It is very worrying for the world that American policy makers should be capable of making such outrageous errors, scoring own-goals, as the decision to play poker against China over the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) and losing so spectacularly and humiliatingly.

There is today, I think, little disagreement that the decision to invade Iraq in 2003 was the US’ most monumental foreign policy error since the Vietnam War. Until then during the previous four decades on balance the US could be described as a benign hegemon. With the collapse in the early 1990s of the Soviet Union as a military threat and Japan as an economic threat, the US emerged as the global uncontested hyper-power. Then with the illegal and ill-considered invasion of Iraq George W Bush blew it. In the last dozen years it has been pretty much downhill for both American power and American prestige.

The US, according to many, is in decline. That, however, does not mean that it is about to be replaced. As Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote almost twenty years ago(1997): ““No state is likely to match the US in the four key dimensions of power – military, economic, technological, and cultural – that confer global political clout.” It was true then, it remains true now. The US since Iraq may have lost a good deal of credibility in its hard power clout, but, as Professor Joe Nye repeatedly reminds us: it remains supreme in soft power; hence “the American century will survive the rise of China”.

China is indeed an emerging great power, but Joe Nye is right: the notion that it will replace the US as global hegemon in the foreseeable future is fantasy. It is a notion, incidentally, that one finds mainly among foreign pundits, but that I at least have not come across among Chinese thought leaders. They are more than conscious of the immense challenges that lie ahead. There was no dancing in the Chinese street when the IMF announced that China had overtaken the US in aggregate GDP. At the per capita level, China is still a middle income country and the jury is out on whether it will succeed to graduate, as it hopes to by 2030, to high income status.

Having said that, there is no doubt that not only China is indeed a rising great power, but it is the first rising great power for a century. The record of former rising great powers – whether Portugal and Spain in the 16th century, the Dutch in the 17th, the British and French in the 18th and 19th, followed by the Germans, the Japanese, the Soviets and the Americans in the late 19th and early 20th centuries – in terms of bullying, blood, oppression, etc, etc, is hardly comforting: thus the insistence among Chinese policy makers and thought leaders that what they aspire to is the “peaceful rise” of China to great power status.

Whether China achieves the aim of being the first ever great power to rise peacefully remains to be seen. It is the key question of the 21st century, the answer to which may determine whether the world will fall into a cataclysmic third world war or whether the pattern will be broken and a new 21st century global paradigm of enhanced peace and prosperity emerges.

As things stand currently, signals are mixed. China has territorial disputes with virtually all its neighbors. As I tell my students in India, I personally do not fear for the moment China breaking out as not just a great power, but an imperialist great power, but then I live in Switzerland. If I were a citizen of India, Indonesia, Vietnam, etc, I would possibly feel differently. The closer one gets to China, by and large the greater the apprehensions.