American (next) Pacific Century? Gli Stati Uniti di Donald Trump alla fine della «Great Divergence»

This essay analyzes, from a global and long-term historical perspective, the Sino-US diplomatic tensions arisen after the Donald J. Trump’s election as President of the United States. In the broader system of international relations, the so-called “rise of China” and the increasing political and economic dynamism of the new Asian Great Powers are leading to the closure of the Euro-Atlantic global hegemonic cycle, begun with the «Great Divergence» in the late XVIIIth century and enshrined by the Opium Wars in the second half of the XIXth. Despite an unconventional diplomatic style, the new Republican President and his administration are facing these systemic transformations in the field of world politics, trying to create a new architecture of global governance, aiming at maintaining the United States’ leadership within a world system that is structurally transiting from an hegemony to another, while is moving from the unipolar condition to a multipolar one.