When lawless behavior by powerful nations can be carried out with virtual impunity—with no significant international opposition—a civilized world order founded on rules rather than brute force can no longer be guaranteed.

Even among America’s allies in the West there is a growing willingness to resist unrestrained U.S. unilateralism. The U.S. must establish a new equilibrium between its traditional isolationist orientation and its commitment to global engagement.

For China-U.S. relations today, the realistic question is not how to construct a G2 but how the two countries can find a workable mode of coexistence under conditions in which cooperation and competition can coexist.

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s China policy aims to balance economic engagement with security concerns while ending the UK’s tendency to swing between confrontation and accommodation, but mixed signals have drawn criticism from both China hawks at home and officials in Beijing. Meaningful progress in UK-China relations will depend on delivering concrete cooperation rather than rhetoric or symbolic high-level visits.

China’s Global Governance Initiative contains some clear structural and cognitive differences compared with the West. Global governance has entered a post-Western era and requires the building of a new governance regime that features consultation and sharing.

As geopolitical tensions rise, competition for the cutting-edge science and talent that underpins advanced technology has heated up. The United States, China, and other major powers now regard leadership in areas like AI, semiconductors, quantum technologies, and biotechnology as central to military capability, economic security, and ideological influence.

In the near future, the supposed “multipolar” world has been deferred, giving way instead to “orbital bipolarity”—a system in which global politics and industry are pulled into competing gravitational fields centered on the United States and China. Multilateralism has become inert, and every other power now orbits these two anchors while maintaining the fiction of choice and autonomy.

In the tense relationship between the United States and China, Hong Kong emerges as a middle space — a vantage point from which to imagine a way forward. The city’s unique position offers a metaphorical middle ground for dialogue, emphasising the need for new frameworks to navigate today’s complex rivalries.

China’s grand strategy is defined by a deliberate balance between integration into the global economic system and resistance to its Western-led constraints. It employs strategic ambiguity and selective engagement to expand influence, preserve flexibility, and avoid confrontation that could jeopardize its modernization.

John Maynard Keynes’ The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919) remains one of the most prescient critiques of postwar settlement in modern history. In it, Keynes warned that victory can hollow itself out when the victors lose their sense of humility. The punitive reparations imposed upon Germany after World War I, he argued, sowed the seeds for future instability by humiliating and impoverishing a nation that, once stripped of dignity and hope, would not long consent to the order imposed upon it. His insight was both economic as well as moral and political: sustainable peace requires magnanimity, not vengeance; it presupposes an architecture of inclusion, not one of exclusion. In today’s parlance, it rejects blocs aimed at those outside and seeks to ground relations in the idea of indivisible peace.