Stephen G. Brooks and Ben A. Vagle
The geopolitical competition between China and the United States is the defining issue in international politics. It is a contest between the world’s largest economies. It pits two dramatically different political systems—one democratic, the other authoritarian—against each other. And it is taking place in almost every region.
According to most American analysts, this competition will be close. Although the pace of China’s rise has slowed, the conventional view in Washington is that China is already a peer, or at least a near peer, in economic power. “If we don’t get moving, [the Chinese] are going to eat our lunch,” quipped former U.S. President Joe Biden soon after his 2021 inauguration. In the same year, Elbridge Colby, whom current U.S. President Donald Trump nominated to be undersecretary of defense for policy, warned that “China’s economy is almost as large [as] or perhaps larger than America’s already.”
Yet the view that China is close to leveling the balance of economic power is incorrect. Chinese government statistics may indicate that the country is almost an equal of the United States. But if the economic power of the two countries is measured correctly, the United States still has a commanding and durable advantage. Its GDP is around twice as large as China’s. Its firms and the firms of its allies dominate global commerce and own or control much of China’s output, especially when it comes to advanced technologies. As a result, the United States has enormous leverage over Beijing. With that leverage, Washington could carry out a broad economic cutoff alongside its allies—in practice, a rapid decoupling—that would devastate China while doing far less short-term damage and almost no long-term damage to itself.
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