NOTHING GOOD FOR CHINA’S NEIGHBORS: What Happens When China Eclipses the U.S. in Asia.

The U.S. strategic position is eroding so quickly that even sharing the region with China isn’t really a valid option any longer, argues Hugh White, a professor at the Australian National University in Canberra. America’s allies in Southeast Asia and Australia say they don’t want to choose between the U.S. and China, but underneath those platitudes, nobody in the region wants to make an enemy of Beijing. All the more so because officials increasingly doubt the U.S. will be there in the end, according to White.

White put these thoughts to paper and pixel with a much-debated essay in the Australian publication Quarterly Essay. “Without America” envisions a Situation Room scene where a fictitious U.S. president decides that, even with America’s superior conventional military, the risk of a confrontation with China just isn’t worth it. Even if the U.S. prevailed, all China would need to do would be to inflict a couple of glancing blows and it would, politically, have triumphed.

That’s what Japan thought in 1941, too.