The global balance of power is shifting. As the
United States retreats from global leadership,
China is expanding its international influence. Now, many in the West fear a China-led attempt to overhaul the rules and norms that underpin
the existing world order. Are they right to be afraid?
The re-emergence of China as a major regional and even world power certainly poses profound challenges to the US-led international order created after the second world war. But the goal of Chinese leaders is not explicitly to upend
that order, which did, after all, prove flexible enough to enable the impoverished China of the 1970s to become what it is today. Instead, the goal is to ensure that the existing order can adequately accommodate the interests and objectives of both China and the US.