Nations are emphatic when they say ‘Thank goodness for China’

Present awful circumstances emphasize the need to ask ourselves a very serious question: How fundamentally unhinged is the United States today?

In fact, this central query has been posed by a range of serious commentators for at least three years. Today, it is being asked far more urgently. While Israel and the US apply the finishing touches to their Gaza genocide, the world is watching as they unleash fresh, terrifying spasms of massively destructive warfare in the Middle East.

Three years ago, in March 2023, Fareed Zakaria was already urging the Biden administration, in The Washington Post, to step firmly away from a foreign policy “forged out of paranoia, hysteria and above all fears of being branded as soft”. Zakaria also compared this prevailing deranged mood to America’s notorious, 1950s, witch-hunting McCarthy era.

At about the same time, The Guardian argued how QAnon and Donald Trump together had “unhinged America”. More recently, Bridget Delaney, in the same newspaper, identified US President Trump, alone, as being responsible for the unbalanced aura surrounding the US, when she argued that “The world is gripped by 3am dread thanks to an unhinged US president.”

A large and growing number of similar estimates of deluded American behavior — often stressing exceptionally malign Israeli influence — can now be found across a wide range of media outlets in the Global West and well beyond.

These arguments are fundamentally right.

But they also prompted me to wonder what the geopolitical impact on America might have been had China failed to rise as remarkably as it has.

Forget for a moment the fact that prominent commentator Gordon G Chang has locked in a remarkable record for wrongly predicting the “collapse” of China. Suppose, instead, that Chang had been right in 2001, when he published The Coming Collapse of China, predicting a pivotal political-economic downfall by 2011.

What if China had buckled in the drastic way Chang foretold and the US had not faced such a formidable, advancing peer competitor, over whom it lacked the sort of controls previously used to manage such challenges (like those applied to Japan in the 1980s)?

Might the world have been spared the spectacle of seeing the US transform itself into a brazen, globally menacing, hoodlum democracy, doing Israel’s bidding today?

My considered view is that, had China failed to rise so conspicuously, America may have been somewhat less anxiety-ridden, and it may have been marginally less obsessed with the need to resort to constant war mongering in order to reassert its perceived, fading virility.

However, it would still have been exceptionally menacing to all nations that failed to demonstrate sufficient obedience, and it most likely would have been even more globally threatening. Moreover, America itself has supplied compelling evidence confirming the cogency of this perspective.

In November 1989, the Berlin Wall came down. By the end of 1991, America’s paramount Cold War foe, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, had collapsed. The following year, The New York Times revealed a crucial, new detailed American proposal to secure indefinite American global supremacy. This secret, Washington-incubated 1992 plan, promising “full-spectrum global dominance”, was designed to ensure that no other nation could ever challenge American hegemony again.

At about the same time, the influential US political scientist Francis Fukuyama argued that the remarkable historical process (outlined above) demonstrated that American-led, Western liberal democracy had evolved as the final form of government for all nations around the globe. Soon after, he published a book titled: The End of History and the Last Man.

Bad consequences soon followed.

Professor John Mearsheimer, in 2014, confirmed how the European Union, by the mid-1990s, cemented the existence of a highly aggressive, new Washington consensus, after recklessly signing up to a drastic US-led, geopolitical thrust into Eastern Europe to bring Russia to its knees. He argued that:

“According to the prevailing wisdom in the West, the Ukraine crisis can be blamed almost entirely on Russian aggression. Russian President Vladimir Putin, the argument goes, annexed Crimea out of a longstanding desire to resuscitate the Soviet empire.

“But this account is wrong: The United States and its European allies share most of the responsibility for the crisis. The taproot of the trouble is NATO enlargement, the central element of a larger strategy to move Ukraine out of Russia’s orbit and integrate it into the West. For Putin, the illegal overthrow of Ukraine’s democratically elected and pro-Russian president — which he rightly labeled a ‘coup’ — was the final straw. He responded by taking Crimea, a peninsula he feared would host a NATO naval base.”

Finally, during this extremely disruptive period, the great majority of nations (in the Global South and well beyond) are increasingly emphatic when they say “Thank goodness for China”. Even across the Global West — outside of the US — most are now quietly but firmly expressing the same view

This grim catalogue has grown apace ever since. In early January, in “New war and peace”, I detailed America’s enduring, warmongering pedigree and explained how it stood behind the wanton use of concentrated, homicidal American military force in Latin America today, adding that America appears locked inside a 200-year time warp, where it cannot move beyond a default habit of imposing its will on other nations by military force or other profoundly coercive means in order to secure a menacing American version of peace.

Most recently we have witnessed the on-off-on-again horror story of vindictive US-Israeli wars-of-choice against Iran. These have ultimately played havoc with the entire global economy. The first huge joint attack on Iran in June 2025 was preceded by audacious American treachery, where agreed negotiations were used to put Iran off guard. The latest major brutal onslaught began with America killing over 100 Iranian primary-school students coupled with a mass Iranian leadership assassination project, which the two warmongers cast as a new form of advanced statecraft.

Around a year ago, China, alone among major trading nations, went toe-to-toe with the US after the White House delivered what The Economist called “Donald Trump’s tariff tantrum”. All the world noticed how, as a direct result, China, in due course, secured a tariff truce with Washington.

The Washington Post recently confirmed America’s contempt for long-term, close allies, when it reported how Thailand had openly expressed significant disappointment with the US failure to offer direct help to Bangkok as it struggled with “severe fallout from the ongoing Iran war”. Thailand subsequently turned to China and Russia seeking assistance.

In conclusion, it is evident that: The rise of China has amplified American hegemonic-paranoia — as argued by Zakaria and others; what has been unleashed under President Trump (elected through voting shaped by that paranoia) is a terrible, fresh willingness to attack, bomb, destroy and kill anyone selected as a primary US foe; Israel’s influence has been exceptionally powerful in the US — and caustically unconcerned — in supporting this intensifying, hoodlum form of statecraft.

Over 30 years ago, China was only the 11th largest economy in the world with a GDP of around $500 billion (compared to around $18 trillion today). China was then regarded by the massively larger US economy as a hopefully converging, but relatively small-scale promising economic opportunity.

Thus, America’s readiness to abuse its huge imperial power was unreservedly confirmed (by Washington’s 1992, post-Cold War, full-spectrum global dominance plan) at a time when China posed no visible “rising-peer threat” to the US.

Fortunately for the world, the extraordinary, peaceful rise of China has since provided a massive, stabilizing counterweight as America has become more violently and destructively unhinged. For almost half a century, China has maintained an exceptionally positive, “Let’s go to work” focus on the future. This has been immensely beneficial for China — and that is certainly Beijing’s priority. But it has also been singularly good for the entire world.

A remarkable endorsement of this view was evident in a recent Fukuyama interview, in which he confirmed, implicitly, that history had restarted, and explicitly, that China’s system works — and appears to be working better in certain respects than that in the US.

Finally, during this extremely disruptive period, the great majority of nations (in the Global South and well beyond) are increasingly emphatic when they say “Thank goodness for China”. Even across the Global West — outside of the US — most are now quietly but firmly expressing the same view.

The author is a former professor of law at the University of Hong Kong and Monash University, Australia.

The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.