America’s third century will be shared with China

For 250 years, America’s ascent was defined by sheer scale. In its third century, the defining strategic fact will be China’s scale — and whether Washington sets the terms of coexistence with its allies.

The scale that built the American century

Hitler marvelled at what he called the “giant state with unimaginable productive capacities”. Admiral Yamamoto, who planned the attack on Pearl Harbour, knew he could run wild in the Pacific for only so long before American industry buried Japan. Quantity, the cold-war aphorism held, has a quality all its own — and the quantity was almost always American.

Scale has always mattered in the rise and fall of great powers. Once countries reach similar levels of economic productivity, those with larger populations and continental size eventually surge ahead. The United States caught the tide of industrialisation to surge ahead of Europe and built the American century.

China’s scale is now the defining strategic fact

But in the 21st century America will find that dynamic reversed. This time China has caught the tide and surged ahead of the world. The defining strategic fact of America’s third century will be China’s sheer scale, which will create a growing imbalance of power that favours Beijing. And the defining strategic question will be how to navigate this unprecedented state of affairs.

Today, China’s economy is 30% larger than America’s when measured by purchasing power. It boasts twice the manufacturing capability and makes more than half of the world’s ships, batteries, electric vehicles and refined rare earths. It files more patents and publishes more top-cited research than the United States. And it has the world’s largest navy, built in yards that dwarf American shipbuilding hundreds of times over.

China has real weaknesses — a shrinking population, mounting debt, faltering finances — but no serious strategy can wish its scale away.

Xi Jinping, China’s president, senses this shift. He tells his cadres that “the East is rising and the West is falling” and that “time and momentum are on our side”. He is investing accordingly: a record military build-up, massive nuclear investment, a lengthening string of overseas bases, a drive to dominate the technologies of the fourth industrial revolution, and a “dual circulation” strategy designed to make the world dependent on China while freeing China from dependence on the world.

China’s aim is not quite to grow rich — indeed many of these actions undercut its prosperity — but to grow powerful and reset global rules in China’s favour. America and its partners, on current course and speed, risk being hollowed out industrially, dependent on China logistically, surpassed technologically, defeated militarily and stripped of millions of jobs.

Containment and accommodation are dead ends

Faced with this, American strategists have mulled two responses, one confrontational and the other accommodative. Both are dead ends. The first focuses on primacy and containment, which is reckless and impossible; the second on de-escalation at all costs, trading away essential interests for an illusory stability and leaving Americans worse off while letting China’s leverage over them grow.

When the Trump era ends, America will need a more realistic grand strategy. It must acknowledge that America will share its third century with China, but what remains to be determined are the terms. The goal of American policy should be to set those terms: a balance of power with China that secures essential American interests while avoiding war.

Managed competition without catastrophe

That strategy must be built on two pillars. The first is managed competition. Competition is inevitable when interests diverge. The task is not to wish it away but to keep it from tipping into catastrophe.

Washington cannot reassure Beijing at the strategic level but it can at the tactical level: telling China plainly what America is and is not doing on technology, trade or Taiwan, and signalling that its aims are bounded. That is the work of face-to-face meetings, where misperceptions can be corrected, competitive moves explained directly, respect extended and off-ramps found by both sides. Far from capitulation, this is the discipline that lets America compete harder without triggering the escalation neither side can control.

Allied scale is the decisive advantage

The second pillar is allied scale. America cannot match China’s scale alone, and it need not. Standing by itself, it is the smaller power on too many measures. Joined with its allies — Europe, Japan, South Korea, Australia, India, Canada and others — it is no contest.

That coalition would command more than twice China’s GDP, double its military spending, triple its active patents and make up roughly half the world’s manufacturing to China’s one-third.

Building that scale means a shared tariff and regulatory wall around allied industrial bases, giving the coalition’s companies a pooled market while ensuring Chinese overcapacity cannot hollow them out one by one. It means two-way flows of capacity: Japanese and Korean help to rebuild American shipyards, Taiwanese semiconductor-fabrication plants on American soil, American investment abroad in rare-earth refiners or pharmaceutical manufacturing to break China’s monopolies, and America’s finest military technology provided to its allies to bolster deterrence.

The artificial intelligence revolution that may reshape global geopolitics is itself a story of allied scale: American design software, German optics and Japanese chemistry converge in Dutch machines to produce cutting-edge chips in Taiwanese foundries. It is an example of what the allied system can do that no other grouping can replicate.

Setting the terms of coexistence

These two pillars cannot provide a total victory, and that is the point. Managed competition will not eliminate discord, and allied scale will not contain a country of China’s heft. What they offer is something more durable: the ability to set the terms of coexistence rather than have them dictated.

America once assumed the century ahead would be its own. It has become clear that the third century will not work that way. The critical question is whether America helps write the terms of that future together with its partners, or lets China write them alone. ■

Rush Doshi is the director of the China Strategy Initiative at the Council on Foreign Relations and an assistant professor at Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service.

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