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Battle of fading hegemons

Today, China and America look like two tired boxers who go at each other for 15 grueling rounds, not to determine who will stay upright, but rather to discover who will be the first not to go down. With such wannabe and reigning hegemons, is it any surprise that the world finds itself in a leaderless and rudderless drift?

Arvind Subramanian (The Jakarta Post)
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Cambridge
Tue, October 22, 2019

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Battle of fading hegemons This combination of file pictures created on April 4, 2017 shows US President Donald Trump in St. Louis, Missouri on October 9, 2016 and China's leader Xi Jinping in Beijing on December 5, 2012. President Donald Trump announced on August 1, 2019 he will hit China with punitive tariffs on another $300 billion in goods, escalating his trade war after accusing Beijing of reneging on more promises. (AFP/Ed Jones, Paul J. Richards)

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lmost a decade ago, China bulls like Martin Jacques and I predicted the rise of the People’s Republic at the expense of a declining United States. Today, with the two superpowers jostling for hegemony, it is time for a fresh assessment.

It is tempting to view the US-China rivalry as just another superpower transition in a long line going back to the classical shift of power from Athens to Sparta. But this case is different.

Traditionally, a strong rising power has challenged a weakening incumbent, making the outcome preordained. The only question was whether the transition would be peaceful or violent.

This question also applies to the US-China struggle. But the outcome is far from inevitable, because the powers of both the aspirant and the incumbent are eroding — albeit in different ways.

Previous predictions of US decline were based on unfavorable domestic economic and social trends such as slowing productivity growth, declining social mobility, and worsening income inequality.

In recent years, however, America has faced the additional problem of a precipitous decline in its soft power, which Joseph Nye defined as a country’s ability to get others to want what it wants. Today, that soft-power currency, more valuable than the dollar itself as a source of US hegemony, has been debased beyond recognition. US global leadership is now associated with disastrous wars, repudiation of the collective commitment to address climate change, sabotage of the global trading system, and unraveling international security arrangements.

America has further damaged its own political institutions. It has an erratic, unbalanced president, a gerrymandered Congress, a politicized Supreme Court, and a system of rulemaking rigged by the elite. Over the past century, US institutions often inspired awe and invited emulation in much of the world. Now, they have become an object of mockery, while the 2008 global financial crisis similarly tarnished the US model of finance-driven, winner-take-all capitalism.

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