I feel the same. This is especially apparent with how they handle their territorial disputes in South East Asia.
Hard to become a superpower when you are antagonizing your neighbors.
I think the historical super-powers would disagree. Rome conquered all its neighbours. Britain had mostly terrible relations with France from the 11th to the end of the 19th century (and, at least according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_modern_great_powers, both can be reasonably viewed as superpowers in the 19th century).
And I'm fairly sure that the USA's relations with Latin America could readily be described as "antagonizing your neighbors" ...
The main point I take from history is that the past does not necessarily determine the future. There's no such thing as fate. The Nazis could have won if they didn't make certain strategic errors. If Rome didn't make certain strategic errors, it would still be an empire today. China itself is older than Rome and there's really no guarantees that they don't win this whole cold war or whatever it is that's brewing.
I just don't see the same type of century old analogies panning out in today's world. A superpower cannot antagonize, bully, invade and destroy neighbors like they used to in 13th century.
Your point of the Nazi party sounds plausible - if Nazi party had slowly built up their power, I think they'd had a hard time spreading on a global scale.
But the cold war still happened and it lasted a long time and there were many proxy wars fought in the process.
If world economy tanked for some reason and we found ourselves in another great depression, then all bets are off, though. Desperate people will do desperate things. They are more easily manipulated.
Any number of things could shift and the world is not as well put together as we would like to believe. It's a lot of duct tape and glue holding the whole thing together.
Rome never forced Latin language on their members the way Mandarin was. Count the extant variants of Chinese and how they declined. In fact Greek was held in high esteem in the Roman empire.
This is not entirely true; Rome sent in the legions only when it had to. It “conquered” most of Britain via soft power, coopting local elites, introducing hypocausts, aqueducts and so on. Where it had to use hard power, it failed hence Hadrian’s Wall.
Er, is this true? I'd have thought quite the opposite: hard to become a superpower _without_ antagonizing neighbors.
Then again, the US has antagonized many countries simply by electing Donald Trump.
[1] In the inter-war period, the US military used a series of color classification schemes to sketch out what the US response to wars with various countries would look like. Red was Britain. And in event of war with the UK, the US plan was to invade Canada, irrespective of Canada declaring neutrality (which was Canada's plan in such a scenario).
Not to mention there's lots of dislike towards Trump's tendency to rip up treaties just because Obama signed them--Vietnam wasn't happy about Trump dropping TPP, Europe was not a fan of him leaving the Paris climate treaty or the Iran nuclear treaty, etc.
Canada has almost always been a virtual non-entity due to things like their incredible population sparsity and longitudinal cultural/economic integration with regions of the US. They are a counterexample, but the pattern very much points in my direction IMO.
On top of that, we're talking about _becoming_ a superpower, not being one. Once you're already a superpower, your neighbors often become varying degrees of vassal, which is why Mexico and Canada are among our closest allies. You're hardly a superpower if you haven't neutralized your neighbors (diplomatically or otherwise). Look at the blood feuds over tiny bits of land in the rest of the world, and consider how cool Mexico seemingly is with their land's massive, unprovoked conquest. They accepted it (and their good relationship with us) because they didn't have a better choice.
How many superpowers can you think of that didn't antagonize their neighbors, especially on their way to becoming one? Rome? Persia? Britain? Russia?
UK is an island and a seabased power whose primary interest in Europe was to prevent the creation of a dominant European power which could overpower it. Therefore it created a number of alliances and rivalries to serve this purpose. On other continents, however, it were more aggressive to secure trade and colonies.
The USSR as a landbased Empire that had a flat border to the west, was fairly hostile to its western neighbors in Eastern Europe and even to China to the East. Although a Russian would argue that they created buffer states in response to the memory of being invaded twice by Napoleon and Hitler.
The USA is a sea based empire with a continent behind it. Therefore it originally was very hostile against its neighbors, be they Native American or European colonies. After securing the continent by reaching the Pacific, it ensured the dominance of the Caribbean through the Monroe Doctrine (similar to China's position vis-a-vis the South China Sea) today. And then afterwards played Balance of Power against any major power from emerging on Eurasia.
China has a number of formidable foes on its immediate periphery. It is almost impossible to dominate them all militarily, especially with the US against it. Therefore it will attempt to establish economic dominance over Southeast Asia and the Middle East. The Belt and Road initiative alleviates it from a over reliance on Sea based imports of oil (especially through the Strait of Malacca which the US navy could easily blockade).
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/f4af/bb82f1b7920fa9444e29eb...
Nearly the entire history of the Ancient Near East was superpowers antagonizing their neighbors. Throughout human history, superpowers NOT antagonizing their neighbors is almost unheard of. The easiest way to become a superpower, historically, was to antagonize your neighbors.