can it achieve that is harder to achieve in the United States?

Wang: My framing of China is as an engineering state because since the 1980s, then top leader Deng Xiaoping started promoting a lot of engineers into China’s leadership, really as a corrective to the mayhem of the Mao years.

Mao was a romantic. He was a poet who inflicted all sorts of strange disasters on the Chinese population.

Deng Xiaoping took a look at what was wrong with China under Mao, and Deng said that what we need is a highly efficient technocracy. Technocrats at the time meant engineers, mostly trained in the Soviet style of heavy industry.

The Chinese were civil engineers. They were mechanical engineers. They were all sorts of electrical engineers that Deng Xiaoping promoted into the highest ranks of the Communist Party. By the year 2002, all nine members of the standing committee of the Politburo had degrees in engineering.

I contrast that with the lawyerly society of the United States. And what’s really striking about the U.S. is that the founding documents of the Declaration of Independence read almost like a legal argument. Most of the founding fathers were lawyers. And so that’s the kind of contrast that I set up, that China is an engineering state trying to build its way out of every problem.

The U.S. is a lawyerly society that is really good at stopping a lot of things. What that means is that the U.S. doesn’t have functional infrastructure almost anywhere, I would say. And it also doesn’t have these stupid ideas like the one-child policy either.

Douthat: Talk a little bit more about how engineers see the world.

Wang: Something that engineers do is not only construct a lot of bridges and subway systems and highways and nuclear plants and coal plants in highly rational ways; they are also very intent on treating the economy as if it were a vast hydraulic system made up of a series of valves.

Part of what I have seen living in China was that Xi Jinping in the years 2020 to roughly 2022 decided that the economy was just something that could be pushed around as well.

He engineered a property crackdown to reduce the leverage of state-owned enterprises in terms of housing development. He also very dramatically re-engineered a lot of the online tech sector, as well.

There was a series of thunderclaps that Xi issued against major Chinese companies that included Alibaba, an e-commerce company; Didi, which was a ride-hailing company; the entirety of the online education sector. And Xi and the rest of the Politburo essentially wiped out about a trillion dollars from China’s stock market back then.

I think part of that was trying to funnel China’s best and brightest — the people graduating from the top universities — away from building cryptocurrencies or consumer tech and hedge funds into building industries that are more critical to strategic needs, something like semiconductors, aviation or chemistry instead.

What Xi Jinping really tried to do was to engineer the economy in a way so that the Communist Party achieves some vision of success.

Douthat: What you just described in terms of the Communist Party’s view of what had gone wrong with the tech sector is a view widely shared in the United States, including by people deeply involved, as you know, in Silicon Valley itself.

The idea that at a certain point Silicon Valley just became a machine for generating new apps and ride sharing and getting people’s DoorDash deliveries there as fast as possible — but lost any direct connection to building rockets and flying cars and new infrastructure and making other kinds of breakthroughs.

But the American assumption is that when capitalism goes wrong, the solution has to be some kind of deregulation. You can’t just have someone sitting in Washington, D.C., say: OK, Silicon Valley, too many ride-share apps. We’re going to turn the dial and we’re going to develop more self-driving cars and high-speed rail. Or something like that.

Part of the argument you present in the book is that over the last 10 or 15 years, China has actually succeeded in turning its dials in ways that are generating cutting-edge breakthroughs, cutting-edge research and technological mastery.

So talk a little bit about what you see as that achievement.

Wang: I think China has achieved a pretty high level of technological mastery.

I moved to China at the start of 2017, in large part to study a major industrial plan that the state council had announced, called Made in China 2025. This was a grand, ambitious plan, one of a series of plans from the Communist Party, declaring that China really needs to master these industries of the future.

That included clean technologies, electric vehicles, maritime technologies, agricultural equipment, whatever you want to name. It is listed somewhere in these plans — sometimes with exquisite percentagesof exactly how much Chinese industries need to be as a share of the global total.

I think we can clearly see now that China is a leader in electric vehicles. It is a leader in all sorts of industrial robotics. China has a complete chokehold on the solar industry. China owns about 90 percent of this industry. If you take a look at rare earth magnets, which caused a lot of grief to the Trump administration earlier this year when it was trying to prosecute the trade war, China has about 90 percent of the processing for these goods.

And if we take a look at a lot of manufactured goods, segment by segment, we’ll see that China owns about 35 percent of global manufacturing value-add. And if we take a look at a couple of these particularly high-end technologies — almost everything aside from semiconductors and aviation, which are big Chinese weaknesses — China is becoming really strong in most advanced technologies.

Now, I wonder to what extent this is the result of government planning. I would certainly not say that this was some genius demonstration of spectacular central planning from Beijing that got China to where it is today.

Sometimes China is able to produce these successes out of some degree of government policy. But just as often, whenever we can take a look at these examples, we can find other examples in which government policy produced only waste and scams and fraud — and to some degree overcapacity, as well.

I would situate China’s success mostly on the level of its fiercely dynamic entrepreneurs.

You can have capitalist competition. I would say far more cutthroat than what we would see in the U.S.

Douthat: Why is that?

Wang: It starts with the scale of the country. I remember visiting a company that had already grown a little bit large. It was called Meituan, which is now one of these big Chinese online platform companies.

And Meituan said that we survived after being one of 5,000 clones of Groupon in China. They simply cloned the Groupon idea and out of this battle royal they managed to brawl it out with everyone else. And they were the only ones left standing.

If we take a look at a lot of these other industries that China completely dominates — solar, for example; China completely owns this industry — the solar industry has collapsed in prices. I think the figure is something like a 94 percent drop in prices since the year 2000.

That is in large part of what Chinese companies have done in making the processes better and making the panels themselves more efficient. But what has been a national strategic success for the government, as well as producing a lot of consumer benefits, has entailed absolutely miserable competition for these companies and absolutely miserable returns for their investors.

In a sense, I think this is what socialism with Chinese characteristics means: The state wins; consumers win. But it is actually pretty rough for any of these companies out there.

One of the things that I did when I was writing this book was to try to confront head-on whether we needed something like free speech and free thinking in order to drive a lot of innovation, as well as dynamism.And I’m not sure that these are terribly important. If we take a look at a lot of highly autocratic regimes — regimes that I would say are more autocratic than China today, namely Stalin’s Soviet Union as well as Hitler’s Germany — these were also regimes that ended up producing a lot of state-driven innovation.

If we take a look at the record of Soviet science, there were a lot of Nobel Prize winners that barely staggered out of gulags in the Soviet Union before they made their great prizewinning innovations.

A lot of Soviet military scientists, fighter jet scientists, nuclear scientists had all been persecuted by Stalin himself. Also, with Nazi Germany, there were breakthroughs in rocketry and fighter jets in spite of a highly autocratic, fascist, totalitarian regime.

I think what matters a lot for innovation is simply the funding.

Sometimes they really care about free speech. Sometimes they care about creative expression. But for many of them, they’re able to make breakthroughs if you just give them a really big lab.

Douthat: But what about the argument that says authoritarian and autocratic models can be really good at driving production and innovation in areas where there is low-hanging fruit? Clearly a lot of what China has done technologically is a catch-up where you are essentially taking a Western product or a Western innovation and perfecting it, figuring out mass production, doing these kinds of things.

But when it comes to discovery, figuring out what the new thing is — the thing that you can’t centrally plan — American democratic capitalism tends to be better. Liberal societies tend to be more successful.

By the 1970s, the Soviet Union was not doing anything substantially cutting-edge. The space program was amazing for a while, and then it wasn’t. The economy grew quickly, and then it didn’t.

So what is the case that China has escaped that kind of trap? That it’s not just catching up, but that it is actually going beyond what liberal and democratic societies are achieving technologically?

Wang: I’m not sure that this is a really big trap because I think that the U.S. is really good at making these sorts of discoveries, but the U.S. also is very significantly unable to actually follow through with building industries out of these discoveries.

Bell Labs invented this great new scientific project in the solar industry in 1954. It remained for the most part a scientific project until the Germans developed it into a much bigger industry throughout the 2000s.

And subsequently, all of the Chinese firms were able to copy the German expertise, and they completely overran the industry such that the Germans and the Americans barely have a strong solar industry anymore, even after quite a lot of tariffs and protection.

I think this dichotomy of innovation and production is at best blurry, because I’ve seen too many examples of the Chinese simply building up an industry accretively, step-by-step trying to perfect an industry such that you get to a whole new industry by the time that they really perfect it. The Chinese are much better at climbing the ladders that the Americans have placed.

Douthat: So let’s just drill down for a minute into why that is. Because part of your argument is that it is choices that the state has made.

But you just said that often the state still seems to make bad choices.

Wang: Yes.

Douthat: So it emerges organically from frantic competition in a large market. But then you also said, you used the phrase “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” which implies that this frantic competition is still constrained in some way by Marxist or socialist norms.

So what is the actual model? Why are they climbing the ladders faster?

Wang: I think that the first and most important part of China’s technological success has to do with something I call process knowledge.

Process knowledge is also known as tacit knowledge, also known as industrial expertise. In a kitchen analogy, it is something like the recipe, and the hardware is something like the stoves and the pots and the pans.

But let’s say, Ross, we give someone who’s never cooked a day in his life the most well-equipped kitchen, as well as the most exquisitely detailed recipe. Are we sure that this person will be able to do something as simple as frying an egg for breakfast?

I’m not sure if that person will burn the kitchen down in some big way.

Douthat: My children have often given evidence for that hypothesis.

Wang: Yes. And I think the crucial part of technology is actually all of this tacit knowledge, process knowledge that we can’t really write down.

That is the core part of what has been driving China’s technological advantage. It started when China started making pretty simple things — socks, T-shirts, all these things that we think and know are not terribly important — before they get to slightly more complex things, like shoes.

Then they get to everything that now includes iPhones and electric vehicle batteries, and they are really good at climbing this ladder.

China’s hardware capital, Shenzhen, was mostly a backwater — making textiles all the way up until 2008, when Shenzhen started producing Steve Jobs’s iPhones.

iPhones started rolling off the line and you had this enormous work force, hundreds of thousands of people making the most sophisticated consumer electronics in the world, making the next consumer drones, more sophisticated electronics. And I think that is really the basis of China’s technology advantage: It’s just these gigantic investments and work force.

The state sometimes gets in the way; the state sometimes harnesses this work force. You also have a lot of entrepreneurial energy. I’m not sure if I wanted to define it as state capitalism with Chinese characteristics, but I just view it as technological catch-up.

Douthat: Right, but what is the difference, then, between that model and ours? Part of your argument is that America has lost a lot of that knowledge through the process of outsourcing and allowing factories to move overseas and allowing deindustrialization to happen, and becoming an information and financial services and service economy — a very rich one, but not an industrial economy in the way that China is.

I want to understand how much of this is saying there are engineering minds in the Politburo who made these choices that maybe you can only make in an authoritarian society, or maybe we could have made different choices ourselves in the U.S.?

How much of it is that versus some other element of competition or culture in China right now?

Wang: I think the crucial mistake in the U.S. was that it wasn’t even a choice that the U.S. made to outsource a lot of manufacturing. Now, there is this line that politicians like to trot out that China stole all the jobs — and sure, that’s one framing of it.

But I think a more accurate framing is that since the 1990s, big American manufacturers had been actively moving their production to China, and the U.S. government did almost nothing to restrain them.

I’m not sure whether that was actually a really deliberate choice plotted out by the Council of Economic Advisers advising Bill Clinton. Maybe it was, but I think this was just a process of business lobbying saying: Well, we need to tap into this market and produce at these cheaper places.

And something that the Communist Party actively decided was that they were going to import big American manufacturers in the 1990s and 2000s, Apple, Tesla.

If they want to build their products here, we are going to completely welcome Steve Jobs and Elon Musk to train our workers and make them as good as they can be.

That was a more conscious decision, I think, made by engineers who realized they had to catch up to the global frontier. They couldn’t do it with China’s existing level of technology, and they were going to have Americans help them.

Douthat: To speak to the views of Bill Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers or any of the other American policymakers who presided over this transfer of industrial might, there was an assumption that has been proved false — which was that economic development would inevitably lead to liberalization in China and would turn China into a democracy. And that would make the world more likely to be at peace and have relations between the U.S. and China get better and better, and so on. At least so far, that has been completely falsified.

But there was also just a basic economic assumption, a free trader’s assumption, that said: Well, if China gets really good at building things and sells them to us, and we have an economy that’s in a different phase and a different stage and is based more on information and services, as long as we stay rich, that’s OK.

And while there obviously are big parts of the U.S. that have suffered from the relationship with China, that were hollowed out, the U.S. has remained very rich. The American economy, despite what some doomsayers would say, is not a disaster area.

So someone could listen to your arguments and read your book and ask: What are the actual stakes here? What is China building and investing for, apart from wealth for its own sake? What kind of power does it want?

Wang: I think you’re absolutely right that America is highly dynamic, and I don’t want to count out America in this stage of competition. I think at various points the U.S. will look weak. At various points it will look strong.

But what are the stakes here? Because I think there is still a broad view in the U.S. that deindustrialization has been pretty bad — not just for regions like Pennsylvania or Michigan, where the deindustrialization has been felt pretty badly.

There’s also a pretty clear loss of manufacturing expertise that is represented in the declining fortunes of American apex manufacturers. Companies like Intel, Boeing, Detroit automakers and now, increasingly, Tesla.

They’ve had mostly bad news over the last few quarters, last few years. In the case of Detroit, the last few decades. Apex manufacturers are not working very well.

If we take a look at the early days of the Covid pandemic, the U.S. manufacturers were not very good at making simple products either — necessary products, like cotton swabs and cotton masks. And they weren’t able to really rejig their supply lines in order to build out critical materials.

If we take a look at the U.S. defense industrial base, after the U.S. shipped a lot of munitions to Ukraine for its self-defense against Russia, the U.S. hasn’t really been able to rebuild its munition stockpiles.

If we take a look at naval ships with the U.S. Navy, every class of ships is now behind schedule.

Douthat: Let’s pause there, then. You just offered two somewhat different examples of what the U.S. loses. The first one is if China is a manufacturing powerhouse and we are not — even if our per capita G.D.P. looks good now — over time, we will just inevitably get poorer relative to China.

Is that right? If we’re making the bullish case for China, would that be your expectation?

Wang: That could be a scenario. I’m not expecting that China will be richer than the U.S.

But I think that what China will do is seize more technological industries of the future the way it already has. And in the apocalyptic scenario in which these two countries meet in the conflagration, you need a material base. You need a defense industrial base in order to meet on the battlefield.

I can see a scenario in which the U.S. can’t get its act together to produce drones and ships, ammunitions — and the Chinese are able to. So it’s not just about the economy.

Douthat: So that’s the second point. I just wanted to think about the economic side of this.

Are we telling a story where even if there isn’t a war between the U.S. and China, the average American is just going to be poorer than we otherwise would be over a prolonged period of time?

Wang: Yeah. I wonder whether services are going to be able to absorb even more of the U.S. work force. Right now, about 11 percent of the American work force works in manufacturing; much of the rest is in services.

Can the U.S. be a great power if a lot more people are working in Hollywood, in Silicon Valley, in Wall Street, in health care, in consulting? Is that even a likely scenario? If we have a lot of people in Silicon Valley trying to produce artificial intelligence, that is going to make it much more difficult, I think, for entry-level people to find jobs in a lot of these service-, knowledge-based sectors.

So I’m not very optimistic that very many people will be able to manufacture in the U.S., but I think there are also strong limits on how much services can absorb, and this is where the economics make me nervous.

Douthat: OK. So you have the possibility of U.S. economic decline, but then you have direct great power conflict where it seems like, very straightforwardly, you’re saying the U.S. is in increasing danger of losing our position as the world’s dominant military power. Being in a position where we would likely lose a war to China.

Do you think we would lose a war to China if we fought a war in the next five years?

Wang: I can’t comment on whether the U.S. would lose. I’m not a military analyst. I wonder whether the U.S. would be able to win on the battlefield, because it depends on the battlefield.

If Beijing is intent on dominating this island nation of Taiwan, which hangs just a few hundred miles off its shores, and if it is not intending to do something like seize Guam or seize Hawaii, then I think it is quite possible that China is able to overwhelm Taiwan pretty quickly and the U.S. Navy isn’t able to sail so far in order to free and maintain the safety and integrity of Taiwan.

I certainly don’t see any scenario in which the U.S. tries to invade and incur into mainland China. And I don’t see the Chinese ever trying to seize Los Angeles in California.

So it depends on the battlefield. But certainly, I feel like we can’t win a war without drones and munitions. And right now it doesn’t look like the U.S. is really able to produce these in quantity.

Douthat: What is China, in terms of that battlefield question? Is China primarily building to become a global superpower as a successor to the U.S., and before that, Britain? Or are they primarily building for an idea of being a self-sufficient East Asian civilization unto themselves, which gathers in Taiwan and can bully Vietnam, et cetera — but is not fundamentally trying to do what the U.S. has done for the last few decades?

Where are you on those two possibilities?

Wang: I think it’s a matter of considerable debate among the specialists who are looking at the tea leaves and trying to read the mind of Beijing.

The contrast is with these two big binaries: Does China want to supplant the U.S. wholesale as the global superpower — not only in technology but also financial terms and diplomatic terms and pretty much everything else that the U.S. is good at?

Or does it want to retreat and become the celestial empire once more, as the Qing dynasty once called itself — close the doors against all of the barbarians, seize Taiwan because it must to fulfill the aims of Mao in the Civil War, and mostly dominate its near neighbors?

My view is that China is closer to the latter, closer to being the serene empire that doesn’t care about the turmoils of the crazy Americans outside.

But I think that the question then has to become something like: If China is fully able to dominate its near neighbors in East Asia — countries like the Philippines and Vietnam and Malaysia — such that it is able to bring those state leaders out to kowtow for the emperor’s pleasure in Beijing, how much does that in particular threaten American interests, and how much should America really feel that it needs to defend these regions against that potential threat?

I don’t have a super strong view here. Mostly, what I think is that China is achieving some goal of being very physically strong in terms of manufacturing might. I don’t think that it is a great superpower in terms of cultural production. And I think their prowess is mostly constrained in the physical manufacturing world.

Douthat: Do you think the A.I. race changes that, or maybe determines the shape of where Chinese power might go?

Wang: I am skeptical. I spend a lot of time in Silicon Valley because I am part of the Hoover Institution, and I spend some time speaking to nerds who want to build God in a box.

Douthat: I’m familiar with that. Yes.

Wang: Yes. And I think there is this eschaton that they want to bring about in which the world ends in something like 2027. And they don’t have a great vision beyond 2027.

My vision of the U.S. and China are that both are giant countries that are increasingly locking horns — although not always — that are not going to fall into the sea and just sink into the Pacific Ocean or something. They are both very strong powers that have a desire to maintain their own prestige and maintain their own power.

They are going to be, I think, staring each other down for decades. And I don’t think that there will be any scenario quite like a repeat of the Soviet Union in which one power simply implodes and fails to get back up.

I think the competition is long-lasting, and the sooner that we let go of this idea that it is just going to be one technology that determines everything, it’s just going to be one cultural product — it is not one anything. It is a long-term race for decades.

Douthat: OK. Let’s talk about a future where the Chinese model seems to fail.

I think we’re establishing a scenario for 2050, let’s say, of Chinese success and American failure. In your terms, that looks like a China that is dominant in Asia, clearly technologically dominant, above and beyond the U.S. and generating more and more wealth through manufacturing, even if the average Chinese person is still poorer than the average American in a way that makes America feel like a kind of decadent and stagnant backwater — a great power, but a great power in clear and sustained decline.

Is that fair as a kind of scenario?

Wang: As a potential scenario.

Douthat: As a potential scenario for Chinese success. How could China, how could this model fail? What do engineers get wrong?

Wang: Engineers are meddling extensively in the economy. And maybe we will wake up and find one day that central planning is a ginormous failure and the Chinese will not be able to fundamentally overcome these contradictions in the model of state capitalism with Chinese characteristics.

That is a potential scenario in which the extensive meddling that has scared the living daylights out of a lot of venture capital investors in China, as well as a lot of entrepreneurs who would really prefer not to suffer through a lot of the edicts of the Politburo — they decide to not contribute so much to the great rejuvenation of the Chinese people.

I think that a lot of people have been pretty extensively burned out by the mistakes and some of the foibles of the Communist Party. A lot of what I have seen is that many young Chinese are willing to take leave of the great rejuvenation that is conducted in their name.

We have a lot of data on Chinese entrepreneurs, a lot of wealthy Chinese people who would much rather live their lives in Chinese communities like Irvine, Calif., by buying some property and just having their businesses be established in Singapore, and still not really quite trusting the Communist Party to respect everything that they want to do.

Young Chinese creative types are interested in smoking dope, just as young California types may be. They are smoking dope in Chiang Mai. I’ve spent a little bit of time seeing these people who are just as into marijuana, as well as cryptocurrencies, as folks are in Silicon Valley.

We also see a lot of Chinese migrants who are not necessarily rich, who are not necessarily the creative types, dare to fly to Ecuador, which has been visa-free for a period of time to the Chinese, and try to walk across the Darién Gap — a perilous journey to cross to the southwestern border of the United States.

At its peak in 2024, the U.S. was apprehending something like 30,000 to 40,000 Chinese who were trying to cross over into Texas. It still blows my mind that many people would try to do that to escape the regime.

Douthat: And what do you feel like they’re most trying to escape?

Is it political repression? Is it the sense that even if you’re getting rich, the government can change its engineering plan tomorrow and strip your wealth away? What aspect of China is driving the desire to go somewhere else?

Wang: Well, let’s take a look at these three canonical groups, because I think they have three different motivations.

If we take a look at the wealthy, the rich, the politically connected: Still, many Communist Party senior members have their kids in the U.S. or the U.K., somewhere abroad, because they’re not quite sure if they’re going to be purged.

There is something peculiarly precarious about authoritarian regimes where if you’re a rich person, let’s say in Beijing, you might be working in the financial industry. And last year the Communist Party declared that there was going to be a salary cap of $400,000 for people working in finance.

And you may have to give some of your money back to the state if you’ve been earning more than that. Or if you are a part of the party elite or part of the military elite and your patron is purged for corruption, the entire network falls away.

You could be a creative person working as a journalist in China. There are still many creative journalists in China who have their pieces, their essays, their reporting completely censored by the state. And after this happens a few times, a lot of people get quite mad and they move to a place like New York.

A few blocks from here, in October, I went to attend a feminist stand-up comedy show in Mandarin — and there were a lot of creative types from China, all women, telling jokes and sharing stories. It’s hard to imagine that something like this may have been necessary perhaps 10 years ago, before Xi consolidated his power.

And then for the lower-skilled migrants who are not necessarily educated very well, who are not necessarily very wealthy, their reasons for crossing are still much more complex. I don’t think I have a good handle on this question.

Douthat: Would these be the kind of people who are trying to do the Darién Gap to get to Texas?

Wang: That’s right. Get to Texas. And maybe they felt really constrained in the Covid lockdowns. Maybe they felt that their property had lost its value. So they are trying to escape and they’ve become things like Uber drivers in California. They’re just trying to make a living — not necessarily trying to flee the political regime.

Douthat: To me, that seems like a big weakness for a great power.

Wang: Yes. Absolutely.

Douthat: It seems, from an American perspective, just somewhat extraordinary that you could simultaneously say: Look, the 21st century could be the Chinese century. China is going to be dominant and we’re going to decline.

And yet the average best and brightest in China would happily accept American citizenship tomorrow, which is probably true for lots and lots of people, right?

I feel like it’s hard for me to square those two realities. That as long as lots and lots of talent would rather bet on even chaotic, misgoverned, bad infrastructure — whatever else you dislike about America, from Donald Trump to wokeness to everything in between — as long as so many talented Chinese would choose that over China, that just seems like a really strong American advantage.

Wang: Absolutely. I completely agree. And the only question is: How many? I’m not sure if the average educated elite person in Beijing and Shanghai would still want to move to the U.S.

Douthat: But at least they want a hedge. They would happily accept an offshore bank account, a house in Vancouver or a house in Irvine, and their kid at a U.S. school. They’d accept that?

Wang: Well, I would accept that if you gave me a Swiss bank account and a home in Vancouver, as well. [Laughs.] And maybe it just makes sense for many people to hedge.

Douthat: That’s fair.

Wang: I think that there are many parts of the Chinese elite that have gone abroad. I think there are complex motivations that vary year by year to what extent people leave. But I think we can certainly point out that many Chinese entrepreneurs have decided that life in Japan, in Singapore, in the U.S. is much easier.

That if you move to the U.S., the state leaves you alone. If you move to Texas and Florida, people aggressively leave you alone. And there is something about that comfort that still attracts a lot of people, for sure.

Douthat: Let’s also talk about not just how an engineering society can feel oppressive, but also how it can actively fail.

In your story about Chinese success, you spend a lot of time on the shadow side of these big projects. Some of these projects look like white elephants. They look like airports built when there aren’t enough people flying or apartment blocks built that lots of people don’t want to live in.

There is a kind of a problem of overbuilding, of building for building’s sake. Then you also have the related problem that China has a deeper version of the depopulation problem that every rich, and many nonrich, countries in the world are facing, where birthrates are very, very low. Society is aging rapidly, and in one of the most powerful parts of your book, you have an account of how an engineering mentality cruelly and brutally made this problem worse.

China’s engineers looked around in the 1970s and ’80s and said: Our population is growing exponentially. We need the one-child policy. We need to impose low birthrates.

And having imposed low birthrates in an incredibly brutal way, it turned out to be very hard to turn higher birthrates back on.

So, looking at those two problems, I feel like you can see a future in China where China in 2050, 2070 — more 2070 maybe than 2050 — isn’t this self-sufficient, dynamic, Asia-dominating empire, but it’s a society of ghost cities with no children that are monuments to engineering’s failure. Talk about those scenarios.

Wang: Yeah. Well, let’s consider physical engineering as well as social engineering. I would say that for the most part, physical engineering is still overwhelmingly positive for China, though you have these bridges to nowhere. Guizhou is heavily, heavily indebted. The local government has a problem paying back the bonds to build these bridges. And there’s not only a financial cost; there’s an environmental cost in which you’re pouring a lot of carbon-intensive cement for essentially nothing.

There is also a human displacement cost because a lot of people have been moved out to places that they’re not very familiar with, especially for building hydroelectric dams. But I would say that’s something that’s maybe an 80 percent positive, 20 percent negative. That ratio might change over time.

But I think physical dynamism is a good thing, and I would say that the United States needs a lot more of this.

I would assign completely the opposite ratio on social engineering. Because the fundamental problem of China — the most fundamental problem with the engineering state — is that they cannot restrain themselves from being only physical engineers.

They have to also get into social engineering because they view the population as just another building material, as if it could be remolded and torn down at their pleasure.

Thank you for picking up the one-child-policy chapter of my book. That was unexpectedly my favorite chapter to write. The one-child policy, the peak of it was mostly throughout the 1980s.

This was before I was born; I was born in 1992. My parents were both college-educated urbanites in the southwestern province of Yunnan, where there wasn’t very high birthrates in the cities already. Dredging through the history of the brutality of the one-child policy, it sounded quite scientific at the time and sounds quite rational — you know, it’s just a number out there.

But it was accomplished with the most brutal means of forced sterilizations, forced abortions that were meted out to mostly people in the countryside in what I described as a campaign of rural terror against overwhelmingly female bodies.

This was something that was prosecuted like a military campaign. Women were sent into hog cages, into clinics.

It was a really difficult thing to read these accounts of the terrible traumas that people suffered, which somehow also washed up on the shores of the United States. We have a lot of overwhelmingly girls of Chinese heritage that grew up with American families here throughout the one-child policy.

I think that the Chinese government is now realizing that it cannot turn the dial back up. It is trying to engineer the population again to try to encourage people to have children. So far, it’s finding that it’s much easier to prevent births with sterilizations and abortions rather than to coerce copulation.

Douthat: Do you think there’s any scenario where discontent with that mode — social engineering, authoritarian means and so on — actually someday leads to a political revolution in China? Because this conversation has been taken for granted, as a lot of people do know that the Chinese regime is stable, that the idea of liberalization and democratization was sort of a fantasy.

Is there any future where that’s wrong, and where China in 2050 or 2060 has experienced some kind of democratic revolution?

Wang: My view is that the regime is still broadly stable in spite of these traumas that it has inflicted on the population.

The one-child policy is not even discussed much these days. I think a lot of this trauma has faded for a lot of people.

Douthat: But there was — not at the same scale — but there was trauma under the “zero Covid” policy, too. And that’s fresh in people’s memories.

You had incredible restrictions. People locked into apartment buildings. You had some kind of protest culture emerging out of that. So even though things fade into the past, the regime generates new forms of engineered suffering as new crises arise.

Wang: Yes. You’re absolutely right that “zero Covid” produced a lot of trauma. I was living in Shanghai, and Shanghai is the city that suffered probably the greatest lockdown ever attempted in the history of humanity — 25 million people were unable to step foot outside of their apartment compounds for about eight to 10 weeks in the spring of 2022.

Shanghai is a little bit like New York in that the people hold themselves to be quite a bit more sophisticated than country bumpkins in Washington, D.C., or Beijing. They’re more cosmopolitan. They’re wealthier in some ways.

And Shanghai suffered this really brutal reminder that, actually, it is Beijing that after all runs them and rolls them. Throughout the Shanghai lockdown experience, a lot of my friends had to go without food so that they could save the food for their children, because Shanghai had no way to organize logistical deliveries of food to 25 million people when most of the city should have been in lockdown and they didn’t want to spread the virus.

So this was a very traumatic time. And I think it is no surprise that Shanghai had this sort of protest culture that you mentioned. I have been to one day of the Shanghai protests where people had gathered on Ürümqi Road. This is the bar district for a lot of young people in China.

There were police everywhere, as well as a lot of people milling about, waiting for something to happen. The night before, people were — we have videos of this — chanting, “Down with the Communist Party, down with Xi Jinping,” which was completely absurd. I would not have been able to believe something like this could have happened.

But after the collapse of “zero Covid,” if you go to Shanghai right now — the last time I went was in December of 2024 — people have drunk away a lot of their sorrows. If we take a look at Ürümqi Road today, it is still full of cocktail bars. People would rather forget about this terrible experience and see no profit in dredging it back up again.

They walk through Shanghai, the beautiful streets of the French Concession, and they feel that their life is still often pretty good. If you’re also subject to quite a lot of the propaganda in China — which is pretty negative about Trump and pretty negative about disorder and everything else that is wrong with the U.S., as well as the West — it may not feel too bad.

Douthat: Something we were talking about earlier is the propensity of discontented Chinese to seek means of escape. Maybe that is itself stabilizing to the regime. That if you are deeply dissatisfied with life under socialist, state capitalist, whatever you want to call it, there are means of exit that take the people who might otherwise be leaders of a resistance out of the country.

Wang: My parents were not much older than the student protesters in Tiananmen Square in 1989. Throughout the 1990s, mostly for economic reasons, they decided that being in Yunnan — then a peripheral province, which was an economic backwater then and remains an economic backwater today — was less preferable to moving to Toronto, which is what we did when I was 7 years old — first time I saw real snow.

I think there is still an element of a lot of creative Chinese who desperately want a better life abroad. They are trying to come to the United States or elsewhere where they still seek that, yes.

Douthat: Let’s end with advice for the United States. What are the actual implications of your analysis — and especially the bull’s case that we started with, the Chinese century case for what the U.S. should do right now? What should we be doing differently if China is poised to be as powerful as you think it might be?

Wang: I think that the U.S. should first and foremost rebuild its manufacturing base. That follows quite naturally from a lot of my analysis of China’s greatest strength, which is that China is a manufacturing superpower and China is poised to further deindustrialize Europe and it is poised to further deindustrialize the United States as well.

I am skeptical that President Trump’s efforts to reindustrialize America through the tariffs have been very effective. I am more positive about the Biden administration’s policies on efforts to reshore through industrial policy. But we can still see a lot of flaws with that approach as well.

Douthat: Do you think tariffs — essentially trade war — can’t work, in your view, because China has become too strong and resilient?

Wang: I think that the trade war, as prosecuted right now through the tariffs, is not going to be very effective. If we just take a look at the manufacturing employment data since Liberation Day in April — with the next jobs release, I’m not sure if we’ll get that data probity back — the U.S. has lost about 40,000 manufacturing workers.

It is not a natural fit if the U.S. is to become a technological, scientific superpower to advance its science by denying a lot of funding to scientific agencies like the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.

I think that universities, flawed as they are, are still driving a lot of American innovation and scientific advancements, and it also doesn’t make a lot of sense to attack universities in order to save the scientific base.

And it really doesn’t make sense to try to deport a lot of workers who may be working in the construction industry or the manufacturing industry, or to frighten away a lot of high-skilled researchers who may want to be in the U.S. from Europe or Asia to do a lot of their work here. So I think that as prosecuted, the trade war is not making a lot of sense.

The industrial push in the U.S. is not making a lot of sense. Maybe there’s something positive to be said about Trump’s energy agenda in terms of building more nuclear power, in terms of building more facilities online. Maybe there’s something positive about the deregulatory agenda. I can certainly see that case, but I certainly see more headwinds than tailwinds.

Douthat: And you don’t think, though, that China fears being cut off from U.S. markets the way it would have 15 or 20 years ago?

Wang: Well, Donald Trump seesaws this way and that. He was the initiator of the tech war when I was living in Beijing in 2018, when he designated scores of China’s technology companies onto highly obscure blacklists maintained by the Department of Commerce.

But here we are in his second term, and he’s saying: Well, maybe China should have Nvidia chips. So Trump is pretty erratic on this. When a journalist asked him whether Chinese students should still be coming to America, Trump said, “It’s our honor to have them.”

That is potentially the right approach, but that is also butting up against a lot of other folks in his administration. It seems kind of weird to me that Donald Trump is the most pro-China member of the White House right now.

Douthat: But do you think that just reflects Trump being mercurial and wanting to make deals? And if Beijing says, “Let’s make a deal,” he is excited to make a deal.

Or does it reflect a rational calculation that China is now too strong to isolate in the way that some China hawks would want? And so you have to make deals with them.

It’s just an economic imperative that you can’t disentangle China and America.

Wang: I don’t have a good sense of what the Trump administration is thinking, but there is a potential world in which they have made that decision because after Trump raised tariffs on China up to 150 percent — which was completely extraordinary — China retaliated by suspending exports of rare earth magnets, which is one of these other things that China really has and the U.S. doesn’t.

Subsequently, automakers everywhere panicked. Ford had to stop production in a couple of its factories, and it is possible that Trump and everyone else around him have decided that we really need all of these Chinese goods because the Chinese are not only very dominant in rare earth magnets; they also have a lot of pharmaceutical ingredients.

All sorts of battery materials, all sorts of electronics are almost exclusively a Chinese product now. I don’t know if the Trump administration has simply thrown in the towel, or if they are simply in dealmaker mode. Do you have a view?

Douthat: What I see, which is similar to what you described, is that the Trump administration has been maybe surprisingly successful in forcing all kinds of countries and economies to basically make unilateral concessions to the U.S. and much, much less successful when it comes to China itself.

China just seems too strong to run a trade war or protectionist conflict against, but I don’t have special insight on that. I do think that it is striking that it seems like the Chinese American relationship at the moment seems too big and too high-risk for even Trump to fundamentally reframe.

Wang: I was living in Copenhagen this summer, having cardamom buns and enjoying everything wonderful that Denmark has to offer, when I read one of your columns that I thought was really right about how the European Union completely became submissive to the Trump administration in these tariff negotiations — that what Europe has shown is that it is fundamentally just really weak, that they cannot get consensus in order to retaliate against the U.S.

Europe right now is adrift — caught between the Chinese, who have waged a far more successful trade war against German automakers, as well as the Americans, with their much stronger service industries.

I feel very much that a lot of regions and countries are going to be caught adrift by these two big powers, that Europe is going to be deindustrialized. It’s going to have much more competition in the services.

Right-wing populist parties in Europe are outpolling their incumbents’ ruling parties pretty much everywhere, and as the economics get worse, I don’t think that the politics will get better.

So I fear this for the United States as well — as the economics get worse in some ways, as you mentioned, the U.S. might actually be poor in some meaningful way. This is what I’m really nervous about for the West.

Douthat: I’ll accept the compliment for my column’s analysis, but use it to ask a geopolitical question, which is to what extent, in terms of how the U.S. approaches other countries and the rest of the world, should we be trying to make an ideological argument against China? Should we say: Look, we represent the free world. We represent liberal democracy. We should be on the same side as other liberal democracies. We should be rallying the Europeans to a kind of conflict against autocracy?

That’s one framework for how to think about a new cold war with China, where the model is the old Cold War versus what you certainly see from the Trump administration, but also see from other voices, as well — a kind of realist view that says: Look, China doesn’t want to revolutionize the world the way the old Soviet Union did. It doesn’t have this global ideological agenda.

Its advantage in geopolitics is cynical dealmaking, right? And so the U.S. needs to be a cynical dealmaker too. Where do you come down on that kind of choice?

Wang: I’m not sure if I would sign on to either framing, because I’m not sure if the U.S. and China are going to outcompete each other in cynical dealmaking. Where are all these deals going to be coming from?

I think the view that I would propose to you, Ross, is that this is not so much about the dealmaking; it’s not about democracy. Part of why I wrote this book was to get us beyond these 19th-century political science terms.

I’m really allergic to political science terms, like “democratic” or “capitalist,” “socialist,” “autocratic.” Let’s try to be fun and inventive in how we make a new framework to think about these two big countries.

I think what is ultimately going to be most important is delivering well for its people. That the country that is going to be able to meet the needs of its own people is going to be the more triumphant power.

It’s not really to cripple the other side. It is to make sure that people feel good about the cities and the homes that they live in. They feel like they have some degree of affordability. They don’t fear shortages and inflation; they feel some sense of an economic future that is still clear and bright, glimmering before them.

And right now we think both countries have done a lot to erode their own advantages.

China believes that its autocratic system is going to be able to deal with these buffeting technological headwinds, especially driven by A.I., and that the Americans are not really going to be able to deal with that.

Social media is obviously driving all of us insane. Elon is trolling all of us to insanity with his crazy tweets and that somehow the West will be rived by some mixture of economic distress, political mistakes, social media and the phones, as well as the artificial intelligence.

The game goes to he who outlasts the adversary. But what the Chinese want to do is to just keep things really, really stable and just wait for the Western countries to collapse.

And as we’ve established, there’s a lot of Chinese who are willing to take leave of the Chinese dream and the great rejuvenation.

So I think the first step for these two countries is to stop delivering these humiliating self-beatings and really try to understand and do better. What do you think?

Douthat: The humiliating self-beatings will continue until morale improves.

Wang: I’m afraid that’s the case.

Douthat: Dan Wang, thank you so much for joining me.

Wang: Thank you very much, Ross.

Decoding China: How Xi aims to overtake US as a superpower

Thousands of soldiers marching in tight formations, state-of-the-art weapon systems — including intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), rocket launchers, and battle tanks — and above all, Chinese President Xi Jinping projecting power standing in a grandstand above the iconic portrait of the founder of the People’s Republic, Mao Zedong, on Tiananmen Square in Beijing.

Twenty-six heads of state and government from Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America attended the parade.

From Europe, Russian President Vladimir Putin, Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico, and Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic were present in the Chinese capital.

It sends out a clear signal that China wants to dictate the rules in a future world order.

“In autocracies, military parades like this are one of the tools used to demonstrate perceived or actual strength,” said Eberhard Sandschneider, professor emeritus of political science at the Free University of Berlin and partner at the consulting firm Berlin Global Advisors.

“Driven by its economic boom, China is in the process of expanding its international role. Under President Xi Jinping, this process has gained significant momentum once again.”

Xi, 72, has a clear vision: By 2049, the 100th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic, China must become a “modern socialist country that is prosperous, strong, democratic, civilized, and harmonious.”

Projections by various renowned consulting firms show that the Asian giant could replace the US as the world’s largest economy within 15 years.

Economic and political dominance go hand in hand

China is also expanding its leadership role politically, for instance in international organizations such as BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO).

Through its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a massive infrastructure project launched in 2013 by President Xi and which now has 153 signatory states, China is increasingly strengthening its global partnerships.

The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), SGR high-speed trains in Kenya, and most recently, the development of the Chancay megaport on Peru’s coast, are some examples of such cooperation.

China is using this intertwining of economics and politics to create its vision of a new world order for the Global South.

While ideas for public infrastructure projects come up through government consultations, the China-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) or other Chinese state banks grant loans in line with Beijing’s foreign policy goals.

On Monday, SCO leaders also decided to set up a new multilateral development bank.

Meanwhile, concerns persist about these institutions not adhering to international standards when it comes to labor rights and environmental protection.

In many cases, Chinese contractors receive Chinese money and send Chinese workers around the world to carry out the projects. But the partner countries bear the debt burden, with huge negative consequences: The larger their debt load, the greater the obedience to their creditor in Beijing.

Anyone that criticizes China’s human rights record in the autonomous region of Tibet or against the Muslim Uyghur minority in Xinjiang province, is kicked out. On the other hand, those who recognize Taiwan as a Chinese province are financially rewarded.

China shows off military might in massive parade

03:26

‘China model’ on the road to success

This “China model” is criticized in the West, but is finding more and more supporters in the Global South.

Olusegun Obasanjo, a former president of Nigeria, is calling on African countries to learn from the “China model.”

China’s remarkable progress in recent decades is “a source of inspiration and opportunity for Nigeria and Africa,” Obasanjo told China’s Xinhua news agency.

Meanwhile, the US, previously the most important donor, stopped almost all of its foreign aid under the Trump administration.

Following the closure of the development agency USAID, US President Donald Trump announced last week that it was slashing $5 billion (€4.3 billion) in foreign aid that was already allocated by US Congress earlier this year.

Reform of ‘global governance’

Xi’s goal is to “democratize” international relations and oppose “hegemony,” says Claus Soong, a researcher at the Mercator Institute for China Studies (MERICS), a Berlin-based think tank. “This approach continuously influences and sharpens China’s view of the world. However, it is not rooted in a liberal order or liberal ideas. Its origin lies solely in statism, in national interests.”

Diplomats in the Chinese Foreign Ministry are currently forging a master plan with the aim of reforming “global governance,” Soong said. This is necessary according to them because global crises are becoming more frequent and international power relations are changing, he added.

Chinese, Russian and North Korean leaders meet in Beijing

02:11

Chinese centralism for export?

China expert Sandschneider said he does not believe that Beijing wants to export its own model of government. “The Communist Party, which has ruled alone for more than 70 years, has created its own unique system. I also cannot see China taking concrete steps, as we in the West have repeatedly tried to promote the export of democracy.”

He underlined China’s policy of non-interference in other countries’ internal affairs. “China wants what China needs. Above all, that means resources and, nowadays, market access.”

MERICS expert Soong said that democracy needs to be defended against both internal and external challenges. “It is threatened when authoritarian regimes expand and demand that we abandon democracy in favor of autocracy.”

https://www.dw.com/webapi/iframes/widget/en/66496979

Europe is preoccupied with itself

Despite the challenges, Europe has limited scope to act.

As the US becomes increasingly unpredictable under Trump, Europe is too preoccupied with itself.

Europe needs to first defend democracy within its own borders, as many EU countries are struggling to keep right-wing extremists from coming to power.

Seven of the 27 EU states already have governments that include right-wing populist parties.

In Germany, the EU’s economic powerhouse, there is a clear reorientation towards the East.

Berlin also has strong economic ties with Beijing. Nevertheless, “anyone who really wants to understand our challenge should travel to Asian countries, not just China,” German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said, addressing a party conference at the end of August.

He said there was incredible momentum in the East, “where there is also the ambition to become a world leader, and that includes China.”

The Once and Future Superpower: why China won’t overtake the United States

Will China Replace the U.S. — Or Will the Two Powers Stalemate?

China is beset by crises of growth, while the U.S. struggles with crises of decline. Could this create an opening for a more decentralized international system?

Recent days have been very memorable when it comes to geopolitics.

The Biden administration issued a National Security Strategy Memorandum that some say was a declaration of enmity against China just short of war. And at the Chinese Communist Party Congress in Beijing, President Xi Jinping warned of “dangerous storms” facing China in the coming years.

This brings up the question: Is the world headed for what is called in international relations jargon as a “hegemonic transition”?

When we assess the situation of the world’s hegemonic power, what is clear is that financialization and globalization combined not only to create severe inequality, but they severely eroded the manufacturing base of the United States. And when we talk about deindustrialization, we are talking not only about the loss of millions of manufacturing jobs, from 17.3 million to around 13 million today, but about the loss of the channels for the generational transmission of skills of the workforce, in semi-skilled and some skilled industries.

Equally important has been the loss of the synergy between manufacturing and technological creativity in the center economies and its emergence in rapidly industrializing economies. Contrary to expectations that the peripheral economies would be limited to providing cheap labor while the center economies would monopolize knowledge intensive activities, high tech offshoring followed manufacturing offshoring.

One important study of eight advanced economies showed that high-tech offshoring increased in less than one decade from 14 percent in the late 1990s to about 18 percent in 2006. As Branko Milanovic has pointed out, “innovation rents, received by the leaders of the new technologies, are being dissipated away from the center.” Aggressively reversing this technological flow was, in fact, the centerpiece of Donald Trump and his economic adviser Peter Navarro’s political economy.

America’s Comprehensive Crisis

But what overdetermines the current crisis of the hegemon is that it is not just economic but also ideological and political.

The British Marxist Paul Mason has argued that with the triumph of neoliberalism and financialization in the global North, solidarity and a sense of community based on economic class and a shared middle class lifestyle among workers was replaced by an individualized identity as consumers, as market players in a society of seemingly shared prosperity but where rising income was increasingly replaced by rising debt as the mechanism of economic pacification.

Having exchanged their class identity for that of consumers in the market, their loss of even the latter owing to the 2008-2009 crisis left them ideologically vulnerable, particularly when it came to their commitment to the liberal democratic belief in universal equality. Even before the financial crisis, many workers had already been feeling psychologically threatened by the gains of the movements for racial and gender justice, and their descent into economic insecurity was the final step in their rightward radicalization.

What the volatile combination of economic crisis, ideological vulnerability, and Donald Trump has done is to make legitimate if not respectable an anti-democratic core belief that has been transmitted generationally, communally, and subversively. This is White Supremacy, which is now informally the ruling ideology of the Republican Party.

Finally, to the political crisis. I don’t think there would be many who would object to our characterizing American liberal democracy as being in crisis. I think the dispute would be over how serious the crisis is. In her book How Civil Wars Start, Barbara Walter writes:

Where is the United States today? We are a factionalized anocracy [a degenerating democracy] that is quickly approaching the open insurgency stage, which means we are closer to civil war than any of us would like to believe. January 6 was a major announcement by at least some groups…that they are moving toward outright violence… In fact, the attack on the Capitol could very well be the first series of organized attacks in an open insurgency stage. It targeted infrastructure. There were plans to assassinate certain politicians and attempts to coordinate activity.

Now Walter’s profile is not that of someone crying wolf. She is not someone speaking from the left. In fact, she’s very establishment, a specialist in comparative civil wars who has used several databases, the most important of which is the CIA’s Political Instability Task Force, of which she is a part.

For Walter and her CIA colleagues, ethnicity has emerged in their global comparative studies as the prime predictor of susceptibility of a society to civil war — and in the U.S., armed white radicals are on the cutting edge. However, ethnicity by itself does not produce conflict. It needs triggers or “accelerants,” and these are the emergence of hegemonic ethnic groupings or “superfactions,” the exacerbation of conflicts by “ethno-nationalist entrepreneurs,” and the frenzied mobilization of ordinary citizens who feel that only the armed ethnic militias stand between them and those who would destroy them and their world.

And to move from A to Z, social media, in particular Facebook, have become a central weapon of radicalization. The angry buzz in white nationalist chat rooms these days is the “Great Replacement Theory,” wherein whites are said to be the victims of an ongoing conspiracy hatched by Jews, blacks, feminists, LGBTQIAs, migrants, and Democrats to make them a minority and eventually destroy them in a race war.

Now the reason we have spent some time detailing the ideological and political dimensions of the crisis of the liberal international order is that when many people talk about hegemonic decline, they consider mainly its economic dimension. Equally important are the political and ideological dimensions. When some analysts speculated about the possible loss of U.S. hegemony to Japan back in the late 1980s, they had in mind only the economic dimension. And while this was the central consideration, their neglect of the political and ideological dimensions of the relationship was one reason their predictions about Japan supplanting the United States went awry.

To repeat, what distinguishes the crisis of the hegemon today from the 1980s is the fatal combination of severe economic dislocation, deep ideological disaffection, and profound political instability. Global hegemony is difficult to exercise if, in addition to falling behind on the economic front, the hegemon is also nearing civil war and a significant sector of the society has lost faith in the liberal democratic ideology that legitimizes its global economic primacy.

That is where the United States is today.

The Chinese Challenge

Let us now turn to the question of whether some other power is moving to replace the United States on center stage. China is, of course, what everyone talks about as the chief candidate, and it is on the economic front that China’s challenge is strongest.

In his book The Great Convergence, Richard Baldwin tries to explain how China was transformed from being not only an industrial non-competitor but an outsider in the global capitalist system in the 1970s to becoming the world’s prime industrial superpower in just over two decades.

China, he says, was smart enough to capitalize on its having joined the capitalist world economy at the time when what he calls globalization’s “second unbundling” was taking place. This was the breaking up of the productive process globally made possible by advances in information technology, resulting in a revolutionary innovation: the corporate global value chain. The key feature of this process has been, as we noted earlier, the dispersal of diffusion of high technology from the knowledge-rich capitalist center economies to the labor surplus peripheral countries.

While Baldwin appears to view this process as inevitable, the fact is, in the case of China, this diffusion was facilitated by policies of forced technology transfer imposed by Beijing. U.S. corporations bristled at this, but compliance was the condition of their access to super-cheap Chinese labor.

By the time Trump and Peter Navarro tried to stop sensitive high tech transfers in 2017, it was too late; China had already moved on from being a passive high-tech recipient to an active high tech innovator. Washington’s recent legislation banning the export of

U.S.-made strategic microchips to China may have made a difference 10 years ago, but will have very little effect now.

In May 2021, Beijing successfully landed a spacecraft on Mars, only the third country to accomplish that after the U.S. and Russia. Nor was this a fluke. Baidu launched a quantum computer that people will be able to access via a smartphone app. Construction is underway on the largest pulsed-power plant in the world, leading specialists to predict that China could achieve nuclear fusion energy by 2028. Beijing is even funding civilian hypersonic transport.

A strong state, it might be noted — one that was far stronger owing to its revolutionary origins than the classic developmental states of the Asia Pacific rim — had made the difference.

In any event, China is now the center of global capital accumulation. In the popular image, it’s the “locomotive of the world economy,” accounting for 28 percent of all growth worldwide in the five years from 2013 to 2018 according to the IMF — more than twice the share of the United States.

A Crisis of Growth vs. A Crisis of Decline

Now, it is certainly true that the Chinese economy is marked by several crises, such as the emergence of vast income inequalities, massive surplus capacity, regional disparities, real estate bubbles, and environmental problems. I look at these, however, as manifestations of the unbalanced growth that the economist Albert Hirschman saw as a necessary feature of rapid industrial development under capitalism.

These are crises of growth, in contrast to crises of decline that mark the U.S. economy.

But let us turn to the political and ideological dimensions of China’s political economy. In contrast to the simplistic view of a population cowed by repression, political protests have been common in China, both on the ground and on the internet, though some say there has been a decline in numbers in the Xi Jinping years.

But few would claim that the ruling regime is undergoing a crisis of legitimacy. Protests have been directed at local problems such land-grabbing, low wages, or environmental pollution, with no protest movement being able to translate itself into a critical mass across the country. Thus there is little challenge to the Communist Party’s political hegemony, except from democracy and human rights activists who, brave and exemplary they may be, are few and far between. Certainly, the kind of polarization one sees in the U.S. is nonexistent.

Now, to the question of ideology. Ideological legitimacy rests on the party’s ability to deliver economically, provide political stability, and convince the population that it is central to achieving what Xi Jinping has called “national rejuvenation.” Corruption, however, is a constant threat, and it cannot really be eliminated since — and here I agree with Milanovic — it is rooted in the system of discretionary decision-making or selective application of the law that, paradoxically, accompanies the technocratic thrust of what he calls “political capitalism.”

Nevertheless, corruption cannot be allowed to spread uncontrolled since this would totally subvert the technocratic rationality that is the centerpiece of the system, militate against economic growth, and erode the legitimacy of the ruling Communist Party elite. Thus, as with Xi Jinping’s now 10-year-long wildly popular campaign against corruption, there must be periodic efforts to contain it, and sacrificing high officials caught with their fingers in the till is often the price paid to stabilize the system.

Corruption is a threat, but it is far from the kind of threat presented by a rival ideology, such as that posed to liberal democracy by the subversive ideology of White Supremacy that has captured the Republican Party in the United States.

Looking at its global political and ideological influence, China has been able to win allies especially in the global South with its economic diplomacy like the Belt and Road Initiative. But even more than the largesse of its trade and aid, what draws governments to China is the model of supple but effective technocratic leadership that appears to promise fast growth in the early stage of development and satisfy the popular desire for higher living standards, even if the cost is rising inequality and the spread of corruption.

This appeal has risen as the perception has grown that the liberal capitalist democracy, with its uncontrolled political conflicts, market failures, and economic stagnation, no longer provides a meaningful alternative for the global South.

Reluctant Beijing, Aggressive Washington

Nevertheless, although it has trumpeted China’s contributions to the developing world, Beijing has been very cautious about presenting China’s path as the one countries of the global South should follow. Neither has it moved to replace the multilateral agencies set up by the West to serve as the canopy of global governance, nor sought to replace the dollar with the renminbi as the world’s reserve currency.

China has, in fact, made painstaking efforts not to be seen as aspiring to step into the place of the United States, not only to avoid provoking the latter but also to avoid being burdened with the tasks that go with global leadership — and, perhaps most critical, because Beijing believes that its development path is not for export. To put it in Deng Xiaoping’s classic phrase, it is “socialism with Chinese characteristics.”

While Chinese reluctance plays a big role, the biggest block to China’s displacing the U.S. and assuming the role of hegemon is Washington’s ability to call on that one resource where it still enjoys absolute superiority — military power — to redress the balance of power, to maintain its increasingly fragile hegemonic status.

We will not go into a detailed comparison between the U.S. and China on the military front. Let us just say that China is not engaged in an arms race with the U.S. and that its strategic posture is defensive. This does not mean that it does not engage in the tactical offensive in areas where it feels it faces an existential threat, like the South China Sea.

With the limited results of Trump and Navarro’s trade and technological squeeze on China, the Biden administration has moved the focus to the military front, its latest move being to bring in North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) naval vessels from Europe to regularly patrol the South China Sea along with ships from Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and Australia. Critics have rightfully decried the escalation of both aggressive rhetoric and actual deployments as enhancing the possibility of armed conflict, since with no rules of engagement, a ship collision could easily escalate into a higher form of conflict.

Bluntly reminding China to moderate its ambitions or face an existential threat is, however, not the only objective of the Biden administration’s increasingly militarized China policy. Probably more important is the symbolic impact of a show of force — that is, its impact on China’s internal politics.

It is likely that this was the thrust of Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan, which took place a few days after a U.S. destroyer passed through the Taiwan Straits. It was the deployment of a highly symbolic event implicitly backed by military power to provoke a political crisis in the China — in this case, the destabilization of the Xi’s leading role — by showing that the U.S. could at any time tear up its One-China policy and brazenly support Taiwan without Beijing being able to do anything about it owing to its fear of U.S. power.

The timing could not have been more critical, coming two and a half months before the Party Congress in mid-October, where Xi Jinping was expected to seek consensus for his initiative to abolish the informal 10-year term limit on a president’s tenure. There are said to be reports of significant dissatisfaction with Xi’s relatively mild and largely symbolic response to the Biden-Pelosi provocation in certain quarters of the the party, the military, and the public.

Chillingly, the Pelosi visit follows one of the scenarios laid out for Washington’s response to China by the dean of U.S. security studies, Graham Allison, in his book The Thucydides Trap, which is to accompany building up its military capabilities with aggressively exploiting China’s political vulnerabilities in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Xinjiang, and Tibet to erode the CCP’s legitimacy.

The Pros and Cons of Stalemate

But to come back to our main concern, with an economically strong China very hesitant to assert global leadership and an economically and politically weakened United States seeking desperately to shore up its position by throwing around its absolute military superiority, can we really speak about a hegemonic transition?

Should we not be talking instead about a hegemonic stalemate or a hegemonic vacuum?

Perhaps, for comparison, we should be looking not so much at a hegemonic transition but at the emergence of a hegemonic vacuum akin to but not exactly the same as that which followed the First World War in the 20th Century. Then, the weakened Western European states no longer had the capacity to restore their pre-war global hegemony — while the U.S. failed to follow through on Woodrow Wilson’s push for Washington to assert hegemonic political and ideological leadership.

Within such a vacuum or stalemate, the U.S.-China relationship would continue to be critical. Neither actor is able to decisively manage trends — such as extreme weather events, growing protectionism, the decay of the multilateral system that the United States put in place during its apogee, the resurgence of progressive movements in Latin America, the rise of authoritarian states and the likely emergence of an alliance among them to displace a faltering liberal international order, and increasingly uncontrolled tensions between radical Islamist regimes in the Middle East and Israel and conservative Arab regimes.

Both conservative and liberal policy makers paint this scenario to underline why the world needs a hegemon, with the former advocating a unilateral Goliath who does not hesitate to use threat and force to enforce order and the latter preferring a liberal Goliath who, to slightly revise Teddy Roosevelt’s famous saying, speaks sweetly but carries a big stick.

There are, however, those of us who view the current crisis of U.S. hegemony as offering not so much anarchy but opportunity.

While there are risks involved, a hegemonic stalemate or vacuum opens up the path to a world where power could be more decentralized, where there could be greater freedom of political and economic maneuvering for smaller, traditionally less privileged actors from the global South, and where a truly multilateral order could be constructed through cooperation rather than imposed through either unilateral or liberal hegemony.

Yes, crisis may lead to an even deeper crisis — but it may also lead to opportunity.

Resources

-medium.com, “The Super Powers of Each Century: A Historical Overview.”;

–https://nationalinterest.org/feature/the-5-greatest-superpowers-all-time-12815, “The 5 Greatest Superpowers of All Time.” By Akhilesh Pillamarri;

-piie.com, “The Inevitable Superpower: Why China’s Dominance Is a Sure Thing.” By Arvind Subramanian;

-nytimes.com, “This Is Why America Is Losing to China.” By Ross Douthat;

-dw.com, “Decoding China: How Xi aims to overtake US as a superpower.” By Dang Yuan;

-Dartmouth Digital Commons, “The Once and Future Superpower: why China won’t overtake the United States.” By Stephen G. Brooks and William C. Wohlforth;

-fpif.org, “Will China Replace the U.S. — Or Will the Two Powers Stalemate? China is beset by crises of growth, while the U.S. struggles with crises of decline. Could this create an opening for a more decentralized international system?” By Walden Bello;

Governmental and Political Posts Both National and International
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2020/11/04/is-the-democratic-party-the-judas-party/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2020/10/15/what-are-the-panama-papers/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2020/10/11/what-amendments-will-be-in-jeopardy-under-a-democratic-government/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2020/10/04/nominating-and-vetting-supreme-court-justices/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2020/09/24/george-soros-revealed/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2020/08/24/hud-housing-mandates/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2020/09/28/roe-vs-wade-redux/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2020/09/14/chinas-100-year-plan-for-world-domination/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2020/09/13/when-the-soviet-union-collapsed-what-type-of-government-did-it-take-and-does-it-still-exist/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2020/09/11/israel-and-the-united-arab-emirate-brokered-deal-how-big-is-this/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2020/09/11/the-plot-to-destroy-america-when-and-how-did-it-start/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2020/08/26/what-ruined-this-country/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2020/08/25/how-to-make-our-country-great-again/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2020/08/18/socialism-explained/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2020/08/17/communism-explained/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2020/08/05/can-american-win-the-war-for-the-world-market/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2020/07/30/do-you-remember-the-movie-independence-day/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2020/07/22/why-does-the-left-hate-this-country/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2020/07/16/essential-and-non-essential-businesses-blast-from-the-past-or-not/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2020/07/13/cancel-culture-needs-to-end-its-unamerican/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2020/07/09/financial-disclosure-for-politicians/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2020/07/10/athletes-speak-out-but-who-cares/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2020/06/26/why-democratic-leaders-are-okay-with-the-destruction-of-our-statues/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2020/06/25/how-would-the-left-respond-to-the-right-if-they-reciprocated-with-violence/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2020/06/25/what-drives-the-agenda-of-the-democratic-party-fear-or-far-left-ideology/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2020/06/23/violence-and-fear-as-a-tool-of-the-left/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2020/06/23/why-are-state-and-local-leaders-allowing-looting-and-rioting-to-occur/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2020/06/21/did-christopher-columbus-deserve-a-statue/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2020/06/20/give-an-inch-take-a-mile-the-age-of-aquiescence/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2020/06/19/daca-right-or-wrong/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2020/06/18/should-tax-payer-dollars-be-used-to-rebuild-decimated-cities/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2020/06/18/the-national-debt-dangerously-high/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2020/06/17/open-our-country-now/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2020/06/16/green-new-deal-what-the-hell/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2020/06/14/public-figures-speaking-out-good-or-bad/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2020/06/12/rejuvenating-our-infrastructure/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2020/06/12/our-history-deserves-to-be-protected-not-destroyed/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2020/06/10/should-we-be-afraid-of-china-our-asian-competitor/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2020/06/09/why-the-left-socialist-and-communist-hate-religion/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2020/06/08/insurrection-act/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2020/10/26/history-of-the-republican-party/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2020/06/06/what-makes-a-leader-great/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2020/06/05/government-reform-proposal-february-17-1999/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2020/10/25/history-of-the-democratic-party/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2020/10/31/what-does-the-socialist-democratic-party-think-of-the-american-people/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2020/11/03/green-new-deal-what-the-hell-part-2/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2020/11/06/china-and-russia-are-among-the-worlds-worst-human-rights-violators/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2020/11/07/how-does-the-biden-sanders-platform-compare-to-the-1936-ussr-constitution/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2020/11/13/voter-fraud-in-2020-how-will-effect-future-elections/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2020/11/14/what-will-happen-if-biden-reverses-trumps-accomplishments/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2020/11/17/the-confederate-constitution-what-can-we-learn-from-it/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2020/12/08/our-new-two-party-system-where-is-it-taking-us/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2020/12/04/what-will-become-of-our-capitalistic-society/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2020/06/12/what-every-leader-needs-to-be/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2020/06/06/what-makes-a-leader-great/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2020/07/05/4th-of-july-celebration-2020/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2020/12/22/roosevelt-stalin-and-churchill-how-they-formed-our-world/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2021/01/29/what-gives-the-top-1-percent-the-right-to-rule-the-world/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2021/02/26/impeachment-dissected/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2021/02/28/is-the-equality-act-about-equality/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2021/03/09/1871-us-corporation-fact-or-fiction/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2021/03/12/are-we-entering-into-a-global-nuclear-cold-war/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2021/04/16/our-2nd-amendment/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2021/04/20/did-kerry-collude-with-iran/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2021/04/25/what-is-cancel-culture/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2021/04/30/what-happened-on-january-the-6th-and-what-were-the-repercussions/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2021/05/07/what-is-a-filibuster-and-why-is-it-such-a-big-deal/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2021/05/18/how-are-the-democrats-changing-the-country/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2021/06/04/the-steele-dossier-exposed/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2021/06/29/did-senator-manchin-save-our-country/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2021/07/06/what-is-up-with-greenland/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2021/07/23/what-are-the-democrats-doing-to-maintain-power/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2021/08/03/why-people-hate-capitalism/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2021/08/31/was-the-death-of-george-floyd-part-of-a-plot-to-destroy-america/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2021/10/01/our-9-11-responses-in-retrospect/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2021/11/26/what-is-the-difference-between-human-infrastructure-and-physical-infrastructure-why-are-we-even-discussing-this-at-the-federal-level/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2021/11/30/what-gives-with-the-lincoln-project/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2021/12/03/what-is-project-veritas/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2022/01/28/how-the-left-is-destroying-our-country-revisited/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2022/02/01/debunking-the-squad/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2022/02/11/how-the-quincy-pact-shaped-our-relationship-with-saudi-arabia/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2022/02/15/the-china-federation/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2022/02/18/the-russia-federation-part-two/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2022/02/22/are-china-and-russia-buddies/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2022/02/25/what-is-the-hidden-cost-behind-the-green-new-deal/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2022/02/27/putins-desperate-attempt-at-regaining-lost-glory/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2022/03/04/why-are-hong-kong-and-taiwan-important-why-we-cant-roll-over-beethoven/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2022/03/11/is-our-country-being-governed-by-the-mob/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2022/03/15/when-will-putin-get-his-head-out-of-his-ass/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2022/03/29/the-human-cost-of-socialism-and-communism/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2022/04/12/what-has-to-be-done-in-2024-to-restore-our-country/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2022/05/24/greenland-and-iceland-what-rolls-will-they-play-in-the-global-arena/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2022/08/09/what-happens-to-the-us-if-china-gets-taiwan/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2022/11/25/what-is-happening-in-ukraine-and-what-are-they-doing-with-our-money-and-weapons/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2023/01/03/how-the-liberal-democratic-leadership-has-ruined-our-country/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2023/01/10/china-is-buying-up-our-country-how-afraid-should-we-be/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2023/03/10/does-the-demise-of-the-monroe-doctrine-mean-the-end-of-the-us/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2023/03/17/we-need-to-get-our-house-in-order-before-our-country-collapses/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2023/05/12/what-causes-civilizations-to-fail/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2023/05/23/what-purpose-does-lawlessness-serve-the-liberal-left/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2023/08/13/u-s-hegemony/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2023/10/27/we-should-not-be-surprised-about-corruption-in-politics-it-has-existed-since-the-first-government-came-into-being/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2024/03/26/food-addiction-and-how-certain-foods-affect-us/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2024/04/23/henry-kissinger-the-yom-kippur-war-and-the-oil-embargo-of-1974/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2024/06/11/did-the-1998-bombing-of-iraq-ordered-by-president-clinton-precipitate-the-9-11-attacks/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2024/07/09/what-is-the-supreme-court-chevron-decision/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2024/09/17/former-top-clinton-adviser-calls-on-abc-to-launch-internal-probe-into-whether-debate-was-rigged/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2024/09/17/abc-trump-harris-debate-whistleblower-affidavit/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2024/09/22/we-were-wrong-this-is-not-just-an-election-it-is-a-war-for-our-very-survival/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2024/09/27/how-soros-backed-organizations-leverage-waves-of-new-immigrants-to-sway-elections/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2024/10/22/what-is-the-filibuster-and-why-do-the-democrats-want-to-get-rid-of-it/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2024/11/25/trump-could-prompt-supreme-court-ruling-on-birthright-citizenship/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2024/12/13/alejandro-mayorkas-and-merrick-garland-a-lethal-and-utterly-corrupt-tag-team/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2025/02/10/inside-the-revolution-rewiring-american-power/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2025/02/21/do-we-have-to-pay-taxes-2/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2025/03/21/bin-ladens-letter-to-america-osama-bin-ladens-letter-to-america-transcript-in-full/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2025/04/29/interim-report-on-the-failures-and-politicization-of-the-january-6th-select-committee/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2025/08/01/what-happened-on-april-12-1937-and-how-it-shaped-our-government/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2025/08/12/did-you-know-that-the-mlk-family-sued-the-federal-government-and-won/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2025/09/05/china-has-come-to-the-table-but-this-fight-with-the-us-is-far-from-over/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2025/09/19/how-edward-snowden-and-john-kiriakou-saved-our-country/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2025/12/30/why-do-we-have-so-many-intelligence-agencies/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2025/12/26/could-secession-happen-again-in-the-united-states/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2025/12/16/what-is-the-terrible-truth-about-globalization/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2026/01/02/will-china-replace-the-u-s-as-the-dominant-super-power/