Don't panic as power shifts from US to China | Critical Analysis |Axisoflogic.com

On Feb. 15, just as Chinese Vice-President Xi Jinping arrived in the United States for a four-day visit, U.S. President Barack Obama told an audience of American workers in Milwaukee, "Manufacturing is coming back!" Coming back from China, that is.

But while the Master Lock Company of Milwaukee has indeed moved some jobs back to the United States, everybody knows the flow will really continue to be in the other direction.

It doesn't matter whether China's economy finally overtakes America's in 2020 or 2025 or 2030. A great shift of productivity is underway, and economic power translates pretty directly into military power. So will the U.S. and China be able to manage the shift without a great war?

At the end of Xi's U.S. visit on Feb. 18, the future Chinese leader assured delegates at a trade conference in Los Angeles, "A prosperous and stable China will not be a threat to any country. It will only be a positive force for world peace and development." Perhaps, but everybody else is very nervous about it.

The transition from one dominant world economic power to another is always tricky, and the historical precedents are not encouraging. Spain was the 16th-century superpower, and the shift to French domination, though never complete, entailed several generations of war. Then Britain displaced France, amid several more generations of war.

When Germany challenged British supremacy and Japan began building its empire in the Pacific and East Asia in the early 20th century, the transition involved two world wars--and resulted in the de facto division of the world between two non-European superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union. The omens are not promising, to say the least.

But the past is a complicated place, and there is a systematic distortion of history that emphasizes violent transitions at the expense of peaceful ones. In fact, at least one major power shift in the past century was entirely peaceful.

The U.S. economy overtook Britain's late in the 19th century, and it was not inevitable the change in the pecking order would be peaceful. Throughout the 19th century Americans see Britain, their old colonial master, as their most dangerous enemy. The two countries fought their last war in 1812-14, but Britain kept a garrison in Canada until 1870.

London then withdrew the garrison, but not because it trusted the United States. It just calculated the United States was now so strong Britain could never win a land war against it in North America. It also concluded a large Royal Navy presence in American waters was likely to drive the U.S. into a naval arms race Britain would lose, and so began thinning out the number of warships it kept in the western Atlantic.

It was the right strategy. So now it's America's turn to figure out what to do about an emerging great-power rival on the far side of a great ocean, and one option would be to copy Britain's example.

Don't provoke the Chinese by hemming their country in with air bases, fleets and military alliances, and they'll probably behave well. If they don't, the other Asian great powers, Japan, India and Russia, are quite capable of protecting their own interests.

The U.S. has no vital interests on the Asian mainland. It was entirely safe from foreign attack before it became the world's greatest power, and it will still be militarily invulnerable long after it loses that distinction.

Britain is a lot more prosperous than it was when it ran the world, and its people are probably happier too. Decline is not nearly as bad a fate as Americans imagine.

Canadian analyst Dr Gwynne Dyer is a journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries. He lives in London, England.

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