Success in great-power competition requires rigorous and unsentimental net assessment. Yet the American estimation of China has lurched from one extreme to the other. For decades, Americans registered blistering economic growth, dominance of international trade, and growing geopolitical ambition, and anticipated the day when China might overtake a strategically distracted and politically paralyzed United States; after the 2008 financial crisis, and then especially at the height of the COVID pandemic, many observers believed that day had come. But the pendulum swung to the other extreme only a few years later as China’s abandonment of “zero COVID” failed to restore growth. Beijing was beset by ominous demographics, once unthinkable youth unemployment, and deepening stagnation while the United States was strengthening alliances, boasting breakthroughs in artificial intelligence and other technologies, and enjoying a booming economy with record low unemployment and record high stock markets.

A new consensus took hold: that an aging, slowing, and increasingly less nimble China would not overtake an ascendant United States. Washington shifted from pessimism to overconfidence. Yet just as past bouts of defeatism were misguided, so is today’s triumphalism, which risks dangerously underestimating both the latent and actual power of the only competitor in a century whose GDP has surpassed 70 percent of that of the United States. On critical metrics, China has already outmatched the United States. Economically, it boasts twice the manufacturing capacity. Technologically, it dominates everything from electric vehicles to fourth-generation nuclear reactors and now produces more active patents and top-cited scientific publications annually. Militarily, it features the world’s largest navy, bolstered by shipbuilding capacity 200 times as large as that of the United States; vastly greater missile stocks; and the world’s most advanced hypersonic capabilities—all results of the fastest military modernization in history. Even if China’s growth slows and its system falters, it will remain formidable strategically.

During the Cold War, Soviet leaders often made the point that “quantity has a quality all its own.” As productivity equalizes, nations with larger populations, broader geographic reach, and greater economic heft scale up and dominate smaller first-movers. This dynamic has held throughout most of history. The United States benefited from it during the last century. It caught the tide of European industrialization, then leveraged its continental scale and larger population to outclass the United Kingdom, Germany and Japan, and ultimately the Soviet Union. Today, it is China that benefits from that dynamic and the United States is at risk of being overtaken technologically, deindustrialized economically, and defeated militarily by a rival with far greater size and productive capacity.

This is an era in which strategic advantage will once again accrue to those who can operate at scale. China possesses scale, and the United States does not—at least not by itself. Because its only viable path lies in coalition with others, Washington would be particularly unwise to go it alone in a complex global competition. By retreating to a sphere of influence in the Western Hemisphere, the United States would cede the rest of the world to a globally engaged China.

Yet acknowledging the need for allies and partners should be the starting point, not an endpoint—because the United States’ legacy approach to alliances will no longer suffice. That approach, rooted in Cold War–era assumptions and extended by inertia over eight decades, tended to view partners as dependents: recipients of protection rather than co-creators of power. They were often seen as helpful, but also as burdensome and even obstructive. That model is obsolete. To achieve scale, Washington must transform its alliance architecture from a collection of managed relationships to a platform for integrated and pooled capacity building across the military, economic, and technological domains. In practical terms, that might mean Japan and Korea help build American ships and Taiwan builds American semiconductor plants while the United States shares its best military technology with allies, and all come together to pool their markets behind a shared tariff or regulatory wall erected against China. This kind of coherent and interoperable bloc, with the United States at its core, would generate aggregate advantages that China cannot match alone.

But such an approach demands a fundamental reorientation, from command-and-control diplomacy to a new capacity-centric statecraft. This radical shift in how the United States builds and wields power is essential in a world where it no longer has the singular advantage of scale. As China plays for time and mass, the United States and its partners must play for cohesion and collective leverage. To repurpose the warning often attributed to Benjamin Franklin: we must hang together, or we will all hang separately.

Not every large country becomes a great power. Size refers to dimensions; scale is the ability to use size to generate efficiency and productivity and thereby outcompete rivals. Small states can become world-class by maximizing efficiency on a small foundation, but when large states run that playbook on a much larger foundation, they can remake the world. Broader internal markets can drive down costs, enabling companies to outcompete others around the world. Bigger populations create deeper pools of talent and research. Large states are less reliant on trade, which gives them greater resilience. And they can field larger militaries.

Small states have risen to power on first-mover advantages, often with the acquiescence or benign neglect of larger states. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the United Kingdom was able to dominate the world with a first-mover advantage in industrialization. But that dominance was short-lived. Germany and the United States—thanks in part to the diffusion of British industrial methods—were able to achieve greater scale than a small island in the northwest corner of Europe. From 1870 to 1910, the British share of global manufacturing fell by half as the United States and Germany caught up and surpassed it. While the United Kingdom’s steel production doubled, to 6.5 million tons, Germany’s quintupled, to 12 million, and the United States’ grew sixfold, to 23 million. Germany and the United States pushed the British out of major industries, leveraging their larger internal markets, resource bases, and talent pools to drive down marginal costs. That economic advantage translated into still greater military and technological advantage. Together, these trends led to the United Kingdom’s gradual deindustrialization and eventual decline.

British leaders and strategists were aware of the problem. In the late nineteenth century, the British historian John Robert Seeley, in one of the most influential books of the era, worried about the emergence of “highly organized states on a yet larger scale,” noting that as technology diffused, “Russia and the United States will surpass in power the states now called great as much as the great country-states of the sixteenth century surpassed Florence.” Even before the collapse of the British Empire, he feared that the United Kingdom would be reduced “to the level of a purely European Power” such as Spain. Seeley was not alone in calling for his country to pursue the kind of scale and efficiency gains an island could not generate on its own, through “Greater Britain”—tighter integration with imperial holdings in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and southern Africa. But these efforts were delayed, inconsistently pursued, and ultimately a failure. The colonies went their own way, and the British never found scale.

When World War I broke out, London was fortunate to have a much more powerful ally in Washington—one with the scale to help win the war. That scale was clear to rivals. Before World War II, Hitler observed that “The American Union . . . has created a power factor of such dimensions that it threatens to overthrow all previous state power rankings.” Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto predicted that his country’s forces would “run wild for the first six months or a year, but I have utterly no confidence for the second and third years” because of the United States’ manufacturing advantage. Italy’s foreign minister also recognized that a protracted war favored the United States: “Who will have the most stamina? This is the way the question should be put.” All the Axis powers feared U.S. industrial capacity. They understood that quantity was a quality of its own.

Today, that daunting scale and capacity belongs to China. American strategists must confront the risk that the United States could find itself in the position of the United Kingdom a century ago. The British experience offers both lessons and warnings: its effort at imperial integration was too little and too late. But the United States today can succeed where Britain failed, by harnessing allied and partner scale in new ways.

RISE AND FALL AND RISE

The starting point for that........

© Foreign Affairs