America and China overestimate their strengths while ignoring their weaknesses

US President Donald Trump left Beijing yesterday, after announcing the conclusion of trade agreements that he described as “wonderful” with his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, who, according to Trump, offered to provide assistance in opening the Strait of Hormuz, during a two-day summit that was aimed at easing bilateral and international tensions.

“We have made some great trade agreements, and they are great for both countries,” Trump said after touring Zhongnanhai Gardens, the Chinese Central Command compound, adding: “We have found solutions to many problems that others could not solve,” without going into additional details.

For his part, Xi described Trump’s visit to China as “historic,” pointing out that the two sides have established “a new bilateral relationship based on constructive strategic stability.”

But there are two ways to understand the Beijing summit between Trump and Xi. The first is to view it as a meeting between two figures usually described as the two most powerful men in the world, with all the personal harmony and theatrics surrounding their summit. The second focuses on the meeting between the two countries that it embodies, and although this is the most difficult to analyze, it is also the most important.

The most common narratives about the two countries’ divergent paths are often superficial and misleading. It is said that the United States in the era of Trump is a great power in decline, indifferent to its decline, or at least unable to stop it.

In contrast, China is often perceived as a country with a steady pace, purpose and determination to progress.

This is not only how outsiders perceive China, at the level of national discourse, at least, but this appears to be how Chinese leaders perceive themselves.

Overconfidence

In fact, both cases are more complex. At the time when the American and Chinese presidents met, both Trump and Xi lead two regimes with both strengths and weaknesses, which makes it difficult to make clear expectations about the direction that each of the two countries will take.

At the same time, a great danger lies in the easy and widespread assumptions circulating within the two political bodies about the supposed advantages inherent in their peoples or systems.

During his second term in particular, Trump has demonstrated the dangers of excessive self-confidence. There is little room for complexity in the way he and his close circle talk about the world, and there is a severe lack of awareness of the limits of American power.

This can be seen in the way Washington has had “superficial” success in Venezuela, where it arrested a sitting president and replaced him with a figure loyal to Trump.

However, Trump and the Pentagon still live in the illusion of believing that securing an unprecedented increase in the US military budget, amounting to $1.5 trillion, will lead to the growth of the US ability to dictate its terms to the rest of the world accordingly.

Military power

Objectively speaking, China under Xi has not achieved as much pure success as global public opinion imagines.

Contrary to popular belief, in the middle of Xi’s third term as head of state and the Chinese Communist Party, China is still far from overtaking the United States to become the world’s largest economy.

By some estimates, China has actually lost some of its gains in relative terms, and China’s per capita income is still much lower than that of the United States.

China has made several momentous achievements during Xi’s tenure, but even in many of these areas, signs of systemic weakness are accompanied by apparent progress.

Under Xi, China has come to rival the United States in terms of military power, especially in its home region, the Western Pacific, where most of the competition for power between the two countries will take place in the coming decades.

China has witnessed an extraordinary expansion of its naval power, deploying new submarines and aircraft carriers that rival the best of the United States, at a remarkable pace. Its air and missile forces now also present formidable challenges to any future American deployment under hostile conditions.

However, given the Chinese president’s ongoing “purge” campaigns against senior military leaders, the military remains plagued by corruption, has not yet been tested on the battlefield, and Xi still views the military as lacking sufficient loyalty. Whether corruption is as widespread as Xi’s “purge” campaigns suggest, or whether those campaigns reflect distrust and a desire for personal control, the impact on the reliability of military operations is about the same.

Industrial victories

On the economic front, even some of the most glamorous symbols of China’s industrial strength are surrounded by question marks. The most prominent example of this is the electric vehicle industry, which is increasingly viewed as the best in the world in terms of innovative design, price and even quality.

But as with other recent Chinese industrial triumphs, such as solar energy, the industry’s massive expansion could not have happened without generous government subsidies that have created problems on a massive scale and squeezed profit margins for even the best manufacturers, as even companies with little or no prior automotive experience rushed to build cars in order to take advantage of government subsidies.

At the same time, the United States has maintained, and perhaps even enhanced, its enormous advantage in a number of leading areas, from artificial intelligence and private space launch capabilities, to supercomputing, to the banking and financial sector.

However, it often looks like a country disintegrating on all sides. This did not start with Trump, but the country’s social and political divisions and incoherence appear to be radically accelerating under his influence, as Washington pushes toward gerrymandering, racial exclusion, white supremacy, and the deepening politicization of institutions that once seemed beyond the whims of executive power, such as the Justice Department and the Federal Reserve.

No one knows where America and China are headed, as both seem to imagine themselves competing for global leadership. But both are rather weak, and their future superiority should not be taken for granted.

Global power has begun to decline in ways not seen since the Age of Empires in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and what is now likely is a period of uncertainty and danger characterized by both Beijing and Washington overestimating their power while ignoring what constitutes a slow realignment of geopolitics. About “Foreign Policy”

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Change against the two superpowers

Elites in both the United States and China are all too easily tempted to believe their own narratives about their power and potential, at a time when middle powers are beginning to rise and global demographics are changing dramatically to the disadvantage of the two current superpowers.

While America and China imagine that they lead the world, the number of those willing to follow them seems to be decreasing.

. There are two ways to understand the Beijing summit, the first as a meeting between two figures described as the most powerful in the world, while the second focused on the meeting between the two countries that they embody.

. Trump confirmed the conclusion of trade agreements with his Chinese counterpart, who offered to provide assistance in opening the Strait of Hormuz.