In the coming decades, nothing will matter more for global peace, prosperity and governance than how the United States and China handle the ongoing shift in their relative power. In the long term, today's other pressing challenges — including Russia's relationship with the West and events in the tumultuous Middle East — will amount almost to sideshows by comparison.
What makes the Sino-American relationship dangerous is that powerful forces in both countries seem intent on a collision course. On the Chinese side, under President Xi Jinping's assertive leadership, the government is no longer heeding Deng Xiaoping's injunction that the country should "hide its strength, bide its time, and never take the lead" in international affairs. It has pursued manifestly expansionist territorial claims, most notably in the South China Sea, and shown a clear determination to resist the indefinite continuation of American dominance in the region. The prevailing Chinese mindset is that the U.S. is intent on isolating, containing and undermining it.
Unhappily, there is plenty of evidence on the U.S. side to feed that sentiment. Whatever many American policymakers may be saying in private, their public discourse almost invariably reflects an intention to remain the world's dominant power — and specifically in Asia — in perpetuity.