5 ideas
From year 1 to 1820, China and India were the world's two largest economies, so the past two centuries of Western dominance are a deviation. Asia's rise is therefore a return to the historical norm, not a disruption. Treating Western primacy as the natural order causes Western strategists to misread a structural rebalancing as a threat to be contained.
Asia's rise came from absorbing seven practices that made the West successful: free-market economics, science and technology, meritocracy, pragmatism, a culture of peace, rule of law, and education. The mechanism is emulation of institutions and habits rather than wholesale adoption of Western political systems.
In November 1978, Deng Xiaoping visited Singapore and saw a predominantly ethnic-Chinese city-state thriving under market economics, foreign investment and disciplined governance. Weeks later he launched China's reform and opening.
Southeast Asia is one of the world's most diverse regions and once seemed likely to become an Asian Balkans. ASEAN kept the peace there through musyawarah and mufakat (consultation and consensus), frequent informal meetings, and a habit of avoiding confrontation. Constant low-stakes interaction builds a web of relationships dense enough to make war between members unthinkable, even without strong supranational institutions.
Assess whether a rising power is dangerous by its actual record of foreign military interventions, not by rhetoric or regime type. On this measure China has fought no major war since its 1979 border war with Vietnam, while the United States has been almost continuously at war. The lens asks the West to measure its own use of force before labelling China an expansionist threat.