This OP-ED is published on Los Angeles Times:
The conventional wisdom is that China is rising and the United States is on its way down. According to this view, the 21st century challenge for U.S. foreign policy is to manage our inevitable decline as gracefully as possible as the new superpower of the East reaches for the stars. The conventional wisdom almost always sounds smart — and is almost always wrong. The U.S. doesn’t need to contain China, and it doesn’t need to fight China either. Nor does it need to prepare to gracefully let China replace the United States as the world’s leading power.
The first reason is simple. The rise of China is only part of a much bigger story — the rise of Asia. China isn’t ascending in a vacuum, destined to dominate its region the way the U.S. dominates the Western Hemisphere — or the way Germany once tried to dominate Europe. [Full Text]
