When nations decline, rule-makers turn rule-breakers, threaten world order

T N Ninan asks which country is the greater threat to the world system: China or the US?

Zillions of articles and hundreds of books have been written, focusing on the problem of managing the rise of China. The more urgent problem, it would seem, is managing the decline of the United States. China has been presented and analysed (also damned) as a threat to the world order, as a country that has not been playing by the rules either domestically or internationally, and as a country that should “normalise” but may not do so. Hence the problem, often viewed through a particular prism of history: the failure to manage the rise of Germany a century ago, and