China Is Not Ready for Global Leadership
Pax Americana is dead, but Pax Sinica is nowhere in sight.
Pax Americana is dead, but Pax Sinica is nowhere in sight.
U.S. President Donald Trump’s profound changes to Washington’s foreign policy during the past few months have unleashed a debate about the extent to which the self-destruction of U.S. global leadership is empowering China. The idea that U.S. retrenchment favors a rising China has been well and amply argued. What is less clear, however, is whether Trump is paving the road to a much more fundamental shift: Chinese global dominance in place of a shattered U.S.-led order.
Washington’s retreat is obvious. Trump has launched a systematic attack on the order and institutions built by U.S. presidents since World War II to benefit U.S. interests. Washington has taken an axe to global trade, slashed funding for the United Nations, downsized foreign aid, and antagonized many key allies. By hollowing out the national security apparatus, Trump risks diminishing Washington’s strategic capabilities. The future of NATO and other U.S.-crafted alliances is unclear. By declaring open season on universities and major scientific institutions, Trump may undermine the very foundation of U.S. power.
The discourse coupling U.S. retreat with China’s advance is not new. It has gone through four distinct phases in line with the shifting balance of power, starting with China’s embrace of capitalism in the 1980s. Historian Paul Kennedy pointed to China’s rise and the United States’ relative decline in his seminal 1987 book, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers; in the 1990s, Harvard University’s William H. Overholt was the first of many arguing that China’s economic reforms would soon create another superpower.
Read the full text in Foreign Policy here.
