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.
Nonetheless, China’s rapid economic rise throughout the 1990s and 2000s did not change the United States’ status as the world’s sole remaining superpower. Washington continued to pursue a grand strategy of deep engagement that promoted the liberal international order.
The next phase of China-rising, America-falling discourse unfolded in the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis, whose causes and epicenters were undeniably Western. The turmoil prompted the Economist to declare “Capitalism at Bay,” while Western capitals asked serious questions about their economic models. Beijing gained confidence in its state-driven version of capitalism, and a so-called Beijing Consensus gained traction worldwide as an alternative to Western economic and political recipes.
At the time, the United States was still significantly more powerful than China, but the title of Martin Jacques’s 2009 book—When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Rise of a New Global Order—captured the change in mood. Working as a diplomat in Beijing at the time, I witnessed firsthand the growing self-confidence of China’s Communist Party cadres—and indeed, of the whole nation. Soon after the financial crisis, China’s foreign policy took a more assertive turn.
Chinese President Xi Jinping and U.S. President Donald Trump attend a welcoming ceremony in Beijing on Nov. 9, 2017.Thomas Peter /Getty Images
A third discursive phase began in 2017. Only weeks after Trump’s first inauguration in January of that year, Chinese President Xi Jinping announced a new grand strategy for China. In an address to China’s National Security Work Forum, a high-level meeting convened to discuss foreign affairs, Xi set the stage for China’s abandonment of its previous grand strategy, which was crafted by Deng Xiaoping in the early 1990s and called for keeping a low profile in geopolitical affairs while the country grew rich and strong. Xi’s new strategy would take an active, revisionist approach to international affairs. This shift in strategy was made official at the 19th Chinese Communist Party Congress later that year. The leadership in Beijing understood that China was now emerging as a superpower on a more equal footing with the United States. Beijing’s shift was reflected in an international debate over the world’s return to a bipolar power structure, with the United States and China as the two superpowers.
The fourth and latest phase started with Trump’s return to the White House this year. Critics had already argued during his first term that his “America First” policy was a gift to Washington’s adversaries, but back then, his administration didn’t really walk the talk of disengagement. This time around, Trump really is tearing apart decades of U.S. foreign policy and the power advantages that it gave the United States. If Chinese leaders sensed in 2008 that the balance of power was shifting in their favor, we can only imagine the euphoria in Beijing’s corridors of power today.
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The years of Washington’s global primacy are over, given the new bipolar power structure. Moreover, the rise of populism, nationalism, and protectionism in U.S. politics are the usual signs of a country in relative decline. (In fact, the current agenda of the U.S. political right is not all that different from that of the British right in the 1890s, when the end of a global Pax Britannica came into view.) By actively and radically disengaging the United States from sustaining the global order, the second Trump administration is accelerating the power shift to China’s advantage.
However, even a full U.S. retreat does not mean that Beijing will take over as the dominant force in world affairs. Four major reasons stand in the way.
First, no matter its degree of engagement, the United States is still the world’s most powerful nation. It is inclined to make a serious attempt at undermining Chinese power. Trump may be pulling Washington out of global governance mechanisms, but that does not mean that the United States is preparing itself to play second fiddle. On the contrary, the United States seems bent on maintaining and potentially strengthening its power position relative to China through various policies, including tariffs; sanctions; the newly announced SHIPS Act, intended to strengthen maritime shipbuilding; and the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act, which aims to boost U.S. research and the manufacturing of semiconductors.
Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) personnel attend the opening ceremony of China’s military base in Djibouti on Aug. 1, 2017.AFP via Getty Images
Second, the nature of China’s superpower status differs vastly from that of the United States and previous superpowers such as the British Empire. It is almost impossible for China to establish a global military posture on the same global scale. Even today, the United States maintains around 750 military bases and facilities in approximately 80 foreign countries. China has a grand total of two overseas military facilities: Djibouti Support Base in Africa and a joint logistics and training center at Ream Naval Base in Cambodia. China certainly has an interest in establishing more military bases abroad, but it will be a long march for Beijing to establish anything resembling the U.S. overseas posture.
This is due to their contrasting paths to superpower status. At first glance, China’s rise within the U.S.-led international order does not seem very different from the United States’ rise during a global Pax Britannica. But the U.S. military posture emerged under unique circumstances: It was established during World War II, in which the United States fought on a global scale. It expanded and consolidated during the global Cold War and was largely maintained during the U.S. unipolar moment. Throughout this time, the United States’ alliance partners in Europe and Asia welcomed Washington’s presence. These avenues are not available to China. Short of outright conquest, Beijing must rely on its economic power to buy or coerce cooperation—or on other countries’ active opposition to Washington.
Even if China has the ambition to establish a global network of military facilities, it will be a long-term project. Meanwhile, even a less engaged Washington is likely to seek to undermine Beijing’s efforts.
This massive discrepancy matters. Foreign bases obviously enable power projection, but they also allow a country to play a decisive role in worldwide peace and reconciliation efforts, which often require both carrots and sticks to achieve a good outcome. Even in an age of space and cyberwar, coercive diplomacy involving troop deployments is often more effective than diplomacy alone. Without a worldwide network of alliance agreements and overseas bases enabling rapid deployment in multiple theaters, like the United States still possesses, China simply cannot act in a similar leadership role.
PLA soldiers stand in front of photo of Xi near Tiananmen Square in Beijing on May 20, 2020.Kevin Frayer/Getty Images
Third, if domestic politics is more volatile in the United States today, that is also the case in China. By extending his leadership for another five-year term, secured with his reelection as party leader at the National Congress in 2022, Xi has broken with the party-state’s norms for power transition, creating uncertainty about China’s future political stability.
China’s economy is also showing signs of weakness. In 2020, China’s nominal GDP was about 70 percent of the U.S. figure, but Xi’s draconian COVID-19 shutdowns, a raging real estate crisis, Western de-risking, and deep structural imbalances in the Chinese economic model have since caused China’s GDP to fall behind significantly. In 2024, China’s GDP stood at 64 percent of that of the United States. (At the same time, Chinese GDP adjusted for purchasing power remains significantly higher than the U.S. figure.)
Another key indicator of global leadership is the internationalization of a country’s currency. Here, China has huge ambitions, but it faces an uphill struggle trying to convince other countries’ central banks to hold substantial reserves in yuan. (Russia is the one notable exception.) The reason is twofold: strict Chinese capital controls and lack of trust in the Chinese system. Currency internationalization would require Beijing to substantially change its economic and political model, which it is understandably loath to do.
Fourth, the Chinese leadership still needs time to switch its mindset—and the state apparatus—from a grand strategy of reticence to one of leadership. True, China has lately pushed for a more active role in global affairs. It has worked hard to enhance its position within the United Nations through increasing funding for U.N. agencies, by placing Chinese nationals into leading positions, and by taking a larger responsibility in multilateral talks. Beijing has courted the global south, facilitated detente between Iran and Saudi Arabia, brokered a deal to unite Palestinian factions, and put forth a plan to end the Russia-Ukraine war. Given Trump’s withdrawal from various international institutions and mechanisms, China will undoubtedly double down on these efforts. Yet even today, these and other initiatives are rarely backed by a constructive vision of Chinese leadership.
Looking ahead, in a long-term perspective, it is of course important to begin contemplating what a Pax Sinica might look like. This is not an easy task. China has not been in a position over the past few centuries to build a major foreign-policy tradition in terms of leadership, and Beijing’s contemporary foreign actions appear to be motivated more often by opposition to the United States than anything else. As for now, the best guide for China going forward is still its domestic agenda.
The key takeaway is that rather than preparing for a China-led order, we might need to prepare for a leaderless order in the short and medium term. Based on material capabilities, China and the United States are clearly the two dominant states in a bipolar power structure. But neither of the two superpowers is in global leadership mode. The United States might still be able, but it is no longer willing, and China is not ready.
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