oiip

China Doesn’t Need to Fight America. It’s Preparing for Its Collapse Instead

Decoding Geopolitics"-Podcast
Dominik Presl in conversation with Thomas Eder
18 July 2026

This is a conversation with Thomas Eder, Research Fellow at the Austrian Institute for International Affairs, about how China actually sees the world – and why Beijing is increasingly confident that America is a superpower in decline. We get into this worldview – that the East is rising as the West unravels, and that China is on the way to take the top spot the way the US once took it from the British Empire – and why this belief is now driving Chinese strategy. But we also dig into why China’s own deep economic and demographic problems complicate that confidence – and why the conclusion Beijing seems to be drawing isn’t to fight America, but to outwait it, using patience, pressure and incentives to win the contest, and even Taiwan, without a war.