Early in 2014, Obama teased Putin that we had grown out of military solutions. That was before Russia invaded Ukraine and US bombers returned to the Middle East. Is it a fantasy to imagine that the economy has replaced the barrel of the gun as the real source of power? Or is this a short cut to Armageddon?

Rana Mitter is Professor of the History and Politics of Modern China at Oxford University. He is also a regular presenter of Night Waves and contributor to The Financial Times, History Today, and the London Review of Books.

Here, he speaks to the IAI about China’s global economic vision and the difference between soft power and military strength.

In the debate on IAI TV you argued that economic power has trumped military strength around the globe. Could you expand on that? How has that taken place?

I was thinking specifically about the Asia-Pacific region. On the one hand there’s a very obvious and, in some ways, alarming story about the growth in military power. The most obvious example of that is the major growth in Chinese military power in the region. A country which, in 2000, was spending about 12 billion US dollars a year in defence is now spending more than ten times as much than that. Japan is one of the other significant countries in the region that is spending more than 50 billion US dollars a year on defence. When you look at those sorts of statistics it’s understandable why people think that military power is going to be a major factor, and it is certainly important.