This week, Donald Trump met with Xi Jinping on a state visit that could form the basis for a new future of shared hegemony, were it possible for Donald Trump to actually think cogently.
Instead, it is likely that the United States of America will, through its hubris and zero-sum gamesmanship, send America on a course that ultimately will lead to great power rivalry, that once again, ultimately leads to increased levels of conflict, and likely, warfare.
As Wang Yong and Chen Shaofeng state in Global Asia, Vol 21, No. 1, March, 2026
“The world is undergoing profound changes, with the international landscape and global governance system facing severe challenges. The four metrics of peace, development, security and governance continue to worsen. From the perspective of China, the core characteristics of this destabilizing transformation are the breakdowns of order, the failure of international rules and growing turbulence. The most direct and primary cause lies with the United States, the world’s sole superpower, which during the Donald Trump administration has fully embraced a predatory hegemonic policy.”
China has determined through a high degree of consensus, to stand firm in upholding multilateralism and the rule of law, leveraging China’s own reforms as well as its four major global initiatives to propel the international community back onto the path of order. Together with the international community, China is committed to resisting predatory hegemonism.
Just as Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney alluded in Davos, Xi Jinping is on record proposing the concept of a “once in a lifetime transformation” to describe the intense changes and challenges in the international landscape.
He believes that “international law and norms have become virtually obsolete, and the the fundamental principles of international relations, rooted in the UN Charter, are being systematically violated”.
And the instigator?
The United States of America.
Xi Jinping has spoken of America’s actions as creating ‘a law of the jungle’, where the weak are preyed upon by the strong, and where the global economic order has been brutally disrupted.
Xi suggests that due to Trump’s actions, “geopolitical tensions have escalated across the board. To control strategic resources such as oil and minerals, as well as critical international shipping routes, the US has resorted to extreme measures – including military force, regime change and targeted assassination.
China believes that “shift in. U.S. policies cannot halt globalization nor prevent the collective rise of merging markets and developing countries to build a community with a shared future. China’s peaceful development and high-level openness provides the world with public goods and stable expectations, serving as a key force in leading governance reforms and hedging against hegemonic risks.”
And to that end, China is obviously winning.
China Knows that the United States is in Decline
Xi Jinping believes that “the Trump administration’s predatory hegemony is a misguided outgrowth of domestic contradictions and international anxieties, which not only goes against the tide of history but also faces widespread opposition. Such short-sighted actions fail to resolve America’s own predicaments and also erode its international credibility and influence, ultimately leading to self-inflicted consequences.”
Many of these, I have written about previously.
China is both prepared and resolved to “forge a new path of high quality, institutionalized opening-up amid turbulence by co-ordinating development and security”.
In the strategic competition against hegemony, China is not merely a follower of established rules. Confronting the US side’s reckless undermining of multilateral trade rules, China has mounted precise and forceful countermeasures to leverage its formidable industrial resilience and vast market, achieving phased victories between 2025 and 2026.
So suggest Professor Yong and Professor Shaofeng.
In short, China is now a competitor of equal strength to the United States.
The forces that now roil the stability of the international order, stem completely from the actions of the United States that is acting like an ‘international loose cannon’ as it continues its predatory hegemonic interests and its pursuit of the law of the jungle.
China’s aim is to ‘steer the international community back onto the path of stable, fair and orderly development.
So too is this the intent of most, if not all of the world’s middle powers, whose intentions are to mitigate America’s actins to the greatest degree possible, by developing an alternative trade organization that not only disavows American hegemony, but completely ostracizes the United States in the process as well.
America’s intentions are beyond obvious, as it steers itself towards pirating the resources and riches of other nations in its pursuit of maintaining its ‘super-power status’.
Unfortunately, America’s ‘super-power status’ has already begun to collapse. The chimera of power politics and coercion are a cheap sideshow that has been witnessed many times before, both historically and in relation to America’s actions, although previously uncontested.
As Prime Minister Mark Carney stated at Davos. No more. While middle-powers in the past elected to ‘go along to get along’, that era, those actions are now no longer applicable and will not be tolerated.
The old era, is dead.
And, to that end, China itself will not enable the United States to dictate international trade policy by fiat. Those days are over.
Actions being taken by the EU, Canada, Japan, Australia and the ROK, and to a lesser extent, the U.K., (which seems mired in its domestic political agenda), now suggest that multipolarity that balances the two poles of China and the United States, both in terms of their respective ‘visions’, and the fact that the two views fly in the face of complementary or collaborative approaches.
This new economic force will comprise approximately 60% of the world’s GDP, with China and the U.S. providing the remaining 40%.
Xi Jinping’s warnings to Trump about Taiwan and resisting China’s stated reunification will lead to direct conflict, one would expect that this should and would inform America’s actions, however, with a man clearly incapable of perceiving nuance, even if blatantly stated to his face, Trump and America is likely to, how shall I say, “step in it” in short order.
Meanwhile, the world eschews American demands and its hegemonic intentions and continues to pursue and develop a new order that precludes America’s membership and works around the associated difficulties manifest within the international trade and international security relationships now clearly on display.
The future will not be dependent on America’s actions, but intent on creating independence of action that supports free-trade and consensus building between partners that can actually trust each other.
Trust is the imperative component, and the United States has proven itself to be incapable of trust.
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