Hegemony is unsustainable---military dominance is declining and China has overtaken an economic lead---current transition will be smooth and stable.

American decline redux¶ Today the military, economic, institutional and ideational pillars that have supported the Pax Americana are being challenged by China. This raises two fundamental and intimately connected questions: if China surpasses, equals or even approximates the United States in these dimensions of power, can the Pax Americana endure? And, if it cannot, what will replace it? Posing these questions raises the contentious issue—contentious at least in the US—of whether American power is, in fact, declining. During his abortive 2012 run for the Republican presidential nomination, Jon Huntsman—President Obama's Ambassador to China, and now President Trump's Ambassador to Russia—succinctly expressed the prevailing view of the US foreign policy establishment when he said: ‘Decline is un-American.’ Leading US security studies experts agree. These primacists argue that the extent of China's rise—and hence of America's decline—are, like premature reports of Mark Twain's death, greatly exaggerated. Primacists believe the international system is still unipolar, and that US power will keep it that way for a long time to come.¶ This claim is increasingly dubious. Indeed, the case made by the ‘declinists’ of the 1980s—notably Paul Kennedy, Robert Gilpin, David Calleo and Samuel P. Huntington—looks stronger every day.23 Contrary to the portrayal of their argument by many of their critics, the 1980s declinists did not claim either that America's post-Second World War power advantages had already dissipated, or that the United States was on the brink of a rapid, catastrophic decline. Rather, they pointed to domestic and international economic drivers that, over time, would cause American economic power to diminish relatively, thereby shifting the balance of power. In essence, the declinists believed that the United States was experiencing a slow—‘termite-like’—decline caused by fundamental structural weaknesses in the American economy that were gradually nibbling at its foundations.24 Kennedy himself was explicitly looking ahead to the effects this termite decline would have on the US world role in the early twenty-first century. As he wrote:¶ The task facing American statesmen over the next decades … is to recognize that broad trends are under way, and that there is a need to ‘manage’ affairs so that the relative erosion of the United States' position takes place slowly and smoothly, and is not accelerated by policies which bring merely short-term advantage but longer-term disadvantage.25¶ The unwinding of the Pax Americana¶ Decline may be ‘un-American’, but that does not mean it isn't happening. America's ‘unipolar moment’ has turned out to be rather—well, momentary.26 The Great Recession that began in 2007–2008 did not end America's unipolar ascendancy. It did, however, focus attention on, and accelerate, the ebbing of American power—the evidence of which has cumulated rapidly over the ensuing ten years. This slippage of US dominance is chipping away at each of the four pillars on which the Pax Americana was erected: military power; economic power; institutions; and soft power. As these pillars erode, it becomes increasingly doubtful that the Pax Americana can endure.¶ China's challenge to American military power¶ Until now the dominant view within the US foreign policy establishment has been that military strength is the one area in which America's advantage is insurmountable (at least within any meaningful time-frame). American military power is considered by US policy-makers and many security studies scholars to be the geopolitical trump card—no pun intended—that will ensure continuing American dominance even if China closes the economic and technological gaps separating it from the United States.27 However, some within the foreign policy establishment are beginning to question this viewpoint. Important recent studies of the Sino-American military balance suggest that some analysts are taking a fresh look at the question of how long it will take China to catch up with the US militarily.¶ China and the United States face different grand strategic challenges. As self-styled global hegemon, America must be able project decisive military power to the three regions it considers vital to both its security and its prosperity: Europe, the Middle East and east Asia. In contrast, China's strategic goals, at least for now, are more limited. China aims at dominating its own geographic backyard: that is, it seeks regional hegemony in east and south-east Asia, which have become the focal points of Sino-American geopolitical competition. Even if China is not at present able to mount a global challenge to the US, there is evidence that it is beginning to draw level with the United States in regional military power in east Asia.¶ In a recent report on the Sino-American military balance, the RAND Corporation refers to the ‘receding frontier of US military dominance’ in east Asia.28 According to RAND, the trend lines in the Sino-American military rivalry in east Asia are not favourable for the United States: ‘Although China has not closed the gap with the United States, it has narrowed it—and it has done so quite rapidly. Even for many of the contributors to this report, who track military developments in Asia on an ongoing basis, the speed of change … was striking.’29 In a recent book, Roger Cliff, an east Asian security expert at RAND, says that by 2020 China's military establishment will be almost on an equal footing with America's with respect to doctrine, equipment, personnel and training (though still lagging behind in organizational structure, logistics and organizational culture). Consequently, he predicts that by 2020 American military dominance in east Asia will be significantly eroded.30 He predicts that the 2020s will witness a power transition in east Asia and that at this point China will be able to challenge the regional status quo.31¶ American economic decline and the impairment of US economic hegemony¶ During the past decade, signs of waning US economic power—and China's growing economic muscle—have become too numerous to ignore. Since the onset of the Great Recession, China has successively taken top position in the world in exports (passing Germany); in trade (passing the United States); and in manufacturing (claiming a title the United States had held for a century). In 2014 the World Bank made the stunning announcement that China had vaulted past the United States to become the world's largest economy (measured by purchasing power parity (PPP);32 and in the early to mid-2020s China is predicted to overtake the United States in GDP measured by market exchange rate.33 These shifts in the relative economic power of China and the United States have enormous economic and geopolitical implications. Indeed, in July 2017 Christine Lagarde, managing director of the IMF, stated that in ten years' time the organization's headquarters—which are required by its by-laws to be located in its member country with the largest economy—could be in Beijing.34 Taken together, these indicators paint a clear picture of relative economic decline.¶ American primacists have advanced a number of clever but unconvincing arguments in an attempt to downplay the significance of the ongoing economic power shift from America to China. For example, some primacists assert that per capita GDP is a better yardstick of national power than aggregate GDP; that newly developed metrics of national power have diminished the importance of GDP as a measure of a state's economic power; that China is far behind the United States in advanced technology; and that China is incapable of doing innovation.35¶ This last claim is ubiquitous among primacists.36 It is, however, undermined by recent developments. For example, in September 2016 China began operating the world's largest radio telescope, which is intended to project China's ambitions deep into the universe, and bring back the kind of dramatic discoveries that win honours such as Nobel Prizes.37 In August 2016 China launched the world's first quantum satellite, which could lead ‘to new, completely different methods for transmitting information’.38 In another example of how China is catching up with the United States in innovation and technology, in June 2016 a Chinese computer (using made-in-China microprocessors) topped the ranking of the world's fastest supercomputers.39 In July 2017 China's State Council announced an ambitious plan to sprint to the front of the pack in artificial intelligence (AI), including both military and civilian applications.40 Indeed, The Economist recently observed that already ‘China could be a close second to America—and perhaps even ahead of it—in some areas of AI’.41 And China is moving to the forefront in green technologies (solar panels and wind-generated power) and in electric cars.42¶ The waning of US economic dominance may not be obvious to primacists, but it is perfectly apparent to many observers in the real world.43 The weakening of US relative economic power, which became unmistakably clear during the Great Recession, has undercut the Pax Americana both by compromising the United States' ability to manage the international economy and by shifting the Sino-American geopolitical balance in east Asia.