ON February 15, just as Chinese Vice-President Xi Jinping arrived in the United States for a four-day visit, US President Barack Obama told an audience of American workers in Milwaukee: “Manufacturing is coming back!” Coming back from China, that is.

But while the Master Lock Company of Milwaukee has indeed moved some jobs back to the United States, everybody knows that the flow will really continue to be in the other direction. It doesn’t matter whether China’s economy finally overtakes America’s in 2020, or 2025, or 2030. A great shift of productivity and wealth is underway, and economic power generally translates pretty directly into military power. So will the US and China be able to manage the shift without a war?

At the end of Vice-President Xi’s US visit on February 18, the future Chinese leader assured delegates at a trade conference in Los Angeles: “A prosperous and stable China will not be a threat to any country. It will only be a positive force for world peace and development.” The transition from one dominant world economic power to another is always tricky, and the historical precedents are not encouraging. Spain was the 16th-century superpower, and the shift to French domination, though never complete, entailed several generations of war.

Then Britain displaced France, amidst several more generations of war.

When Germany challenged British supremacy and Japan began building its empire in the Pacific and East Asia in the early 20th century, the transition involved two world wars — and resulted in the de facto division of the world between two non-European superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union.

But the past is a complicated place, and there is a systematic distortion of history that emphasises violent transitions at the expense of peaceful ones. In fact, at least one major power shift in the past century was entirely peaceful. The US economy overtook Britain’s late in the 19th century. The two countries fought their last war in 1812-1814.

London then calculated that the US was now so strong that it could never win a land war against it. So now it’s America’s turn to figure out what to do about an emerging great-power rival on the far side of a great ocean, and one option would be to copy Britain’s example.

The United States has no truly vital interests on the Asian mainland, or at least none that it could protect by fighting China. It was entirely safe from foreign attack before it became the world’s greatest power, and it will still be militarily invulnerable long after it loses that distinction.

Britain is a lot more prosperous than it was when it ran the world, and its people are probably happier too. Decline (especially decline that is only relative) is not nearly as bad a fate as Americans imagine.