Imagine, on one side, solar-powered AI satellites operating in deep space, with orbital internet feeding into ground robotics, going to grind the world’s productivity, connectivity, and even philosophy into a unified whole.
On the other, the rise of protected expansionism among world powers shows a drift back into the grooves of kings and empires. Despite remarkable advances in language models and communication, human political dialogue remains inefficient, largely governed by power’s enduring romance with imperial trivialities of interest and identity.
As a result, two geopolitical flashpoints with memories of conflict—the Asia-Pacific and Eastern Europe— are strategically hyperactive. Until the turn of the twentieth century, both regions stood at the crossroads of empires: Imperial Japan and China in the East, and the Russian Tsars, Habsburgs, Ottomans, and Prussians across Eastern Europe and the Balkans.
In September 2025, China’s 80th World War II anniversary parade at Tiananmen Square—10,000 troops backed by a $244.99 billion defense budget, two million PLA soldiers, three aircraft carriers, and a projected 1,000 nuclear warheads by 2030—was read in Washington as a declaration of a new China-led trade and security architecture in the Indo-Pacific. The choreography and camaraderie among leaders from China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea marked the beginning of a new declaratory phase in Beijing’s vision of Eurasian integration and a multipolar order.
Two days earlier, President Xi presented alternative global statesmanship at the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit in Tianjin, calling for a “more just and equitable global governance system.” Addressing leaders representing 43 percent of the world’s population and 23 percent of global GDP, Xi chose a city heavy with symbolism: Tianjin—a vital crossing point on the Grand Canal connecting the Yellow and Yangtze rivers, and a gateway to the Bohai Sea. It was the same city where the humiliating Treaty of Tientsin was signed in 1858 after the Second Opium War, forcing China to grant trade concessions to Britain, France, Germany, Japan, and Russia.
The Tianjin message was clear: achieving strategic balance in the South and East China Seas is China’s inescapable national goal, and Taiwan is integral to this goal. It also signaled that, unlike Deng Xiaoping’s cautious and collegial China, Xi’s China is capable of asserting its historical worldview and defending its strategic assets, particularly its gateway waters. Today, nearly 80 percent of global trade is maritime. China handles about 40 percent of global container shipments, according to Ocean Network Express CEO Jeremy Nixon. Only 14 percent of Chinese shipments now go to the U.S.; 86 percent dock elsewhere.
Donald Trump dismissed these developments as a “conspiracy against the US,” while Japan called Xi’s speech a “distorted version of history.” U.S. arms sales to its eastern alliance network have surged. China warned that aiding “Taiwan independence” would “bring fire” upon Washington after an $11 billion U.S. arms package—the largest ever for Taiwan—was approved under President Lai Ching-te’s $40 billion plan for asymmetric warfare.
U.S. naval strategy views America as an Asian maritime power, with the Indo-Pacific as the pivot of 21st century geopolitics. Historically—from Commodore Matthew Perry’s opening of Japan in 1853 to wars in the Philippines, the Pacific front in World War II, and the Korean War—the U.S. Navy has a profound strategic memory of the Pacific, stronger than any other front outside its own blue-water extensions. Today, no issue commands more seriousness in Washington than Taiwan.
Moreover, both the U.S. and China are the largest consumers of advanced logic chips. Taiwan, home to TSMC, sits at the chokepoint of the global semiconductor supply chain. It produces over 90 percent of the world’s most advanced chips and controls about 67 percent of the market share for nodes below seven nanometers. These chips are used everywhere: by Apple, NVIDIA, Lockheed Martin, and in Chinese fifth generation war jets and nuclear submarines. Microchips add another layer of intensity to the conflict.
One could argue that an all-out war between the two powers is not possible. Economic interdependence, globally connected stock markets, and complex supply systems make conflicts manageable. Others might also view Russia’s attack as a tool for managing internal legitimacy and succession problems, or see the U.S. acting to extract economic benefits—such as pressuring Taiwan, Korea, and Japan to buy its weapons, or leveraging Venezuela’s Orinoco Belt oil against the Siberian one. All of these points hold. Yet, applying anxious foresight for a moment, four clear and proven facts remain.
First, human stupidity has no limits, as proved by World War I and its devastating legacy on the world’s maps, cultures, and politics. Second, while the land and sea available for contestation remain unchanged from 2,000 years ago, warfare has transformed. Armies no longer advance on chariots or steamboats; cyber warfare, hypersonic missiles, laser weapons, and fifth-generation jets have compressed geography and made battlespace more claustrophobic. Third, inorganic systems such as artificial intelligence have taken over critical military functions—making war more precise, yet strategically inconclusive over time, as seen in Iraq and Afghanistan. The last and important factor is that the UN-based, rule-bound institutional arbitration system has in recent years been eclipsed by the Shakespearean instincts of modern Caesars—“enthroned” at the doors of Washington, Beijing, Moscow, the Gulf, and Pyongyang.
Amid this power politics, Europe’s post–Marshall Plan strategic honeymoon is also over. While war rhetoric in Europe carries a domestic counter-populist element, it also indicates Europeans’ genuine anxiety over protecting their trade-centered and value-driven integration project, which emerged after centuries of conflict and is now sandwiched between Russia and China to the east and a shift in U.S. security doctrine to the west. NATO Chief Mark Rutte’s observations—“What is happening in the Indo Pacific and what is happening in the Euro-Atlantic area is getting more and more connected and intertwined,” and that “China is the key enabler of Russia”—appeared a few weeks before EU countries agreed to allocate $105.5 billion in aid to Ukraine for 2026 and 2027. The German Chancellor, Friedrich Merz, summed up the U.S. part by stating, “The decades of Pax Americana are largely over for us in Europe.”
From antiquity to the medieval world, moments when a rising power challenged an established order were rarely peaceful. The psychology of power resists voluntary retreat. The Persian and Roman empires expanded by dismantling earlier orders rather than accommodating them, just as the Ottoman Empire rose through the destruction of Byzantine authority. In modern history, the British Empire displaced earlier European maritime powers through sustained conflict. The gradual transition from British dominance to U.S. leadership remains a rare exception—shaped by shared institutions and strategic alignment.
Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi has called Taiwan a “crisis of survival,” while the Chinese Foreign Ministry urges Japan to maintain its “defeated nation status” from World War II. Russia’s foreign minister invoked Catherine the Great while emphasizing Odesa’s importance, and Vladimir Putin warned Europe that a future war would not be “surgical” like Ukraine (but bloody like Tannenberg or Stalingrad). Meanwhile, France, Germany, and the Netherlands are creating new military services, the U.S. asserts naval power in the Caribbean in a post–Spanish-American War style, and Donald Trump views Greenland as a matter of “U.S. national security.” Taken together, these developments show that under pressure, power psychology returns—imperial for some, protective for others—placing position above norms during moments of transition.
The central question, then, is whether the United States can manage an operational accommodation with a rising China. Unlike Britain’s gradual accommodation of American power, the United States and China carry deep civilizational differences in cognition and worldview, compounded by the existentially critical disputes discussed above. For this reason, it is imperative that Washington and Beijing preserve at least a post–Cuban Missile Crisis–style strategic stability, lest rivalry slide into an abyss—where miscalculation, rather than intent, drives catastrophe, and where the abyss, when stared into too long, stares back with even greater terror.
(The author is a regular columnist and commentator on global affairs, serving on the panels of the UNFCCC and ICAN. He taught Public Policy at the National Defense University of Pakistan)
