For Americans, the drift may feel dispiriting. As my colleague Ross Douthat wrote last week, there has been a striking turn in global opinion against the United States in the past decade, with the invasion of Ukraine only slightly denting the otherwise steady trajectories. According to “A World Divided: Russia, China, and the West,” a report published in the fall by the University of Cambridge’s Bennett Institute for Public Policy, public opinion among developing countries is more favorable to Russia than to the United States, even in the aftermath of invasion of Ukraine. For the first time, it was more favorable to China, as well.

But one curious feature of this turn is that, by some conventional measures of global status, the United States is not experiencing any great decline. As The Economist recently emphasized in a cover story on America’s “astonishing economy,” whatever the problems of our society and our politics and however bleakly Americans themselves regard the state and future of the country, by topline economic standards the U.S. remains a serious juggernaut.

Since the end of the Cold War and through the post-9/11 era — a period often characterized by America’s stumbles and China’s rise — the U.S. share of global G.D.P. hasn’t fallen at all. Its share of the output of the Group of 7 nations has grown by almost half, from 40 percent in 1990 to 58 percent today, and, “adjusted for purchasing power, only those in uber-rich petrostates and financial hubs enjoy a higher income per person.” Those same adjusted incomes are higher in Mississippi, America’s poorest state, than in Macron’s France; subtract Paris and the comparison looks even worse. In Britain, the adjusted average income is only as high as in Arkansas (and that’s including London, of course.)

Cross-country comparisons like these aren’t perfect, as anyone admiring the social-welfare states of Northern Europe or lamenting America’s Covid response — or life expectancy crisis — could tell you. But they do say something about the enduring economic clout and status of the United States on the world stage.

At the same time, China’s star isn’t as inarguably ascendant as it might have appeared just a few years ago. The country’s population, long seen as the engine of future global dominance, has probably already peaked, and seems set for a pretty precipitous decline. It has hit a number of speed bumps — once-unthinkable quarters of recession, crises in the real estate and construction sectors — that have already forced analysts to reconsider near-universal predictions that China would soon become the world’s largest economy. And despite the outward triumph and political pageantry of the recent Communist Party congress that reappointed Xi Jinping to an unprecedented third term as president, the abrupt and messy end of “zero Covid” signaled considerable internal social and political tumult.