Do you think it's a necessary role to play?
There has to be some level of global order post Teller–Ulam configuration. How you establish and maintain that order without it being the very thing that causes a nuclear exchange is a different question.
Regardless, globalization has been beneficial and its the United States that pushed it to through goal post and played the largest role in its tangibility.
That's the thing. China has already beat US in terms of its economy, just look at PPP. It'll become even clearer once you extrapolate 10 years. This whole thing about US being the de facto superpower is a remnant of what was taught 10-20 years ago. People are just holding on to an idea that became outdated several years back.
I'm well aware of this, the only issue is that some specific economic metric isn't what determines necessarily who the global hegemon is.
While China does have a larger economy, that economy is incredibly fragile. It relies on other countries for half of its food and 3/4 its petroleum (though it does have ~5 years worth of petroleum reserves). It is only capable of producing 17% of its own semiconductor consumption (though they are striving to change this with the IC china fund). Its largest export relies on semiconductors but those are low grade, almost all high grade are imported. its semiconductor capacity relies on importing it western equipment, or tools and materials to make said equipment.
The united states is anti-fragile given they are the exact opposite of this. We can produce all of the food and energy we will ever need in house. And our semiconductor and computing industry speaks for itself (though it relies on others, we have a lot of the cards in our hand).
What makes the U.S. the global hegemon beyond our geographical luck is the fact that we field the largest and most advanced blue water navy in the world. Globalization very much relied on the existence of this navy and still does today. If the U.S. gets in a conflict with China all it has to do is drop a carrier group in the Indian ocean to embargo petroleum exports to China and cut its food imports. There is not much China could do given the naval vessels it has capable of reaching that far would be out numbered 2:1, have less advanced load outs, and no real world experience. Not to mention the U.S airforce has a technological gap on the Chinese by more than two decades.
Having said this, China knows it doesn't stand a chance and is fragile. Hence, they have established PLAN which is a manufacturing program to reach a blue water navy size of 270 ships by 2035. They can probably pull that off, and despite those ships being less advanced it would be a very fair fight.
However, PLAN relies on chinas semiconductor industry. Advanced radar and targeting systems take a lot of compute. Recently the United States has established a semiconductor ban on China. This requires any company in the U.S. to have a license to export chips to China. It bans American citizens to work for and consult Chinese companies on advanced semiconductor manufacturing. It bans companies from selling equipment to make semiconductors to China. It bans exporting the components needed to build the equipment that manufactures semiconductors. To make matters worst is the proposed Chip 4 alliance which is a shared policy implementation between U.S., japan, Taiwan, and South Korea. Japan will play along, Taiwan likely will, while Korea is up in the air. As such the United States will likely still be the single most powerful blue water navy in the 30's.
Economic output and manufacturing capacity does have a lot to do with hegemony, but logistics and power projection are just as important. While China has two of the four, the U.S. has all four.
In summary Hegemony is much more multi-dimensional than any specific economic metric.
People try saying that old people are the one with jobs in China but the same is happening in the US, power tripping child minded old people aka boomers.
The major issue is China has insanely bad demographics while the U.S. are more or less stable (especially when compared to the rest of the world).
I feel like this is unironically why we're doing it at this point.
I have heard a lot of different narratives that explain the U.S. motives and i really don't know which is true. Plus some play into each other.
