Navigating a world without a center: What the end of the postwar order means for business

China–US competition

In May 2026, the president of the United States, Donald Trump, made a state visit to China. This visit was Trump’s second state visit to China; the first was in 2017, and the result was to work toward a constructive strategic stability relationship. Our foreign minister Wang Yi described the relationship as an active stability featuring cooperation as the mainstay, a sound stability with well-defined competition, a regular stability where differences are manageable, and a lasting stability promising peace.

People have asked me what the real meaning of this is. My answer is low-level stability, which is better than uncertainty, but it’s still limited. It means we recognize that competition exists, and we agree to manage and regulate it. We accept that there will be difficulties, and we acknowledge that some issues are too complex and too significant to ignore. Rather than letting them escalate, we understand that action is necessary.

Competition between China and the US is focused on three key issues: Taiwan (Chinese Taipei), cutting-edge technology and its supply chains, and critical minerals supply chains. The main issue right now between the two is cutting-edge technology and its supply chains. As a friend of mine, an American admiral, said to me so clearly in 2019, “Even if China gets ahead of the US in just one field of cutting-edge technologies, it would mean the end of the US’s current international position.”

There are currently two diverging views on this: “small yard, high fence,” or “two separate tech systems.” I don’t think either is likely on its own. The first is unlikely because China’s technology is improving. The small yard has a chance to expand. The second is also unlikely because in the past, when there was cooperation, the US did the innovation and China the application. Now, because of competition, China has had no option but to improve on innovation and the US has seen how this plan has backfired, so I don’t think the US will push it very hard. My sense is that the future will be somewhere between these two.

The Liberation Day Tariff in 2025 was a historical event between China and the US when the world’s two biggest economies almost stopped their direct trade for the first time in the post-Cold War era. I think the meaning of what happened here is much more than the US–China trade war; the most favored nation principle was undermined. This principle is crucial to today’s global trading system. This time, the US administration overrode this principle, and we doubt whether the next US administration will go back to its previous position.

The November 2025 National Security Strategy of the US government included a key sentence: “The days of the United States propping up the entire world order like Atlas are over.” What I think is that the United States is not abandoning its rights or power, but its global responsibility. This is crucial to all of us.

Which brings me to the question, in the next 15 to 20 years, what is the most probable risk for the world order, the Thucydides Trap or the Kindleberger Trap? The Kindleberger Trap is what I am hearing most and I think this is noteworthy. Kindleberger’s Trap is where no country wants to assume leadership of the world. When there is a crisis, no single country will provide for the public good, and every country will have to do it by itself. This will lead to chaos.