Can China beat the US by acting morally? A book review.

Morality as an instrument of power to gain alliances and become the world’s hegemon? That’s the key argument made by Chinese foreign policy expert Yan Xuetong in his new book “Leadership and the rise of Great Powers”. This review applies this concept in today’s grand struggle for hegemony between the United States and China and asks whether indeed it might not be Europe that could benefit most as a moral superpower.

“May you live in interesting times.” This supposedly Chinese wish isn’t particularly well-meaning. Interesting times are troubled, even dangerous times. But whether we like it or not, we are living in interesting times. The end of history, which the American political theorist Francis Fukuyama proclaimed at the end of the Cold War, is long over. Geopolitics has returned with a vengeance. The United States and China are locked in a struggle for hegemony that will define the 21st century as much as the Cold War defined the preceding one. For the moment, this struggle is primarily played out in the economic and technological sphere. But a spill-over into other domains is not unthinkable.

For many, the United States and China are locked in the “Thucydides’s Trap”. According to this concept, coined by Harvard professor Graham T. Allison and based on the writings of the ancient Greek strategist Thucydides, a rising…