"One standard narrative is that as we recede, China will step up as part of a benign post-American world. "

Robert D. Kaplan has a challenging Oregonian op-ed “No time for U.S. to flinch” which argues (here):

Americans rightly lack an imperial mentality. But lessening our engagement with the world would have devastating consequences for humanity. The disruptions we witness today are but a taste of what is to come should our country flinch from its international responsibilities.

I think the U.S. does not have the resources to continue its current level and mode of engagement with the world. I am for reducing and shifting our mode of engagement. Put simply, we should have less troops and more students abroad.

But even Kaplan recognizes the increasing resource limitations facing the U.S.

Husbanding our power to slow America's decline in a post-Iraq and post-Afghanistan world would mean avoiding debilitating land entanglements and focusing instead on being more of an offshore balancer: that is, lurking with our air and sea forces over the horizon, intervening only when outrages are committed that unquestionably threaten our allies and world order in general. While this may be in America's interest, the very signaling of such an aloof intention may encourage regional bullies, given that rogue regimes are the organizing principles for some pivotal parts of the world.

But Oregon leaders take note, and stop your dithering, if you are even doing that, over expanding Mandarin and study abroad programs in China, Kaplan recognizes how central China will be to our futures:

North Korea already plows onward with its nuclear weapons program, even as it lobs artillery shells on a South Korean island, demonstrating the limits of both U.S. and Chinese power in a semi-anarchic world. During the Cold War, North Korea was kept in its box by the Soviet Union while the U.S. Navy dominated the Pacific as though it were an American lake. Now China's economic dominance of the region, coupled with our distracting land wars in the Middle East, is transforming the western Pacific from a benign and stable environment to a more uncertain and complex one.

China's navy is decades behind America's, but that should offer little consolation. The United States, having just experienced asymmetric warfare on land, should now expect asymmetric challenges at sea. With its improving mine-warfare capability, seabed sonar networks and cyber-warfare in the service of anti-ship ballistic missiles, not to mention its diesel-electric and nuclear submarines, China will make U.S. Navy operations more dangerous over the coming years.

As for Taiwan, China has 1,500 short-range ballistic missiles pointed at the island, even as hundreds of commercial flights each week link Taiwan with the mainland in peaceful commerce. When China effectively incorporates Taiwan in the years to come, that will signal the arrival of a truly multipolar and less predictable military environment in East Asia.

And:

One standard narrative is that as we recede, China will step up as part of a benign post-American world. But this presupposes that all imperial powers are the same, even when history clearly demonstrates that they are not. Nor does one empire sequentially fill the gap left by another.

While the Soviet Union and the United States were both missionary powers motivated by ideals -- communism and liberal democracy -- through which they might order the world, China has no such grand conception. It is driven abroad by the hunger for natural resources (hydrocarbons, minerals and metals) that it requires to raise hundreds of millions of its citizens into the middle class.

This could abet the development of a trading system between the Indian Ocean, Africa and Central Asia that might maintain peace with minimal American involvement. But who is to fill the moral void? Does China really care if Tehran develops nuclear weapons, so long as it has access to Iran's natural gas? And Beijing may not be entirely comfortable with the North Korean regime, which keeps its population in a state of freeze-frame semi-starvation, but China props it up nevertheless.

It can be argued that with power comes moral responsibility, but decades probably will pass before China has the kind of navy and air force that would lead it to become an authentic partner in an international security system. For the moment, Beijing gets a free ride off the protection of the world's sea lanes that the U.S. Navy helps provide, and it watches us struggle to stabilize Afghanistan and Pakistan so that China can one day extract their natural resources.

So, as China rises uncertainly, Oregon’s business, political and educational leaders just watch and do nothing.  No efforts to engage China for our mutual futures! No state funded expansion of Mandarin immersion programs (like in Utah)!  No creation of a statewide, cost-neutral high school study abroad in China program! Nor any serious expansion of Mandarin and study abroad in China at the Oregon University System level!  Just ignore, deny, dither and vacillate all across the our leadership classes.

Kaplan's op-ed has implications for both the next Portland School Board meeting and for the legislature to convene in January, and not just for our foreign policy elites in Washington, D.C.