Are Sino-U.S. Relations Comparable to the WWI-era Anglo-German Rivalry?

Member in the School of Historical Studies Katherine Epstein writes:

"One of today’s premier strategic challenges is the Sino-US relationship. When analysts turn to history seeking perspective on navigating this challenge, the analogy most often employed is the Anglo-German relationship before the First World War. Like Germany at the turn of the century, the logic runs, China is now a rising economic and naval power challenging the declining global economic and naval hegemon—Great Britain then, the United States now. Just as Britain had to abandon global reach in order to concentrate on the emerging threat across the North Sea, so the United States must now pivot to the Pacific.

However, the scholarship on which contemporary analysts tend to rely for their understanding of the historical side of the analogy is dated."

Find Epstein's critique of this scholarship, and presentation of an alternative, at the London School of Economics and Political Science.