"How China Wins" - by CWP alum Julian Gewirtz

The United States and China see eye to eye on very little these days, but there is one surprising point on which their top officials agree: the world is becoming multipolar. In one of his first interviews in office, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio insisted that the unipolar dominance the United States had enjoyed in recent decades was “an anomaly” and “a product of the end of the Cold War.” The United States, in his view, was no longer the unrivaled global hegemon but one of a handful of “great powers in different parts of the planet.” Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi agrees. At the Munich Security Conference in February 2025, Wang declared, “A multipolar world is not only a historical inevitability; it is also becoming a reality.”

To be sure, Beijing’s and Washington’s understandings of multipolarity are different. Trump administration officials picture a world in which the United States has been freed from many of its overseas obligations and can act unilaterally, focusing mainly on the Western Hemisphere and “America first” policies while tolerating spheres of influence elsewhere. “The Chinese will do what’s in the best interests of China, the Russians will do what’s in the best interest of Russia,” and the United States will do “what’s in the best interest of the United States,” as Rubio put it in January. For their part, Chinese leaders see multipolarity not merely as an opportunity to dominate Asia but also as heralding the emergence of a transactional global system in which the reach of U.S. power is curtailed, key U.S. partners are less aligned with Washington, autocracy faces less pushback, and China—along with its strategic partner Russia—has far greater freedom of action and global influence.

July/August 2025 Published on June 24, 2025 in Foreign Affairs. 

JULIAN GEWIRTZ served as Senior Director for China and Taiwan Affairs at the National Security Council and Deputy China Coordinator at the State Department during the Biden administration. He is the author of Never Turn Back: China and the Forbidden History of the 1980s

Photo Credit: https://pixabay.com/users/wikiimages-1897/