There is precedent for our fear of Chinese power. In the 1970s conventional wisdom held that the Soviet Union commanded a lethal modern military machine. They had the firepower and manpower to overwhelm us in a direct confrontation. Then Soviet tanks rolled into Afghanistan and the world saw how limp the threat was. The Russians hadn’t built a war machine. They’d centrally planned a paper tiger.

The U.S. may have failed in Afghanistan very recently and has only grown weaker and more failure-prone since then, but we’re still better than China, because more than forty years ago, another, different country that isn’t China also failed in Afghanistan.