For decades, analysts have watched China’s rapid growth and expanding geopolitical ambitions, anticipating the day when it might outstrip the United States as the world’s dominant power. But with China facing demographic challenges, rising youth unemployment, and economic stagnation, many have come to believe that a seemingly weakened Beijing will not overtake Washington, after all.
“Just as past bouts of defeatism were misguided, so is today’s triumphalism,” argue Kurt M. Campbell and Rush Doshi in an essay from the forthcoming issue of Foreign Affairs. Washington has swung “from pessimism to overconfidence”—and in doing so underestimates Beijing’s actual and latent power. “China possesses scale, and the United States does not—at least not by itself,” they argue. “If the United States fails to pursue scale with others, or retreats to the Western hemisphere while undoing its alliances, the contest for the next century will be China’s to lose.”
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