2. The rest of China’s neighbors. Sticking with geopolitics for a moment, consider China’s encirclement. Even its coastline is hemmed in by Japan, Taiwan and ASEAN, while its continental situation is like Germany’s—surrounded by many states, almost all wary of domination. Even Myanmar has begun to tack away. Should China genuinely act dangerously – although again, we should be wary of listening to military figures unaccustomed to speaking to uncowed foreign audiences – building a containment ring around China, with the U.S. lurking off-shore, would not be that difficult. It is a commonplace to compare China to Wilhelmine Germany, but the Germans lost, twice, and the Chinese know that.

3. Nondemocratic China cannot credibly commit to restraint, so it will never be trusted. Nondemocracies have a hard time credibly committing their good intentions to neighbors. Because their policy process is closed and opaque, and given to unpredictable swings as poorly understood elites take power, other states inevitably hedge against even their best behavior. The little goodwill toward China accumulated despite a decade of cautious “peaceful rising” is a good example. Suddenly, a few years ago, China swung toward belligerence in its maritime disputes, and its neighbors, even Myanamar, turned rapidly against it.

Indeed, the great irony of Chinese power is how ideologically limited it is. China has no friends; even Kim Jong Il reportedly told a U.S. official that he did not trust China. True, China has business partners in democracies like South Korea, Australia and Japan. But these states will never be China’s friends, or, in geopolitical terms, enter into a “security community” with it. So long as China is an autocracy with political prisons, poor human rights protections, and no elections, its outreach will be limited to the strictly utilitarian. It can bully Hollywood into saccharine portrayals, but it will never build affective relations akin to those between the U.S. and Canada, or Germany and France.