Years ago, while researching a book about a rising China’s self-image as a global power, I came across a parable about the risks of sudden and excessively naked geopolitical ambition that was so remarkable that I quoted it in length, as I will again here.

The imagery in the passage by the strategy writer Edward N. Luttwak has lost none of its power. What stands out today, though, is how much the world it applies to has changed and how thoroughly the principals have switched roles.

Years ago, while researching a book about a rising China’s self-image as a global power, I came across a parable about the risks of sudden and excessively naked geopolitical ambition that was so remarkable that I quoted it in length, as I will again here.

The imagery in the passage by the strategy writer Edward N. Luttwak has lost none of its power. What stands out today, though, is how much the world it applies to has changed and how thoroughly the principals have switched roles.

“Riders in a crowded elevator cabin into which an extremely fat Mr. China has just stepped in must react self-protectively if he is becoming fatter at a rapid rate, squeezing them against the walls—even if he is entirely unthreatening, and indeed affable. True, the crowded elevator cabin already contained an even fatter, louder, and frequently violent Mr. America, but simply because he had long been a fellow rider, almost everybody had over the decades come to a satisfactory accommodation with his noisy bulk…”

Luttwak’s elevator scenario, with its offending body imagery, was published more than a decade ago, at a time of sharpening anxiety about a fast-rising China. What was then still the world’s most populous country, and the nation with the most extraordinary record of economic transformation over a quarter-century, was making lots of people nervous. This, of course, included Western countries, led by the United States, which had long been accustomed to their own world-beating wealth and far-reaching power and influence that this fed. Increasingly now, they were reduced to nervously watching China gain on them in the rearview mirror.

China may have still been capable of affability, as Luttwak then put it, but it was far from “entirely unthreatening.” The sense of an already overcrowded elevator with an outsized new passenger he described verged sometimes on........

© Foreign Policy