As China Celebrates, the World Repositions Itself:How Will the United States Respond?

At a pivotal moment reflecting the profound transformations reshaping the international order, Beijing staged a massive military parade to mark the eightieth anniversary of victory over Japan, timed to coincide with President Xi Jinping’s birthday. The event was not a mere classic military display; it was a carefully crafted geopolitical message—meticulously detailed, tightly directed, and laden with symbolism.

Soldiers marched with exacting precision as “Dong” intercontinental missiles and “Virex” multiple nuclear warheads strutted through the streets, while modern tanks roared—together sending clear signals to those concerned. The comparison arose naturally with a lackluster military parade once seen in Washington for President Trump’s personal occasion, which delivered little more than confusion and division.

Yet China’s pageant was not only a showcase of power; it was a platform from which L-sīn (China) expressed a desire to redraw the contours of the world. More than twenty heads of state attended, including two leaders from NATO—Turkey and Czechia. It is a scene that shatters many of the assumptions upon which the United States built its diplomatic doctrine for decades.

Shifting Alliances… and an Eroding U.S. Diplomacy

The slaps directed at the United States were multiple and simultaneous. Russia slammed the door on what remained of the Alaska meeting’s outcomes and chose Beijing as the place—shoulder to shoulder with China—to announce the birth of a new axis challenging American centrality. India, which Washington assumed had moved into its camp, flipped the table. Prime Minister Narendra Modi—feted in Washington only weeks earlier—found himself insulted by U.S. sanctions on Russian oil imports. His thunderous response: Washington deserves no credit for halting the war with Pakistan. He then packed his bags for Beijing, joining the celebration of his geostrategic rival and breaking a full decade of U.S. efforts to pry India away from Russia.

The tableau of Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, and Narendra Modi in a prolonged three-way handshake amounted to a historic snapshot—an emblem of a newly multipolar world. Brazil was no less explicit. Despite Washington’s attempts to reset ties with President Lula da Silva, threats of sanctions over the prosecution of former president Bolsonaro nudged Brazil toward alignment with the camp resisting U.S. hegemony. Kim Jong Un, for his part, seized the moment to issue direct threats from Beijing toward South Korea and the United States—an explicit sign of the failure of the American bet on sidelining him.

In this setting, U.S. diplomacy looks like a lone child in the schoolyard, discovering that no one wants to play—neither in Moscow nor Beijing nor the Global South, and perhaps soon neither in Europe nor the Middle East.

China Bets on the Future… and America on the Past

China no longer hides its global ambition. For centuries it was the world’s largest economy, and it was never an expansionist colonial power but one centered on the defense of itself. Under Xi Jinping, however, a strategic shift has taken shape: Beijing now seeks to be a leading global power—not merely competing with the West but aiming to recast the architecture of the international system through a more “Chinese” lens. To that end, China is investing in nuclear technology, planning to field more than 1,000 nuclear warheads, and building blue-water carriers and a navy to command the high seas. Its economy keeps growing despite challenges, and its advances in AI, biotech, and energy impress even American visitors who say, “This is the future.”

As a sardonic aside reported in a leaked conversation to the Japan Times, Putin and Ping joked about living to 150 thanks to massive investments in biomedical technologies, while a hot mic from the White House carried Trump’s wish that Putin would strike him a personal deal—a paradox that captures America’s bewildering tableau.

The American Interior… Chaos and Retrenchment

While China wagers on the coming century, the United States recedes into internal ideological battles: antiquated debates over abortion, vaccines, voting rights, and immigration; constraints on scientific and academic research; and doors slammed on international scientific elites—at a moment when the global race demands minds, not walls. Environmental and scientific agencies are, at times, run by those who do not even accept the very principles of science on which they were founded—a civilizational contraction mirrored by China’s strategic expansion.

The paradox is stark: the United States—long a global leader through its scientific, academic, and research institutions—appears busy dismantling what it built, with policies that drag it centuries backward, especially when curbing scientific immigration, closing university doors to foreigners, and hemming in research with funding and politics.

As China launches innovation programs and pours resources into its universities, American universities face budget cuts and ideological strife that threaten academic independence.

China Seeks to Reframe the World Order

China is not challenging America solely with arms but with science, technology, and vision—competing according to the very rules the United States once wrote. Beijing no longer seeks merely to assimilate into the Western model; it is proposing an alternative premised on stability, economic growth, and disciplined central leadership—an approach attractive to many states seeking less dependency.

U.S. diplomacy, once holding the initiative worldwide, now absorbs blows from every direction. More troubling still, it seems unable thus far to recognize the depth of the challenge, let alone craft a new vision to meet it. The question, amid this sweeping transformation and the successive slaps to American diplomacy, imposes itself:

How will the United States respond?