China's soft power as the world's biggest property buyer is under severe strain due to a government crackdown on capital flight and the Qatar controversy, which is expected to drive a lot of Arab money into the property market in western countries.

On a dirt path that passes for a street in a Kenyan refugee camp, a merchant sells grains he bought from a local farmer outside the settlement. To call it an “economy” would be euphemistic, but it’s a living, and it’s enough to support his wife and two children — a family he’s built since arriving at the camp over a decade ago. [...] Mastercard and Western Union have spent the past year studying the needs of these international camps-turned-cities.

A security strategy consistent with this circumstance would be one that is more multi-faceted, that deals with long-standing issues that affect relations with its neighbours in the region. [...] its diplomacy and foreign policy in years to come has to be welded into Asian coalitions. 

China’s diplomacy has truly gone global. Over the past forty years China has traveled a path from a nation isolated from the international community to one integrated into it. Today, Beijing enjoys diplomatic relations with 175 countries, is a member of more than 150 international organizations and is party to more than three hundred multilateral treaties. 
 

The overwhelming impression given by the bulk of historical scholarship on pre-modern China’s foreign relations, as well as by official dynastic histories, is that generally the Chinese empire sustained its regional pre-eminence through civilisational and economic ‘soft power’ while adopting a defensive military posture and conservative grand strategy.

The failure of the U.S. campaign to dissuade allies from joining China’s Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank was greeted in some quarters as a sign of American decline. But this episode was not a crisis of American power, which remains unequaled. And while the threat that the bank poses to that power and to the international order it undergirds has been much touted, it is in fact overstated. In fact, the main portent of the episode is not Beijing’s overturning of the international economic order or the arrival of China as a U.S.

Given its economic and political might, it would be foolish to predict the decline of the US. It has systematically been able to extend its dominant role.

The obituary of the American century has been written, but there are very good reasons to believe that the USA will continue to play a dominant role in the 21stcentury. America’s continued dominance is based on its ability to project both hard and soft power.