Some of the World Cup’s most revealing American moments came before and after U.S. matches. Players and tens of thousands of fans stood with hands over their hearts to sing the national anthem. After U.S. victories, they joined in “Take Me Home, Country Roads,” filling stadiums with a song about returning home.
The United States has not overcome polarization. A stadium is not a nation, and a song is not a political settlement. But as the World Cup comes to an end, the tournament offers an opportunity to look again at a country usually described through decline, dysfunction, and social fragmentation. It displayed great wealth, organizational capacity, and a sense of national belonging that American politics has not destroyed.
The United States hosted the tournament across 11 metropolitan areas largely through stadiums, airports, highways, and service systems it already possessed. Despite high ticket prices, demand remained intense; FIFA reported that stadiums were 99.6 percent full after the first 44 matches. Many visitors from Europe remarked on the scale and abundance of ordinary American life: large homes and cars, enormous supermarkets and sports facilities, reliable air-conditioning, free refills, and round-the-clock conveniences Americans barely notice.
American problems – household insecurity, homelessness, public debt, institutional paralysis, and political extremism – are real as well. The viral Chinese social media metaphor of an American “kill line,” in which one unexpected expense can push an ordinary family toward collapse, captures a real anxiety. But the World Cup also showed how incomplete that picture is.
A visitor to the United States in the late 1960s might easily have concluded that the country had lost its future. The civil rights struggle, the antiwar movement, urban unrest, political assassinations, campus protests, and the women’s liberation movement exposed deep racial, generational, and ideological conflict. Yet the decades that followed brought a technological revolution, renewed economic growth, major social change, and the eventual end of the Cold War on terms highly favorable to the United States.
That history should not be romanticized. Many injustices remained unresolved, and American power produced serious mistakes at home and abroad. But it shows a central feature of national resilience: the capacity to absorb crisis, adapt, and generate new sources of strength.
The United States still possesses deep reserves of such strength in technology, finance, higher education, entrepreneurship, alliances, and civil society. Its central weakness is not that it has run out of power. It is that polarization and institutional paralysis increasingly make it difficult to convert power into coherent and sustained policy.
In the same way, narratives of China’s weaknesses are overblown. Yes, China faces serious economic and social pressures: slower growth, a troubled property market, local government debt, an aging population, and weak consumer confidence. These challenges are substantial, but they do not erase the foundations of China’s resilience.
China’s rise was not an accident. It was built through more than four decades of reform and opening, the accumulation of infrastructure and industrial capacity, vast manufacturing networks, expanding technological capabilities, and generations of investment in education. China’s social resilience also draws in part on a Confucian cultural tradition that places unusual value on learning, hard work, family responsibility, and investment in the next generation. These qualities help explain why China has repeatedly adapted to hardship.
America’s success was not accidental, either. Both countries have benefited from accumulated institutions, social habits, human capital, and the hard work of their people. Both have serious internal problems. Neither should assume that those problems will automatically overwhelm the other’s capacity to recover and adapt.
Yet social media in both countries increasingly encourages precisely that conclusion. Chinese platforms circulate images of homelessness, political chaos, aging infrastructure, and social division as evidence that American decline is irreversible. As the United States marks its 250th anniversary, many discussions in Chinese media and policy circles have focused on national decline, lost hegemony, or the image of an aging beauty past her prime.
American platforms, meanwhile, focus on China’s property problems, local debt, slowing growth, and demographic pressures as proof that China has already peaked. Some in the United States believe that these economic and social pressures will sharply limit China’s future development and gradually remove the long-term strategic challenge it poses.
These narratives are most visible online, but they do not remain there. Assumptions about irreversible decline influence public expectations, enter elite debate, and narrow what policy communities regard as possible. Some in China may conclude that American polarization will eventually force Washington to retreat from long-term competition. Some in the United States may assume that China’s present economic difficulties will permanently restrict its future growth and strategic influence. In both cases, a partial picture of the other country becomes a comforting forecast of its future.
Decline stories are attractive because they simplify difficult choices. If the rival is destined to fail, compromise looks unnecessary, restraint appears weak, and waiting begins to look like a strategy.
That temptation is especially dangerous given the emerging G2 reality. The G2 does not mean that Washington and Beijing will jointly govern the world, divide it into spheres of influence, or exclude other powers from major decisions. It describes a structural condition in which the United States and China are bound by competitive coexistence. Each can restrict, punish, and disrupt the other, but neither can dominate or exclude the other.
In the western Pacific, the United States cannot push China out of its own region, but China cannot remove the United States and its alliances. In technology and trade, Washington can slow China’s access to some advanced capabilities, but it cannot exclude China from the global economy or prevent it from developing alternatives. Beijing can use its manufacturing scale, market power, and control of critical minerals to impose costs, but it cannot push the United States out of Asia’s economic order without imposing major costs on itself.
Recognizing the G2 reality means rejecting a dangerous idea that still appeals to some on both sides: the myth that achieving a decisive strategic victory over the other is both desirable and feasible. In both China and the United States, narratives emphasizing the other country’s decline trap make this belief look reasonable. However, a strategy built on the expectation of the other side’s eventual defeat is more likely to produce escalation than victory.
The World Cup did not negate the United States’ divisions, economic insecurity, or institutional dysfunction. It revealed that these problems coexist with great wealth, scale, organizational capacity, and a common identity that has not disappeared. The same intellectual discipline should shape U.S. assessments of China. China’s current economic difficulties are real, but so are China’s deep national capacity, accumulated experience, and social resilience.
Neither Washington nor Beijing can afford a strategy based on waiting for the other to fail. The first step toward peaceful coexistence is a harder form of realism: recognizing that the rival is likely to remain powerful, troubled, and resilient for a very long time.
