The American Narrative About a Revisionist China Is Upside-Down

The United States has become the dangerous revisionist power it long warned us that China would be. 

U.S. President Donald Trump’s hyper-aggressive foreign policy has made one thing crystal clear: Washington’s narrative about China as a revisionist power is upside-down. U.S. foreign policy analysts, military officials, and lawmakers in both parties have converged on a consensus narrative regarding China. According to this narrative, China is a revisionist power bent on undermining international law and threatening world peace. But anyone who has observed Trump’s impulsive and violent foreign policy should understand that these American descriptions of China are far more applicable to the U.S. itself. 

Since taking power in January 2025, Trump has: bombed seven countries; kidnapped one head of state and killed another; militarily blocked Cuban oil imports in an attempt at sparking regime change; carried out extrajudicial killings of approximately 150 alleged drug smugglers in the Caribbean; threatened annexation or occupation of the Panama Canal, Canada, and Greenland; waged a trade war against the whole world; withdrawn from 66 international organizations and treaties, including the World Health Organization and the Paris Climate Agreement; massively cut funding to the United Nations while setting up alternative U.S.-led institutions; declared a new Monroe Doctrine for Latin America; and, of course, started an unprovoked war against Iran for reasons no one in the Trump administration seems to know. 

This is the true face of a revisionist power. More accurately, it is the face of a declining superpower that is desperately trying to prevent its downfall by disrupting every element of the order it once created. The United States is losing global influence politically, diplomatically, economically, culturally, and, indeed, morally. The only aspect of U.S. influence that has not diminished is military power. The United States is therefore increasingly relying on military power to solve international problems. This trend has culminated with Trump, whose obsession with strength has led to a supersized role for the military in American statecraft.

But U.S. brutality under Trump is a sign not of strength, but of weakness. Military force is increasingly becoming the only means by which Washington can get other countries to do what it wants. But over-reliance on brute force is not going to work in the long term. It will only antagonize other countries and unite them against the United States, thus hastening U.S. decline. 

The irony is that the United States is behaving exactly like many American experts have predicted that China would. The consensus among the Washington “blob” has been that a rising China would begin to behave in increasingly reckless and dangerous ways. There are of course scholars and analysts who push back on this narrative. But the conventional wisdom in Washington is that China is disrupting the “rules-based order” while seeking global hegemony. The upshot is of course that the U.S. has to prevent China’s rise at all costs. 

These analyses are deeply flawed. In fact, they often seem more of an exercise of projection than an objective description of China’s goals and actions.

There are countless examples of this kind of fearmongering China analysis in the United States, but I want to highlight a book called “Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China,” written by Hal Brands and Michael Beckley, as it perfectly epitomizes the misguided American narrative on China. 

First of all, as the title indicates, the book is based on the premise that the China-U.S. relationship must be one of conflict. Cooperation is ruled out from the beginning. The authors, writing in 2022, argued that China has already peaked and is about to enter a period of rapid decline. To prevent this, they predicted that China would increasingly resort to force to achieve its foreign policy goals. The 2020s are therefore a “danger zone” where China’s reckless actions risk causing a military conflict with the United States. 

The authors’ thesis is that if the U.S. can simply get through the dangerous 2020s, China will become so weak that it no longer poses a real challenge to the United States. To get through the danger zone, the U.S. must build up its military strength while containing and weakening China.

There is an element of wishful thinking in these types of analysis as they simultaneously overestimate the U.S. ability to contain China and underestimate China’s ability to withstand economic challenges. But the most serious problem with the United States’ China narrative is that it misrepresents China’s geopolitical goals as revisionist. 

It should not be controversial to state that China is today a far stronger defender of the liberal international order than the United States. This is not because China is inherently a more moral superpower than the U.S., but because China perceives this order as beneficial to its rise while the U.S. has begun to regard it as a cause of its decline. In the words of U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio: “The post-war global order is not just obsolete, it is now a weapon being used against us.” 

Of the two superpowers, it is therefore China that most reliably defends free trade and international institutions today. The United States, on the other hand, is trying to forcefully revise this order in ways that it sees as beneficial to its national interests. In other words, it is the U.S. that is acting as a revisionist power.

But that begs the question: what does China want? Helpfully, a trio of scholars asked and tried to answer this question in the pages of International Security last year. The authors analyzed a large set of authoritative CCP texts and speeches and found that China’s goals are “unambiguous,” “enduring,” and “limited.” What China wants is recognition of its borders, respect for its sovereignty within these borders, and non-interference in its economic relations. These are China’s so-called “core interests” on which it will not compromise. 

Importantly, the authors found that Chinese leaders consistently do not express desire for global hegemony, but instead often explicitly deny such ambitions. Chinese leaders also consistently state that they have no ambition of replacing the United States. Of course, this does not mean that China’s rhetoric is true, but it is at any rate far less ambitious than U.S. rhetoric which openly states that “[t]he United States cannot allow any nation to become so dominant that it could threaten our interests.”

Even though China’s goals are “limited” and mainly inward-looking, they do admittedly contain potential for conflict. This is mainly because China’s borders are contested. Taiwan, the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands, and the South China Sea are all potential flashpoints. But given that China needs regional stability for continued growth and development, it seems unlikely that China would resort to violence over these territorial disputes unless other actors actively tried to change the status quo. 

It is worth remembering that China has not fought a war since 1979. It is no coincidence that China’s economic miracle began as soon as Beijing abandoned violence as a conventional foreign policy tool. For China, the lesson has been obvious: only peace and stability can guarantee growth and development. 

This is not to say that China never acts rashly or unreasonably on the international stage. Nor is it to say that China does not have serious domestic shortcomings in terms of democracy and human rights. The argument is simply that, judging by its words and actions, there is little evidence that China has ambitions of global hegemony or that it seeks to undermine the international institutions of the postwar period.

The conclusion by the authors of the aforementioned study on China’s goals is pertinent and should be reflected on by Washington’s China hawks: “We find that China does not pose the type of military threat that the conventional wisdom claims it does. Consequently, there is no need for a hostile military posture in the Pacific, and indeed the United States may be unnecessarily creating tensions.”

China does present many challenges, but revisionism is not one of them. The same cannot be said about the United States. The Trump administration’s relentless attacks on the United Nations and the low threshold for use of military force are the hallmarks of a revisionist power. 

The consequences of U.S. revisionism and norm-breaking under Trump have been shocking. But Trump’s latest actions in the Middle East may have ushered in a new age of lawlessness. On February 28, the United States in concert with Israel (a revisionist in its own right) launched an unprovoked attack on Iran while negotiations with the same country were ongoing. 

On the first day of the Iran War more than 150 Iranian school girls were killed in what appears to have been a U.S. strike on a girls’ school. Instead of showing remorse, the self-styled U.S. secretary of war, Pete Hegseth, vowed that American soldiers would not be restrained by “stupid rules of engagement” and mocked U.S. allies (except Israel) who “wring their hands and clutch their pearls, hemming and hawing about the use of force.” Similarly, both Trump and his White House have been gleeful about the destruction caused by the American attacks. 

Expressing pride in one’s moral transgressions has become the new ethos in Washington. Every day, the Trump administration is telling the world that it does not care about international law. Every day, it destroys norms and lives. The United States has become the dangerous revisionist power it long warned us that China would be.   

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U.S. President Donald Trump’s hyper-aggressive foreign policy has made one thing crystal clear: Washington’s narrative about China as a revisionist power is upside-down. U.S. foreign policy analysts, military officials, and lawmakers in both parties have converged on a consensus narrative regarding China. According to this narrative, China is a revisionist power bent on undermining international law and threatening world peace. But anyone who has observed Trump’s impulsive and violent foreign policy should understand that these American descriptions of China are far more applicable to the U.S. itself. 

Since taking power in January 2025, Trump has: bombed seven countries; kidnapped one head of state and killed another; militarily blocked Cuban oil imports in an attempt at sparking regime change; carried out extrajudicial killings of approximately 150 alleged drug smugglers in the Caribbean; threatened annexation or occupation of the Panama Canal, Canada, and Greenland; waged a trade war against the whole world; withdrawn from 66 international organizations and treaties, including the World Health Organization and the Paris Climate Agreement; massively cut funding to the United Nations while setting up alternative U.S.-led institutions; declared a new Monroe Doctrine for Latin America; and, of course, started an unprovoked war against Iran for reasons no one in the Trump administration seems to know. 

This is the true face of a revisionist power. More accurately, it is the face of a declining superpower that is desperately trying to prevent its downfall by disrupting every element of the order it once created. The United States is losing global influence politically, diplomatically, economically, culturally, and, indeed, morally. The only aspect of U.S. influence that has not diminished is military power. The United States is therefore increasingly relying on military power to solve international problems. This trend has culminated with Trump, whose obsession with strength has led to a supersized role for the military in American statecraft.

But U.S. brutality under Trump is a sign not of strength, but of weakness. Military force is increasingly becoming the only means by which Washington can get other countries to do what it wants. But over-reliance on brute force is not going to work in the long term. It will only antagonize other countries and unite them against the United States, thus hastening U.S. decline. 

The irony is that the United States is behaving exactly like many American experts have predicted that China would. The consensus among the Washington “blob” has been that a rising China would begin to behave in increasingly reckless and dangerous ways. There are of course scholars and analysts who push back on this narrative. But the conventional wisdom in Washington is that China is disrupting the “rules-based order” while seeking global hegemony. The upshot is of course that the U.S. has to prevent China’s rise at all costs. 

These analyses are deeply flawed. In fact, they often seem more of an exercise of projection than an objective description of China’s goals and actions.

There are countless examples of this kind of fearmongering China analysis in the United States, but I want to highlight a book called “Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China,” written by Hal Brands and Michael Beckley, as it perfectly epitomizes the misguided American narrative on China. 

First of all, as the title indicates, the book is based on the premise that the China-U.S. relationship must be one of conflict. Cooperation is ruled out from the beginning. The authors, writing in 2022, argued that China has already peaked and is about to enter a period of rapid decline. To prevent this, they predicted that China would increasingly resort to force to achieve its foreign policy goals. The 2020s are therefore a “danger zone” where China’s reckless actions risk causing a military conflict with the United States. 

The authors’ thesis is that if the U.S. can simply get through the dangerous 2020s, China will become so weak that it no longer poses a real challenge to the United States. To get through the danger zone, the U.S. must build up its military strength while containing and weakening China.

There is an element of wishful thinking in these types of analysis as they simultaneously overestimate the U.S. ability to contain China and underestimate China’s ability to withstand economic challenges. But the most serious problem with the United States’ China narrative is that it misrepresents China’s geopolitical goals as revisionist. 

It should not be controversial to state that China is today a far stronger defender of the liberal international order than the United States. This is not because China is inherently a more moral superpower than the U.S., but because China perceives this order as beneficial to its rise while the U.S. has begun to regard it as a cause of its decline. In the words of U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio: “The post-war global order is not just obsolete, it is now a weapon being used against us.” 

Of the two superpowers, it is therefore China that most reliably defends free trade and international institutions today. The United States, on the other hand, is trying to forcefully revise this order in ways that it sees as beneficial to its national interests. In other words, it is the U.S. that is acting as a revisionist power.

But that begs the question: what does China want? Helpfully, a trio of scholars asked and tried to answer this question in the pages of International Security last year. The authors analyzed a large set of authoritative CCP texts and speeches and found that China’s goals are “unambiguous,” “enduring,” and “limited.” What China wants is recognition of its borders, respect for its sovereignty within these borders, and non-interference in its economic relations. These are China’s so-called “core interests” on which it will not compromise. 

Importantly, the authors found that Chinese leaders consistently do not express desire for global hegemony, but instead often explicitly deny such ambitions. Chinese leaders also consistently state that they have no ambition of replacing the United States. Of course, this does not mean that China’s rhetoric is true, but it is at any rate far less ambitious than U.S. rhetoric which openly states that “[t]he United States cannot allow any nation to become so dominant that it could threaten our interests.”

Even though China’s goals are “limited” and mainly inward-looking, they do admittedly contain potential for conflict. This is mainly because China’s borders are contested. Taiwan, the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands, and the South China Sea are all potential flashpoints. But given that China needs regional stability for continued growth and development, it seems unlikely that China would resort to violence over these territorial disputes unless other actors actively tried to change the status quo. 

It is worth remembering that China has not fought a war since 1979. It is no coincidence that China’s economic miracle began as soon as Beijing abandoned violence as a conventional foreign policy tool. For China, the lesson has been obvious: only peace and stability can guarantee growth and development. 

This is not to say that China never acts rashly or unreasonably on the international stage. Nor is it to say that China does not have serious domestic shortcomings in terms of democracy and human rights. The argument is simply that, judging by its words and actions, there is little evidence that China has ambitions of global hegemony or that it seeks to undermine the international institutions of the postwar period.

The conclusion by the authors of the aforementioned study on China’s goals is pertinent and should be reflected on by Washington’s China hawks: “We find that China does not pose the type of military threat that the conventional wisdom claims it does. Consequently, there is no need for a hostile military posture in the Pacific, and indeed the United States may be unnecessarily creating tensions.”

China does present many challenges, but revisionism is not one of them. The same cannot be said about the United States. The Trump administration’s relentless attacks on the United Nations and the low threshold for use of military force are the hallmarks of a revisionist power. 

The consequences of U.S. revisionism and norm-breaking under Trump have been shocking. But Trump’s latest actions in the Middle East may have ushered in a new age of lawlessness. On February 28, the United States in concert with Israel (a revisionist in its own right) launched an unprovoked attack on Iran while negotiations with the same country were ongoing. 

On the first day of the Iran War more than 150 Iranian school girls were killed in what appears to have been a U.S. strike on a girls’ school. Instead of showing remorse, the self-styled U.S. secretary of war, Pete Hegseth, vowed that American soldiers would not be restrained by “stupid rules of engagement” and mocked U.S. allies (except Israel) who “wring their hands and clutch their pearls, hemming and hawing about the use of force.” Similarly, both Trump and his White House have been gleeful about the destruction caused by the American attacks. 

Expressing pride in one’s moral transgressions has become the new ethos in Washington. Every day, the Trump administration is telling the world that it does not care about international law. Every day, it destroys norms and lives. The United States has become the dangerous revisionist power it long warned us that China would be.   

Ulv Hanssen is an associate professor at Soka University in Japan and an associate research fellow at the Swedish Institute of International Affairs. He holds a Ph.D. in Japanese Studies from Freie Universität Berlin. He is the author of “Temporal Identities and Security Policy in Postwar Japan” (Routledge, 2020).

China international order

U.S. international order

U.S. revisionist power

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