Abstract
Today, economically wounded though it is, the United States nonetheless remains the world’s most powerful state when power is measured in terms of economic and military assets. In the future, the U.S. economy will continue to grow, and the United States will remain the most powerful military nation on earth for some time to come. However, America’s economic and military edge relative to the world’s other great powers, will inevitably diminish over the next several decades.
The country best positioned to challenge America’s preeminence, first in East Asia, and then perhaps later globally, is China. If China’s economy continues to grow for two more decades at anything close to the rate of the last two decades, then it will eventually rival and even surpass the United States in the size of its gross domestic product (GDP—measured in purchasing power parity terms, not in constant dollar terms), although not in per capita GDP. Even if its economy never catches up to America’s, China’s remarkable economic growth has already given it significant political influence in East Asia, and that influence will only grow as China’s economy continues to grow. Moreover, having emerged as the low-cost manufacturing platform of the world, China’s economic influence extends well beyond East Asia and affects not only the rich great powers but also the struggling smaller developing ones, because of both its competitive prices for low-cost goods and its voracious appetite for raw materials. China is determined to climb up the technological ladder and may well give the United States a run for its money.2 China is already the dominant military land power on the East Asian mainland, and it has made significant strides in creating pockets of excellence in its armed forces. If it continues to channel a healthy portion of its GDP into its military forces over several more decades, and if it makes a determined naval and air power projection effort, China might be able to deploy a maritime force that could contest America’s supremacy at sea in East Asia, much as the German fleet built by Alfred von Tirpitz in the decade before World War I posed a severe threat to the British fleet in the North Sea.
Historically, the rise of one great power at the expense of the dominant one has nearly always led to conflictual relations between the two, and, more often than not, eventually to a war between them that has dragged in other great powers.3 Is the history of rising versus dominant great-power competitions, including great-power war, the future for U.S.–China relations?
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