These comparisons are not neutral, and one may detect in the analogy between China today and nineteenth-century Germany an element of that guilty pleasure in others’ troubles that the Germans call “Schadenfreude.” Asia may be doing well economically now, according to this view, but just wait: rising nationalism, China’s appetite for power, and the rest of Asia’s desire to curb its ambitions will necessarily impede economic growth and restore the West’s global primacy.