To be fair to the article, it does actually talk about this question:
"Chinese leaders today may be making the same error as past aspiring hegemons. And China, for all its growing might, starts from a less formidable position. At their peak in 1941, the Axis powers had a combined GDP larger than that of the U.S. and only a little smaller than the combined GDP of the U.S. and Britain. Today the U.S. and its allies and partners (which includes most of Europe, Japan, India, South Korea, Australia and others) produce over 50% of the world’s wealth, while China and Russia together produce a little over 20%."
You can question the inclusion of India in "allies and partners," but it is correct that the Axis powers had a combined GDP similar to that of US + Britain, and that China + Russia has a combined GDP less than that of NATO + Japan + South Korea, today.
But I think we're getting ahead of ourselves on this theory. The problem is rather two-fold: first, to make the US and its allies seem like the emerging power of today really requires putting India into the equation. Otherwise, all of NATO + Japan + South Korea are mature, declining powers, and even combined their population is < that of China, which was not the case for Allies vs Axis during World War 2. This is probably why the US is so committed to getting India on its side no matter the costs, allowing Indians to essentially walk all over the US's face in terms of ignoring sanctions, telling the US to **** off with its demands, etc.
Second, the Axis powers were actually capable of victory during World War 2. It was a series of poor strategic decisions - including the invasion of the Soviet Union by Germany and Japan's attempt to conquer all of China - that made it possible for the Americans and the British to prevail.
This is where the comparison with modern affairs totally collapses. Germany and Japan were trying to create VAST empires, to control populations and territories several times that of their imperial core. They became over stretched very quickly because of the nature of these goals. By the time the US was at Japan's door steps, a huge fraction of their military was still fighting knee deep on the front lines of China. They were never able to bring the full power of their military to bear on the US.
And Germany? Germany had it even worse because they made the historic decision to invade the Soviet Union, a much larger country with far more population. The Germans then ended up fighting on two-fronts against two great powers, both of which were larger than itself. No country could've won that fight.
But if the Germans were more conservative with their targets? If they settled for continental Western Europe only and made concessions to the Soviet Union? If the Japanese were content with South Korea and Taiwan and oil producing regions in Southeast Asia? Then World War 2 might've ended differently. If not for the Japanese, then at least for the Germans, since if the Soviet Union ended up being the "third party" to the war, then it's likely that they would've seen the US as equally threatening to the Communist agenda. Which would've forced a three-way stand off in which no party would've been able to prevail against the other two combined, and so there would've had to have been a settled peace.
The analogy with today is if NATO + Japan + South Korea ended up fighting against China + Russia and then the rest of the world, including India, decided to stay the **** out of the war. In fact, that's the most likely scenario, and with the limited ambitions of the China + Russia side, it's not at all obvious to me that it wouldn't result in a settled peace. If China stopped at Taiwan and Russia stopped at Ukraine, they'd never become over stretched, and so would be in much better positions compared to Japan and Germany to weather the war.
Ironically, the article even makes an implicit statement about this - that Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany should've been content with their initial success of becoming great powers - instead of pressing for much more. Well, I think that could also apply to China, since the desired world order for China is not a vast empire over Asia, but just a buffer zone against the US and its allies in the Pacific.
