Is the US losing its position as a great power against China?

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Hegemony

The United States pursues ultimate hegemony and dominates the international system economically, politically and militarily, rejecting any return to bipolarity or multipolarity and preventing the emergence of any peer competitor.

So the U.S. foreign policy should focus on maintaining U.S. power and preventing any other power from becoming a serious challenger to the United States. Some supporters of this strategy argue that the U.S. should work to contain China and other competitors rather than engage them.

In regards to humanitarian crises and regional conflicts, primacy holds that the U.S. should only intervene when they directly impact national security, more along the lines of selective engagement than collective security. It does, however, support the active prevention of nuclear proliferation at a level similar to collective security. (Brands, 2014)

Offshore balancing

Offshore balancing is associated with offensive realist theories of state behavior: it believes that conquest can often enable states to gain power, and thus that a hegemon in regions with large economies, high populations, or critical resources could quickly become a global threat to U.S. national interests.

The United States would refrain from significant involvement in security affairs overseas except to prevent a state from establishing hegemony in what offshore balancers identify as the world's three key strategic regions: Western Europe, Northeast Asia, and the Persian Gulf.

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Financial crisis

The United States has been widely blamed for the recent financial crisis. As the U.S. economy struggled and China continued to grow in the great recession of 2008—2009, Chinese authors launched ‘‘a flood of declinist commentary about the United States’.’ One expert claimed that the high point of U.S. power projection was 2000.

The Chinese were not alone in such statements. Goldman Sachs advanced the date at which it expects the size of the Chinese economy to surpass the U.S. economy by 2027.

In a 2009 Pew Research Center poll, majorities or pluralities in 13 of 25 countries believed that China will replace the United States as the world’s leading superpower.

Even the U.S. government’s National Intelligence Council projected in 2008 that U.S. dominance would be ‘‘much diminished’’ by 2025.

President Dmitri Medvedev of Russia called the 2008 financial crisis a sign that the United States’ global leadership is coming to an end, and even a sympathetic observer, Canadian opposition leader Michael Ignatieff, suggested that Canada should look beyond North America now that the ‘‘the noon hour of the United States and its global dominance are over’’. (Nye, 2011)

The World Economic Forum still rates the U.S. economy as the world’s second most competitive (after Switzerland) because of its labor market flexibility, higher education, political stability, and openness to innovation, while China is ranked number 29.  

In areas like biotechnology, nanotechnology, and the second generation of the World Wide Web, the United States still leads. Nevertheless, while few expect China to surpass the United States in military power in the next two decades, many still see the crisis as transformative in economic and soft power relations.

A number of observers see China’s soft power increasing in Asia and other parts of the developing world, particularly after the financial crisis. Great powers try to use culture and narrative to create soft power that promotes their advantage, but much of it is created by civil society rather than the government.

American soft power rests on a variety of resources that range from Hollywood to Harvard; from Madonna to the Gates Foundation; from Martin Luther King’s speeches to Barack Obama’s election.

Some young Chinese use these projections to demand a greater share of power now. Feeling stronger, they demand greater accommodation of what they consider their ‘‘core interests’’ in Taiwan, Tibet, and the South China Sea.

During the past decade, China moved from being the ninth largest exporter to the largest in the world, but China’s export-led development model will probably need to be adjusted as global trade and financial balances become more contentious as a result of the recent financial crisis.

Conclusion

One should be cautious of generalizing long-term trends from repeated events, while being aware of misleading descriptions of organic decline. Nations are not like humans with predictable life durations.

Therefore, it is important to focus on the implications of the crisis in order to analyze the power relations between China and the United States. But a careful analysis looks more closely at the interdependence and power between China and the United States. It is not easy for governments to sell their country’s charm if their narrative is inconsistent with domestic realities. In that dimension, except for its economic success, China still has a long way to go.

The Chinese policymakers should be aware of the Policy Implications of Misleading Projections. Deducing the wrong long-term projections from short-term cyclical events like the recent financial crisis can lead to costly policy miscalculations.

China’s current reputation for power benefits from projections about the future. Some difficulties that arose between the United States and China recently may have been attributable to such assessments. Such projections should be viewed with some suspicion. China still remains behind the United States economically and militarily and has focused its policies primarily on its region and on its economic development.

Even if China’s GDP passes that of the United States around 2027 (as Goldman Sachs projects) the two economies would technically be equivalent in size but not in composition. China would still have a massive underdeveloped countryside, and it will begin to face demographic problems from the delayed effects of the one child per couple policy it enforced in the twentieth century. Moreover, as countries develop, there is a tendency for growth rates to slow.

Assuming six percent Chinese growth and only two percent American growth after 2030, China would not equal the United States in per capita income until some time in the second half of the century. Since per capita income provides a measure of the sophistication of an economy, aggregate economic size will not necessarily mean that China will economically surpass the United States in 2027. That means that the financial crisis may eventually hurt Chinese power in the medium term by reducing the rest of the world’s willingness to effectively allow China to free ride on open global markets without liberalizing its own exchange rates, interest rates, and markets.

And although China holds huge foreign currency reserves, China will have difficulty increasing its financial leverage by lending overseas in its own currency until it has a deep and open financial market where interest rates are set by the market and not the government.

Given the global challenges that both China and the United States face, they have much to gain from working together. But the nationalism among some Chinese, as well as unnecessary fear of decline among some Americans, makes it difficult to assure this future.

References

Brands, H. (2014). What Good Is Grand Strategy?: Power and Purpose in American Statecraft from Harry S. Truman to George W. Bush. Itaca and London: Cornell University Press.

Nye, J. S. (2011). The Future of Power. New York: Public Affairs.

Williams, G. A. (2010). Buying national security: how America plans and pays for its global role and safety at home. New York and London: Routledge Taylor and Francis Group.