It is now apparent that U.S. President Donald Trump believes, with his new National Security Strategy, that the People’s Republic of China is a threat; the regime is also in the process of being eliminated.

So what’s next? And what does this mean for the rest of the world?

Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Xi Jinping is no longer effectively in power. He reigned for a dozen years before he was cornered into relative impotence.

The collapse of communist China had become irrefutable as 2025 was coming to an end.

As well, by late 2025, the PRC was no longer the major economic or military power it had become in recent years. It now only has sufficient weight to act as a disruptor for the coming few years; maybe not even that.

So now is the time to begin a reassessment of the global balance of power, and not solely because of the implosion of the PRC and CCP. The United States had also embarked on a surge of global dominance, but with its own deep internal divisions. The European Union was in deepening economic, social, and strategic decline and division, and hitherto prosperous states such as the United Kingdom, Australia, and Canada were in what could be a terminal (or at least serious) malaise.

The power and stability of middling states, such as Turkey, Iran, Egypt, Pakistan, and Nigeria, were questionable, and the global realignment seemed to promise that a new world would, by default, emerge. Even such promising stars as Saudi Arabia and India faced challenges, and all would be subject to the downstream effects of China’s economic collapse. So, too, would Russia be severely impacted.

Even by the end of 2025, few were willing to accept that the PRC had indeed already imploded economically, but the forecast that mainland China would probably reduce steel production by 50 percent in 2026 highlighted the reality of the situation, especially for iron ore exporters such as Australia and Brazil.

And yet the PRC’s resources are dwindling. China has been importing some of the “rare earths” it has been reexporting to the world, indicating it has dwindling control of this asset. Its petroleum imports rose by 4.48 percent year over year in November, the highest level in 27 months, and imports from Russia fell. This was despite the economic crash, which should have eased the burden on energy resources. None of the indicators is moving in the right direction for the PRC.

Much of the 2025–26 global restructuring, indeed, is linked to the economic chaos caused by the PRC’s collapse. This was not a sudden or clearly defined thing that could be ascribed solely to a certain specific date or action, but rather to an accretion of actions and symptoms with roots going back decades. Constant identification of the decline of the PRC as a strategic power, economic giant, or military threat raised no concern among states addicted to Chinese investment.

There has been the willing suspension of logic that would normally be characteristic of a narcotically addicted subject.

This writer saw the signs in 2006–07 that the PRC would not be able to sustain itself beyond 2025 as the great power it determined it wished to be. My rationale for stating this explicitly in 2007—in the study, “Australia 2050: An Examination of Australia’s Condition, Outlook, and Options for the First Half of the 21st Century”—was that the PRC had neglected to secure its base of stability before it attempted to move, as a gunpowder state, to seek military equality or dominance in the world.

It failed to guarantee internal lines of supply for food, water, or energy, and attempted to intimidate those states that could have an impact on China’s food, water, and energy supplies. Such a condition, and on such a scale, caused the downfall of the Western Roman Empire, as it became isolated from its originally internal (effectively so until that point) grain supply from Egypt.

That is not to say that the PRC—or, to be more accurate for the future, China—could not resurge and rebuild, but this is not a short-term prospect. The major problem in undertaking a clean-sheet analysis of the new global architecture today is not the PRC, but the reality that much of the world views current realities through antique lenses and mindsets developed around old myths and half-truths.

This results in poor resource allocation in defense, diplomacy, and techno-economic policy.

Moreover, this paralleled the collapse of the CCP itself, largely because Xi’s opponents within the Party left it too long to challenge him. Then, all the contestants for power—including Xi and his remnant loyalists, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), reformists, and CCP elders—became committed to the appearance that the Party remains “in charge,” even though economic and social collapse had become irreparable.

As a result, the country—particularly amid a major remigration of “migrant (countryside) workers” back to their villages from the cities—could be described as in a prerevolutionary condition. It should be remembered that, with the death of Dowager Empress Cixi on Nov. 15, 1908, it was unrest among rural “migrant workers” in China’s cities that exploited the Qing Dynasty’s collapse and ignited the civil war, which was brought to a standstill—but unresolved—in 1949.

The immediate outcome of the PRC’s collapse in 2026 is that it is unlikely to be in a position to claw back any of the investments it made to build its Belt and Road Initiative, leaving debtor nations with a margin of relief. Those foreigners who held Qing Dynasty government bonds also saw their investments wiped out by the collapse and revolution.

Bets and investments turn sour when strategic reality takes precedent. But the vast economic benefits China was able to deploy around the world by buying food, energy, and raw materials from supplier nations (and finished goods from others) were also over, leaving countries such as Australia, Brazil, and Russia—among others—without markets for their exports.

In other words, in the post-Cold War era, Western states defined themselves not by their own attributes but by the caliber of their adversaries. But if the reality was, by mid-2026, that neither the PRC nor Russia resembled the overwhelming threat they had been painted to portray, then how would future alliances and defense postures be expressed?

The collapse of the USSR in 1990–91 was so simplistically portrayed as a great victory for “the West,” as the Ronald Reagan leadership handed over to George H. W. Bush in the United States and as Margaret Thatcher retired from office in the UK, that the West declared a “peace dividend.” This “dividend” included not only reductions in defense spending but a total loss of cohesion or credibility in threat assessments, all of which led to a decline in Western identity and cohesion.

But the collapse of the PRC, which has been foretold for more than a decade due to its own shortcomings, was by 2025 already being portrayed solely as a victory of the United States, unshared with any other states. So how will, or how can, the United States use this “sole remaining superpower” image in the coming years?

U.S. President George W. Bush (2001–09) saw the United States as a global power, leaving it strategically unfocused. When the Sept. 11, 2001, al-Qaeda terrorist attacks occurred against the United States, Bush declared “a war on terror,” and thereby elevated al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden to the status of a superpower. So bin Laden defined the United States in a very meaningful sense.

How will the United States identify itself post-PRC? And how will U.S. allies identify the United States when no clear threat to “the West” is evident? Will Trump be able to convince much of the world—as he would need to do—of a rationale that causes the international community to accept U.S. predominance, absent a threat?

The new Trump Doctrine, released as the National Security Strategy, pointedly does not specify a strategic adversary for the United States. This, arguably, is the bold step by which the United States argues its purpose as its own ethos, not defined by a threat.

By arguing this, Trump has already declared the end of the PRC–CCP era, and an America defined by America. Can that strategy survive Trump?