Trump’s US may be a ‘declining nation’ but China won’t want to take over

In amongst all the pageantry that accompanied Donald Trump’s state visit to China this week, one comment seemed to stand out. At the state banquet welcoming Trump to Beijing for his second state visit since 2017, China’s President Xi Jinping mentioned an increasingly popular comparison used to discuss the relationship between the two countries. “Can China and the United States transcend the so-called ‘Thucydides Trap’ and forge a new paradigm for major power relations?” The notion of the trap – which deals with a dominant but declining power’s fear over the rise of a powerful rival, ultimately leading to war – is something China has clearly thought about in terms of its own relationship with the US. The idea, after all, is that the best way for a dominant power to deal with a competitor is to attack and degrade its capacity. That is something China clearly wants to avoid. Shorts But by raising the topic, many saw XI echoing the belief that China’s time has come – likely at the expense of the US. Trump quickly jumped in, writing on Truth Social that Xi was not saying that the US is currently a “declining nation”, but that it was under his predecessor. “When President Xi very elegantly referred to the United States as perhaps being a declining nation, he was referring to the tremendous damage we suffered during the four years of Sleepy Joe Biden and the Biden Administration, and on that score, he was 100% correct,” Trump wrote. However, others saw signs of the changing relationship during Trump’s state visit, with China acting like it was in the driving seat, and Trump simply a passenger. Trump walked away with an order for 200 Boeing planes, less than expected, and little else, while Xi was seen as dominating proceedings. The idea of the Thucydides Trap, made popular by Graham Allison, a former US official, has come to the fore in China over the last decade, as it confronts the question of how it might deal with its own rising economic and military rise without provoking attacks from Washington. Donald Trump participates in a welcome ceremony with China’s President Xi Jinping at the Great Hall of the People in his second presidential visit (Photo: Mark Schiefelbein/AP) On the face of it, Xi is not looking for fights – not for today, at least, and perhaps not ever. The pomp and ceremony that was on show while Trump was in town – and the words that Xi delivered on the need to regulate and manage their mutual relationship and avoid clashes – show that Beijing is not trying to usurp America today, but to coexist as equals. Still, Trump doesn’t like to share power – or indeed the stage – with anyone. China increasingly wants a multipolar world order, and with the US now mired in conflict in Iran, and the Russia-Ukraine war looking like a perpetual stalemate, it is able to position itself as a mediator in ways it has never been able to before. With Iran’s foreign minister visiting China only a week before Trump, and Russia’s President Vladimir Putin due eight days later, the influence of the world’s second-largest military and economy is now obvious for all to see. But for all the schadenfreude about the US’s current problems, and Trump’s struggles, China will be happy to see an incremental and managed decline of the US rather than a precipitous and dramatic collapse. It would be happy with a world where the US is still strong, but more confined and limited in its capacity. A US focused on North and South America rather than Asia and beyond. What it doesn’t want is an isolationist, wholly self-consumed US, creating a withdrawal that opens up diplomatic and security vacuums all around it. US President Donald Trump came to Chinese President Xi Jinping’s defence on Truth Social after comments Xi made about a ‘declining nation’ (Photo: Evan Vucci/Pool Photo via AP) China wants to have a dominant role in its own region, where it sees its key interest in Taiwan, the South and East China sea and the Pacific more generally. It would be reluctant to stretch its capacity far beyond these, to become embroiled in the Middle East, Africa and further afield, as the US does. And underneath China’s confident facade there are long-term, well-understood and deep challenges. China’s population is ageing and its economy remains precarious, despite good growth in recent months. With climate change and AI, Beijing is as concerned as the rest of the world about how to manage these epoch-defining challenges. Stepping into the US’s shoes as a global policeman, therefore, would not be China’s choice. What it wants is greater leverage over its own region, and more scope to drive forward with its own innovation and economic growth. That is what we saw glimpses of when Xi declared, standing before Trump, that “Make America Great Again” can sit alongside China’s own growth and progress. This isn’t the Thucydides Trap that Xi mentioned, but it does point to a changing world order that some in the US will struggle to accept.