Hal Brands, Columnist

China's Global Power Tops the U.S.? New Measures Say No

GDP and military spending matter, but so do networks of allies and “resilience.”

December 10, 2020 at 12:00 AM UTC

Hal Brands is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist and the Henry Kissinger Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies.

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Ever since the U.S. reached the pinnacle of global power after World War II, Americans have worried it wouldn’t remain there. Waves of “declinism” rolled across the country after Sputnik in the late 1950s, the Vietnam War, the oil shocks of the 1970s, the rise of Japan in the 1980s, and the Iraq War and the global financial crisis of the 2000s.

Now, amid a global pandemic and at the onset of a long struggle with China, the question of American decline has taken on renewed urgency.