President Obama’s high-profile release of America’s big new strategic defense review has made it official: The brave new world of the War on Terror is a thing of the past, and the bad old world of global great-power politics is back. A new Great Game is afoot. In response to China’s debut of its first aircraft carrier, its more muscular attitude toward the smaller powers surrounding the South China Sea, and similar developments, the United States has begun a courtship of Myanmar, announced a permanent installation of 2,500 Marines in Australia, and crystallized the vision behind it all in a few key pages of the review document. Gone is the military emphasis on open-ended, resource-intensive counterinsurgency operations—with all its murky questions about the future of sovereignty and the transformation of war. In its place, the new strategic review elevates the “Asia Pacific”—thinly veiled code for China and anywhere near it—to a place of unprecedented prominence.

The President’s overt and deliberate strategic shift exhibits the classic response of a status quo power to the problems posed by a new power rising even marginally closer to parity. Among analysts, the move has ushered in visions of the Western world’s prickly state of affairs a hundred years ago, with today’s China playing the role of a 21^st-century German Empire. For writers across the conceptual spectrum, from The Diplomat to LewRockwell.com, the evocative comparison is as natural as it is worrisome. For the White House, however, the catastrophic run-up to the First World War would seem to make for a teachable moment. As Walter Russell Mead has argued, the Administration’s broader policy for the region promises to bring great flourishing to both sides of the Pacific, so long as China understands there will be real downsides to refusing to play by the so-called rules of the road. Instead of a tit-for-tat race to the belligerent bottom, perhaps the Obama strategy augurs the dawn of a true sphere of mutual prosperity for East Asia.

On the other hand, the differences between the present situation in the Pacific and the one that led to World War One may be far greater than the similarities, and U.S. policymakers ought to beware the limits of such a comparison. In at least four key ways, today’s China is quite unlike the Germany of the now-distant past. More important than the rhymes or echoes of history are the novel circumstances that define the strategic contours of the US-China relationship. Those circumstances, combined with America’s response to them, may make the future of that relationship more dangerous than any that Britain or the United States experienced with the Germans. Unfortunately, American efforts to avoid a Guns of August-style tinderbox could be planting depth charges capable of touching off a worse conflagration to come.

First, as was true in the years preceding World War I, the world economy is defined by a historically high degree of interdependence. Unlike strategists in 1912, however, we in 2012 must think through possible military conflicts that come after a global economic disaster. The aftermath of the 2008 economic crisis—and the aftershocks yet to come—should fundamentally change our understanding of the politics of economic interdependence. Not all economically interdependent relationships are created equal, and not all are equally good. The precarious U.S.-China web of liabilities, vulnerabilities, commitments and opportunities hardly guarantees that cooler heads and disinterested reason will prevail as competition and conflict heats up. If global economic interdependence failed to prevent the European alliance system from shattering the peace in 1914, the interdependence that persists in today’s rickety economic system is likely to raise the stakes of conflict and increase concerns in Beijing as well as Washington over relative rather than absolute gains.

Complex interdependence, once the West’s great hope for postwar stability, is not the only source of pressure for war. As with Germany, China is highly susceptible to being demonized (or “othered”, as the academics say). Even in today’s allegedly more cosmopolitan times, culture matters. But as the Rhodes Scholarship reminds us, Germany was once celebrated and respected as one of Western civilization’s brightest lights. Today’s appreciation for China’s newfound market dynamism and social energy falls far short of that mark. The problem of identity and difference supplies the United States with incentives for war with China that didn’t exist with Germany. America’s now decades-long conceptual obsession with getting ahead of the “next big threat” exacerbates the tendency of democracies to rush off to war when confronted with what appears to be a radically alien foe. The forces of jihadist Islam are indeed culturally alien, but nobody believes that they offer a rival system of governance. Despite all its reforms and changes, China does. In a way that was never true of Germany until years into World War Two, the seeds are already planted for the demonization of China as America’s next and truest existential threat.

The sheer size and power of China is also set to contribute to that stark view. Like the Germany of Bismarck and the Kaiser, China is a preeminent and rising manufacturing power with sizable ambitions to grow its market share and satisfy its resource demands. But behind these abstract economic similarities are some potent geostrategic complications. China is vastly bigger than Germany. Situated in a much larger theater of war, it is much harder to fight, much harder to beat, and essentially impossible to conquer. But limited war with China is likely to result, at best, in the sorts of disappointments already achieved in first Korea and then Vietnam. On the other hand, a general war with China will test American military infrastructure in ways war with Germany never did. Whether quantified in terms of territory, population or military size, China’s massive presence lends weight to the notion that any serious confrontation will escalate into a full conflict.

Nor is China’s geostrategic size limited to its sovereign territory. Around the world, China has already pushed into traditionally American spheres of influence (such as South America) to a degree Germany was unable to do. On the eve of the First World War, British military might was at its peak. America’s, by contrast, is significantly reduced, and is on track to be reduced even further. To be sure, President Obama has made plain that America’s ability to fight one war has been and will be retained. But if the United States will supposedly be well-prepared to win the one war that it fights, the President is in the odd position of furnishing very little information that would lead observers to conclude that the one war the United States can win will be with China. It is unclear which other single war the Administration might be planning for. Europe’s interlocking turn-of-the-century alliance systems guaranteed general war, but they also left little to chance or doubt when it came to predicting which combatants would take which side. American intentions are clear, but those of Russia, North Korea and other regional powers are less so. It’s possible that configuration decreases the odds of a domino effect, but if one does happen, it will come as a more painful surprise.

In sum, despite some enduring resonances, the strategic landscape of early 20^th century Europe is not an effective place to turn for comparisons to the contemporary Asia Pacific. What’s more, in all likelihood, there are no good historical parallels. The United States has never faced a strategic threat like China before—and has never before been entangled in a relationship of such complex and inauspicious interdependence with a strategic threat of any size. What we can conclude is that the new Pacific strategy should not come with a new sense of complacency or comprehensive control. Policymakers might be entitled to feel some confidence that they are making the best of a difficult situation. But they should be keenly aware of just how difficult the President’s new strategy may soon cause it to become. The United States launches its play for Asian prosperity on its own terms from a position of great weakness: Whatever the benefits of the new strategy, should American prosperity continue to falter in a significant way, its central premise will swiftly become an irrelevant failure. Severed from the prosperity pitch that had made it so palatable, the President’s Pacific strategy will be reduced to little more than a risky military gamble made on the cheap.