China Is a Declining Power—and That's the Problem https://foreignpolicy.

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ARGUMENT

China Is a Declining Power—and That’s the Problem

The United States needs to prepare for a major war, not because its rival is rising but because of the
opposite.

By Hal Brands, Michael Beckley

SEPTEMBER 24, 2021, 4:16 PM

Why do great powers fight great wars? The conventional answer is a story of
rising challengers and declining hegemons. An ascendant power, which chafes at the rules of the
existing order, gains ground on an established power—the country that made those rules. Tensions
multiply; tests of strength ensue. The outcome is a spiral of fear and hostility leading, almost
inevitably, to conflict. “The growth of the power of Athens, and the alarm which this inspired in
Sparta, made war inevitable,” the ancient historian Thucydides wrote—a truism now invoked, ad
nauseum, in explaining the U.S.-China rivalry.

The idea of a Thucydides Trap, popularized by Harvard political scientist Graham Allison, holds
that the danger of war will skyrocket as a surging China overtakes a sagging America. Even Chinese
President Xi Jinping has endorsed the concept arguing Washington must make room for Beijing.
As tensions between the United States and China escalate, the belief that the fundamental cause of
friction is a looming “power transition”—the replacement of one hegemon by another—has
become canonical.

The only problem with this familiar formula is that it’s wrong.

The Thucydides Trap doesn’t really explain what caused the Peloponnesian War. It doesn’t capture
the dynamics that have often driven revisionist powers—whether that is Germany in 1914 or Japan
in 1941—to start some of history’s most devastating conflicts. And it doesn’t explain why war is a
very real possibility in U.S.-China relations today because it fundamentally misdiagnoses where
China now finds itself on its arc of development—the point at which its relative power is peaking
and will soon start to fade.

There’s indeed a deadly trap that could ensnare the United States and China. But it’s not the
product of a power transition the Thucydidean cliché says it is. It’s best thought of instead as a
“peaking power trap.” And if history is any guide, it’s China’s—not the United States’—impending
decline that could cause it to snap shut.

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The retreat of the Athenians from Syracuse in the Peloponnesian War is depicted in “Cassell’s Illustrated Universal History, Vol. I—Early
and Greek History.” THE PRINT COLLECTOR/HERITAGE IMAGES VIA GETTY IMAGES

There is an entire swath of literature, known as “power transition theory,”

which holds that great-power war typically occurs at the intersection of one hegemon’s rise and
another’s decline. This is the body of work underpinning the Thucydides Trap, and there is,
admittedly, an elemental truth to the idea. The rise of new powers is invariably destabilizing. In the
runup to the Peloponnesian War in the 5th century B.C., Athens would not have seemed so
menacing to Sparta had it not built a vast empire and become a naval superpower. Washington and
Beijing would not be locked in rivalry if China was still poor and weak. Rising powers do expand
their influence in ways that threaten reigning powers.

But the calculus that produces war—particularly the calculus that pushes revisionist powers,
countries seeking to shake up the existing system, to lash out violently—is more complex. A
country whose relative wealth and power are growing will surely become more assertive and
ambitious. All things equal, it will seek greater global influence and prestige. But if its position is
steadily improving, it should postpone a deadly showdown with the reigning hegemon until it has
become even stronger. Such a country should follow the dictum former Chinese leader Deng
Xiaoping laid down for a rising China after the Cold War: It should hide its capabilities and bide its
time.

Now imagine a different scenario. A dissatisfied state has been building its power and expanding
its geopolitical horizons. But then the country peaks, perhaps because its economy slows, perhaps
because its own assertiveness provokes a coalition of determined rivals, or perhaps because both of
these things happen at once. The future starts to look quite forbidding; a sense of imminent danger
starts to replace a feeling of limitless possibility. In these circumstances, a revisionist power may
act boldly, even aggressively, to grab what it can before it is too late. The most dangerous trajectory
in world politics is a long rise followed by the prospect of a sharp decline.

As we show in our forthcoming book, Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China, this scenario is
more common than you might think. Historian Donald Kagan showed, for instance, that Athens
started acting more belligerently in the years before the Peloponnesian War because it feared
adverse shifts in the balance of naval power—in other words, because it was on the verge of losing
influence vis-à-vis Sparta. We see the same thing in more recent cases as well.

Over the past 150 years, peaking powers—great powers

that had been growing dramatically faster than the world
average and then suffered a severe, prolonged slowdown Great powers that had been
growing dramatically faster
—usually don’t fade away quietly. Rather, they become
than the world average and then
brash and aggressive. They suppress dissent at home and suffered a severe, prolonged

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try to regain economic slowdown usually don’t fade

momentum by creating away quietly. Rather, they
become brash and aggressive.
exclusive spheres of
influence abroad. They
pour money into their militaries and use force to expand their influence. This behavior commonly
provokes great-power tensions. In some cases, it touches disastrous wars.

This shouldn’t be surprising. Eras of rapid growth supercharge a country’s ambitions, raise its
people’s expectations, and make its rivals nervous. During a sustained economic boom, businesses
enjoy rising profits and citizens get used to living large. The country becomes a bigger player on
the global stage. Then stagnation strikes.

Slowing growth makes it harder for leaders to keep the public happy. Economic underperformance
weakens the country against its rivals. Fearing upheaval, leaders crack down on dissent. They
maneuver desperately to keep geopolitical enemies at bay. Expansion seems like a solution—a way
of grabbing economic resources and markets, making nationalism a crutch for a wounded regime,
and beating back foreign threats.

Many countries have followed this path. When the United States’ long post-Civil War economic
surge ended, Washington violently suppressed strikes and unrest at home, built a powerful blue-
water Navy, and engaged in a fit of belligerence and imperial expansion during the 1890s. After a
fast-rising imperial Russia fell into a deep slump at the turn of the 20th century, the tsarist
government cracked down hard while also enlarging its military, seeking colonial gains in East
Asia and sending around 170,000 soldiers to occupy Manchuria. These moves backfired
spectacularly: They antagonized Japan, which beat Russia in the first great-power war of the 20th
century.

A century later, Russia became aggressive under similar circumstances. Facing a severe, post-2008
economic slowdown, Russian President Vladimir Putin invaded two neighboring countries, sought
to create a new Eurasian economic bloc, staked Moscow’s claim to a resource-rich Arctic, and
steered Russia deeper into dictatorship. Even democratic France engaged in anxious
aggrandizement after the end of its postwar economic expansion in the 1970s. It tried to rebuild its
old sphere of influence in Africa, deploying 14,000 troops to its former colonies and undertaking a
dozen military interventions over the next two decades.

All of these cases were complicated, yet the pattern is clear. If a rapid rise gives countries the
means to act boldly, the fear of decline serves up a powerful motive for rasher, more urgent
expansion. The same thing often happens when fast-rising powers cause their own containment by
a hostile coalition. In fact, some of history’s most gruesome wars have come when revisionist
powers concluded their path to glory was about to be blocked.

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German Kaiser Wilhelm II meets with troops during World War I in 1914.

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Japanese schoolgirls wave flags in front of the Imperial Palace in Tokyo on Dec. 15, 1937, in celebration of the Japanese capture of the Chinese city of Nanjing. PHOTOQUEST/GETTY IMAGES

Imperial Germany and Japan are textbook examples.

Germany’s rivalry with Britain in the late 19th and early 20th centuries is often considered an
analogue to U.S.-China competition: In both cases, an autocratic challenger threatened a liberal
hegemon. But the more sobering parallel is this: War came when a cornered Germany grasped it
would not zip past its rivals without a fight.

For decades after unification in 1871, Germany soared. Its factories spewed out iron and steel,
erasing Britain’s economic lead. Berlin built Europe’s finest army and battleships that threatened
British supremacy at sea. By the early 1900s, Germany was a European heavyweight seeking an
enormous sphere of influence—a Mitteleuropa, or Middle Europe—on the continent. It was also
pursuing, under then-Kaiser Wilhelm II, a “world policy” aimed at securing colonies and global
power.

But during the prelude to war, the kaiser and his aides didn’t feel confident. Germany’s brash
behavior caused its encirclement by hostile powers. London, Paris, and St. Petersburg, Russia,
formed a “Triple Entente” to block German expansion. By 1914, time was running short. Germany
was losing ground economically to a fast-growing Russia; London and France were pursuing
economic containment by blocking its access to oil and iron ore. Berlin’s key ally, Austria-Hungary,
was being torn apart by ethnic tensions. At home, Germany’s autocratic political system was in
trouble.

Most ominous, the military balance was shifting. France was enlarging its army; Russia was adding
470,000 men to its military and slashing the time it needed to mobilize for war. Britain announced
it would build two battleships for every one built by Berlin. Germany was, for the moment,
Europe’s foremost military power. But by 1916 and 1917, it would be hopelessly overmatched. The
result was a now-or-never mentality: Germany should “defeat the enemy while we still stand a
chance of victory,” declared Chief of Staff Helmuth von Moltke, even if that meant “provoking a
war in the near future.”

This is what happened after Serbian nationalists assassinated Austria’s crown prince in June 1914.
The kaiser’s government urged Austria-Hungary to crush Serbia, even though that meant war with
Russia and France. It then invaded neutral Belgium—the key to its Schlieffen Plan for a two-front
war—despite the likelihood of provoking Britain. “This war will turn into a world war in which
England will also intervene,” Moltke acknowledged. Germany’s rise had given it the power to
gamble for greatness. Its impending decline drove the decisions that plunged the world into war.

Imperial Japan followed a similar trajectory. For a half-century after the Meiji Restoration in 1868,
Japan was rising steadily. The building of a modern economy and a fierce military allowed Tokyo
to win two major wars and accumulate colonial privileges in China, Taiwan, and the Korean
Peninsula. Yet Japan was not a hyper-belligerent predator: Through the 1920s, it cooperated with
the United States, Britain, and other countries to create a cooperative security framework in the
Asia-Pacific.

During that decade, however, things fell apart. Growth dropped from 6.1 percent annually between
1904 and 1919 to 1.8 percent annually in the 1920s; the Great Depression then shut Japan’s overseas
markets. Unemployment soared, and bankrupt farmers sold their daughters. In China, meanwhile,
Japanese influence was being challenged by the Soviet Union and a rising nationalist movement
under then-Chinese leader Chiang Kai-Shek. Tokyo’s answer was fascism at home and aggression

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abroad.

From the late 1920s onward, the military conducted a slow-motion coup and harnessed the
nation’s resources for “total war.” Japan initiated a massive military buildup and violently
established a vast sphere of influence, seizing Manchuria in 1931, invading China in 1937, and
laying plans to conquer resource-rich colonies and strategic islands across the Asia-Pacific. The
goal was to build an autarkic empire; the result drew a strategic noose around Tokyo’s neck.

Japan’s push into China eventually led to a punishing war with the Soviet Union. Japan’s designs
on Southeast Asia alarmed Britain. Its drive for regional primacy also made it a foe of the United
States—the country from which Tokyo imported nearly all of its oil with an economy vastly larger
than Japan’s. Tokyo had antagonized an overwhelming coalition of enemies. It then risked
everything rather than accepting humiliation and decline.

The precipitating cause, again, was a closing window of opportunity. By 1941, the United States was
building an unbeatable military. In July, then-U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt imposed an oil
embargo that threatened to stop Japan’s expansion in its tracks. But Japan still had a temporary
military edge in the Pacific Ocean, thanks to its early rearmament. So it used that advantage in a
lightning attack—seizing the Dutch East Indies, the Philippines, and other possessions from
Singapore to Wake Island as well as bombing the U.S. fleet at Pearl Harbor—which guaranteed its
own destruction.

Japan’s prospects for victory were dim, acknowledged then-Japanese Gen. Hideki Tojo, yet there
was no choice but to “close one’s eyes and jump.” A revisionist Japan became most violent when it
saw that time was running out.

Relatives pause as they place the ashes of a loved one in a metal chute on a ferry in the East China Sea off Shanghai on March 22, 2014. A number of Chinese cities promote sea
burials as an attempt to offset a shortage of land for cemeteries due to a rapidly ageing population. KEVIN FRAYER/GETTY IMAGES

This is the real trap the United States should worry about regarding China
today—the trap in which an aspiring superpower peaks and then refuses to bear the painful
consequences of descent.

China’s rise is no mirage: Decades of growth have given Beijing the economic sinews of global
power. Major investments in key technologies and communications infrastructure have yielded a
strong position in the struggle for geoeconomic influence; China is using a multi-continent Belt

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and Road Initiative to bring other states into its orbit. Most alarming, think tank assessments and
U.S. Defense Department reports show China’s increasingly formidable military now stands a real
chance of winning a war against the United States in the Western Pacific.

It is unsurprising, therefore, that China has also developed the ambitions of a superpower: Xi has
more or less announced that Beijing desires to assert its sovereignty over Taiwan, the South China
Sea, and other disputed areas, becoming Asia’s preeminent power and challenging the United
States for global leadership. Yet if China’s geopolitical window of opportunity is real, its future is
already starting to look quite grim because it is quickly losing the advantages that propelled its
rapid growth.

From the 1970s to the 2000s, China was nearly self-sufficient in food, water, and energy resources.
It enjoyed the greatest demographic dividend in history, with 10 working-age adults for every
senior citizen aged 65 or older. (For most major economies, the average is closer to 5 working-age
adults for every senior citizen.) China had a secure geopolitical environment and easy access to
foreign markets and technology, all underpinned by friendly relations with the United States. And
China’s government skillfully harnessed these advantages by carrying out a process of economic
reform and opening while also moving the regime from stifling totalitarianism under former
Chinese leader Mao Zedong to a smarter—if still deeply repressive—form of authoritarianism
under his successors. China had it all from the 1970s to the early 2010s—just the mix of
endowments, environment, people, and policies needed to thrive.

Since the late 2000s, however, the drivers of China’s rise have either stalled or turned around
entirely. For example, China is running out of resources: Water has become scarce, and the country
is importing more energy and food than any other nation, having ravaged its own natural
resources. Economic growth is therefore becoming costlier: According to data from DBS Bank, it
takes three times as many inputs to produce a unit of growth today as it did in the early 2000s.

China is also approaching a demographic precipice: From 2020 to 2050, it will lose an astounding
200 million working-age adults—a population the size of Nigeria—and gain 200 million senior
citizens. The fiscal and economic consequences will be devastating: Current projections suggest
China’s medical and social security spending will have to triple as a share of GDP, from 10 percent
to 30 percent, by 2050 just to prevent millions of seniors from dying of impoverishment and
neglect.

To make matters worse, China is turning away from the

package of policies that promoted rapid growth. Under Xi,
Beijing has slid back toward totalitarianism. Xi has China is also approaching a
demographic precipice: From
appointed himself “chairman of everything,” destroyed
2020 to 2050, it will lose an
any semblance of collective rule, and made adherence to astounding 200 million
“Xi Jinping thought” the ideological core of an working-age adults—a
increasingly rigid regime. And he has relentlessly pursued population the size of Nigeria—
and gain 200 million senior
the centralization of power at the expense of economic
citizens.
prosperity.

State zombie firms are being propped up while private firms are starved of capital. Objective
economic analysis is being replaced by government propaganda. Innovation is becoming more
difficult in a climate of stultifying ideological conformity. Meanwhile, Xi’s brutal anti-corruption
campaign has deterred entrepreneurship, and a wave of politically driven regulations has erased
more than $1 trillion from the market capitalization of China’s leading tech firms. Xi hasn’t simply
stopped the process of economic liberalization that powered China’s development: He has thrown
it hard into reverse.

The economic damage these trends are causing is starting to accumulate—and it is compounding
the slowdown that would have occurred anyway as a fast-growing economy matures. The Chinese
economy has been losing steam for more than a decade: The country’s official growth rate declined

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from 14 percent in 2007 to 6 percent in 2019, and rigorous studies suggest the true growth rate is
now closer to 2 percent. Worse, most of that growth stems from government stimulus spending.
According to data from the Conference Board, total factor productivity declined 1.3 percent every
year on average between 2008 and 2019, meaning China is spending more to produce less each
year. This has led, in turn, to massive debt: China’s total debt surged eight-fold between 2008 and
2019 and exceeded 300 percent of GDP prior to COVID-19. Any country that has accumulated debt
or lost productivity at anything close to China’s current pace has subsequently suffered at least one
“lost decade” of near-zero economic growth.

All of this is happening, moreover, as China confronts an increasingly hostile external

environment. The combination of COVID-19, persistent human rights abuses, and aggressive
policies have caused negative views of China to reach levels not seen since the Tiananmen Square
massacre in 1989. Countries worried about Chinese competition have slapped thousands of new
trade barriers on its goods since 2008. More than a dozen countries have dropped out of Xi’s Belt
and Road Initiative while the United States wages a global campaign against key Chinese tech
companies—notably, Huawei—and rich democracies across multiple continents throw up barriers
to Beijing’s digital influence. The world is becoming less conducive to easy Chinese growth, and
Xi’s regime increasingly faces the sort of strategic encirclement that once drove German and
Japanese leaders to desperation.

Case in point is U.S. policy. Over the past five years, two U.S. presidential administrations have
committed the United States to a policy of “competition”—really, neo-containment—vis-à-vis
China. U.S. defense strategy is now focused squarely on defeating Chinese aggression in the
Western Pacific; Washington is using an array of trade and technological sanctions to check
Beijing’s influence and limit its prospects for economic primacy. “Once imperial America considers
you as their ‘enemy,’ you’re in big trouble,” one senior People’s Liberation Army officer warned.
Indeed, the United States has also committed to orchestrating greater global resistance to Chinese
power, a campaign that is starting to show results as more and more countries respond to the
threat from Beijing.

In maritime Asia, resistance to Chinese power is stiffening. Taiwan is boosting military spending
and laying plans to turn itself into a strategic porcupine in the Western Pacific. Japan is carrying
out its biggest military buildup since the end of the Cold War and has agreed to back the United
States if China attacks Taiwan. The countries around the South China Sea, particularly Vietnam
and Indonesia, are beefing up their air, naval, and coast guard forces to contest China’s expansive
claims.

Other countries are pushing back against Beijing’s assertiveness as well. Australia is expanding
northern bases to accommodate U.S. ships and aircraft and building long-range conventional
missiles and nuclear-powered attack submarines. India is massing forces on its border with China
while sending warships through the South China Sea. The European Union has labeled Beijing a
“systemic rival,” and Europe’s three greatest powers—France, Germany, and the United Kingdom—
have dispatched naval task forces to the South China Sea and Indian Ocean. A variety of
multilateral anti-China initiatives—the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue; supply chain alliances;
the new so-called AUKUS alliance with Washington, London, and Canberra; and others—are in the
works. The United States’ “multilateral club strategy,” hawkish and well-connected scholar Yan
Xuetong acknowledged in July, is “isolating China” and hurting its development.

No doubt, counter-China cooperation has remained imperfect. But the overall trend is clear: An
array of actors is gradually joining forces to check Beijing’s power and put it in a strategic box.
China, in other words, is not a forever-ascendant country. It is an already-strong, enormously
ambitious, and deeply troubled power whose window of opportunity won’t stay open for long.

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A Chinese military band plays after Chinese President Xi Jinping’s speech at the opening session of the 19th Communist Party
Congress in Beijing on Oct. 18, 2017. KEVIN FRAYER/GETTY IMAGES

In some ways, all of this is welcome news for Washington: A China that is
slowing economically and facing growing global resistance will find it exceedingly difficult to
displace the United States as the world’s leading power—so long as the United States doesn’t tear
itself apart or otherwise give the game away. In other ways, however, the news is more troubling.
History warns the world should expect a peaking China to act more boldly, even erratically, over
the coming decade—to lunge for long-sought strategic prizes before its fortunes fade.

What might this look like? We can make educated guesses based on what China is presently doing.

Beijing is already redoubling its efforts to establish a 21st century sphere of economic influence by
dominating critical technologies—such as artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and 5G
telecommunications—and using the resulting leverage to bend states to its will. It will also race to
perfect a “digital authoritarianism” that can protect an insecure Chinese Communist Party’s rule at
home while bolstering Beijing’s diplomatic position by exporting that model to autocratic allies
around the world.

In military terms, the Chinese Communist Party may well

become increasingly heavy-handed in securing long,
vulnerable supply lines and protecting infrastructure Most troubling of all, China will
be sorely tempted to use force to
projects in Central and Southwest Asia, Africa, and other
resolve the Taiwan question on
regions, a role some hawks in the People’s Liberation its terms in the next decade.
Army are already eager to assume. Beijing could also
become more assertive vis-à-vis Japan, the Philippines,
and other countries that stand in the way of its claims to the South and East China Seas.

Most troubling of all, China will be sorely tempted to use force to resolve the Taiwan question on
its terms in the next decade before Washington and Taipei can finish retooling their militaries to
offer a stronger defense. The People’s Liberation Army is already stepping up its military exercises’
intensity in the Taiwan Strait. Xi has repeatedly declared Beijing cannot wait forever for its
“renegade province” to return to the fold. When the military balance temporarily shifts further
toward China’s favor in the late 2020s and as the Pentagon is forced to retire aging ships and
aircraft, China may never have a better chance of seizing Taiwan and dealing Washington a
humiliating defeat.

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To be clear, China probably won’t undertake an all-out military rampage across Asia, as Japan did
in the 1930s and early 1940s. But it will run greater risks and accept greater tensions as it tries to
lock in key gains. Welcome to geopolitics in the age of a peaking China: a country that already has
the ability to violently challenge the existing order and one that will probably run faster and push
harder as it loses confidence that time is on its side.

The United States, then, will face not one but two tasks in dealing with China in the 2020s. It will
have to continue mobilizing for long-term competition while also moving quickly to deter
aggression and blunt some of the more aggressive, near-term moves Beijing may make. In other
words, buckle up. The United States has been rousing itself to deal with a rising China. It’s about to
discover that a declining China may be even more dangerous.

Hal Brands is the Henry Kissinger distinguished professor of global affairs at Johns Hopkins
University’s School of Advanced International Studies. He is also a resident scholar at the
American Enterprise Institute and a Bloomberg Opinion columnist.
Michael Beckley is an associate professor of political science at Tufts University, a Jeane
Kirkpatrick visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and the author of Unrivaled: Why
America Will Remain the World’s Sole Superpower.

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\/china-great-power-united-states\/"},"headline":"China Is a Declining Power\u2014and That's the Problem","description":"The United States needs
to prepare for a major war, not because its rival is rising but because of the opposite.","Articlebody":"<div class=\"bolded-first-line\">\r\n\r\nWhy do
great powers fight great wars? The conventional answer is a story of rising challengers and declining hegemons. An ascendant power, which chafes
at the rules of the existing order, gains ground on an established power\u2014the country that made those rules. Tensions multiply; tests of strength
ensue. The outcome is a spiral of fear and hostility leading, almost inevitably, to conflict. \u201cThe growth of the power of Athens, and the alarm
which this inspired in Sparta, made war inevitable,\u201d the ancient historian Thucydides wrote\u2014a truism now invoked, ad nauseum, in
explaining the U.S.-China rivalry.\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\nThe idea of a Thucydides Trap, popularized by Harvard political scientist Graham Allison, holds
that the danger of war will skyrocket as a surging China overtakes a sagging America. Even Chinese President Xi Jinping has endorsed the concept
arguing Washington must make room for Beijing. As tensions between the United States and China escalate, the belief that the fundamental cause
of friction is a looming \u201cpower transition\u201d\u2014the replacement of one hegemon by another\u2014has become canonical.\r\n\r\nThe
only problem with this familiar formula is that it\u2019s wrong.\r\n\r\nThe Thucydides Trap doesn\u2019t really explain what caused the
Peloponnesian War. It doesn\u2019t capture the dynamics that have often driven revisionist powers\u2014whether that is Germany in 1914 or Japan
in 1941\u2014to start some of history\u2019s most devastating conflicts. And it doesn\u2019t explain why war is a very real possibility in U.S.-China
relations today because it fundamentally misdiagnoses where China now finds itself on its arc of development\u2014the point at which its relative
power is peaking and will soon start to fade.\r\n\r\nThere\u2019s indeed a deadly trap that could ensnare the United States and China. But it\u2019s
not the product of a power transition the Thucydidean clich\u00e9 says it is. It\u2019s best thought of instead as a \u201cpeaking power trap.\u201d
And if history is any guide, it\u2019s China\u2019s\u2014not the United States\u2019\u2014impending decline that could cause it to snap shut.\r
\n\r\n[hrthick]\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_1056715\" align=\"alignnone\" width=\"1024\" class=\"none text_width\"]<img class=\"alignnone
size-text_width wp-image-1056715\" src=\"https:\/\/siteproxy.ruqli.workers.dev:443\/https\/foreignpolicy.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/09\/Peloponnesian-War-Thucydides-Trap-
GettyImages-1155879110.jpg\" alt=\"The retreat of the Athenians from Syracuse in the Peloponnesian War\" width=\"1024\" height=\"614\" \/> The
retreat of the Athenians from Syracuse in the Peloponnesian War is depicted in \u201cCassell<span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u2019<\/span>s
Illustrated Universal History, Vol. I\u2014Early and Greek History.\u201d<span class=\"attribution\">The Print Collector\/Heritage Images via Getty
Images<\/span> <!-- caption placeholder -->[\/caption]\r\n\r\n<div class=\"bolded-first-line\">\r\n\r\nThere is an entire swath of literature, known as
\u201cpower transition theory,\u201d which holds that great-power war typically occurs at the intersection of one hegemon\u2019s rise and
another\u2019s decline. This is the body of work underpinning the Thucydides Trap, and there is, admittedly, an elemental truth to the idea. The
rise of new powers is invariably destabilizing. In the runup to the Peloponnesian War in the 5th century B.C., Athens would not have seemed so
menacing to Sparta had it not built a vast empire and become a naval superpower. Washington and Beijing would not be locked in rivalry if China
was still poor and weak. Rising powers do expand their influence in ways that threaten reigning powers.\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\nBut the calculus that
produces war\u2014particularly the calculus that pushes revisionist powers, countries seeking to shake up the existing system, to lash out

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violently\u2014is more complex. A country whose relative wealth and power are growing will surely become more assertive and ambitious. All
things equal, it will seek greater global influence and prestige. But if its position is steadily improving, it should postpone a deadly showdown with
the reigning hegemon until it has become even stronger. Such a country should follow the dictum former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping laid down
for a rising China after the Cold War: It should hide its capabilities and bide its time.\r\n\r\nNow imagine a different scenario. A dissatisfied state
has been building its power and expanding its geopolitical horizons. But then the country peaks, perhaps because its economy slows, perhaps
because its own assertiveness provokes a coalition of determined rivals, or perhaps because both of these things happen at once. The future starts to
look quite forbidding; a sense of imminent danger starts to replace a feeling of limitless possibility. In these circumstances, a revisionist power may
act boldly, even aggressively, to grab what it can before it is too late. The most dangerous trajectory in world politics is a long rise followed by the
prospect of a sharp decline.\r\n\r\nAs we show in our forthcoming book, <em>Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China<\/em>, this scenario is
more common than you might think. Historian Donald Kagan showed, for instance, that Athens started acting more belligerently in the years before
the Peloponnesian War because it feared adverse shifts in the balance of naval power\u2014in other words, because it was on the verge of losing
influence vis-\u00e0-vis Sparta. We see the same thing in more recent cases as well.\r\n\r\n<span class=\"pull-quote-sidebar\">Great powers that
had been growing dramatically faster than the world average and then suffered a severe, prolonged slowdown usually don\u2019t fade away quietly.
Rather, they become brash and aggressive.<\/span>\r\n\r\nOver the past 150 years, peaking powers\u2014great powers that had been growing
dramatically faster than the world average and then suffered a severe, prolonged slowdown\u2014usually don\u2019t fade away quietly. Rather, they
become brash and aggressive. They suppress dissent at home and try to regain economic momentum by creating exclusive spheres of influence
abroad. They pour money into their militaries and use force to expand their influence. This behavior commonly provokes great-power tensions. In
some cases, it touches disastrous wars.\r\n\r\nThis shouldn\u2019t be surprising. Eras of rapid growth supercharge a country\u2019s ambitions,
raise its people\u2019s expectations, and make its rivals nervous. During a sustained economic boom, businesses enjoy rising profits and citizens
get used to living large. The country becomes a bigger player on the global stage. Then stagnation strikes.\r\n\r\nSlowing growth makes it harder for
leaders to keep the public happy. Economic underperformance weakens the country against its rivals. Fearing upheaval, leaders crack down on
dissent. They maneuver desperately to keep geopolitical enemies at bay. Expansion seems like a solution\u2014a way of grabbing economic
resources and markets, making nationalism a crutch for a wounded regime, and beating back foreign threats.\r\n\r\n[fp_related]\r\n\r\nMany
countries have followed this path. When the United States\u2019 long post-Civil War economic surge ended, Washington violently suppressed
strikes and unrest at home, built a powerful blue-water Navy, and engaged in a fit of belligerence and imperial expansion during the 1890s. After a
fast-rising imperial Russia fell into a deep slump at the turn of the 20th century, the tsarist government cracked down hard while also enlarging its
military, seeking colonial gains in East Asia and sending around 170,000 soldiers to occupy Manchuria. These moves backfired spectacularly: They
antagonized Japan, which beat Russia in the first great-power war of the 20th century.\r\n\r\nA century later, Russia became aggressive under
similar circumstances. Facing a severe, post-2008 economic slowdown, Russian President Vladimir Putin invaded two neighboring countries,
sought to create a new Eurasian economic bloc, staked Moscow\u2019s claim to a resource-rich Arctic, and steered Russia deeper into dictatorship.
Even democratic France engaged in anxious aggrandizement after the end of its postwar economic expansion in the 1970s. It tried to rebuild its old
sphere of influence in Africa, deploying 14,000 troops to its former colonies and undertaking a dozen military interventions over the next two
decades.\r\n\r\nAll of these cases were complicated, yet the pattern is clear. If a rapid rise gives countries the means to act boldly, the fear of decline
serves up a powerful motive for rasher, more urgent expansion. The same thing often happens when fast-rising powers cause their own containment
by a hostile coalition. In fact, some of history\u2019s most gruesome wars have come when revisionist powers concluded their path to glory was
about to be blocked.\r\n\r\n[hrthick]\r\n\r\n[gallery gallery_type=\"section_break_two\" ids=\"1056723,1056724\" columns=\"1\" link=\"none\"
size=\"full\" border=\"none\"]\r\n<div class=\"bolded-first-line\">\r\n\r\nImperial Germany and Japan are textbook examples.\r\n\r\n<\/div>
\r\nGermany\u2019s rivalry with Britain in the late 19th and early 20th centuries is often considered an analogue to U.S.-China competition: In both
cases, an autocratic challenger threatened a liberal hegemon. But the more sobering parallel is this: War came when a cornered Germany grasped it
would not zip past its rivals without a fight.\r\n\r\nFor decades after unification in 1871, Germany soared. Its factories spewed out iron and steel,
erasing Britain\u2019s economic lead. Berlin built Europe\u2019s finest army and battleships that threatened British supremacy at sea. By the early
1900s, Germany was a European heavyweight seeking an enormous sphere of influence\u2014a Mitteleuropa, or Middle Europe\u00ad\u2014on the
continent. It was also pursuing, under then-Kaiser Wilhelm II, a \u201cworld policy\u201d aimed at securing colonies and global power.\r\n\r\nBut
during the prelude to war, the kaiser and his aides didn\u2019t feel confident. Germany\u2019s brash behavior caused its encirclement by hostile
powers. London, Paris, and St. Petersburg, Russia, formed a \u201cTriple Entente\u201d to block German expansion. By 1914, time was running
short. Germany was losing ground economically to a fast-growing Russia; London and France were pursuing economic containment by blocking its
access to oil and iron ore. Berlin\u2019s key ally, Austria-Hungary, was being torn apart by ethnic tensions. At home, Germany\u2019s autocratic
political system was in trouble.\r\n\r\nMost ominous, the military balance was shifting. France was enlarging its army; Russia was adding 470,000
men to its military and slashing the time it needed to mobilize for war. Britain announced it would build two battleships for every one built by
Berlin. Germany was, for the moment, Europe\u2019s foremost military power. But by 1916 and 1917, it would be hopelessly overmatched. The result
was a now-or-never mentality: Germany should \u201cdefeat the enemy while we still stand a chance of victory,\u201d declared Chief of Staff
Helmuth von Moltke, even if that meant \u201cprovoking a war in the near future.\u201d\r\n\r\nThis is what happened after Serbian nationalists
assassinated Austria\u2019s crown prince in June 1914. The kaiser\u2019s government urged Austria-Hungary to crush Serbia, even though that
meant war with Russia and France. It then invaded neutral Belgium\u2014the key to its Schlieffen Plan for a two-front war\u2014despite the

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likelihood of provoking Britain. \u201cThis war will turn into a world war in which England will also intervene,\u201d Moltke acknowledged.
Germany\u2019s rise had given it the power to gamble for greatness. Its impending decline drove the decisions that plunged the world into war.\r
\n\r\nImperial Japan followed a similar trajectory. For a half-century after the Meiji Restoration in 1868, Japan was rising steadily. The building of a
modern economy and a fierce military allowed Tokyo to win two major wars and accumulate colonial privileges in China, Taiwan, and the Korean
Peninsula. Yet Japan was not a hyper-belligerent predator: Through the 1920s, it cooperated with the United States, Britain, and other countries to
create a cooperative security framework in the Asia-Pacific.\r\n\r\nDuring that decade, however, things fell apart. Growth dropped from 6.1 percent
annually between 1904 and 1919 to 1.8 percent annually in the 1920s; the Great Depression then shut Japan\u2019s overseas markets.
Unemployment soared, and bankrupt farmers sold their daughters. In China, meanwhile, Japanese influence was being challenged by the Soviet
Union and a rising nationalist movement under then-Chinese leader Chiang Kai-Shek. Tokyo\u2019s answer was fascism at home and aggression
abroad.\r\n\r\nFrom the late 1920s onward, the military conducted a slow-motion coup and harnessed the nation\u2019s resources for \u201ctotal
war.\u201d Japan initiated a massive military buildup and violently established a vast sphere of influence, seizing Manchuria in 1931, invading
China in 1937, and laying plans to conquer resource-rich colonies and strategic islands across the Asia-Pacific. The goal was to build an autarkic
empire; the result drew a strategic noose around Tokyo\u2019s neck.\r\n\r\nJapan\u2019s push into China eventually led to a punishing war with
the Soviet Union. Japan\u2019s designs on Southeast Asia alarmed Britain. Its drive for regional primacy also made it a foe of the United
States\u2014the country from which Tokyo imported nearly all of its oil with an economy vastly larger than Japan\u2019s. Tokyo had antagonized
an overwhelming coalition of enemies. It then risked everything rather than accepting humiliation and decline.\r\n\r\nThe precipitating cause,
again, was a closing window of opportunity. By 1941, the United States was building an unbeatable military. In July, then-U.S. President Franklin
Roosevelt imposed an <a href=\"https:\/\/siteproxy.ruqli.workers.dev:443\/https\/www.history.com\/this-day-in-history\/united-states-freezes-japanese-assets\">oil embargo<\/a> that
threatened to stop Japan\u2019s expansion in its tracks. But Japan still had a temporary military edge in the Pacific Ocean, thanks to its early
rearmament. So it used that advantage in a lightning attack\u2014seizing the Dutch East Indies, the Philippines, and other possessions from
Singapore to Wake Island as well as bombing the U.S. fleet at Pearl Harbor\u2014which guaranteed its own destruction.\r\n\r\nJapan\u2019s
prospects for victory were dim, acknowledged then-Japanese Gen. Hideki Tojo, yet there was no choice but to \u201cclose one\u2019s eyes and
jump.\u201d A revisionist Japan became most violent when it saw that time was running out.\r\n\r\n[hrthick]\r\n\r\n[caption
id=\"attachment_1056728\" align=\"alignnone\" width=\"1024\" class=\"none mid_width_graphic_photo\"]<img class=\"alignnone size-
mid_width_graphic_photo wp-image-1056728\" src=\"https:\/\/siteproxy.ruqli.workers.dev:443\/https\/foreignpolicy.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/09\/china-aging-sea-burial-
shanghai-GettyImages-480432939.jpg\" alt=\"Chinese Encouraged To Bury Deceased At Sea\" width=\"1024\" height=\"576\" \/> Relatives pause as
they place the ashes of a loved one in a metal chute on a ferry in the East China Sea off Shanghai on March 22, 2014. A number of Chinese cities
promote sea burials as an attempt to offset a shortage of land for cemeteries due to a rapidly ageing population. <span class=\"attribution\">Kevin
Frayer\/Getty Images<\/span> <!-- caption placeholder -->[\/caption]\r\n\r\n<div class=\"bolded-first-line\">\r\n\r\nThis is the real trap the United
States should worry about regarding China today\u2014the trap in which an aspiring superpower peaks and then refuses to bear the painful
consequences of descent.\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\nChina\u2019s rise is no mirage: Decades of growth have given Beijing the economic sinews of global
power. Major investments in key technologies and communications infrastructure have yielded a strong position in the struggle for geoeconomic
influence; China is using a multi-continent Belt and Road Initiative to bring other states into its orbit. Most alarming, think tank assessments and
U.S. Defense Department reports show China\u2019s increasingly formidable military now stands a real chance of winning a war against the United
States in the Western Pacific.\r\n\r\nIt is unsurprising, therefore, that China has also developed the ambitions of a superpower: Xi has more or less
announced that Beijing desires to assert its sovereignty over Taiwan, the South China Sea, and other disputed areas, becoming Asia\u2019s
preeminent power and challenging the United States for global leadership. Yet if China\u2019s geopolitical window of opportunity is real, its future
is already starting to look quite grim because it is quickly losing the advantages that propelled its rapid growth.\r\n\r\nFrom the 1970s to the 2000s,
China was nearly self-sufficient in food, water, and energy resources. It enjoyed the greatest demographic dividend in history, with 10 working-age
adults for every senior citizen aged 65 or older. (For most major economies, the average is closer to 5 working-age adults for every senior citizen.)
China had a secure geopolitical environment and easy access to foreign markets and technology, all underpinned by friendly relations with the
United States. And China\u2019s government skillfully harnessed these advantages by carrying out a process of economic reform and opening while
also moving the regime from stifling totalitarianism under former Chinese leader Mao Zedong to a smarter\u2014if still deeply
repressive\u2014form of authoritarianism under his successors. China had it all from the 1970s to the early 2010s\u2014just the mix of endowments,
environment, people, and policies needed to thrive.\r\n\r\nSince the late 2000s, however, the drivers of China\u2019s rise have either stalled or
turned around entirely. For example, China is running out of resources: Water has become scarce, and the country is importing more energy and
food than any other nation, having ravaged its own natural resources. Economic growth is therefore becoming costlier: <a href=\"https:
\/\/www.brookings.edu\/blog\/future-development\/2019\/01\/22\/joyless-growth-in-china-india-and-the-united-states\/\">According to data from
DBS Bank,<\/a> it takes three times as many inputs to produce a unit of growth today as it did in the early 2000s.\r\n\r\nChina is also approaching a
demographic precipice: From 2020 to 2050, it will lose an astounding <a href=\"https:\/\/siteproxy.ruqli.workers.dev:443\/https\/hbr.org\/2019\/09\/can-china-avoid-a-growth-
crisis#:~:text=China's%20working%20population%20(people%20aged,the%20Netherlands%2C%20and%20Switzerland%20combined.\">200
million working-age adults<\/a>\u2014a population the size of Nigeria\u2014and gain 200 million senior citizens. The fiscal and economic
consequences will be devastating: Current projections suggest China\u2019s medical and social security spending will have to triple as a share of
GDP, from 10 percent to 30 percent, by 2050 just to prevent millions of seniors from dying of impoverishment and neglect.\r\n\r\n<span

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class=\"pull-quote-sidebar\">China is also approaching a demographic precipice: From 2020 to 2050, it will lose an astounding <a href=\"https:
\/\/hbr.org\/2019\/09\/can-china-avoid-a-growth-crisis#:~:text=China's%20working%20population%20(people%20aged,the%20Netherlands
%2C%20and%20Switzerland%20combined.\">200 million working-age adults<\/a>\u2014a population the size of Nigeria\u2014and gain 200 million
senior citizens.<\/span>\r\n\r\nTo make matters worse, China is turning away from the package of policies that promoted rapid growth. Under Xi,
Beijing has slid back toward totalitarianism. Xi has appointed himself \u201cchairman of everything,\u201d destroyed any semblance of collective
rule, and made adherence to \u201cXi Jinping thought\u201d the ideological core of an increasingly rigid regime. And he has relentlessly pursued
the centralization of power at the expense of economic prosperity.\r\n\r\nState zombie firms are being propped up while private firms are starved of
capital. Objective economic analysis is being replaced by government propaganda. Innovation is becoming more difficult in a climate of stultifying
ideological conformity. Meanwhile, Xi\u2019s brutal anti-corruption campaign has deterred entrepreneurship, and a wave of politically driven
regulations has erased more than $1 trillion from the market capitalization of China\u2019s leading tech firms. Xi hasn\u2019t simply stopped the
process of economic liberalization that powered China\u2019s development: He has thrown it hard into reverse.\r\n\r\nThe economic damage these
trends are causing is starting to accumulate\u2014and it is compounding the slowdown that would have occurred anyway as a fast-growing
economy matures. The Chinese economy has been losing steam for more than a decade: The country\u2019s <a href=\"https:\/\/siteproxy.ruqli.workers.dev:443\/https\/data.worldbank.org
\/indicator\/NY.GDP.MKTP.KD.ZG?end=2020&amp;locations=CN&amp;start=2006\">official growth rate<\/a> declined from 14 percent in 2007 to 6
percent in 2019, and rigorous studies suggest the true growth rate is now closer to 2 percent. Worse, most of that growth stems from government
stimulus spending. <a href=\"https:\/\/siteproxy.ruqli.workers.dev:443\/https\/conference-board.org\/data\/economydatabase\/total-economy-database-productivity\">According to data
from the Conference Board<\/a>, total factor productivity declined 1.3 percent every year on average between 2008 and 2019, meaning China is
spending more to produce less each year. This has led, in turn, to massive debt: China\u2019s total debt surged eight-fold between 2008 and 2019
and exceeded <a href=\"https:\/\/siteproxy.ruqli.workers.dev:443\/http\/reuters.com\/article\/us-china-economy-debt\/chinas-debt-tops-300-of-gdp-now-15-of-global-total-iif-
idUSKCN1UD0KD\">300 percent of GDP<\/a> prior to COVID-19. Any country that has accumulated debt or lost productivity at anything close to
China\u2019s current pace has subsequently suffered at least one \u201clost decade\u201d of near-zero economic growth.\r\n\r\nAll of this is
happening, moreover, as China confronts an increasingly hostile external environment. The combination of COVID-19, persistent human rights
abuses, and aggressive policies have caused negative views of China to reach levels not seen since the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989.
Countries worried about Chinese competition have slapped thousands of new trade barriers on its goods since 2008. More than a dozen countries
have dropped out of Xi\u2019s Belt and Road Initiative while the United States wages a global campaign against key Chinese tech
companies\u2014notably, Huawei\u2014and rich democracies across multiple continents throw up barriers to Beijing\u2019s digital influence. The
world is becoming less conducive to easy Chinese growth, and Xi\u2019s regime increasingly faces the sort of strategic encirclement that once drove
German and Japanese leaders to desperation.\r\n\r\nCase in point is U.S. policy. Over the past five years, two U.S. presidential administrations have
committed the United States to a policy of \u201ccompetition\u201d\u2014really, neo-containment\u2014vis-\u00e0-vis China. U.S. defense
strategy is now focused squarely on defeating Chinese aggression in the Western Pacific; Washington is using an array of trade and technological
sanctions to check Beijing\u2019s influence and limit its prospects for economic primacy. \u201cOnce imperial America considers you as their
\u2018enemy,\u2019 you\u2019re in big trouble,\u201d one senior People\u2019s Liberation Army officer warned. Indeed, the United States has also
committed to orchestrating greater global resistance to Chinese power, a campaign that is starting to show results as more and more countries
respond to the threat from Beijing.\r\n\r\nIn maritime Asia, resistance to Chinese power is stiffening. Taiwan is boosting military spending and
laying plans to turn itself into a strategic porcupine in the Western Pacific. Japan is carrying out its biggest military buildup since the end of the Cold
War and has agreed to back the United States if China attacks Taiwan. The countries around the South China Sea, particularly Vietnam and
Indonesia, are beefing up their air, naval, and coast guard forces to contest China\u2019s expansive claims.\r\n\r\nOther countries are pushing back
against Beijing\u2019s assertiveness as well. Australia is expanding northern bases to accommodate U.S. ships and aircraft and building long-range
conventional missiles and nuclear-powered attack submarines. India is massing forces on its border with China while sending warships through the
South China Sea. The European Union has labeled Beijing a \u201csystemic rival,\u201d and Europe\u2019s three greatest powers\u2014France,
Germany, and the United Kingdom\u2014have dispatched naval task forces to the South China Sea and Indian Ocean. A variety of multilateral anti-
China initiatives\u2014the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue; supply chain alliances; the new so-called AUKUS alliance with Washington, London,
and Canberra; and others\u2014are in the works. The United States\u2019 \u201cmultilateral club strategy,\u201d hawkish and well-connected
scholar Yan Xuetong acknowledged in July, is \u201cisolating China\u201d and hurting its development.\r\n\r\nNo doubt, counter-China
cooperation has remained imperfect. But the overall trend is clear: An array of actors is gradually joining forces to check Beijing\u2019s power and
put it in a strategic box. China, in other words, is not a forever-ascendant country. It is an already-strong, enormously ambitious, and deeply
troubled power whose window of opportunity won\u2019t stay open for long.\r\n\r\n[hrthick]\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_1056730\"
align=\"alignnone\" width=\"1024\" class=\"none text_width\"]<img class=\"alignnone size-text_width wp-image-1056730\" src=\"https:
\/\/foreignpolicy.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/09\/china-military-peoples-congress-xi-jinping-GettyImages-862723230.jpg\" alt=\"A Chinese
military band plays\" width=\"1024\" \/> A Chinese military band plays after Chinese President Xi Jinping<span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">
\u2019<\/span>s speech at the opening session of the 19th Communist Party Congress in Beijing on Oct. 18, 2017. <span class=\"attribution\">Kevin
Frayer\/Getty Images<\/span> <!-- caption placeholder -->[\/caption]\r\n\r\n<div class=\"bolded-first-line\">\r\n\r\nIn some ways, all of this is
welcome news for Washington: A China that is slowing economically and facing growing global resistance will find it exceedingly difficult to
displace the United States as the world\u2019s leading power\u2014so long as the United States doesn\u2019t tear itself apart or otherwise give the

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game away. In other ways, however, the news is more troubling. History warns the world should expect a peaking China to act more boldly, even
erratically, over the coming decade\u2014to lunge for long-sought strategic prizes before its fortunes fade.\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\nWhat might this look
like? We can make educated guesses based on what China is presently doing.\r\n\r\nBeijing is already redoubling its efforts to establish a 21st
century sphere of economic influence by dominating critical technologies\u2014such as artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and 5G
telecommunications\u2014and using the resulting leverage to bend states to its will. It will also race to perfect a \u201cdigital
authoritarianism\u201d that can protect an insecure Chinese Communist Party\u2019s rule at home while bolstering Beijing\u2019s diplomatic
position by exporting that model to autocratic allies around the world.\r\n\r\n<span class=\"pull-quote-sidebar\">Most troubling of all, China will be
sorely tempted to use force to resolve the Taiwan question on its terms in the next decade.<\/span>\r\n\r\nIn military terms, the Chinese Communist
Party may well become increasingly heavy-handed in securing long, vulnerable supply lines and protecting infrastructure projects in Central and
Southwest Asia, Africa, and other regions, a role some hawks in the People\u2019s Liberation Army are already eager to assume. Beijing could also
become more assertive vis-\u00e0-vis Japan, the Philippines, and other countries that stand in the way of its claims to the South and East China
Seas.\r\n\r\nMost troubling of all, China will be sorely tempted to use force to resolve the Taiwan question on its terms in the next decade before
Washington and Taipei can finish retooling their militaries to offer a stronger defense. The People\u2019s Liberation Army is already stepping up its
military exercises\u2019 intensity in the Taiwan Strait. Xi has repeatedly declared Beijing cannot wait forever for its \u201crenegade province\u201d
to return to the fold. When the military balance temporarily shifts further toward China\u2019s favor in the late 2020s and as the Pentagon is forced
to retire aging ships and aircraft, China may never have a better chance of seizing Taiwan and dealing Washington a humiliating defeat.\r\n\r\nTo
be clear, China probably won\u2019t undertake an all-out military rampage across Asia, as Japan did in the 1930s and early 1940s. But it will run
greater risks and accept greater tensions as it tries to lock in key gains. Welcome to geopolitics in the age of a peaking China: a country that already
has the ability to violently challenge the existing order and one that will probably run faster and push harder as it loses confidence that time is on its
side.\r\n\r\nThe United States, then, will face not one but two tasks in dealing with China in the 2020s. It will have to continue mobilizing for long-
term competition while also moving quickly to deter aggression and blunt some of the more aggressive, near-term moves Beijing may make. In other
words, buckle up. The United States has been rousing itself to deal with a rising China. It\u2019s about to discover that a declining China may be
even more dangerous.","datePublished":"2021-09-24T16:16:39+00:00","dateModified":"2021-09-24T16:16:39+00:00","url":"https:\/
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beckley\/"}],"image":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https:\/\/siteproxy.ruqli.workers.dev:443\/https\/foreignpolicy.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/09\/china-xi-jinping-decline-
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China Is a Declining Power—and That's the Problem https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/09/24/china-great-power-united-states/

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