As the US voluntarily dismantles its global hegemony, China has neither the will nor the capacity to fill the role, a prominent Chinese foreign policy expert has argued.
Beijing was forging an alternative path rooted in sovereign equality and multilateralism, rather than a quest for global dominance, said Da Wei, director of Tsinghua University’s Centre for International Security and Strategy.
“I believe America’s global institutional hegemony is coming to an end,” Da told a public seminar at Renmin University of China in Beijing on Wednesday, noting this demise was unlikely to be reversed.
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“It’s hard to return [to that situation] as the world is rethinking liberalism – the very foundation of US hegemony – and marching towards nationalism and realism instead.”
Since the 1990s, the world has operated within a liberal multilateral system anchored by Washington. However, since Donald Trump’s first presidential term, Washington’s “table-flipping” diplomacy signalled that the US no longer wished to sustain this global structure, Da said.
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However, he stressed that this did not equate to the decline of US national power, noting that the “post-American era” had not yet arrived. Rather, the execution of US leadership had shifted from an institutional focus to one that prioritised coercion and transaction.