HARMONY: U.S. musicians with the Philadelphia Orchestra visit the Great Wall in Beijing on June 2 (LUO XIAOGUANG)

Thirteen years ago, Andrew W. Marshall, the most influential Pentagon strategist, endorsed the Asia 2025 report in which the scenario of Sino-American synergy was not even considered:

"A stable and powerful China will be constantly challenging the status quo in East Asia. An unstable and relatively weak China could be dangerous because its leaders might try to bolster their power with foreign military adventurism."

The tragic terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, modified the orientation of America's foreign policy for a decade, but as Washington exits from Iraq and prepares to withdraw from the Afghan quagmire, Marshall's assessment on China has resurfaced and provided the fundamental rationale for President Barack Obama's grand "pivot to Asia."

Power shift

If Marshall's reasoning was taken seriously by the vast majority of U.S. analysts when the Chinese GDP represented only 10 percent of the American domestic product, it certainly has a new resonance now that the Chinese economy has become half of the American economy.

However, by assuming that the main challenges to the national security of the United States come from external factors and not from domestic inadequacies, the American "return to Asia" might illustrate what American scholar Andrew J. Bacevich calls "the new American militarism," but does not necessarily serve the long-term interest of the Western world. A diversion from what really matters, the solidity of the internal conditions, is a regrettable corollary of this policy.

"It is not alone by the rapidity, or extent of conquest, that we should estimate the greatness of Rome," wrote Edward Gibbon in his History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, "but the firm edifice of Roman power was raised and preserved by the wisdom of ages... The general principle of government was wise, simple and beneficent."

The global financial crisis caused by Wall Street's hubris and a national credit addiction has accelerated Beijing's relative rise, and a decade before China's economy is expected to surpass the U.S. GDP, the most recent survey of the Pew Global Attitudes Project concludes that China is already perceived as the world's leading economy.

According to the Washington, D.C.-based institute, the views about the economic balance of power have indeed shifted dramatically in the past four years: In 2008, before the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, 45 percent of the respondents named the United States as the world's economic superpower, while 22 percent mentioned China; currently, 36 percent refer to the United States but 42 percent believe that China is number one.

Despite pervasive China-bashing, gross misrepresentation of Chinese society and the gap between the American and the Chinese instruments of soft power, it is remarkable to observe that in global public perception the United States does not lead the world any more, at least in the field of economic affairs.

More generally, China demonstrates a unique ability to navigate a world of paradoxes where multipolarity is concomitant with interdependence. In this unprecedented environment, the relevance of the American spectacular "return to Asia" can be questioned, but this doctrine certainly underlines the striking contrast between a polarizing American outlook in which Beijing is framed as a power to contain and a 21st century China which operates beyond an East-West exclusive opposition.

U.S. miscalculation

Before U.S. President Harry Truman orchestrated the containment of the Soviet Union, George Kennan famously wrote in his 1946 "long telegram" that Stalinist Moscow "still lives in antagonistic capitalist encirclement with which in the long run there can be no permanent peaceful coexistence." If the American "pivot to Asia" hypothesizes that Beijing could opt for an antagonistic posture, it miscalculates Beijing's intentions, since the core and the utmost subtlety of Beijing's global strategy is precisely to remain non-confrontational.

Moreover, China's socioeconomic progress should not be seen as a threatening development to be circumscribed while it is synonymous with stability and prosperity. The Chinese reemergence does not weaken U.S. Asian allies, but rather offers them additional sources of growth.