The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers in the Twenty-first Century: China's Rise and the Fate of America's Global Position

Abstract

Unipolarity is arguably the most popular concept used to analyze the U.S. global position that emerged in 1991, but the concept is totally inadequate for assessing how that position has changed in the years since. A new framework that avoids unipolarity's conceptual pitfalls and provides a systematic approach to measuring how the distribution of capabilities is changing in twenty-first-century global politics demonstrates that the United States will long remain the only state with the capability to be a superpower. In addition, China is in a class by itself, one that the unipolarity concept cannot explain. To assess the speed with which China's rise might transform this into something other than a one-superpower system, analogies from past power transitions are misleading. Unlike past rising powers, China is at a much lower technological level than the leading state, and the gap separating Chinese and U.S. military capabilities is much larger than it was in the past. In addition, the very nature of power has changed: the greatly enhanced difficulty of converting economic capacity into military capacity makes the transition from a great power to a superpower much harder now than it was in the past. Still, China's rise is real and change is afoot.

Why Does the US Face Greater Disadvantages in the Trade War with China?

“…More importantly, military and scientific/technological levels are more decisive. As Brooks (2019) argued, China is not expected to overtake the US for many decades, if at all, due to many critical structural impediments faced by China (see also Brooks and Wohlforth, 2016;Beckley, 2018;Gilli andGilli, 2018/2019). Thus, the US does not have to worry about being overtaken in military power in the medium term.…”

Understanding American Power: Conceptual Clarity, Strategic Priorities, and the Decline Debate

“…The standing of the United States in the global distribution of power, and its trajectory, is not a subject that has struggled for attention. The suggestion that relative decline might be underway gives rise to strong and divergent reactions among International Relations scholars (Brooks and Wohlforth, ,b; Ikenberry, ; Layne, ; Mearsheimer, ), news media (Bryant, ; O'Reilly, ), and the public at large (Wike et al., ). The questions of whether US power is waning and, if so, what should be done to forestall or reverse this have been the focus of heated disagreement at the highest level of electoral politics.…”

“…To illustrate the underlying structure of debates over the future of US power where this is understood as material capabilities, we focus on the US-China comparison. This is because China has stood out in making rapid, major advances across the range of great-power attributes, with the result that debates over American decline and China's rise have been symbiotic (Brooks and Wohlforth, 2016a). The argument map that follows is conveyed diagrammatically in Figure 1.…”

US grand strategy in flux

“…In spite of China's impressive economic and political rise, the first scenario appears unlikely. A recent study focussed on material power, especially military and technological capabilities, concludes that the United States will remain the only superpower in the foreseeable future (Brooks and Wohlforth 2015). The authors suggest that China has risen to an upper category of its own, behind the United States but ahead of the rest, mainly because of its economic ascent.…”