The Collapse of the US-led World Order: China Gains Ground but Not Ready to Replace It

President Trump has upended the US-led post-World War II world order. Beijing watched almost in disbelief as Trump chaotically and with shocking speed withdrew the US from multilateral organizations, dismantled the US-led alliance system, imposed tariffs on US allies and foes alike, returned to the old power politics of spheres of influence and might-makes-right, and showed his myopic worldview and admiration for autocrats. Many observers believe that these actions have bestowed a strategic advantage on China to create a Sinocentric order, known as Pax Sinica, to replace Pax Americana.¹  

China has indeed benefited from Trump’s destruction of the postwar order, advancing its normative power as a rule-maker, presenting itself as a more responsible partner than the US in global engagement and multilateral institutions, and exercising less constrained power to pursue its territorial claims in the Darwinist world. Still, China is not ready to step into America’s shoes to remake the world order, not only because China remains a revisionist stakeholder but also because Beijing cannot provide alternative universal values and international public goods to fill the void of global leadership. The collapse of the US-led order created a power vacuum and disorder that is in the interests of neither the US nor China.

The Rise and Fall of the US-led Postwar Order

The United States led the construction of the postwar order comprising the UN and the US-led global alliance system. Commanding the world’s largest economy, most capable military, and arguably strongest geographic position, the US made an exceptional commitment to becoming a world leader in defending liberal norms and creating a thriving free world economy. Using both carrots and sticks to entice other countries to join the international order, the US sometimes compromised or ceded to other countries’ interests to maintain the liberal order. The US-led alliance protected countries thousands of miles away and cultivated democracy in distant lands. War persisted, but great power war and outright territorial conquests became artifacts of an earlier age. The postwar order produced unprecedented global prosperity and relative peace, notwithstanding many faults, mistakes, hypocrisies, and contradictions of US leadership.²

The global power balance shifted significantly in the 21st century. As the US share of global GDP declined from roughly half of global GDP after World War II to about 25% today, the US can hardly sustain global leadership. Although American hubris continued to costly, humiliating wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, well before Trump’s ascent, many Americans had developed fatigue with key aspects of American global leadership, unwilling to pay the high costs to pursue the liberal order, provide public goods, and protect distant allies.

The result is the election of Trump twice. Trump has long maintained that the costs of US global leadership outweigh the benefits, saddling it with the burden of policing the globe and enabling its allies to play it for a sucker. As his Secretary of State Marco Rubio puts it, “The postwar global order is not just obsolete, it is now a weapon being used against us.”³ He held further that other countries had “gotten used to a foreign policy in which you act in the national interest of your country and we [the US] sort of act in the interest of the globe or the global order… Under President Trump, we’re going to do what you do.”⁴ Indeed, as the conditions that produced exceptional power faded, many Americans wanted to pull back. In a January 2025 New York Times poll, 60 percent of respondents wanted the US to pay less attention to problems overseas and concentrate “on problems here at home.” A Chicago Council on Global Affairs poll found that only 17 percent of Americans thought the United States’s wealth and strength mean that “it has a responsibility to take a leading role in world affairs.”⁵

This development set the backdrop for Trump to abdicate the US global leadership and reject multilateralism and self-restraint in exercising US power. On the first day of his second term, the US withdrew from the World Health Organization, the UN Human Rights Council, and other international organizations, dismantled the US Agency for International Development (USAID), and defunded the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), weakening democratic promotion. While he continues to throw weight around the world to pursue US interests, these interests do not include liberal values and rules-based order. Attempting to transform the US into a monarchy with him as king,⁶ Trump revealed his singular admiration for leaders who wielded power without constraint. He hailed Putin as savvy, strong, and genius for invading Ukraine and Xi for being “exceptionally brilliant” in controlling Chinese citizens with an iron fist, rhapsodizing about how well he gets along with these strongmen and elected illiberal or autocratic leaders such as Viktor Orban in Hungary, Narendra Modi in India, or Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel.

Trump has also undermined the US-led alliance system. While his predecessors, Democrats and Republicans alike, insisted that these alliances were America’s great force multiplier, Trump views them as a bleeding wound and bad investments that saddle the US with the cost of protecting countries that steal jobs from Americans. Trump has regularly denounced these allies for taking advantage of US largess and long viewed NATO and WTO with disdain and the alliances a rip-off for the US. For Trump, the US is better off pursuing a narrow-interest agenda based on might-makes-right, regardless of the consequences for allies and the rest of the world. Repeatedly asking why America should defend countries running trade surpluses with the US, Trump made headlines even before his inauguration by threatening to reclaim the Panama Canal and seize Greenland from Denmark and floated the idea of Canada shedding its sovereignty to become the 51st state of the United States. Trump’s Vice President, J.D. Vance, shocked the EU member states when his blistering and confrontational remarks at the Munich Security Conference in February 2025 questioned if the US and Europe shared values and an agenda.⁷ Using economic power to extract concessions from countries that displease him and compel foreign capitals to bend to his will, Trump imposed higher tariffs on almost every country, no exception to US allies. The creators of the postwar global order believed high tariffs could destroy the global economy and fuel conflict. Trump’s tariffs marked the dawn of a coercive order in which economic intimidation replaces free trade and international cooperation as a currency of power.

Trump’s sudden shift from supporting Ukraine to being a dealmaker to negotiate directly with Russia’s leader to end the war has shaken the transatlantic alliance to its core. His predecessor took pride in leading the Western alliance against Russian aggression. Trump broke with its European allies and joined the Axis of Evil of Russia, North Korea, Belarus, and other authoritarian nations on February 24, 2025, voting against a UN General Assembly resolution to condemn Russian aggression in Ukraine. The resolution passed overwhelmingly despite US opposition. The US then sided with Russia and China to win the UN Security Council resolution that did not blame Moscow for the Ukraine war and called for a swift end to the conflict. This was followed by the optics of the verbal altercation in the White House between Trump, Vance, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on February 28, 2025, painful not only to Ukrainians but also to US allies. Clutching his plan to end the war and disregarding the interests of European partners, Trump’s humiliation of Zelensky insulted European allies and their support for Ukraine, underscoring the widening gulf between Europe and the US. Fears were growing in European capitals that the bond forged from the ruins of World War II was on the verge of collapse.

Trump’s skepticism about US support for Ukraine, his eagerness to impose tariffs on allies, and his threats to retake the Panama Canal, absorb Canada, and acquire Greenland make it clear that he envisions a return to nineteenth-century power politics and spheres of influence. This is a function of his longstanding aversion toward globalism, multilateralism, entangling alliances, and forever wars in distant countries. Acting on the narrowly defined US interests and disregarding the liberal norms and rules, Trump pronounced the fall of the postwar order associated with US leadership.

China As a Revisionist Stakeholder

Although China did not participate in setting the rules of the postwar order, it rose to the world’s second-largest economy, largely thanks to the liberal rules of the postwar order. China has, therefore, become a stakeholder, deeply engaged in UN-centered multilateralism and committed to “firmly maintaining international order and the international system to the purposes and principles of the UN Charter as core.”⁸ Taking the UN-centered approach to world order, Beijing frequently describes the UN as the world’s most universal, representative, authoritative intergovernmental organization and the multilateral body best placed to handle global threats and challenges. Asserting that the UN Charter should provide the principles of world order, Chinese officials regularly reference their country’s stance as the first government to sign the UN Charter in 1945 and that China played a crucial role in creating the postwar order with a frequent reference that Beijing always accepted its responsibilities as a permanent member of the UN Security Council.⁹

China has significantly increased its commitments to UN institutions. As the second-largest financial contributor to the UN regular budget and contributor to the UN Peacekeeping Operations fund, Beijing provided the sole funding to the UN Global Geospatial Knowledge and Innovation Centre for the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals. President Xi pledged US$1 billion in 2015 to establish the UN Peace and Development Trust Fund.¹⁰ From 2013 to 2022, China’s assessed contributions grew over 3 times. Voluntary core contributions increased about 2.4 times, while voluntary non-core (earmarked) contributions grew roughly 2.2 times.¹¹ China headed its first UN specialized agency, the World Health Organization, in 2006. Chinese nationals have led the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs since 2007. China is currently the only country to lead more than one of 15 UN specialized agencies. These efforts helped China align its behavior with the norms and rules of the UN system, including its adherence to UN treaties and membership obligations.¹² One study testified that the Chinese government maintained an impressive record in compliance with almost all WTO rulings, including adverse rulings.¹³

However, China is a revisionist stakeholder. Regarding the US-led order as unfair and unreasonable enough to reflect China’s interests and values and limit its rising power ambitions, Beijing is frustrated by America’s power dominance not serving its interests and values. As a non-democracy, China faces obstacles to exercising international influence due to the liberal encoding of postwar international institutions, which gives greater legitimacy to democratic states than to non-democracies.¹⁴

Moreover, China is uneasy with the US double standard in compliance with the international rules and norms. Since World War II, no country has done more than the US to build international norms and rules to guide the actions of other states. And yet, it has resisted submitting to the rules that it hopes would bind others.¹⁵ When its interests are at stake, as in the US claims of the freedoms of navigation and other operations in the South China Sea, Washington has claimed that the relevant rules of UNCLOS are part of customary international law. But the US Congress has not ratified UNCLOS. Washington has insisted others obey the treaty rules that the US has refused to accept. The norm of prohibiting military force in the absence of UNSC authorization except for self-defense suffered blows by the US-led NATO intervention in Kosovo without the UNSC prior approval in 1999 and a US-led “coalition of the willing” invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Chinese leaders, therefore, demanded reform of the world order. Xi explicitly vowed that China would lead the international community in building a more just and reasonable new world order and safeguarding international security. China previously expressed its intention to participate in the world order. Xi called on China to take the lead in improving the world order. Such a shift symbolized China’s revisionist stakeholder position.

China Gaining Ground from Trump’s Destruction

China had made limited headway in its revisionist demands because the postwar order was resilient. Trump has gone beyond the wildest dreams China’s leaders could have had to bury the liberal international order, the cohesion of the democratic West, and the US global standing,¹⁶ helping China gain ground to influence rule-making in its image, pitch itself as a more reliable partner than Washington, explore the divisions among Washington and its allies, and advance its big power interests in the new Darwinist world.

Increased Normative Power as a Rule-maker

China has been in a defensive position against the US promotion of human rights, democracy, and free market, which ostracized China as an outlier in the US-led order. In response, Beijing has called for the democratization of international relations to forge the “Community of Shared Future for Mankind” (CSFM), which rejects Western values as universal and calls for tolerance and respect for the paths and modes of development chosen by different countries. Xi announced three global initiatives: the Global Development Initiative in September 2021, the Global Security Initiative in April 2022, and the Global Civilization Initiative in March 2023 to advocate that “each civilization appreciates its beauty, appreciates the beauty of others, shares beauty, and achieves harmony in the world” (各美其美, 美人之美, 美美与共, 天下大同). China does not impose its values and models on others or engage in ideological confrontation.¹⁷ This harks back to a Sinocentric order with all the baggage of tianxia.

China’s narratives have appealed to many countries in the “Global South” but not to democratic governments. The US withdrawal from key multinational institutions helped China avoid international criticism and increase its normative power as a rule maker in these institutions. For example, Washington had long criticized Beijing’s predatory industrial policies, including high tariffs and other restrictions on US exports, barriers to foreign investment, and subsidies to support domestic firms. But the US now follows Beijing in imposing the same trade barriers and disregards the WTO rules, not only behaving more like China but also making China more influential in defining the rules of the international economic order.¹⁸

Abandoning the ideological challenge to the Chinese political system, the US withdrawal from the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) increased Beijing’s normative power to reshape international human rights governance. China has regarded economic development and social rights as more "fundamental" than the civil and individual rights promoted by the US. The proper balance is determined according to "national circumstances." The priority of human rights protection in developing countries differs from those of the West. The state, rather than international actors, has the responsibility to protect its people from mass atrocity crimes. The withdrawal of the US has helped China override the votes of Western democracies in the UNHRC.

China’s normative power is enhanced by Trump’s dismantling of USAID, NED, and the Agency for Global Media (the US federal agency that oversees Voice of America [VOA] and Radio Free Asia). Endangering humanitarian aid for millions in places where China has sought to increase its influence and spread its authoritarian model, Trump has made China a reliable partner and Washington an uncaring and chaotic power uninterested in helping the world.¹⁹ The suspension of funding for the groups monitoring dissent and human and labor rights essentially deals a heavy blow to the US promotion of democracy and a sweet gift for Beijing, which has tried to crush these groups for seeking to foment "color revolutions" in China and elsewhere. When these agencies had to furlough employees and close offices, Chinese state media celebrated the US government’s discard of “the so-called beacon of democracy” like a “dirty rag,” hailing their downfall as vindication of their complaints.²⁰ Many in China have likened the chaos and radical and clumsy destruction of the state apparatus by Trump to an insurrectionary movement, amounting to self-sabotage of US interests, to China’s Cultural Revolution in the 1960s when Mao Zedong used his power as an insurrectionary leader to wage war on Chinese political bureaucracy and brought the Chinese economy to the edge of collapse.²¹ As a New York Times opinion piece suggested, rather than transforming China more like America—more democratic and open—“[n]ow for some Chinese, the United States is looking more and more like China.”²²

Trump’s retreat has contrasted with China’s aggressive initiatives in making rules in its image. Promoting his “China Dream,” which treats the US as a declining hegemon and predicts that “the East is rising, and the West is declining,” Xi launched the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in 2013, which shows China’s normative power in writing the rules for international development, ostensibly weaving a China-centered transcontinental network of non-Western countries into China’s orbit. An eye-catching initiative, the BRI is Xi’s signature foreign policy to project Chinese power.²³

Beijing then initiated the AIIB in 2015 as a China-led international financial institution to participate in global financial rulemaking. The US dissuaded its allies from joining the AIIB but was caught flat-footed when the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Australia, and South Korea applied as founding members. In 2018, the Chinese government established the China International Development Cooperation Agency to streamline China’s overseas spending and promote the Chinese model of modernization. With USAID gone, China’s narrative about international development has become more convincing. Widely opening its arms to “Global South” nations, investing with few immediate conditions, and speaking the language of win-win outcomes, China has grown increasingly louder in calling for Chinese solutions to reform the world order.

A More Responsible Partner

China has long resented the US-led alliance system and has struggled to build an International Anti-Hegemonic “United Front” of miscreant states of Russia, North Korea, and Iran sustained primarily by complementary grievances against US hegemony. Building on what they are against but not what they are for, the “United Front” is more transactional than sentimental.²⁴ Trump took an ax to the economic cords binding US allies and partners into a bloc to rival Beijing, bringing a boon to Beijing to seek common causes with Trump’s victims and expand its international united front. At the height of the tariff war, Beijing held a high-level Communist Party Central Work Conference on relations with periphery countries. All members of the Politburo Standing Committee attended. It claimed that China would consolidate strategic mutual trust with neighboring countries, build a high-level interconnection network, strengthen industrial chain and supply chain cooperation, expand exchanges and communication, and facilitate personnel exchanges.²⁵

Trump’s Liberation Day tariff announcements proposed high tariffs on all US allies and partners in Asia and Europe, pushing them to re-evaluate their relationships with China. Trump walked back his tariff rollout with the sudden announcement of tariff pauses that singled out Beijing, but US credibility was already severely damaged. The Trump administration, with its chaotic incompetence and overnight reversals, painted America as unpredictable and unreliable. Fueling economic unreliability and indiscriminately bullying so many countries deeply undercut the US stance, showing it as an unsteady partner. The same day Trump announced the tariffs, China’s Foreign Ministry released an AI-generated video on social media, calling the United States a source of harm and instability. Noting that the president was aggressively deporting immigrants and imposing tariffs on new cars arriving at ports, the video then shows Chinese peacekeepers and Chinese rescue teams pulling victims from the rubble after the recent earthquake in Myanmar, with John Lennon’s “Imagine” playing in the background.

Beijing is particularly pleased to see Trump dramatically upending the transatlantic alliance that the Biden administration spent four years strengthening to counter China. Repeatedly questioning the value of NATO and blaming its expansion for triggering Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Trump has forced European allies to recalibrate their relationships with Washington. Although European leaders are not eager for a full-blown confrontation with the US and prefer to preserve the strategic relationship despite his disdain for Europe, American intimidation and threats have pushed them to rethink their stance on China and leverage their ties with China to assert their independence and explore its options if America persists with its antagonism.²⁶ The shift of the US position compels EU states to de-risk the US, hold their collective noses, and work with Beijing to keep their independence. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, a notable China hawk, floated the prospect of cutting new “agreements” with Beijing and then added that the pair could “even expand trade and investment ties.” Her remarks were a significant departure from her assertive language in recent years.²⁷

In the wake of Trump’s wrecking ball, China leveraged the widening transatlantic rift, capitalized on the US betrayal of its allies, and pitched itself as a more reliable partner than Washington to build its united front with Europe. When Vance blasted European allies at the Munich Security Conference, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi presented China as a factor of certainty and a steadfast constructive force in a changing multipolar world. Using the fractured transatlantic alliance to draw Europe closer to its orbit, Wang laid out the case that “Both sides share a consensus on valuing free trade and maintaining the stability of global industrial and supply chains.”²⁸ Taking advantage of the American “pivot” under Trump, Wang’s message was clear: Your best friend has abandoned you. Let’s uphold the multilateral order together. When Wang "used a more accommodating and reconciliatory tone to address Europeans," assuring them that China is a trustworthy partner, “Virtually nobody now expects the Western powers to continue collaborating on China policy.²⁹

As one British journalist suggests, “the US is a revolutionary—more precisely, a reactionary—power, while supposedly communist China is a status quo power.” The EU has much in common with China because they both “vastly prefer the world that Trump is trying to destroy to the chaotic one he is trying to create."³⁰ Remaining cautious in a painstakingly orchestrated agenda, the EU has tried to work with China and avoid following the US down the self-destructive road. Although not all countries are ready to boost trade with Beijing, the EU, Canada, Mexico, China, India, ASEAN, Japan, and South Korea have many high-income consumers and high-value manufacturers. Trump seemed to have overestimated the US economic might and how far he can force countries into concessions. While the US remains the top economic power, it is no longer the only power in town. Other countries can better withstand US pressure if they band together. It would be China’s dream coming true to see globalization without the US. But Sinocentrism may prevent China from taking a leadership role if it happens.

Trump may seek to settle matters with Putin and concentrate US resources on confronting China in a reverse Nixon strategy. However, his course may succeed only in making China harder to contend with because America can hardly count on its allies after Trump has pushed them toward a hedging strategy, deepening their ties with Beijing and viewing China as a more predictable partner.³¹

The US-led alliance system is built on the assumption that the US is trustworthy. The US has lost its trust. It is a lot harder to build trust than to destroy it. Trust, which, once lost, is difficult to restore.³² Leaders in Canada and Europe proclaimed that their relations with the US would never be the same. Other allies were jittery. Trump’s “America First” could mean America alone against China if Trump continued to alienate allies and partners. When the US loses trust or behaves more like an adversary than an ally, its allies would see it as becoming less trustworthy than China. By alienating the allies and ceding global leadership to China, Trump created a world that is more friendly to China than to the US. Washington can hardly reestablish global leadership as US allies cannot assume that the promises of future presidents will endure. Trump’s attack on the US-led alliance system has helped “Make China Great Again” and become a more reliable partner in remaking world order.

Big Power Politics in a Darwinist World

Trump’s throwback to might-makes-right power politics and spheres of influence played into China’s hands. After suffering a century of humiliation at the hands of Western imperialist powers, Chinese leaders are familiar with Trump’s power politics and have drawn lessons that “the weak state cannot have diplomacy” (弱国无外交). A weak state is suppressed, bullied, or invaded. The strong powers always bully the weak (持强凌弱) but fear the stronger (欺软怕硬).³³ Embracing Westphalian norms to defend its state sovereignty and territorial integrity, China has observed the iron law that the strongest survive and the weakest are eliminated, making the nation the strongest in the Darwinian jungle. A return to a might-makes-right world based on narrow national self-interest would favor China as a rising power. Although China’s economic growth has slowed, it has built the scale and size of great power and continued to gain strong economic, military, and technological might to achieve its foreign policy objectives.

One of the objectives was to take back Taiwan. Beijing has threatened military conquest if Taiwan does not accept peaceful unification. Trump’s retrenchment from the UN norms is an invitation for Beijing to pursue its interests in Taiwan. If the US can threaten Greenland and the Panama Canal, why can China not threaten Taiwan by force? Beijing’s concern over using force is US intervention. Trump’s return to the might-makes-right world and dividing the world into spheres of influence sent mixed messages about Taiwan. Trump assured Beijing in answering the question whether the United States should defend Taiwan militarily that if China invades the island, “there isn’t a fucking thing we can do about it.”³⁴ 

China has also wanted to establish its sphere of influence in the Asia-Pacific. A compelling historical lesson for China is that the loss of control of the region repeatedly rendered China vulnerable to penetration and attack. Chinese leaders have compared its claim in the South China Sea to historical US efforts to turn the Caribbean into “an American lake.” Trump’s revival of power politics would bode ill for China’s neighbors, such as the Philippines and Vietnam, resisting Beijing’s expansionist aspirations.³⁵ As a dominant power in the region, China refused to participate in the International Court of Arbitration over the disputed islands in the South China Sea under UNCLOS in 2013. After the court nullified China’s vague claims to the territories within the nine-dash line in 2016, Beijing dismissed the ruling as nothing more than “a scrap of paper.” China was criticized for violating UN convention obligations, subscribing to the might-makes-right school of international politics.³⁶ From the Chinese perspective, however, rejecting international arbitration to exercise its military and political power was a great power privilege. Trump’s military threats to US neighbors and ignorance of international law legitimize Beijing’s efforts to dominate its neighborhoods despite the fear of Sinocentrism by China’s neighbors.

Not Ready to Remake the World Order

China has gained more ground from Trump’s retreat to defend its values and interests. However, China remains a revisionist stakeholder and is not ready to remake the world order. Trump’s “America First” and self-centered unilateralism have demonstrated all the hallmarks of a revisionist state, making it far easier for China to be seen as a responsible stakeholder in the world order. Distinguishing itself from Trump’s unilateralism that has thrown quite chaos and has torn away the very bedrock of the postwar order under which, for all its faults, China and many other countries have prospered mightily, China has continued to promote multilateralism as it interpreted and position itself as the global ballast and institution-builder by pledging to continue supporting the WTO and UN, honoring the Paris Accord and other international treaties and working together with other countries to address global challenges.

China has launched new initiatives and institutions, but they do not amount to replacing the existing order. Some commentaries expressed fear that China would use the BRICS, BRI, and AIIB to create alternative rules for its narrow interests. However, none of them has even been close to that end. For example, the Beijing-led AIIB has not become a blatant agent of Chinese foreign policy but a multilateral development institution. The AIIB modeled the governance structure and standards of established multilateral lending institutions, engaged former officials from these institutions to help craft policies, and pledged "lean, clean, and green." Emphasizing transparency, accountability, openness, and independence, AIIB adopted international norms and standards in line with the practices of established institutions in environment, society, disclosure, procurement, debt sustainability, and oversight mechanisms.

As part of the postwar order, not apart from it as was the Soviet Union, China holds a stake in maintaining the order that allows it to pursue its agenda within the existing international institutional framework—freed up to do so by the United States’ new spoiler role. This role is won by default, not by taking leadership in supplying regional and global public goods—let alone collaborating with partners, such as the United States did in the years after World War 2, to wrap itself in multilaterally negotiated rules.³⁷  

China cannot step into America’s shoes because it cannot project values and ideals others identify with and aspire to share. Although Chinese civilization originated the idea of statecraft at roughly the same time as the classical thinkers in the West, China has limited experience as an equal player in the world. For most of its history, China was either an imperial power dominating its neighbors or a victim of Western imperialist powers. The traditional Chinese tianxia (all under heaven) hierarchy is not desirable for most countries. As June Teufel Dreyer said, "Supporters of the revival of tianxia as a model for today’s world are essentially misrepresenting the past to reconfigure the future, distorting it to advance a political agenda that is at best disingenuous and at worst dangerous.”³⁸ China does not possess the universal values to shape the norms of international politics. Against the backdrop of sliding democracy, China’s authoritarianism appears more attractive to non-democracies. However, this has not been accompanied by significant interest worldwide in China’s development model. Many of China’s neighbors viewed China’s power aspirations with a wary eye, worrying that China’s imperial past could produce undue pressure on its leaders to restore the old Chinese hierarchical order.

Global leadership requires the readiness to provide international public goods. Facing tensions between its ambitions to project itself as a world leader and the imperatives of geopolitical competition, China is far from offering these public goods. In Europe, for example, although the Trump administration’s erratic and confrontational policies have placed unprecedented strain on the transatlantic relationship, China is unlikely to replace the US and offer the EU a credible alternative in market and defense matters. Despite the shifting geopolitical landscape, deep-seated European skepticism about China’s long-term geopolitical ambitions, particularly its strategic alliance with Russia and its ambition to create an alternative world order, persists.³⁹

In Africa, China has provided a fraction of America’s aid to some countries on a case-by-case basis with conditions for political, diplomatic, and economic returns, such as concessions on the Taiwan and Uyghur issues. China’s BRI is not a foreign aid program but a commercial operation with loans and development finance. Although Trump’s decision to freeze USAID assistance created an opportunity for China to position itself as a reliable partner in the face of the uncertainty, China’s economic growth has slowed significantly, and Chinese leaders have found it more difficult to mobilize the resources to fill the void.⁴⁰ China’s presence in Africa has traditionally focused on trade, technology, infrastructure, and security rather than humanitarian aid or health. “It’s not in their (China’s) diplomatic DNA to run large aid programs.”⁴¹ After USAID was dismantled, Wang Yi said that China has supported Africa to get on “the path of self-reliance and self-strengthening.”⁴² He did not give any sign that China would step into the vacuum left by the US withdrawal of development assistance.

Conclusion

Trump’s discrediting of American global leadership produced a profound crisis in the postwar order and created a power vacuum. However, China cannot step in to fill the void. The world is in danger of falling into the jungle of unbounded power politics, a 21st-century Hobbesian struggle of all against all. The strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must. The great powers sought to divide the world into spheres of influence each would dominate, regardless of the desires of those who lived there, a vision of the world that Trump explicitly echoed. Although China has taken advantage of Trump’s retreat, this is not the world order in the best interests of China, the US, or many other smaller countries.