The Chinese decade

If you were scripting a historical moment when a rising power overtakes a fading hegemon, the cascade from establishment naïveté through Trumpian folly to the coronavirus disaster would be almost too on-the-nose. And foreign policy hands who fear a “Thucydides trap” — a scenario where a rising and an established power end up, like Athens and Sparta, in a war — have good reasons to be nervous about how the current combination of Chinese ambition and American decline might play out in, say, the Taiwan Strait.

But there is another way to look at things. It’s possible that we’re nearing a peak of U.S.-China tension not because China is poised to permanently overtake the United States as a global power, but because China itself is peaking — with a slowing growth rate that may leave it short of the prosperity achieved by its Pacific neighbors, a swiftly aging population, and a combination of self-limiting soft power and maxed-out hard power that’s likely to diminish, relative to the U.S. and India and others, in the 2040s and beyond.

Instead of a Chinese Century, in other words, the coronavirus might be ushering in a Chinese Decade, in which Xi Jinping’s government behaves with maximal aggression because it sees an opportunity that won’t come again.