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Jul 26, 2023Liked by Noah Millman

"I would far prefer the United States to be the most-potent power in a genuinely multipolar world than either play second fiddle to a Chinese dictatorship or shoulder the burden of leadership of the free world in a new Cold War. "

If handled properly, I would like this as well, if for no other reason that that multipolar world is by far the likeliest future, given demographic and economic trends.

But let's not assume that such a multipolar world lends itself to stability, compared to the two other possibilities. Multipolar worlds, with rising and falling powers and no dominant ones, often lead to arms races and heightened tensions, as we saw with the rise of Wilhelmine Germany and the (relative) decline of Great Britain before WWI.

This *could* be a peaceful world if the US were to become an able balancer among conflicting and rivalrous forces in the Indo-Pacific. But in our history we've never shown the ability to do that. We've either withdrawn from the world (19th century; between WWI and WWII) or we join in but only to lead great crusades (WWII, the Cold War, the Global War on Terror). We don't do subtle; we don't do balancing.

Can we learn new foreign policy skills? I guess we'll see.

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Does the analysis change if one considers also (for example) China’s investments outside of China. Owning much of the US debt, purchasing priory and land, winning bids for concesionarios e.g. building and managing sea ports, running electrical companies in e.g. Chile ... ?

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I'm not sure how it would, given that I was focusing on demography. There are a lot of other lenses through which to look at the potential for Chinese power, but I thought demography was a particularly important one.

Demography does have implications for those Chinese investments inasmuch as an aging China will depend more and more on investment income to subsidize their domestic consumption. Japan has managed to sustain a seemingly never-ending capital account surplus notwithstanding their dramatically aging population; we'll see whether China can do the same.

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