In combination, the two countries can team up against the U.S. power advantage, but there are some significant limitations, as they don’t always see eye to eye.

The G7 Summit, which just concluded at the French seaside resort of Biarritz, showed that Europe and the United States diverge with and even increasingly confront each other on trade issues. Considering its fading influence, the continued value of the G7 has been thrown into doubt, even by European academia.

Donald Trump’s ascension to the presidency in 2017 will also make him the new commander-in-chief of the United States Armed Forces, with a large say over the question of war and peace in the next four years. While some see his strongman style as reminiscent of Theodore Roosevelt’s Gunboat Diplomacy, there are too many known unknowns about Trump’s defense policies to predict how he would react in the event of war or a perceived threat.

The strong tides of anti-establishment anger have shaken politics to its core in a number of Western democracies, as symbolized by the British vote to leave the European Union and the rise of Donald Trump in the United States. Authoritarian capitalism, on the other hand, usually pretends to be meritocracy offering competent governance and economic opportunity for all. In reality, it entrenches corrupt oligarchies that are answerable to no one and that employ ultra-nationalism as the legitimating credo of their monopoly on power.

The gravest threat to American global leadership is neither Russia nor China but continued interest group-driven Congressional abandonment of the kind of balanced strategy that won the Cold War.

Policymakers in the United States, China, and other Asian powers must choose whether to deal forthrightly and sensibly with the changing regional power distribution or avoid the hard decisions that China’s rise poses until the situation grows ever more polarized and dangerous.

The January 19, 2011 White House summit between Presidents Obama and Hu Jintao was of considerable international significance. There is no more high-stakes rela