Foreign Affairs - 09.2019 - 10.2019

Competition Without Catastrophe

September/October 2019 99

o‘ nuclear escalation as great, as it was in Cold War Europe. The kind

o‘ nuclear brinkmanship that took place over Berlin and Cuba has no

corollary in U.S.-Chinese ties. Nor has U.S.-Chinese competition

plunged the world into proxy wars or created rival blocs o‘ ideologi-

cally aligned states preparing for armed struggle.

Despite the diminished danger, however, China represents a far

more challenging competitor. In the last century, no other U.S. adver-

sary, including the Soviet Union, ever reached 60 percent o‘ U.S. ³²Ÿ.

China passed that threshold in 2014; in purchasing-power terms, its

³²Ÿ is already 25 percent greater than that o‘ the United States. China

is the emerging global leader in several economic sectors, and its

economy is more diversi¿ed, Çexible, and sophisticated than the So-

viet Union’s ever was.

Beijing is also better at converting its country’s economic heft into

strategic inÇuence. Whereas the Soviet Union was hamstrung by a

closed economy, China has embraced globalization to become the top

trading partner for more than two-thirds o‘ the world’s nations. The

kinds o‘ economic, people-to-people, and technological linkages that

were lacking in the militarized U.S.-Soviet conÇict de¿ne China’s rela-

tionship with the United States and the wider world. As a global eco-

nomic actor, China is central to the prosperity o‘ American allies and

partners; its students and tourists Çow through global universities and

THOMAS PETER

/ AP

Eclipsed: Trump and Xi in Beijing, November 2017