When China introduced new export controls on rare earth metals last October, some observers interpreted the move as the latest example of China’s bid for global dominance—a deliberate show of force meant to compel the West to acknowledge Chinese power. Others have long seen China’s control of the supply of rare earths as a more defensive and even desperate move by a country grappling with slowing economic growth, trade threats, and rising unemployment, particularly among young people, and searching for leverage against the United States and its allies. This disagreement reflects a larger, ongoing debate about the true nature of China’s ambitions, one with significant implications for U.S. policy.

Many politicians and pundits in the United States argue that China seeks nothing less than global hegemony—in other words, to displace and usurp the United States as the central power in the international system. As a senior member of then-Sen. Marco Rubio’s staff told me in 2022, “Beijing really, truly, does envision a world where they are the hegemon and they create the rules of the road.”

When China introduced new export controls on rare earth metals last October, some observers interpreted the move as the latest example of China’s bid for global dominance—a deliberate show of force meant to compel the West to acknowledge Chinese power. Others have long seen China’s control of the supply of rare earths as a more defensive and even desperate move by a country grappling with slowing economic growth, trade threats, and rising unemployment, particularly among young people, and searching for leverage against the United States and its allies. This disagreement reflects a larger, ongoing debate about the true nature of China’s ambitions, one with significant implications for U.S. policy.

Many politicians and pundits in the United States argue that China seeks nothing less than global hegemony—in other words, to displace and usurp the United States as the central power in the international system. As a senior member of then-Sen. Marco Rubio’s staff told me in 2022, “Beijing really, truly, does envision a world where they are the hegemon and they create the rules of the road.”

Others contend that China’s ambitions are more limited, that it seeks regional hegemony by overturning what it sees as an unnatural situation where a far-away United States dominates East Asia. Still, some assert that China is, as a recent paper put it, “a status quo power concerned with regime stability and is more inwardly focused than externally oriented.” Chinese leaders themselves claim that they seek only to replace a U.S.-led unipolar order with a more “equal and orderly” multipolar system.

Each of these interpretations suggests a different U.S. response, ranging from confrontation, to accommodation, to cooperation. The problem is that while each interpretation captures aspects of China’s behavior, none fully explain it. A more convincing explanation is that China does not seek global hegemony but rather what I call global preeminence: a position as a sort of “first among equals,” wherein its interests take precedence, without requiring it to assume the full responsibilities of hegemonic leadership that the United States has borne since World War II.

The notion that China wants to replace the United States as global hegemon and write the rules of the road for the international system fails for two reasons. First, China has benefited—and continues to benefit—from many of those rules. Second, China has shown little interest in assuming the duties of a hegemon. Although Chinese officials frequently complain about the U.S. dollar’s role as the global reserve currency and the power it gives the United States over the global financial system, their proposals focus on creating an international currency, not replacing the dollar with the renminbi. Likewise, while Beijing chafes at the global presence of the U.S. Navy and is building a blue-water fleet potentially capable of challenging it, China does not want to take on the responsibility of policing global shipping lanes.

China also criticizes the U.S.-led alliance system, but it shows no desire to provide its own security guarantees on that scale or to use its own forces to resolve global conflicts. Instead, Beijing argues that such hegemonic arrangements need not exist and should be replaced by multipolarity, a vision articulated most clearly in Chinese President Xi Jinping’s 2022 Global Security Initiative. In short, while China wants to dethrone the United States as global hegemon, it does not want to take up the role itself.

At the same time, China’s global activities are far too expansive to be reconciled with a strategy of regional hegemony. Its four global initiatives on security, development, civilization, and governance have translated into concrete policies, including expanded police training and security cooperation abroad, a new $10 billion fund to support development projects in the global south, and an expanding slate of convenings and people-to-people exchanges. From its long-standing Forum on China-Africa Cooperation to its more recent diplomatic engagement in the Persian Gulf and its growing naval activities in Latin America, China has projected both hard and soft power across every region of the world. China may not want to play global hegemon, but neither is it content to confine its ambitions to East Asia alone.

Nor does a focus on domestic stability preclude wider ambitions. Regime security is undoubtedly central to Xi’s calculus, particularly given his fear of a Soviet-type collapse. But domestic stability and expanding international power are not mutually exclusive; many states, including the Soviet Union under Leonid Brezhnev, have pursued both simultaneously. Moreover, Xi has shown a willingness to risk China’s domestic stability in pursuit of foreign-policy objectives. China’s support for Russia’s ongoing war in Ukraine has jeopardized its relationship with one of its largest trading partners, the European Union, at a time when China desperately needs to preserve export markets to bolster domestic economic growth. Its assertive territorial claims, particularly in the South China Sea, have also strained economic relationships with neighboring states. The leadership’s concern for domestic stability, therefore, coexists with an expansive international—and yes, global—agenda.

If China is not seeking global or regional hegemony, nor merely domestic stability and the preservation of the status quo, then what is its objective? That brings us back to global preeminence. China does not aspire to write all the rules of the international system, but it does want the power to revise or veto rules that conflict with its interests. It does not want to be responsible for providing global security, but it does want to prevent others from using security provision in ways it views as infringing on its prerogatives—as in U.S. freedom of navigation operations in the South China Sea. It does not want to replace the dollar with the renminbi, but it does want to blunt the United States’ ability to use the dollar and the international financial system as tools of coercion or to sustain endless deficits. What China ultimately seeks is status and authority without responsibility: the assurance that its voice must always be heard, and heard first, without obligating it to bear costs that do not align with narrowly defined national interests.

Beijing seeks this influence globally, not just in East Asia, and it pursues this by creating leverage with as many countries as possible. China is now a top-three trading partner for 157 countries and regions, and it is the largest trading partner to more than 120 of them. Contrary to claims of systematic “debt-trap diplomacy,” these relationships are not always designed to extract immediate political or military concessions. But China is not shy about using the leverage these arrangements create when its interests are at stake. It has long done this to persuade countries to diplomatically recognize China over Taiwan, but it is increasingly using its economic leverage, and the political relationships built on it, to pressure countries to put China’s interests first. China has used its economic relationships with Hungary and Slovakia to fight the adoption of EU policies directed against it, mobilized its African partners to win votes at the United Nations and other international organizations, and, more recently, attempted to rally support in Latin America against U.S. trade policy. The logic is less a coherent blueprint for expansion than an accumulation of leverage, so that when interests collide, third countries will find it costlier to oppose Beijing than to oppose anyone else, particularly Washington.

Understanding China’s drive for global preeminence has important implications for U.S. policy. It suggests that strategies centered on confrontation and containment are unnecessarily risky and that pressuring countries to choose between the United States and China is likely to backfire—particularly if that pressure erodes U.S. diplomatic, economic, or cultural ties. To counter China’s drive for global preeminence, the United States must grow its own leverage, so that when something important is at stake, countries have more to lose by upsetting Washington than upsetting Beijing.

For U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration, this presents both good and bad news.

The good news is that the United States need not engage in the proxy wars and overseas military involvement that marked the late Cold War and devolved into the so-called forever wars in the Middle East. Instead, U.S. leverage can focus on economic and social domains, creating opportunities for U.S. businesses and workers. Although the consumption-driven U.S. economy makes shifting trade balances more difficult than in export-oriented China, the United States’ strengths—especially in high-tech innovation—and the pull of its consumer market still give Washington considerable leverage.

The bad news is that this approach requires more engagement with the world’s people, not less—which would run directly counter to the Trump administration’s policies. It requires making the United States once again attractive to foreign students, migrants, and investors. The United States has built-in advantages over China in this regard: a more open culture, the English language, elite educational institutions, and a long history of integrating newcomers who then forge links between the United States and their home countries. Throwing away the strengths that the United States has built up over decades would open the door wide for China.