Based on a few hundred years of history, we Americans think time is on our side. We believe that events have proven the superiority of our liberal democratic model, and that a political system based on limited government and individual rights will always deliver more prosperity, creativity, happiness, and freedom than an authoritarian system. It’s a natural law of sorts. We are, in short, Whig historians.
That was before Trump, of course. The Chinese, with a vastly longer history, see the world in a different light. To them, time has a circular as well as a linear component. China has been down over the past 150 or so years, just as it was at the end of many other dynasties, but it is currently on the rise, and it is predestined to regain its accustomed position as the dominant power in its region, if not the whole world. That, too, is the natural order of things.
Two powerful countries with the belief that the arc of history bends their way. In all likelihood, only one can be right. It’s a combustible situation, to say the least.