“I’m the guy who went to live in China and came away believing in the U.S.,” former Financial Times Beijing bureau chief Geoff Dyer told a Zócalo audience.

Dyer, the author of a new book, The Contest of the Century: The New Era of Competition With China—and How America Can Win, offered up two propositions. The first is that the U.S. is entering a new era of geopolitical competition with China. The second is that the odds remain in America’s favor.

Under Deng Xiaoping’s leadership from 1978 to 1992, explained Dyer, China was passive in international relations, focusing instead on economic growth. But in the past five years, the country has become a great power that wants to shape the world. “We use the phrase ‘rising China,’” said Dyer, “but in a lot of ways, China has already risen.”

Dyer attributed China’s newfound strength to converging factors. The financial crisis of 2008 and 2009 had a powerful impact on China, starting a new conversation there about American decline. China had long debated what path the country should take once it became powerful: Should it challenge the U.S. or integrate itself into the global economy the U.S. forged? After the financial crisis, with the U.S economy weakened and China still growing, that debate was no longer hypothetical.

Since World War II, said Dyer, the world has been run by institutions the U.S. created, under U.S. values, and funded with U.S. money. China is starting to push back against this America-centric global order and to demonstrate that it too should have a say.

This challenge to the U.S. is unprecedented. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union’s economy was approximately half the size of the U.S. economy. In the next decade, China will likely become the biggest economy in the world—and could become twice the size of the U.S. economy.

China is challenging America on three fronts, said Dyer. One is the military (China’s defense budget has increased 10 percent a year for two decades), especially the navy: China has built “an anti-navy—a series of missiles specifically designed to go after American ships.” The country’s not trying to start a war but rather to push the U.S. out from Asia and gain control of the seas around China. A second is currency: China is trying to challenge the U.S. dollar both to help Chinese companies and for political reasons. Right now in Hong Kong, China is experimenting with allowing foreigners to buy Chinese currency, trade in it, and invest in it in order to increase China’s presence in the international economy. The third challenge is via so-called “soft power”—culture, media, business—which Dyer called an “obsession” of Chinese leaders. The country is currently focused on bringing the media overseas. The most prominent digital billboard in Times Square today features Coca-Cola (the biggest brand in the world), Samsung (the biggest cell phone company), and the Xinhua News Agency, China’s state press agency.

Despite these challenges, the U.S. is in a strong position to maintain its power and influence. The rest of Asia is also rising, and China has begun throwing its weight around—which makes countries like South Korea, Vietnam, and Japan feel threatened. This gives the U.S. partners and allies in the region—and a reason to stay engaged there.

That doesn’t mean facing the China challenge is going to be easy. For the U.S. to maintain its position and geopolitical status, our country needs to “have a sense of focus in the way it thinks about the world,” said Dyer. America tends to treat “every nook and cranny on the planet” as if it’s important to national security. Instead, the country needs to focus on the important parts of the world—and realize what regions are less important in the long term. (Dyer pointed to the question of U.S. involvement in the Syrian civil war as an example.) America also has to use wise diplomacy in Asia to show that it is there for the long run. And it needs to develop an economic strategy and story that links future U.S. prosperity to prosperity in Asia.

In the question-and-answer session, audience members asked Dyer to open up the conversation to other countries and continents.

When asked how he sees Russia playing into Chinese strategy, Dyer joked that Vladimir Putin wakes up every morning and thinks, “‘How can I screw America today?’” Moving close to China would be one way to accomplish that, and collaboration between these two countries would make it much harder for the U.S. to retain global influence. But Russia has its own problems with China, said Dyer—including over energy and China’s influence in Central Asia.

In response to a question about how China’s presence in Africa relates to his argument, Dyer said that China has become hugely influential in a number of African countries—and has taken a great deal of responsibility for African growth rates over the past decade. But he cautioned that the U.S. should not get more involved in Africa just because China is there. This isn’t a Cold War, he said, reiterating his point that the U.S. needs to focus on the parts of the world that serve the country’s best interests.