Zhang Weiwei, dean of Fudan University’s China Research Institute, and Chien Joanna Lei, a Taiwanese politician and senior researcher at Hainan University’s Belt and Road Research Institute, delivered a joint assessment of the collapse of U.S. hegemony and its implications for Taiwan in an April 11 episode of “Cross-Strait Roundtable School.” The transcript was published by China’s Observer Network.
Zhang, who debated Francis Fukuyama in 2011 and predicted at the time that the U.S. would elect a leader worse than George W. Bush and that the “Arab Spring” would become an “Arab Winter,” argued that the Iran war has confirmed the end of the “end of history” thesis. He cited the theologization of U.S. decision-making, highlighting Secretary of War Pete Hegseth’s invocations of divine mandate for the war, which Zhang sees as evidence that the American system lacks the rationality its own democratic theory presupposes. He quoted a now-popular formulation: a hundred years ago, China represented the past, Europe the present, and America the future; today, Europe represents the past, America the present, and China the future.
Zhang said U.S. hegemony has collapsed on three fronts simultaneously: militarily, the U.S. cannot protect the Gulf states in which its bases are located; in its alliance system, no ally joined the U.S. call for a joint escort through the Strait of Hormuz; and morally, the U.S. has lost all credibility. He invoked Chinese Marshal Liu Bocheng’s maxim that a commander who fails to understand five factors—the enemy, his own forces, his mission, terrain, and timing—will surely be defeated, and said Trump understood none of them going into Iran.
