Minxin Pei proposes that the U.S. change its China policy to cope with Chinese decline and the possibility of regime change from within:

The United States should reassess the basic premises of its China policy and seriously consider an alternative strategy, one based on the assumption of declining Chinese strength and rising probability of an unexpected democratic transition in the coming two decades. Should such a change come, the geopolitical landscape of Asia would transform beyond recognition. The North Korean regime would collapse almost overnight, and the Korean Peninsula would be reunified. A regional wave of democratic transitions would topple the communist regimes in Vietnam and Laos.

Suppose that China experiences an “unexpected democratic transition.” Would a newly democratic China stop propping up the North Korean government? If it did, the collapse of that government would inundate China with North Korean refugees. Avoiding that scenario is one of the reasons China keeps propping up North Korean government now, and a new Chinese government would probably have to act in a similar fashion. Would a newly democratic Chinese government be interested in Korean unification? We can’t know, but it would represent a significant change from present attitudes. It’s possible that Vietnam and Laos could undergo similarly dramatic political changes, but a democratizing China wouldn’t necessarily cause authoritarian regimes in Southeast Asia to lose control.

If the U.S. started viewing China as a state with declining strength, how would that change U.S. policies in East Asia? Pei doesn’t go into detail on this point, since that is beyond the scope of his current article. If China’s strength really is declining, that would mean that there is even less need for the U.S. to counter-balance it than there is now. If things unfolded according to Pei’s scenario, much of the current U.S. military role in East Asia could very quickly become redundant and unnecessary, just as it did in Europe between 1989 and 1991.

Would that be the likely U.S. response to perceived Chinese declining strength? Probably not. We already know that the U.S. response to the end of the USSR and the subsequent decline of Russian power was to move into eastern Europe, expand NATO, and take advantage of Russian weakness. As it did in Russia during the 1990s, that sort of response would go down very poorly in a nominally democratic and probably even more nationalist China. If China were declining in strength, the smartest thing the U.S. could would be to avoid taking actions that the Chinese would perceive as humiliating and aggressive. The U.S. would want to reassure the new Chinese government that ours would not try to use their domestic transition to their disadvantage.