For the past five years, America has grown used to thinking of itself - not without a certain ruefulness - as the last remaining superpower.
The rest of the world, its diplomats argue, is breaking down into regional conflicts in which the United States might be expected to hold the balance.Well, the United States is no longer the unchallenged superpower. China is coming up on the outside, and its importance stretches far beyond its immediate borders.
In the past few months it has stoked up a potentially explosive conflict with the Philippines over the Spratly Islands, embarked on a new testing program for nuclear weapons, exported nuclear technology to Iran and Pakistan and announced its determination to wipe away democracy in Hong Kong as soon as it takes over.
Now it has brought its rockets to bear, literally, on Taiwan for daring to hold a presidential election that might end Beijing's assumption that this breakaway "province" would rejoin the mainland.
The dilemma for Washington is excruciating. In the two decades since Richard Nixon made an alliance with China a cornerstone of U.S. foreign policy, successive presidents have gently glided over the problems of their traditional support of Taiwan and Beijing's lack of democratic credentials.
That evasion has been brutally exposed by the massacre in Tia-nan-men Square and the continuing arrest and torture of civil rights activists.
At the same time, a Republican-dominated Congress has revived its former enthusiasm for the Taiwanese regime. The Taipei lobby, long marginalized by U.S. policy, is back on Capitol Hill with lots of money and many to take it.
It is easy enough to relish Washington's anguish over Taiwan. America, after all, did little to support Britain's efforts to safeguard democracy in Hong Kong.
But it cannot really be said that Europe has behaved any better. The sight last weekend of the full retinue of European leaders at the Euro-Asian summit rushing to Chinese Prime Minister Li Peng with hands outstretched for export orders, shouldering aside any advocates of human rights, was bad enough.
What really made it so wrong-headed, however, is that human rights are not irrelevant to the China problem, they are central to it. But Beijing and other Asian governments have told Western critics that these rights are no concern of theirs.
Perfectly true. We do not have the right to tell others how to run their internal affairs. But we do have the right to express concern when authoritarianism at home is expressed in expansionism abroad.
You can argue that recent Chinese aggressiveness represents no more than saber-rattling to keep the army happy while the politicians jostle for the succession to Deng Xiaoping. You can attempt to play it all down by saying these are essentially sovereignty issues for China that have no bearing on its external relations. You can even, as Hong Kong Gov. Chris Patten does, put your faith in a change in China's rule as the strains of maintaining political authoritarianism alongside commercial freedom begin to show.
But those same strains make China's latest moves all the more worrisome.
China is never going to fit into neat ideas of regional balance after the Cold War. With a population of more than a billion and a burgeoning army, it cannot be contained by any of its neighbors.