America has repeatedly been declared a dying empire, yet every rival—from Nazi Germany to the Soviet Union to China—has ultimately fallen short of US power and resilience.
May 19, 2026
America: The Real Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
America has repeatedly been declared a dying empire, yet every rival—from Nazi Germany to the Soviet Union to China—has ultimately fallen short of US power and resilience.
By Victor Davis Hanson
May 19, 2026
e Right alike, especially among the hate-Trump crowd—is that the communist colossus will be forever ascendant, with continued astonishing levels of food production, ship construction, and industrial output. In this pessimistic view, China will soon replace America as the world’s predominant power. We are, supposedly, like an exhausted British Empire circa 1945, and China is the new version of the postwar American powerhouse.
Yet even Beijing’s miraculous 30-year leap out of poverty into first-world affluence and Westernized power is hardly the same as parity with the US. In truth, Trump held almost all the cards at the current summit and will do so again when Xi Jinping visits the US this autumn. According to nearly every historical measure of power, the US leads China by sizable margins—in wealth, economic output, fuel, food, and military strength.
China has roughly four times the population of the US, but produces only about 60 percent of our total GDP. A crude way of looking at this asymmetry is that one US citizen accounts for 40 percent more goods and services than his four Chinese counterparts. Americans enjoy a per capita GDP (roughly $95,000) over six times higher than China’s (roughly $15,000).
We are the largest oil and gas producer and exporter in history; China must import 11 to 12 million barrels of oil every day. The US is also the greatest food exporter in history; China, for all its miraculous increases in agricultural productivity, still must import 30–40 percent of its food, a number that keeps rising as China becomes more affluent and more diverse in its food consumption.
The US still spends almost three times as much on defense. Its nuclear forces are roughly six times larger, and its 11 carrier strike groups are nearly four times more numerous than China’s three conventionally powered carriers. The US has more than 100 years of experience in carrier warfare; China has less than 15 years.
American universities’ science, technology, engineering, and mathematics departments dominate global rankings. In terms of market capitalization, eight US companies are in the world’s top ten. American companies, along with NASA, have regained prior American primacy in space exploration. In new frontiers such as robotics, drones, artificial intelligence, nuclear fusion, cryptocurrencies, and bioengineering, a once sluggish US has woken up, rebounded, and is reasserting its preeminence.
True, the US fertility rate is down to 1.7. But China’s is 1.0, and its population is rapidly shrinking and aging.
But most importantly, China is an autocracy. It is superficially efficient, but its technology is ultimately derived from the free and wide-open atmosphere of the West and of the US in particular. There are usually around 300,000 Chinese students here in the US—and they are not art history majors, but sent here to master and appropriate US scientific expertise and then return home to clone it.
China has spent over $4 trillion in the last decade on its Belt and Road, mercantile, and imperialist agendas and on its military-industrial complex. Yet recently, its effort to pull Latin America away from the US has been failing miserably. China lost its client, Nicolás Maduro, in Venezuela, and, with his arrest, Venezuela’s discounted oil imports. Its insidious effort to control the Panama Canal was aborted by Trump.
For now, China has also lost its discounted oil from Iran. If, in the months ahead, the Iranian theocracy falls, China will have no presence in the oil-rich Middle East, even as its appetite for oil grows exponentially. In terms of China’s stranglehold on rare-earth minerals, a once sleepy US is planning its own huge new mines in mad dash fashion everywhere from Greenland to California, Utah, and Wyoming.
The latest Chinese air defenses have failed miserably in Iran in 2025–26. But US naval and air power—both weapons and personnel—performed brilliantly against Iran.
Geostrategically, the US enjoys two vast oceans off its coast and, despite tensions, considers Canada and Mexico allies. Both are dependent on the US economy and ultimately the American military for their defense. And North America may be the most natural-resource-rich continent in the world. China, by contrast, shares a border with nuclear-armed arch-rival India and an always unpredictable nuclear Russia—not to mention volatile, nuclear North Korea. Besides these, China, which suppresses 12 million Uyghur Muslims, has five Muslim neighbors. The US and its European NATO partners often bicker, but again, China’s North Korean “ally” is a nuclear global pariah.
Critics claim the Iran war plays into China’s hands, but they rarely convincingly explain how or why Beijing is stronger than before the war started. Its trading partner and oil supplier, Iran, is in shambles and now fires on Chinese tankers seeking oil in the Gulf. Israel and the US allies in the Gulf are ascendant, and in the years to come, they will remember that China was an enabler of their shared archenemy Iran.
If there is peace soon in Ukraine, Russia will likely seek to triangulate with the US against China and vice versa, as in the old days of Henry Kissinger’s great-game balancing act (“China will be no friendlier to Russia than to the US, and Russia no friendlier to China than to the US”).
China is about as popular in the Pacific as was the hated Japanese Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere of World War II. It takes some effort to alienate formerly anti-American nations like Vietnam and the Philippines and drive them into the US sphere of influence. In truth, China has legitimate worries about its neighborhood, since it is surrounded by its own “ring of fire,” nations that are far more potent and dangerous than the motley crew of Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis that Iran once used to encircle Israel. Australia, Japan, the Philippines, South Korea, Taiwan, and Vietnam are all rearming, seeking closer military relations with the US, and forming a loose alliance against what they see as their common existential enemy China.
As far as leverage goes, tomorrow the US could deny visas and green cards to hundreds of thousands of Chinese students and technicians, effectively aborting China’s fifty-year effort to absorb and replicate US technology.
Tomorrow, Trump could announce that he seeks “parity” and “equity” with China in a spirit of “friendship” as he announces that the number of Chinese nationals in the US from now on will match the number of their US counterparts residing in China. China can buy as much US farmland as Americans can buy Chinese farmland. Chinese can buy property as close to US bases as Americans can purchase land near Chinese bases.
Finally, the Ukraine and Iran wars have taught the world that cheap drones can sometimes nullify missile defenses and are nearly as effective as $100 million combat aircraft and $4 million missiles. The US is now rapidly incorporating the data from these two wars and will soon deploy a vast fleet of its own air, surface, and submarine drones.
The idea of a third of a million Chinese troops steaming across the 110-mile Taiwan Strait to land on the beaches of Taiwan, while fighting, in transit, and on arrival, thousands of drones, is not an appealing invasion scenario.
True, America can be sluggish, insular, complacent, and naïve.
But historically, its innately resilient free people, singular constitutional government, robust federalism, and free-market economy eventually wake up to the next rising threat—if often just in the nick of time. In the 1930s, a disarmed America, mired in depression, was told that fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, and militarist Japan were the paradigms of the future, armed to the teeth, fielding millions of goose-stepping, scary soldiers, and engaging in massive rearmament.
When war broke out in 1939, the US Army ranked 19th in size worldwide. Was it hopeless? No. By war’s end in August 1945, Nazism, fascism, and Japanese militarism were in ruins, and the US fleet and economy were larger than those of all the war’s belligerents combined.
A communist Russia on the move, we were told, starting in the late 1940s, would destroy the US. And indeed, the Red Army loomed huge, and thousands of Russian nuclear missiles were eventually pointed at the US.
The Soviet Union, we were further warned, was taking over the globe, as an unstoppable communism seemed to spread unchecked through Latin America, Africa, and Asia to our doorstep in Cuba. But after the crackup of the Soviet Empire, Russia’s GDP today is pathetically one-thirteenth the size of the US economy, and it has become a shrinking, aging, and unhealthy society.
Next, Japan, Inc. was also supposed to bury us in the 1980s, as confident, rich Japanese investors bought up the iconic Pebble Beach Golf Course, Rockefeller Center, and Columbia Pictures. We were told Honda and Toyota were light-years ahead of the soon-to-go-bankrupt Ford and GM. Today, Japan remains mired in deflation, and US corporations dwarf their Japanese counterparts.
Then, at the beginning of the millennium, it was the European Union’s turn to be the next supposed wave of the future, with America once more relegated to the past. When the US in 2008 was mired in the Iraq War, short of oil, and faced with soaring gas prices, the dollar fell, and the euro rose to $1.60. Soon, President Barack Obama would lecture Americans that we were no more an exceptional nation than Greece or the United Kingdom. “Lead from behind” became his new declinist mantra, and “apology tours” the way of the future.
Yet now the energy-short Europeans import American natural gas, and in early 2025, the euro fell to about $1 before rising later in the year. Moreover, the Iran war revealed the European Union as militarily weak and energy-short, with vast numbers of unassimilated and often hostile illegal aliens, suicidal green policies, and a shrinking and aging population—and as reliant upon the US economy and military for its continued prosperity and security.
The latest supposed Chinese existential threat is not to be assessed by how fast and impressively the nation rose from its own prior weakness, poverty, and irrelevance. What matters instead is to what degree its innate system ensures that such ascendance will be permanently continued and whether its political system, food and fuel capacity, military, and scientific community are on par with those of America’s.
And so far, in these regards, China, like all the other rivals of the last hundred years, has not come close.
THE ARTFUL DILETTANTE 