TY - JOUR
AU - Layne,, Christopher
AB - Abstract During the Trump administration, Sino-American relations have deteriorated to the point where the new consensus in the U.S. foreign policy establishment is that a new Cold War has begun between the U.S. and China. This article looks at the origins of the “first Cold War” for insight into how a second Cold War might be avoided. There is a danger of the Cold War turning hot because of power transition dynamics. This article also invokes the pre-1914 Anglo-German rivalry, and argues that if conflict is to be avoided, the U.S. must accommodate China's rise by yielding hegemony in East Asia and meeting China's status claim. Introduction Even before the Covid-19pandemic, Sino-American relations were in a downward spiral. Under President Donald Trump, the United States initiated a trade war with China and intensified the high-tech competition with Beijing by trying to cripple leading Chinese firms. In the realm of geopolitics, in its National Security Strategy, the administration declared that ‘after being dismissed as a phenomenon of an earlier century, great power competition returned’. China and Russia, the national security strategy document says, are reasserting ‘their influence regionally and globally [and] are contesting our geopolitical advantages and trying to change the international order in their favor’.1 Trump’s hard-line stance against China has resonated in Washington with national security hawks concerned about China’s military buildup; economic nationalists concerned with the loss of manufacturing jobs and high-tech supremacy to China; and human rights advocates angered by Chinese actions in Hong Kong and against Uighurs in Xinjiang. The Covid-19 pandemic has caused Sino-American relations to go from bad to worse. As Martin Wolf, chief economics commentator for The Financial Times has noted, ‘The pandemic may not itself transform the world, but it can accelerate changes under way’, such as those besetting Sino-American relations.2 Events seemingly validate Wolf’s observation. Seeking to tap into extant negative perceptions of China held by the American public, the Trump administration is attempting to deflect attention away from its own tardy, bumbling response to the pandemic by accusing Beijing of covering-up the seriousness of the Covid-19 outbreak in Wuhan.3 Moreover, US intelligence agencies are investigating allegations that the coronavirus escaped from a biological research laboratory in Wuhan.4 The Trump administration’s finger-pointing at China is affecting both US national security policy and international economic policy. For example, the Pentagon is using the pandemic as leverage to request additional spending to counter Chinese military power.5 Republican China hawks in Congress are using the pandemic to push for hard-nosed policies on defense, trade, and human rights.6 With respect to trade policy, the administration is using the pandemic as a reason for ‘re-shoring’ manufacturing jobs from China back to the United States and also is pushing American firms to reorient their supply chains away from China.7 The pandemic also is impacting American domestic politics—in ways that will affect US foreign policy. Trump’s reelection strategy aims at exploiting growing anti-China sentiment in the United States by blaming China for the pandemic and attacking former Vice President Joseph R. Biden (the Democratic nominee for president) as being ‘soft’ on China.8 In the Congressional races, many Republican candidates are planning to follow a similar approach. They want to divert attention from the Trump administration’s bungled response to the pandemic by bashing China and pinning the blame on Beijing for the Covid-19 crisis and the massive economic dislocation it has caused in the United States. Republican political strategists have concluded that fanning the flames of anti-China sentiment is their only viable path to victory in the 2020 elections. As the The New York Times has reported, ‘Republicans increasingly believe that elevating China as an archenemy culpable for the spread of the virus, and harnessing America’s growing animosity toward Beijing, may be the best way to salvage a difficult election’.9 Whether this path to electoral victory works for Trump and his Republican allies remains to be seen. However, this domestic political strategy will have important foreign policy consequences; most importantly, by setting the stage for the Second Cold War. In Washington, D.C., talk of a new Cold War—with China—preceded the pandemic. It began shortly after Trump took office and steadily has grown in both volume and vehemence. In a July 2019 column, The Financial Times’s Edward Luce—a keen observer of American politics—confessed that ‘The speed with which US political leaders of all stripes have united behind the idea of a “new cold war” is something that takes my breath away’.10As Luce observed, less than two years ago, the notion that the United States and China were locked in a new Cold War was dismissed as ‘fringe scaremongering’. But now, he says, ‘it is consensus’. Similarly, Rana Mitter, a noted China scholar at Oxford University, says: ‘There may only be one bipartisan issue in Washington, D.C. these days: China’. Republicans and Democrats argue that containing Chinese power is the most important foreign policy task facing the United States and the broader west’.11 And, for good measure, after noting that ties between the United States and China used to rest on the belief that theirs was a win-win relationship, The Economist says things have changed: ‘Today winning seems to involve the other lot’s defeat—a collapse that permanently subordinates China to the American order; or a humbled America that retreats from the western Pacific. It is a new kind of cold war that could leave no winners at all’.12 The trade war has been overshadowed by the realization that the US-China rivalry could, in the decades ahead, culminate in a real war.13 Of course, from the American standpoint, none of this should be happening. When the Soviet Union imploded between 1989 and 1991, the Cold War’s end supposedly meant ‘the end of history’—the final triumph of America’s liberal democratic/capitalist ideology and, perforce, the end of great power politics.14 As did America’s post-Cold War ‘unipolar moment’.15 Admittedly, when Charles Krauthammer first proposed the idea of a unipolar moment, he suggested that it would last three or four decades (and by that projection, it should be over now or nearly so). However, 10 years later he said, ‘That seemed bold at the time. Today, it seems rather modest. The unipolar moment has become the unipolar era’.16 Any notion that the United States’ relative power was declining—or ever could—was given short shrift by the American foreign policy establishment. US security studies scholars also dismissed the notion that unipolarity would trigger counterbalancing against the United States.17 Until quite recently, with the exception of hyperrealists like John Mearsheimer, many leading American scholars had a relaxed view of the role a risen China would play in international politics. Princeton professor G. John Ikenberry, for example, dismissed the idea that China would attempt to overthrow the liberal rules-based international order (LRBIO) that the United States constructed following World War II. Rather, he said, because China rose to great power status within its framework, a risen China would uphold the LRBIO.18 According to many US policymakers and foreign policy analysts, after its admission to the World Trade Organization in December 2001, China would liberalize—politically as well as economically. Rather than being conflictive, the Sino-American relationship—‘Chimerica’—would be one of mutually beneficial cooperation within the LRBIO’s confines, with Beijing playing the role of America’s junior partner.19 These beliefs drew heavily on the work of American international relations scholars and also were rooted in US political culture; that is, liberal ideology. Hindsight, of course, is always 20/20. But it should have been apparent even in the early 1990s that these beliefs rested on a flimsy intellectual foundation. The ballyhooed post-Cold War peace turned out to be a peace of illusions. My starting point in this article is that a Second—Sino-American—Cold War could too easily veer into a real conflict. Developments on the American side increase the chances of this because the American foreign policy establishment increasingly views the Sino-American rivalry though the lens of ideology—American liberalism vs. Chinese communism—rather than as a traditional great power rivalry. When ideology is inserted into the equation, it is all too easy to see one’s rival as the embodiment of evil. Once that happens, it is difficult to employ diplomacy to adjust differences because compromising with an ‘evil’ state would be ‘appeasement’.20 Of course, during the First Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union did not come to blows. To be sure, there were some dicey moments—the Cuban missile crisis (1962) and the Berlin crises (1948–1949, 1958–1961), but the standard lesson that most security studies scholars have drawn from the First Cold War is that nuclear deterrence will preserve peace. Perhaps, but there still are reasons to worry that the United States and China could (in David Lloyd George’s words) slither into war. We have, for example, in the 1999 Kargil crisis, an example of two nuclear armed states—India and Pakistan—engaging in a limited conventional war. There may a lesson here about the effect of the ‘stability/instability paradox’, which holds that rather than guaranteeing peace, a standoff at the nuclear level will push conflict down to the conventional level.21 There is also the fact that technological advances—miniaturization of nuclear warhead yields and precision delivery systems—may make the ‘unthinkable’ quite thinkable in the guise of fighting a limited nuclear war. And, given the geographic configuration of the Sino-American rivalry, a hot war could begin as a limited conventional conflict fought at sea.22 There are, in short, a number of pathways to conflict. The more US policymakers become convinced that the conflict with China is fundamentally an ideological struggle, the less likely it is that Washington and Beijing will be able to find a modus vivendi that resolves their differences without war. In this article, I make four specific arguments. First, the new Cold War consensus that is emerging in Washington is a tacit acknowledgment of two important—inextricably connected—points: the unipolar era is over, which, ipso facto, signifies the relative decline of American power. Many in the American foreign policy establishment are having trouble come to grips with this. Second, I explain the dynamics that are leading to the end of the end of America’s unipolar moment in East Asia. American security studies scholars are good at adducing arguments that purport to explain why other states do not—and should not—regard the United States’ preponderant power as threatening.23 On the contrary, building on hegemonic stability theory, American primacy is said to be both benevolent and beneficent. For example, the United States provides important ‘public goods’ for the international system. In terms of security, the United States acts as a ‘regional stabilizer’ in Europe, East Asia, and the Middle East, and it plays the leading role in managing the global economy. Advocates of American primacy argue that other states have no reason to balance against the United States, and, that even if they have cause to do so, they will not because America’s power (military, economic, and technological) is so overwhelming that they could not hope to catch up to United States. So how is it that China has emerged as a ‘peer competitor’ of the United States? In a nutshell, I show that the flip side of hegemonic stability theory is hegemonic instability: over concentration of power leads to counterbalancing—even in a unipolar world. Third, I revisit the First Cold War, which for the United States had huge tangible and intangible costs. There were the casualties incurred in the Korean and Vietnam Wars. There were opportunity costs associated with spending so much of America’s wealth in massive defense budgets rather than investing in the nation’s domestic welfare.24 There was the seemingly permanent ‘militarization’ of all aspects of American life that congealed during the First Cold War.25 And the First Cold War resulted in the expansion of the federal government’s reach, the erosion of civil liberties, and the vast accretion of the executive branch’s power (the ‘imperial presidency’) at the expense of Congress. These costs were attributable largely to the decision that American policymakers made following World War II to wage the First Cold War as a Manichean ideological struggle against Soviet communism rather than as a traditional great power rivalry. Fourth, I look at the trends that now are shaping America’s policy toward China. The United States seems to be repeating the same mistakes today with China that it made with the Soviet Union some three quarters of a century ago. These mistakes are being compounded because the Sino-American competition poses a real life test of a fundamental conundrum of international relations theory: Can transitions between international orders be peaceful? My conclusion is that it is the United States that controls the off-ramp for avoiding a conflictive Sino-American struggle for mastery in East Asia.26 In the coming years, unless Washington acknowledges Beijing’s claims to regional hegemony in East Asia, and China’s status as a great power equal, the deterioration of the US-China relationship will accelerate. The Continuation of History: From the Unipolar Moment to the Return of Great Power Politics When the First Cold War ended with the Berlin Wall’s fall (1989), and the collapse of the Soviet Union (1991), US policymakers, foreign policy analysts, and pundits alike proclaimed that the demise of its erstwhile superpower rival had ushered in the beginning of America’s ‘unipolar moment’—a post-Cold War international system in which the United States was, as American policymakers never tired of pointing out, the ‘sole remaining superpower’. In the First Cold War’s wake, American policy makers, and many security studies scholars, believed that unipolarity would be long-lasting—‘durable’—and sustainable.27 By and large they still do.28 It is unsurprising, therefore, that since the First Cold War’s end, preserving America’s preponderant power has been the overriding grand strategic goal of each administration beginning with that of George H. W. Bush. Since the First Cold War ended, American policymakers and scholars have used different terms to characterize the aims of US grand strategy: unipolarity, empire, hegemony, preponderance of power, American leadership, ascendancy, etc. The variety of terms can be seen as introducing a degree of conceptual fuzziness into discussions of post-1989 American grand strategy. Nevertheless, a common thread runs through each of these terms, as is the case with ‘primacy’, which seems to have become the term of choice to describe American policy. Underlying each of these terms is the belief that the United States is, and must remain, the dominant power in the international system. This means that the United States must prevent any other state from challenging its paramountcy.29 This is not about unipolarity as an abstract international relations theory concept. Rather, it reflects that the American foreign policy establishment likes the idea of a unipolar system as long as the United States ‘uni’. Although their respective policies are differentiated by nuances, broadly speaking, each post-Cold War administration has subscribed to this view of America’s world role. President George H. W. Bush laid the foundation in his January 1992 State of the Union speech when he declared, ‘A world once divided into two armed camps now recognizes one sole and preeminent superpower: the United States of America’.30 His administration’s draft Defense Planning Guidance for Fiscal Years 1994–99 stated that the United States ‘must maintain the mechanisms for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role’.31 There was a firestorm of criticism when this document was leaked to the The New York Times, and it was formally disowned by the administration. However, the document’s core concepts were incorporated into the administration’s Regional Defense Strategy, which did become policy.32 The administration’s leading grand strategic architects—many of whom played a key role in the George W. Bush administration—favored preservation of unchallenged US geopolitical supremacy.33 For its part, the Clinton administration declared both that the United States was ‘the world’s preeminent power’ and its ‘indispensable nation’.34 During the Clinton administration, the Pentagon produced its Joint Vision 2020 strategy paper, which called for the United States to maintain ‘full spectrum dominance’ over any potential rivals.35 According to the George W. Bush administration, the aim of US grand strategy was to prevent any other power from ‘surpassing, or equaling, the power of the United States’.36 Unsurprisingly, given that its key foreign policy positions were staffed largely by Clinton administration veterans, leading Obama administration officials—though perhaps not Barack Obama himself—were wedded to preserving US primacy. The Obama administration declared that it was ‘focused on renewing American leadership so that we can more effectively advance our interests’ and also that ‘going forward there should be no doubt: the United States of America will continue to underwrite global security’.37 And, as the The New York Times reported, the Obama administration’s 2015 National Security Strategy used the phrase ‘American leadership’—a codeword for US primacy/hegemony—or variations thereof, nearly 100 times in a 29-page document.38 Emphasizing the need to ‘overmatch’ the military capabilities of all potential adversaries, the Trump administration apparently is as committed as its post-Cold War predecessors to maintaining America’s primacy.39 Notwithstanding the American foreign policy establishment’s professed commitment to US primacy, there is an obvious cognitive dissonance in elite thinking: there is no easy fit between China’s rise as a great power and continuing American primacy. Outward expressions of confidence in American primacy mask unacknowledged inner doubts about the changing balance of power. For example, the Obama administration’s ‘pivot’ to Asia was an (at least) implicit recognition of China’s rise and the shifting balance of power in East Asia.40 The same can be said of the Trump administration’s ‘Indo-Pacific’ strategy.41 The panicky ‘inside-the-beltway’ rhetoric about a new Cold War with China is difficult to reconcile with assertions of continuing US geopolitical supremacy. Similarly, the now fashionable contention that great power politics has ‘returned’—with Sino-American relations as the catalyst—is inconsistent with the still prevalent belief in US policy and academic circles that the international system remains unipolar. After all, great power politics can only ‘return’ if there is more than one great power. If a new great power—China—indeed has emerged to challenge America’s post-1991 unipolar dominance, we need to revisit the neuralgic issue (for American policy makers and security studies scholars) of whether US power is in relative decline. In fact, the relative decline of US power has been ongoing since the late 1960s. But it was largely overlooked, because, during the 1970s and 1980s, it was US allies like (West) Germany and Japan that were chipping away at the United States’ economic supremacy—not its geopolitical foe, the Soviet Union. Because they depended on the United States for their security during the First Cold War, West German and Japanese gains in relative economic power posed no geostrategic risk for the United States. Nevertheless, publication of Yale historian Paul Kennedy’s 1987 book, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers triggered a fierce debate about the nature of American power.42 In arguing that the United States was experiencing the gradual erosion of its economic predominance, Kennedy was not alone. Other prominent scholars making this case included David Calleo, James Chace, Robert Gilpin, and Samuel P. Huntington.43 The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers resonated because it dovetailed with popular fears that the United States—enervated by its First Cold War exertions—was being surpassed economically by Japan (and, to a lesser extent, West Germany).44 While Kennedy’s thesis struck a responsive chord with the public, it hit a raw nerve with the American foreign policy establishment, which lashed out at the notion that the United States was declining. Two leading establishment scholars, Harvard professors Samuel P. Huntington and Joseph S. Nye, Jr., went so far as to label Kennedy (and the others making similar arguments) as ‘declinists’.45 Kennedy’s sin, apparently, was to puncture the myth of American Exceptionalism by suggesting that the United States was not immune from the pattern of great power rise and fall that he described in his book.46 Contrary to the way in which their arguments were portrayed by Nye and Huntington, Kennedy and the others did not claim either that the United States already had declined steeply or that it would soon undergo a rapid, catastrophic collapse (Nor, it should be said, did they advocate American decline). Rather they pointed to domestic political, financial, and economic drivers that were in play and which, over time, would cause American economic power to continue declining relative to the rest of the world. In other words, the so-called declinists contended that the United States was afflicted by a slow—‘termite’—decline caused by fundamental structural weaknesses in the US economy and by differential growth rates between the United States and other centers of economic power that gradually were eroding the foundations of American supremacy.47 Over time, Kennedy argued, America’s relative decline would cause a shift in the global distribution of power. Kennedy himself explicitly was looking ahead to the effects that America’s termite decline would have on United States’ world role in the early 21st century. As he wrote, ‘The task facing American statesman over the next decades… is to recognize that broad trends are under way, and that there is a need to “manage” affairs so that the relative erosion of the United States’ position takes place slowly and smoothly, and is not accelerated by policies which bring merely short-term advantage but longer-term disadvantage’.48 The debate sparked by The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers was like a summer thunderstorm: intense but brief. It ended when, in short order, the United States’ main geopolitical and economic rivals—the Soviet Union and Japan, respectively—experienced dramatic reversals of fortune. The Soviet Union unraveled, and, in the early 1990s, Japan’s economic bubble burst, plunging it into a cycle of deflation and low growth from which it has yet to recover. Thus, seemingly overnight, the threats to the United States’ military and economic dominance vanished from the international chessboard. In this context, it is easy to understand why the 1990s were a time of euphoric American triumphalism that wiped away any thoughts of US decline. On the contrary, the ‘unipolar moment’ and the ‘end of history’—along with the emergence of the so-called Washington consensus—seemed to confirm that both America’s power and its ideology were unchallengeable in the post-Cold War world. Notwithstanding China’s ascent, and the Great Recession, in three decades or so since the First Cold War’s end, when it comes to the question of national decline, the consensus view of the American foreign policy establishment essentially is unchanged. The very notion of American decline invariably is dismissed out of hand. As then-President Barack Obama said in his 2012 State of the Union address, ‘anyone who tells you that America is in decline or that our influence has waned, doesn’t know what they’re talking about’.49 Similarly, in an October 2011 foreign policy position paper, the eventual 2012 Republican presidential nominee (and now US Senator), Mitt Romney, stated that he ‘rejects the philosophy of decline in all of its variants’.50 But the pithiest comment on this issue was uttered by Romney’s rival for the 2012 GOP presidential nomination, Jon Huntsman. As Huntsman put it: ‘Decline is un-American’.51 Just as it did with Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, the American foreign policy establishment continues to dismiss—or at least says it dismisses—the very idea of American decline.52 Some policy analysts write off ‘declinism’ by noting that fear of decline is old hat: a subconscious anxiety imbedded in America’s political and social culture that periodically bubbles to the surface of national debate always—or so it is said—turning out to be a false alarm. Moreover, we are told, claims of US decline run counter to the narrative of American Exceptionalism: history—in the form of the rise and fall of great powers—is something that happens to other nations, not the United States. As Tufts University scholar Michael Beckley asserts: ‘the laws of history do not apply today. The United States is not like other great powers’.53 On the issue of US decline, it is denialism—not ‘declinism’—that pervades the American foreign policy establishment’s worldview. This is evidenced by important books published during the last decade or so about the United States’ world role. For example, its provocative title notwithstanding, in his influential 2008 book, The Post-American World, foreign policy commentator Fareed Zakaria contended that the United States would remain the ‘pivotal player’ in international politics for a long time to come because there is ‘still a strong market for American power, for both geopolitical and economic reasons. But even more centrally, there remains a strong ideological demand for it’.54 Despite its catchy title, when one actually reads Zakaria’s book, it is evident that far from arguing that we are entering a post-American world, he actually believes in a ‘now and forever’ American world of continuing US primacy.55 He is not alone: other leading denialists include, Robert J. Lieber, Michael Beckley, Josef Joffe, and Robert Kagan.56 For them, US decline is—literally—inconceivable (or, perhaps more correctly, inadmissible) because American primacy is necessary to perpetuate the post-World War II LRBIO, which is also known as the Pax Americana. Denialists believe that ‘no country is likely to acquire the means to challenge the United States for global primacy’.57 With respect to the Sino-American relationship, denialists make three specific claims. First, to support their contention that the United States is not declining relative to China, they assert that traditional measures of national power—especially GDP—no longer are robust. As Michael Beckley puts it, ‘Despite the widespread use of GDP … few people know what it actually measures. In particular, it is rarely recognized that GDP measures gross flows of resources and therefore does not deduct costs or measure long-term wealth accumulation’.58 Similarly, Stephen G. Brooks and William C. Wohlforth assert that GDP fails to capture true size of the economic gap between the United States and China because, while it accurately measures mid-20th century manufacturing—smokestack—economies (which is how they characterize China’s), it significantly underestimates ‘knowledge-based’ economies like America’s.59 Beckley, and Brooks and Wohlforth propose to replace GDP with new metrics for measuring states’ relative power.60 For example, Beckley advances a framework for measuring national wealth based on a net measure of output minus costs.61 Second, denialists assert that there is a huge technological gap between the United States and China. According to Brooks and Wohlforth, the United States enjoys a ‘robust technological dominance’ versus China.62 It will be difficult, they say, for China to catch up with the United States because it is so far behind: ‘Given that the overall technological gap between China and the United States is so massive, the process of closing it will be a lengthy one. America’s unique combination of massive scale and technological prowess will be a long-term feature of the distribution of capabilities’.63 Indeed, some denialists argue that China may never catch up to the United States because while the Unites States excels at innovation, China does not.64 Third, denialists claim that China’s global military capabilities are well behind America’s.65 5 As Brooks and Wohlforth put it, ‘the overall military gap between the United States and other states in the military realm remains unprecedented in modern international relations’.66 According to denialists, not only does China lag well behind the United States in military power, but it will be difficult to catch up with the United States because it is so far behind with respect to technology and innovation.67 For denialists, the bottom line is that the ‘foundational material pillar of the post-World War II international system—the United States’ unmatched global power position—will long remain in place’.68 American Decline—Reality, not Myth The waning of US economic dominance may not be obvious to American denialists, but to many observers in the real world, it is apparent that America’s global economic leadership is waning.69 The 2008 Great Recession did not cause the relative decline of American power. However, it did focus attention on the shifting distribution of power between the United States and China. In 2010, China became the world’s largest exporter (passing Germany).70 In 2011, wresting away a title the United States had held for a century, China became the world’s largest manufacturing state.71 Most tellingly, in 2014 the International Monetary Fund announced that measured by purchasing power parity (PPP), China had passed the United States as the world’s largest economy.72 The latest IMF data (using PPP) pegs China’s share of world GDP at 19.3% and the United States’ share at 15.1.%.73 It is only a matter of time before China overtakes the United States as the leading economy based on market exchange rate (MER) as well.74 Denialists also assert that per capita GDP is a better indicator of states’ relative power than aggregate GDP. This is debatable. Per capita GDP may provide a useful method for comparing living standards between states. However, aggregate GDP arguably still is a better measure of a state’s overall economic power and its ability to mobilize resources to build up its military capabilities. After all, if per capita GDP is really the best indicator of a state’s geopolitical weight, US policymakers would now be worrying about the Norwegian threat and not about China.75 In any event, even with respect to per capita GDP, China is chipping away at the America’s lead. In 2000, China’s per capita GDP was 8% of the United States’. By 2016, China’s per capita GDP was 28% of the United States’, and the trend lines suggest that China will continue narrowing significantly—if not altogether closing—the per capita GDP gap with the United States.76 Although denialists do not want to admit it, China’s GDP growth—its sheer economic muscle—is, in fact, fueling China’s drive to reduce dramatically the gap between its military and technological capabilities and the United States’.77 With respect to military power, denialists focus on global military power. But this is not the correct metric. China and the United States face different grand strategic challenges. As a self-styled global hegemon, America must be able to project decisive military power to the three regions it considers vital to both its security and its prosperity: Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia.78 In contrast, at least for now, China’s grand strategy is focused on attaining regional hegemony in East and Southeast Asia. This is what ascending great powers do: they aim at dominating the regions in which they are situated.79 This means China and the United States are on a collision course in East Asia—the region where the United States has been the incumbent hegemon since 1945 and which an increasingly powerful and assertive China sees as its own backyard.80 This means that the relevant yardstick of how the United States and China stack up against each other militarily is regional, not global. In the competition for preeminence in East and South East Asia, China is beginning to pull even with the United States. In a recent study of the Sino-American military balance, the RAND Corporation stated that the ‘frontier of US military dominance’ in East Asia is ‘receding’.81 1 As the RAND study observes, ‘Although China has not closed the gap with the United States, it has whittled it - and it has done so quite rapidly. Even for many of the contributors to this report, who track military developments in Asian on an ongoing basis, the speed of change … was striking’.82 Similarly, in his 2015 book, RAND East Asian security expert Roger Cliff stated that by 2020—that is, now—China’s military almost will be on an equal footing with America’s in such key areas as doctrine, equipment, personnel, and training (though still lagging behind in organizational structure, logistics, and organizational culture).83 Consequently, he said, by 2020—now—American military dominance in East Asia would be significantly eroded. Moreover, Cliff predicted that during the 2020s, a power transition will occur in East Asia, and that China will be able to stake its claim to regional hegemony.84 Just as denialists have missed the magnitude of China’s military challenge to US primacy in East Asia, they also have overlooked the evidence showing that China has been highly innovative and is establishing itself as a leader in key areas of technology. Indeed, the aim of Beijing’s (now renamed) ‘Made in China 2025’ plan is to establish China as a global leader in key emerging technologies. It is the very fear of China’s growing technological prowess that has fueled the push by America's China hawks to use the trade war as leverage to derail Beijing’s drive to place China at the technological forefront. It is difficult, however, to reconcile American fears of China’s push for technological leadership with continuing assertions by US policymakers and scholars that China can’t do innovation. The assertion that China is not good at innovation is belied by recent developments. For example, in September 2016, China began operating the world’s largest radio telescope, which is intended to project China’s ambitions deep into the universe, and bring back the kind of dramatic discoveries that win honors like Nobel Prizes.85 In August 2016, China launched the world’s first quantum satellite, which could lead ‘to new, completely different methods for transmitting information’.86 In another example of how China is catching up with the United States in innovation and technology, in June 2016, a Chinese computer (using made-in-China microprocessors) topped the ranking of the world’s fastest supercomputers.87 In July 2017, China’s State Council announced an ambitious plan to sprint to the front of the pack in Artificial Intelligence (AI), including both military and civilian applications.88 Indeed, the Economist recently observed that already ‘China could be a close second to America—and perhaps even ahead of it—in Artificial Intelligence (AI)’.89 And China is moving to the first rank in green technologies (solar panels and wind-generated power) and in electric cars.90 The claim that ‘China can’t innovate’ is a form of American cultural solipsism. It is reminiscent of the American foreign policy elite’s pre-World War II perception of Japan as a nation able only to make cheap toys. As the historian John Dower pointed out in his book War Without Mercy, the realities of war punctured this illusion: during the first year of the Pacific War, Japan had the best fighter plane in the sky (the Mitsubishi Zero), the best torpedoes (the Long Lance), and the best night-fighting optical equipment.91 There is no factual basis for the ‘China can’t innovate’ belief held by so many US denialists. After all, China has a rich history of innovation, for example: the printing press, gunpowder, and the compass. If, as the saying goes, actions speak louder than words, the Trump administration’s ‘tech war’ against China—directed at high technology firms like Huawei, the global leader in 5 G technology—belies the notion that China cannot innovate. Rather, it is an implicit (at least) acknowledgment that China has emerged as a global leader in critical advanced technologies. Explaining China’s Great Power Ascent: Hegemonic Instability As Sir Isaac Newton famously said, whatever goes up must come down. This law applies not only in physics but also to the geopolitical trajectories of the great powers—even those that have attained primacy. The rise and decline of great powers is one of history’s constants. As Robert Gilpin pointed out, states grow at different rates.92 So, with respect to relative power, in international politics at any point in time, some great powers are going up and others are coming down. Today, China and the United States fit the mold, respectively. Even the strongest great powers—actual or near hegemons—cannot stay on top forever. The title of Paul Kennedy’s celebrated 1987 book says it all. Great powers rise. They enjoy their (possibly unipolar) moment in the geopolitical sun. And then they fall. What I call Hegemonic Instability Theory (HIT) explains why hegemony is impermanent. In a real sense, HIT is not a ‘new’ theory. Rather it is a restatement and elaboration of ideas about unipolarity, hegemony, and the balance of power that I first set out elsewhere.93 Moreover, as the late Sir F. H. Hinsely, my mentor when I was a research student at Cambridge University, always said, ‘In scholarship each chap stands on the shoulders of those who came before him’. This is certainly true of my views on the impermanence of hegemons—and unipoles. I have been strongly influenced by the work of Kenneth Waltz, Robert Gilpin, Paul Kennedy, and E. H. Carr, among others. Each of them, and not only them, has had much to say about the operation of the ‘balance of power’, and why failure seems to be the usual fate of hegemons. Great power politics is characterized by two opposing tendencies. First, there have been successive attempts by leading great powers to gain hegemony—dominance—of the international system. Second, bids for hegemony invariably are resisted, and thwarted, by the opposition—‘balancing’—of the other great powers. This was the story during the era when Europe was the center of geopolitics (1500–1945).94 It was true during the two earlier unipolar moments prior to the current one that have occurred in the modern international system’s history. Regardless of the label—primacy, hegemony, unipolar politics—periods where power is over-concentrated in the hands a single state are interludes that never last. To put it somewhat differently, unipolar politics is nothing more than a warm-up for the return to great power politics. No hegemonic system—not even unipolarity—truly cancels out great power politics. In unipolar systems, great power politics is bubbling just below the surface because there are ‘great powers in-waiting’ that, sooner or later, will step up to the plate and take their swings at the reigning hegemon. Great power politics temporarily may appear to be absent in a unipolar system, but it always is immanent. In the ‘Unipolar Illusion. Why New Great Powers Will Rise’, I illustrated this with case studies of the two earlier periods when international politics was unipolar: France’s era of preeminence under Louis XIV and Victorian Britain’s supremacy. Neither of these powers was able to hold on to its dominance because new great powers rose to challenge them and offset their power.95 HIT’s causal logic is based on the interplay of its six component parts. First, any time a great power is perceived as becoming too powerful—that is, closing in on hegemony—other states become apprehensive. For good reason, because when a single great power wields excessive military and economic clout, the security and autonomy—and even survival—of the others are potentially at risk. Great powers that try for hegemony are seeking absolute security for themselves.96 That constitutes a potentially existential threat to the other states. Hence, if it looks as if a single great power has a shot at attaining hegemony, at least some of the others will try to stop it from succeeding. In this respect, geopolitics mimics Newton’s Third Law that every action produces an equal and opposite reaction. Second, this push back is what security studies scholars refer to as ‘balancing’.97 Specifically, it is counter-hegemonic balancing. The image of a scale usefully illustrates how counter-hegemonic balancing works: when there is too much weight on one side (that of the actual, or aspiring, hegemon), weight is put on the other side to restore equipoise. As Waltz said, ‘In international politics, overwhelming power repels and leads other states to balance against it’.98 If they value their survival, weaker states will not align themselves (‘bandwagon’) with the dominant great power for the same reason smart people avoid riding tigers. While there is always a chance that the tiger may turn out to be a nice kitty, the more likely result is that the rider will become the tiger’s dinner. It comes as no surprise, therefore, that the pretty much ironclad rule of great power politics is that hegemony begets resistance: whenever one state becomes too powerful, others will act—singly or in concert—to offset the over-concentration of power in its hands, thereby restoring equilibrium to the international political system. In a unipolar system, this means that a new great power (or powers) will emerge as a counter-weight(s) to the unipole. States balance by building up their own military capabilities (‘internal balancing’), forming counter-hegemonic alliances or coalitions with others (‘external balancing’), or—typically—by a combination of external and internal balancing.99 The historical record holds a grim lesson for great powers seeking preponderance in the international system: the fate of hegemons—and hegemonic wannabes—is defeat and failure. It was not by accident that the hegemonic bids of the Habsburgs (under Charles V and Philip II), France (under Louis XIV and Napoleon), and Germany (under Wilhelm II and Adolph Hitler) all were repulsed. Third, even in a unipolar world—where, by definition, there is only a single great power—balancing dynamics are present if only latently. Because of the effect of uneven growth rates, inevitably there will be at least one state that is a ‘great power-in-waiting’—a state that has the potential of ascending to great power rank.100As Paul Kennedy noted, time and again in international politics, relative ‘economic shifts heralded the rise of new Great Powers which one day would have a decisive impact on the military/territorial order’.101 The competitiveness of the international political system incentivizes great powers-in-waiting to rise as quickly as possible; first by economic self-strengthening and then by building-up their military power. If they fail to do so, the consequences may be severe. The dominant power(s) will throttle their rise and strip away their autonomy. The fate of 19th-century China—which saw the European powers (later joined by Japan) divide its territory into spheres of influence while assuming oversight of the key functions of the government in Peking—illustrates what happens to great powers-in-waiting that fail to develop their latent power expeditiously and effectively.102 As Harvard Sinologist Ezra F. Vogel notes, the two Opium Wars (1839–1842, 1856–1860) demonstrated that: ‘China as a nation did not adapt effectively to the challenge as the Industrial Revolution brought new power to the Western nations. Because of China’s weak response, stronger imperialist powers from the West dominated relations with China, and even dominated industry and trade along the China coast’.103 Twenty-first-century China has internalized this historical lesson. Beijing realized that, in a unipolar system, the best way to rein-in a hegemonic United States was to move up from great power-in-waiting status by becoming a countervailing pole of power in the international political system. The first step in China’s road to great power status was the economic self-strengthening program represented by Deng Xiaoping’s ‘reform and opening up’ policy. As Deng Xiaoping said during his Southern Tour (1992), ‘Those who are backward get beaten … If we don’t’ emphasize science, technology, and education, we will be beaten again’.104 Fourth, great powers-in-waiting emerge from their chrysalis phrase as new, rising great powers. There is a pattern to great power rise. Initially, they adopt policies of domestic economic development and state-building. Their intentions and ambitions are fueled by their growing military and economic muscle. As Zakaria observes, a rising great power’s ‘definition of security, of the interests that require protection, usually expand in tandem with a nation’s material capabilities’.105 As they become more powerful, rising great powers seek to dominate their own geographical backyards.106 That is, they aim at gaining regional hegemony. And the more clout rising great powers have, the more influence they want over the international political system. As Robert Gilpin observes, ‘As the power of a state increases, it seeks to extend its territorial control, its political influence, and/or its domination of the international economy’.107 Rising great powers seek out, and seize, opportunities to exert their influence because their strengthened capabilities reduce the costs of expansion and increase the odds of success. As their geopolitical footprint grows, however, they rub up against the interests of the entrenched dominant power(s). This generates friction between them, which sparks competition between them for power, influence, control, and status. Zakaria summarizes the phenomenon of great power rise: Over the course of history, states that have experienced significant growth in their material resources have relatively soon redefined and expanded their political interests, measured by their increases in military spending, initiation of wars, acquisition of territory, posting of soldiers, and diplomats, and participation in great power decisionmaking.108 Fifth, in addition to boosting their hard (military and economic) power, rising new great powers want their new role acknowledged by the established power(s). That is, they want to be accorded status and prestige equal to that of the leading great power(s).109 To be sure, great power grand strategies are driven by fear of others, the quest for power, and the search for security. But they are driven equally by their desire to be respected. As the Greek historian Thucydides wrote in his History of the Peloponnesian War, the policies of great powers reflect their concerns about fear (external threats), interests, and concern for their honor. The contest for status and prestige is a crucial—but too often overlooked—trigger mechanism for great power rivalry. Sixth, if the relative power gap between the incumbent hegemon and a rising challenger narrows significantly, ‘power transition’ dynamics come into play.110 For HIT, power transitions are where the rubber meets the road. They are the geopolitical equivalent of a hurricane warning: a nasty storm is brewing. Power transitions are easily visualized. Imagine side by side up and down escalators. The dominant power is on the down escalator and the rising challenger on the up escalator. As they approach each other heading in opposite directions, one of them leaps over the rail to the opposite side and begins pummeling the other. Although scholars agree broadly about the outlines of power transition dynamics, they disagree about which power initiates the conflict.111 Nevertheless, security studies scholars agree that when power transitions loom, great power politics is at fever pitch because what is at stake is nothing less than the leadership, and nature, of the international (or regional) order. One of international politics’ enduring questions is whether the interests of a declining hegemon can accommodate those of the rising challenger to allow the international order to change peacefully.112 This is the big question in the 21st-century relations between the United States and China. There is a good reason to be pessimistic. Here, the First Cold War is a flashing red light. Forgotten Lessons? The First Cold War As the United States and China stand on the precipice of a new Cold War, it is worth revisiting the beginnings of the Soviet-American rivalry and asking whether that competition could have been avoided or significantly modulated in its intensity. Few subjects have engaged American diplomatic historians and security studies scholars as deeply as that of the First Cold War’s origins. Two basic schools of thought have dominated the debate. The ‘orthodox’ interpretation, and its ‘neo-orthodox’ offspring, views the First Cold War as a struggle between good and evil; that is between American liberalism and Soviet communism.113 For scholars of this bent, Stalin’s blood-soaked tyranny and the nature of the Soviet regime are all we need to know to understand the First Cold War’s causes. In this telling, the United States was a passive actor—responding only in self-defense when provoked by Soviet actions. ‘Revisionist’ scholars, on the other hand, emphasize America’s agency in the First Cold War’s origins. They note that following World War II, the United States had expansive—indeed, extravagant—geopolitical, economic, and ideological ambitions. Revisionists believe that America’s pursuit of these objectives was the First Cold War’s primary cause. For neorealists, the post-World War II Soviet-American rivalry is easy to explain: in the bipolar international system that existed after 1945, it was inevitable that there would be competition, and friction, between the international system’s only two great powers.114 Neorealism, however, does not explain why the US-Soviet relationship became a highly militarized, ideologically virulent, and global struggle. That was not inevitable. As UCLA professor Deborah Welch Larson observed, ‘Within a bipolar structure of power the United States and the Soviet Union could have defined their relationship in a variety of ways’.115 Postwar relations between Washington and Moscow might have evolved in the more traditional mold of great power relations, in which competition is dampened by mutual restraint, legitimate security interests are accommodated, and spheres of interest are recognized. In the critical years between 1945 and 1948, this is the course that some American policymakers and commentators urged the United States to follow.116 What diplomatic historian Daniel Yergin has called the ‘Yalta axioms’—to which President Franklin D. Roosevelt subscribed—‘downplayed the role of ideology and the foreign policy consequences of authoritarian domestic practices, and instead saw the Soviet Union as behaving like a traditional Great Power within the international system, rather than trying to overthrow it’.117 Washington chose not to manage its relationship with the Soviet Union as a traditional great power competition. Instead, American policy fueled tensions with the Soviet Union in two ways. First, the United States adopted an expansionist—‘offensive realist’—strategy vis-a-vis the Soviet Union.118 Second, Washington was unwilling to allow the Soviet Union to establish a ‘closed’ sphere of influence in East Central Europe. America’s policy toward the Soviet Union was colored by liberal ideology, which regards international politics as a morality play that pits ‘good’ states vs. ‘bad’ states.119 Liberal ideology rendered US policy makers incapable of understanding, or accommodating, the Soviet Union’s legitimate security interests in East Central Europe. From 1945 onward, US policymakers adopted a grand strategy that defined American interests ambitiously; wove together geopolitical, military, economic and ideological concerns; and aimed at maximizing America’s relative power advantage vis-a-vis the Soviet Union.120 Washington came to view the Soviet ‘threat’ through the prism of ‘the new doctrine of national security’, which was based on ‘an expansive interpretation of American security needs’, and thus ‘represented a major redefinition of America’s relation to the rest of the world’.121 As the diplomatic historian Melvyn Leffler puts it, Washington’s capacious definition of America’s national interests included: regional hegemony in the Western Hemisphere; control over the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans; an extensive network of overseas bases to ‘enlarge the strategic frontier’ and project US power; access to Eurasia’s resources and market and denial of access to rivals; and nuclear superiority.122 As Leffler says, to grasp why the First Cold War began, ‘the breadth of the American conception of national security that emerged between 1945 and 1948 must be appreciated’.123 The vast sweep of America’s interests left very little room for Soviet interests. Indeed, following World War II, Washington effectively equated national security with American global hegemony. As Daniel Yergin said, flushed with the self-confidence engendered by victory, American leaders ‘eagerly embraced their mandate of heaven’.124 Following World War II, the United States ringed the Soviet Union’s periphery with bases and projected US military and economic power into Western Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia. The United States resurrected (West) Germany’s economic power, formed the Atlantic Alliance, and aimed to use the Marshall Plan as a lever to pull the East Central European states out of Moscow’s orbit. American policy makers understood that their grand strategy would heighten Moscow’s sense of insecurity and provoke Soviet counter-moves.125 As Yergin puts it, ‘the extension of American power around the Soviet rim could only increase the Soviet’s sense of danger, leading the Russians to respond in such a way as to increase rather than decrease, the very range of dangers that the United States had sought to forestall’.126 US officials understood that initiatives like the Marshall Plan—and the absorption of an economically revived West Germany into a US-dominated Western Europe—would cause the Soviets to respond defensively by tightening their grip on East Central Europe and eastern Germany, which is exactly what happened.127 Washington and Moscow could have reached a modus viviendi after World War II and conducted their relationship in the traditional mold of great power politics. This appears to have been what Moscow hoped would happen. ‘The USSR’, Yergin observes, ‘behaved as a traditional great power, intent upon aggrandizing itself along the lines of historic Russian goals, favoring spheres of influence, secret treaties, Great Power consortiums, and other methods and mores from the “old diplomacy”’.128 However, America’s liberal ideology foreclosed this possibility. To be sure, the Soviets pursued traditional Russian imperial interests in the Eastern Mediterranean and Iran; sought security in East Central Europe by clamping down on Poland, Romania, and Bulgaria; and competed with Washington for influence in Germany. Yet, at the same time the Soviets: demobilized their armies and withdrew from important areas. In 1945 and 1946 they pulled their troops out of northern Norway and Bornholm, Denmark, established acceptable governments in Austria and Finland, allowed free elections in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, discouraged revolutionary action in France, Italy, and Greece, endeavored to maintain acceptable relations with the Chinese nationalists, and evacuated their forces, however belatedly, from Iran and Manchuria.129 As scholars like Walter Lafeber, Leffler, Odd Arne Westad, Yergin, and Norman Naimark have pointed out, in the immediate postwar years, Soviet policy was cautious and ambiguous, not expansionist or aggressive.130 If the United States had wanted postwar relations with the Kremlin to unfold along the lines of traditional great power diplomacy, East Central Europe was the place where it should have implemented such a policy. This was a region in which Moscow, extending back into Czarist times, had well-established strategic interests and in which the United States had none. Having seen its territory invaded by Germany twice in less than 30 years, following World War II, Moscow sought to establish a defensive buffer zone in East Central Europe to protect itself from the potential of renewed aggression by a resurgent Germany. The Kremlin believed that its security concerns required it to control the internal politics of its East Central European neighbors. Only in this way could the Soviets be certain that the states in the region—especially, but not only, Poland—would not align their security, diplomatic, and economic policies with the West. In other words, the Soviet Union wanted an exclusive—or ‘closed’—sphere of influence in the region. America’s liberal ideology made this unacceptable to Washington. Roosevelt,Truman, and their senior advisors all recognized that the Soviet Union had legitimate security interests in East Central Europe.131 Moreover, US policymakers understood that when the war ended, the United States would have little leverage to influence events in the region.132 Yet, the United States wanted East Central Europe to remain open to American economic and ideological penetration. When the war drew to a close, Washington’s hopes of establishing a cooperative postwar relationship with the Soviet Union collided head-on with its insistence that East Central Europe not be closed off.133 Even those American policymakers who acknowledged the legitimacy of Soviet security interests in East Central Europe, and advocated for a harmonious postwar US-Soviet relationship, were unwilling to allow Moscow to establish a closed sphere of influence in the region.134 Since the First Cold War began in earnest more than seven decades ago, the American foreign policy establishment has viewed the Soviet Union’s ideology as main reason the wartime Grand Alliance fell apart between 1945 and 1948. That is a myopic view that ignores the United States’ agency in contributing to the breakdown of US-Soviet relations. As Yergin has written, Soviet ideology was not alone in contributing to the First Cold War: ‘There was also the American ideology - the ideas and outlook that US leaders brought to international affairs, their world set’.135 Indeed, as the diplomatic historian Odd Arne Westad says ‘it was to a great extent American ideas and their influence that made the Soviet-American conflict into a Cold War’.136As shaped by liberal ideology, American policy was universal in its ambitions. American leaders harbored a ‘one size fits all’ belief that their liberal notions about democracy, capitalism, and human rights should apply everywhere. At the end of World War II, an overwhelmingly powerful United States had a ‘second chance’ to build an international order based on its Wilsonian, liberal principles—principles that held that no part of the world should be closed to the reach of America’s liberal ideology and its economic interests.137 As the diplomatic historian Geir Lundestad has noted, postwar US policymakers believed that America’s interests legitimately extended to all corners of the globe.138 A closed Soviet sphere in East Central Europe would have challenged one of the bedrock assumptions of US policy: that the United States led liberal international order ‘could only work globally’.139 US policymakers ‘wanted a world safe both for liberal democracy and liberal capitalism’, and, therefore, it was for the ‘best of reasons’ that the United States opposed Soviet attempts to close off East Central Europe.140 For Washington, the Soviet refusal to accept an open East Central Europe was prima facie proof of the Kremlin’s malevolent intentions.141 For the Kremlin, on the other hand, America’s insistence that East Central Europe remains open demonstrated that the United States was unwilling to accept the Soviet Union’s legitimate security interests. In fact, as we now know, rather than seeking a modus vivendi with Moscow, American liberalism’s ‘eliminationist’ impulses led the United States in the late 1940s and early 1950s to search for policies that would remove the Soviet threat altogether.142 This ambition, of course, was not realized, but its pursuit ensured that there would be a First Cold War that was vastly expensive, corrosive of America’s domestic institutions, and which several times came perilously close to triggering a nuclear war. Had the United States opted for a more traditional realpolitik policy toward the Soviet Union, the Cold War’s worst excesses could have been avoided. It remains to be seen how the Sino-American Cold War will play out. The Second Cold War: The United States and China Since the First Cold War ended, the US foreign policy establishment has been divided into two camps with respect to China: hawks and engagers. Engagers have believed the China’s incorporation into international institutions, and integration into the international economy will foster economic and—ultimately—political liberalization in China. On the other hand, hawks see a rising China as a threat to American interests; not only militarily but also economically, technologically, and—increasingly—ideologically. The Pentagon invariably has been hawkish on China. Much of the hawks’ worldview can be traced back to the so-called Blue Team that emerged at the tail end of the Clinton administration. Writing in The Washington Post. Robert G. Kaiser and Steven Mufson described the Blue Team as ‘a loose alliance of members of Congress, congressional staff, think tank fellows, Republican political operatives, conservative journalists, lobbyists for Taiwan, former intelligence officers and a handful of academics, all united in the view that a rising China poses great risks to America’s vital interests’.143 Until recently, US policy toward China has incorporated both hawkish and pro-engagement perspectives but with the balance between them shifting. The George H. W. Bush, Clinton, and Obama administrations leaned more toward engagement. The George W. Bush and Trump administrations have taken a harder line toward Beijing. Harking back to the premises underlying the draft FY 1994–99 Defence Planning Guidance, the George W. Bush administration sought to maintain unipolarity by dissuading China from modernizing its military. It warned Beijing that, ‘In pursuing advanced military capabilities that can threaten its neighbors in the Asia-Pacific region, China is following an outdated path that, in the end, will hamper its own pursuit of national greatness. In time, China will find that social and political freedom is the only source of that greatness’.144 Hammering home this point, then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said that any moves by China to enhance its military capabilities were necessarily a signal of aggressive Chinese intent because ‘no nation threatens China’.145 For emphasis, this point was restated in the administration’s report, The Military Power of the People’s Republic of China, which declared that ‘China’s military modernization remains ambitious’ and that ‘China’s leaders may be tempted to resort to force or coercion more quickly to press diplomatic advantage, advance security interests, or resolve disputes’.146 Until recently, however, Pentagon hawkishness was offset by the American business community’s, and the broader foreign policy establishment’s, pro-engagement stance. As already noted, this support for engagement largely has melted away during the Trump administration. Engagement has been displaced by a new Cold War consensus, which in many respects resembles the First Cold War consensus that coalesced in 1946/1947 as hopes for postwar cooperation with the Soviet Union gave way to implacable rivalry.147 American strategy seeks to ring China with US military forces and alliances, just as Washington did with the Soviet Union following World War II. And, the Sino-American relationship increasingly is depicted—as was the US-Soviet relationship—as a clash between two irreconcilable ideologies. The Trump administration has affirmed its determination to maintain the America’s extra-regional hegemony in East Asia. Indeed, it has widened the geographical scope of US interests to encompass the ‘Indo-Pacific’ (which now includes South Asia and the Indian Ocean in addition to East and Southeast Asia). As then-Acting Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan said in June 2019, the United States is a ‘resident power’ in the region.148 According to the Pentagon, the existing international order in the region—the Pax Americana established after 1945—is endangered by China’s growing power and the ambitions that it fuels: ‘As China continues its economic and military ascendance, it seeks Indo-Pacific regional hegemony in the near-term and, ultimately global preeminence in the long-term’.149 The Trump administration’s strategic ‘vision’ is that ‘no one nation can or should dominate the Indo-Pacific’.150 Administration officials fear that China is catching up to US military power in the region and will use its enhanced capabilities to lock the United States out of the region economically.151 The Trump administration’s Indo-Pacific Strategy makes clear that the United States will counter China by maintaining US military superiority, strengthening America’s regional alliances and partnerships, and boosting the military capabilities of its US regional allies.152 As part of its strategy, the Pentagon is developing a new intermediate range ballistic missile intended for deployment in East Asia in response to China’s military buildup.153 When it comes to US policy toward China, great power politics is only part of the story. American policy makers are revisiting the First Cold War by characterizing Sino-American relations as a Manichean ideological struggle between freedom and (communist) authoritarianism. Discourse matters, and when American policymakers and foreign policy analysts continually play up the fact that China’s government is communist, they do so with a purpose. At least subliminally they seek to: recall the most dire First Cold War depictions of the Soviet ‘threat’ (‘the grim oligarchy of the Kremlin’); delegitimize China’s government in the eyes of the American public; and create an ‘enemy image’ of China as a bad actor in international politics. In short, they seek to unleash America’s ‘crusader state’ mentality.154 While not—quite (or yet)—employing the kind of overwrought, lurid language of official US pronouncements during the First Cold War, the rhetoric emanating from Washington about China does evoke memories of documents such as NSC-68.155 The Trump administration says great power politics is ‘defined by geopolitical rivalry between free and repressive world order visions …’,156 which means that for the United States, the Sino-American relationship is more about ideology than it is about the balance of power. Lest there be any doubt that ideology is a driving force in the United States’ China policy, the Indo-Pacific Strategy report declares: Yet while the Chinese people aspire to free markets, justice, and the rule of law, the People’s Republic of China (PRC), under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), undermines the international system from within by exploiting its benefits while simultaneously eroding the values and principles of the rules-based order.157 Similarly, Vice President Pence’s October 2018 and October 2019 speeches on China also emphasized the ideological differences between the United States and China.158 And speaking in London in January 2020, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo declared that the Chinese Communist Party—not China as a great power—is ‘the central threat of our times’.159 Speaking at The Hague, Netherlands in June 2019, Pompeo stated that ‘China wants to be the dominant economic and military power of the world, spreading its authoritarian vision for society and its corrupt practices world-wide’.160 The signs of the Second Cold War are hard to miss. In a rare display of bi-partisanship, Congress passed the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act. One of the bill’s sponsors, Republican Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.) said, ‘The United States and the international community must make clear to Chinese leaders and power brokers that their aggression toward Hong Kong risks swift, severe and lasting consequences’,161 Rubio warned that Hong Kong is not ‘simply China’s internal affair’. Gordon Chang, who comments regularly on China, has suggested that ‘contagion’ from Hong Kong could spill over onto the mainland and cause the collapse of communism.162 Beijing’s policy toward Muslim’s in Xinjiang has been widely denounced in the United States.163 And Congress has passed veto-proof legislation to compel the Trump administration to punish China for its human rights violations.164 While geopolitics and economics play a role in deteriorating Sino-American relations, the salience of ideology is increasingly apparent on the American side. The post-Cold War policy of engaging China was based on the—erroneous—assumption that admitting China into the WTO would result in economic liberalization and, ultimately, political liberalization. Or, to use Robert Zollick’s phrase, China would become a ‘responsible stakeholder’ in the international order (with Washington defining the meaning of responsibility).165 As the Indo-Pacific Strategy Report says, ‘At the turn of the 21st century, the United States advocated for China’s admission into the World Trade Organization, with the belief that economic liberalization would bring China into a greater partnership with the United States and the free world’.166 Instead, according to Pence, ‘China has chosen economic aggression, which in turn emboldened its growing military’, and it ‘has taken a sharp U-turn toward control and oppression of its own people’.167 Within the US foreign policy establishment, the belief that engagement failed has fanned a widespread sense of disillusionment with China. The growing disenchantment with China is a result of the American foreign policy establishment’s own naivete. There never was any realistic basis for believing China would change its economic growth model, or its political system, in response to American expectations. US pressure on China to adhere to American norms and values serves only to heighten Sino-American tensions. This is not a new story. Chinese president Jiang Zemin’s October 1995 remarks to the UN Security Council are illustrative. In that speech, Jiang observed that ‘certain big powers, often under the cover of freedom, democracy and human rights, set out to encroach upon the sovereignty of other countries, interfere in their internal affairs and undermine their national unity and ethnic harmony’.168 It is commonplace for US leaders to assert that American values are ‘universal’.169 Obviously, they are not, but when the United States acts on this belief, it is going down a path fraught with peril.170 Here we see influence of ‘offensive liberalism’ on American foreign policy.171 At its core, Wilsonianism—liberal internationalism American-style—holds that the world is divided into ‘good’ states (democracies) and ‘bad’ states (non-democracies). The latter are deemed incorrigible, expansive, and aggressive. As Vice President Pence put it when speaking about China, ‘History attests [that] a country that oppresses its own people rarely stops there. And Beijing also aims to extend its reach across the wider world’.172 There is an eliminationist impulse imbedded in Wilsonianism: if ‘bad’ states are troublemakers, regime change is—ostensibly—the path to peace because, so it claimed, democracies: don’t fight other democracies; uphold an open international economic system; and respect liberal values both at home and abroad.173 This elminationist impulse was very much on display in US relations with the Soviet Union: American intervention in the Russian Civil War; early First Cold War documents such as NSC 20/4; U.S. ‘psychological warfare’ efforts in the Baltic States and Ukraine during the late 1940s/early 1950s; and, of course, NSC-68.174 American policy makers ought to have learned from the First Cold War that an important—and perilous—threshold is crossed when a great power competition is converted into a titanic ideological struggle. The former can be modulated with adroit diplomacy but the latter invariably become zero sum contests. Conclusion: Can a Train Wreck in Sino-American Relations Be Avoided? Two powerful forces—America’s liberal ideology and power transition dynamics—are shaping the future of Sino- American relations. Liberalism is the most potent generator of American hubris and overreaching. As I argued in The Peace of Illusions, liberalism is America’s own distinctive ‘myth of empire’.175 This is evident today in the attitudes of the American foreign policy elite toward China. For them, it seems that the real ‘threat’ to the United States is not the rise of China’s military or economic power. Rather, it is the ‘threat’ to America’s identity—the asserted universality of its model of political and economic development—posed by a non-democratic, state capitalist China.176 China’s rise has fueled doubts—seldom acknowledged openly—about the United States’ future economic prospects and, even more fundamentally, about whether America’s model of economic and political development remains superior to China’s.177 As the Eurasia Group’s Ian Bremmer and David Gordon have argued, ‘China’s rise and state-capitalist model present the most significant commercial and geopolitical challenge that the United States has faced in two decades’, and ‘China’s state capitalism challenges the future of democratic capitalism’.178 Indeed, as Princeton University Professor Aaron Friedberg argues, ‘For Americans the success of a mainland [Chinese] regime that blends authoritarian rule with market-driven economics is an affront’.179 China is a problem for American foreign policy establishment because it taps into their deepest fear: that a powerful non-liberal state will be able to close off the world (or a least its key regions) from ideological and economic penetration by the United States. This fear of ‘closure’ is inextricably rooted in American liberalism and explains why the United States has such a difficult time coexisting with non-liberal states.180 The last thing we should want, however, is for the Sino-American relationship to degenerate into a new, highly ideological Second Cold War. When power transition dynamics are added to America’s liberal ideology, Sino-American relations are highly combustible. Security studies scholars agree that power transitions are powder kegs because of what is at stake: nothing less than the leadership, and nature, of the international (or regional) order are up for grabs. Power transitions are about whether the status quo can prevail over the forces of geopolitical change (revisionism). When rising challengers near parity with the declining dominant power, invariably their dissatisfaction with the existing international order bubbles up (as it did in pre-1914 Anglo-German rivalry, to which some have compared today’s Sino-America relationship).181 After all, the existing order was constructed by the declining dominant power during better days to privilege its own interests.182 Rising challengers, on the other hand, want to revise the existing order and bring it into line with what they perceive are the new relative power realities. They seek, as Gilpin said, ‘to change the international system in order to advance their own interests’.183 If the United States really wants to avoid a head-on collision with China, it will have to make difficult—even painful—adjustments and adopt a policy that accommodates China’s rise. In this sense, the United States and China are rapidly nearing what could be called an ‘E. H. Carr Moment’.184 The Carr Moment occurs when the power relations that underpinned—and gave birth to—the prevailing international order have shifted in favor of the rising—revisionist—power. Carr analyzed the international political crisis of the 1930s caused by the breakdown of the post-World War I order enshrined in the Versailles Treaty (1919). The Versailles system cracked, Carr argued, because of the growing gap between the order it represented and the actual distribution of power in Europe. At stake in the Sino-American rivalry is which power will be the hegemon in East Asia. China seeks to supplant the United States, which has been the incumbent (extra-regional) hegemon since 1945. This competition is inherently dangerous. Afficionados of American Western movies will easily recognize what can be called the ‘Dodge City syndrome’: two gunslingers confront each other in the saloon and one says ‘This town ain’t big enough for both of us’. We all know what happens next: the shoot-out on Main Street. For those inclined to physics rather than the cinema, there is the Newtonian Law of Geopolitics: there cannot be two hegemons in the same region at the same time. Chinese culture has its own way of making this point. As a Chinese expression puts it, two tigers cannot live on one mountain. Or, as the Emperor Wen-Di said, ‘When two emperors appear simultaneously, one must be destroyed’.185 Whether the United States can, or will, peacefully cede its dominance in East Asia is an open question. There is also the question of whether the United States can, or will, acknowledge Beijing’s push to be accorded status and prestige equal to that of the United States.186 There is little reason to believe Washington is disposed to do this. As Dartmouth professor William C. Wohlforth reminds us, ‘U.S. decision makers value their country’s status of primacy’.187 Members of the American foreign policy establishment dismiss Beijing’s status claims because ‘China has not earned a voice equal to that of the United States’.188 As already discussed, since the end of the First Cold War successive administrations have sought to rein in a rising China by employing both carrots (engagement) and sticks (containment). On the American side today, carrots are out and sticks are in. Even advocates of ‘restraint’ in American grand strategy take a hawkish position on China. None more so than University of Chicago professor John Mearsheimer, who argues that: ‘Realism dictates that the United States should seek to remain the most powerful state on the planet … and make sure that no other power dominates its region’.189 Therefore, he says the United States ‘must prevent China from becoming a regional hegemon in Asia’.190 For the United States, ‘restraint’ must not be a one region grand strategy applicable only to the Middle East. Restraint is needed in America’s East Asia grand strategy as well. However, rather than being a counsel of restraint, Mearsheimer’s China policy is a recipe for conflict.191 Doubtless going forward, many US policymakers and analysts will agree with Mearsheimer, invoke fears about the balance of power, play up the ideological differences between China and America, and raise the specter of 1930’s style‘appeasement’ of China. As will leading US political figures. For example, three rising stars in the Republican party—Senators Tom Cotton (Ark.), Marco Rubio (Fla.) and Josh Hawley (Mo.)—have taken strong anti-China stands.192 For example, Hawley warns that China has demonstrated ‘its eagerness to impose authoritarian principles on America …’. He goes on to say: America must prevent any one nation from dominating or dictating to us in any key region of the globe …. We need instead to prevent any other nation from becoming a hegemon - and that brings us to China … For years China has been stealing American jobs and intellectual property, abusing the international trade system. Now it is militarizing the South China Sea and preparing to project its power across the Asia-Pacific region ….China’s expansionist moves are a direct threat to American security. Beijing’s aim is nothing short of domination—first of the region, then of the world. The Asia-Pacific is critical to the prosperity of American farmers, manufacturers and consumers. We can’t afford to be shut out in the years to come, nor can we afford to be reduced to begging Beijing for terms.193 This may be ‘realism’ but, if so, it is realism of a kind; a kind that is at odds with the thoughtful forms of realism that opposed the Vietnam War and the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Moreover, it is a potentially dangerous form of ‘realism’ because once the genie of public opinion is released from the bottle, it can be difficult to control. ‘Restraint’ is not a new concept. It has deep roots as an American foreign policy tradition that has counseled prudence and the moderation of America’s external ambitions. It is a tradition that leaves open the possibility of accommodating the interests of rival great powers. After all, as the noted journalist and foreign policy commentator Walter Lippmann said: The history of diplomacy is the history of relations among rival powers, which did not enjoy political intimacy, and did not respond to appeals to common purposes. Nevertheless, there have been settlements. Some of them did not last very long. Some of them did. For a diplomat to think that rival and unfriendly powers cannot be brought to a settlement is to forget what diplomacy is about. There would be little for diplomats to do if the world consisted of partners, enjoying political intimacy, and responding to common appeals.194 This is, to be sure, a time of renewed great power competition. But there is a big difference between rivalry and war. In the coming decades, it will be the United States that controls the exit ramp from a Sino-American war. Whether Washington will be able to accommodate China’s emergence as a great power is the geopolitical issue of our time. The recent centenary of the Great War is a reminder of why it is important to accommodate ascending great powers. As the scholar David Calleo has written, ‘The proper lesson’, to be drawn from pre-1914 Anglo-German rivalry, ‘is not so much the need for vigilance against aggressors, but the ruinous consequences of refusing reasonable accommodation to upstarts’.195 Along with the take away from the First Cold War—don’t transform great powerrivalries into ideological struggles—that is a lesson American policy-makers would do well to internalize. Footnotes 1 National Security Strategy of the United States of America (Washington, D.C.: The White House, 2017) https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/NSS-Final-12-18-2017-0905.pdf. 2 Martin Wolf, ‘The Tragedy of Two Failing Superpowers’, The Financial Times, 31 March, 2020, https://www.ft.com/content/ea1563e8-725f-11ea-ad98-044200cb277f. 3 See Walter Russell Mead, ‘China Still Misleads the World’, The Wall Street Journal, 14 April, 2020, p. A13; Ishaan Tharoor, ‘It’s Not Just Trump Who’s Angry at China’, The Washington Post, 13 April, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2020/04/14/its-not-just-trump-whos-angry-china/. As both the The New York Times and The Washington Post have documented, the Trump administration ignored ample timely warnings of the Covid-19 outbreak and when it did respond, did so slowly and ineffectively. See Eric Lipton, David E. Sanger, Maggie Haberman, Michael D. Shear, Mark Mazzetti, and Julian E. Barnes, ‘Despite Timely Alerts, Trump Was Slow to Act’, The New York Times, 12 April, 2020, p. A1; Dan Balz, ‘America Was Unprepared for a Major Crisis. Again’, The Washington Post, 4 April, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/politics/america-was-unprepared-for-a-major-crisis-again/. 4 Warren P. Strobel and Michael R. Gordon, ‘U.S. Intelligence Sifts Evidence for the Virus’s Origin’, The Wall Street Journal, 17 April, 2020, p. A5, https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-intelligence-sifts-evidence-for-origins-of-coronavirus-11587077170. 5 Julian E. Barnes, ‘U.S. Military Asks for More Pacific Funding’, The New York Times, 6 April, 2020, p. A20, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/05/us/politics/us-china-military-funding-virus.html. 6 Catie Edmondson, ‘China Hawks See Opening to Push for Punitive Measures Against a Nation’, The New York Times, 11 April, 2020, p. A6, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/10/us/politics/coronavirus-congress-china.html. 7 Ana Swanson, ‘He Hectored Global Firms and Now He Is in Charge’, The New York Times, 7 April, 2020, p. B1, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/06/business/economy/peter-navarro-coronavirus-defense-production-act.html. 8 Michael Scherer, Josh Dawsey, Annie Linskey, and Toluse Olorunnipa, ‘Trump Campaign Concludes There Is More to Be Gained by Attacking Biden Than Trying to Promote President’s Pandemic Response’, The Washington Post, 18 April, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-campaign-concludes-there-is-more-to-be-gained-by-attacking-biden-than-trying-to-promote-presidents-pandemic-response/2020/04/18/9644af9a-80e6-11ea-9040-68981f488eed_story.html. 9 Jonathan Martin and Maggie Haberman, ‘G.O.P. Aiming to Make China the Scapegoat’, The New York Times, 19 April, 2020, p. A1, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/18/us/politics/trump-china-virus.html. 10 Edward Luce, ‘Getting Acclimatized to the U.S.-China Cold War’, The Financial Times, 19 July, 2019, https://www.ft.com/content/a3062586-a9ac-11e9-984c-fac8325aaa04. 11 Rana Mitter, ‘Solutions to the U.S.-China Trade War’, The Financial Times, 4 June, 2019, https://www.ft.com/content/571603da-8233-11e9-a7f0-77d3101896ec. 12 ‘China v. America: A New Kind of Cold War’, The Economist, 19 May, 2019, p. 9. 13 For example, see Christopher Layne, ‘The Sound of Distant Thunder: The Pre-World War I Anglo-German Rivalry as a Model for Sino-American Relations in the Early 21st Century’, in Asle Toje, ed., Will China’s Rise be Peaceful? The Rise of Great Powers in Theory, History & Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). This article was first presented as a paper at the Norwegian Nobel Institute’s June 2014 Summer Symposium. Also, see Graham Allison, Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap? (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017). 14 Francis Fukuyama, ‘The End of History’, National Interest, Vol. 16 (1989), pp. 3–18. 15 Charles Krauthammer, ‘The Unipolar Moment’, Foreign Affairs, Vol. 70, No. 1 (1990/91), pp. 23–33. 16 Charles Krauthammer, ‘The Unipolar Moment Revisited’, National Interest, Vol. 70 (2002), pp. 5–18. 17 For example, see William C. Wohlforth, ‘The Stability of a Unipolar World’, International Security, Vol. 24, No. 1 (1999), pp. 5–41; Keir Lieber and Gerard Alexander, ‘Waiting for Balancing: Why the World is Not Pushing Back’, International Security, Vol. 30, No. 1 (2005), pp. 109–39. Also, see the sources cited at f.n. 22. 18 G. John Ikenberry, Liberal Leviathan: The Origins, Crisis, and Transformation of the American World Order (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011). 19 The term ‘Chimerica’ was coined by Niall Ferguson and Moritz Schularick to describe what they characterized as the ‘symbiotic’ economic relationship that had developed between the United States and China by the early 2000s. See Niall Ferguson and Moritz Schularick, ‘Chimerica and the Global Asset Market Boom’, International Finance, Vol. 10, No. 3 (2007), pp. 215–39. Also see Robert B. Zoellick, ‘Wither China: From Membership to Responsibility?’, Remarks to the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, 21 September, 2005, https://2001-2009.state.gov/s/d/former/zoellick/rem/53682.htm. 20 On the potency of the 1930s analogy (‘Munich’, ‘appeasement’) in US foreign policy debates, see Yuen Foong Khong, Analogies at War: Korea, Munich, Dien Bien Phu, and the Vietnam Decisions of 1965 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). Following World War II, in the first volume of his wartime memoirs, Winston Churchill deliberately sought to seize control of the narrative concerning Britain’s policy toward Germany during the 1930s. Winston S. Churchill, The Gathering Storm (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1948). On Churchill’s attempt to recast the historical record, see David Reynolds, In Command of History: Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World War (New York: Random House, 2005). Also see Christopher Layne, ‘Security Studies and the Use of History: Neville Chamberlain’s Grand Strategy Revisited’, Security Studies, Vol. 17, No. 3 (2008), pp. 397–437. 21 See Glenn H. Snyder, ‘The Balance of Power and the Balance of Terror’, in Paul Seabury, ed., The Balance of Power (San Francisco: Chandler, 1965), pp. 185–201. Robert Jervis, The Meaning of the Nuclear Revolution: Statecraft and the Prospect of Armageddon (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989). 22 See Oystein Tunsjo, The Return of Bipolarity in World Politics: China, the United States, and Geostructural Realism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018). 23 The literature making these arguments is voluminous. Key works include: Joseph S. Nye Jr., The Paradox of American Power: Why the World’s Only Superpower Can’t Go It Alone (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); Joseph S. Nye Jr., Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power (New York: Basic Books, 1990); Joseph S. Nye Jr., Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics (New York: Public Affairs, 2004); Wohlforth, ‘The Stability of a Unipolar World’; Stephen G. Brooks and William C. Wohlforth, ‘American Primacy in Perspective’, Foreign Affairs, Vol. 81, No. 4 (2002), pp. 20–33; Michael Mastanduno, ‘Preserving the Unipolar Moment: Realist Theories and U.S. Grand Strategy’, International Security, Vol. 21, No. 4 (1997), pp. 49–88; G. John Ikenberry, ‘Institutions, Strategic Restraint, and the Persistence of Postwar Order’, International Security, Vol. 23, No. 3 (1998), pp. 43–78; William Kristol and Robert Kagan, ‘Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy’, Foreign Affairs, Vol. 75, No. 4 (1996), pp. 18–32; and Stephen G. Brooks, G. John Ikenberry, and William C. Wohlforth, ‘Lean Forward: In Defense of American Engagement’, Foreign Affairs, Vol. 92, No. 1 (2013), pp. 130–42. 24 President Dwight D. Eisenhower was extremely cognizant of the harm the Cold War could inflict on America’s economy, society, and institutions. His views are especially noteworthy given his World War II military service as the commander of the Western allies’ forces that landed in Normandy and defeated the German army in Western Europe. See his 1961 farewell speech warning about the rise of a US ‘military-industrial complex’ and his April 1953 speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors. 25 See Michael Sherry, In the Shadow of War: The United States Since the 1930s (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995); Michael Hogan, A Cross of Iron: Harry S. Truman and the Origins of the National Security State, 1945-1954 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 26 A. J. P. Taylor, The Struggle for Mastery in Europe, 1848–1918 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954); Aaron Friedberg, A Contest for Supremacy: America, China, and the Struggle for Mastery in Asia (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011). 27 See Wohlforth, ‘The Stability of a Unipolar World’. 28 Stephen Brooks and Willam Wohlforth, America Abroad: The United States’ World Role in the 21st Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016); Nuno Monteiro, Theory of Unipolar Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Stephen Brooks and William Wohlforth, World Out of Balance: International Relations and the Challenge of American Primacy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008); Michael Beckley, Unrivaled: Why America Will Remain the World’s Sole Superpower (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2018). 29 For the argument that the two overriding goals of American grand strategy since World War II have been to establish itself as the dominant power in the international system, and prevent the emergence of challengers, see Christopher Layne, The Peace of Illusions: American Grand Strategy from 1940 to the Present (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006). 30 ‘Transcript of President Bush’s Address on the State of the Union’, The New York Times, 29 January, 1992, https://www.nytimes.com/1992/01/29/us/state-union-transcript-president-bush-s-address-state-union.html. 31 ‘Excerpts from Pentagon’s Plan: “Prevent the Re-emergence of a New Rival”‘, The New York Times, 8 March, 1992, https://www.nytimes.com/1992/03/08/world/excerpts-from-pentagon-s-plan-prevent-the-re-emergence-of-a-new-rival.html; Patrick E. Tyler, ‘U.S. Strategy Plan Calls for Insuring No Rivals Develop’, The New York Times, 8 March, 1992, p. A1, https://www.nytimes.com/1992/03/08/world/us-strategy-plan-calls-for-insuring-no-rivals-develop.html. The ‘potential competitors’ to which the draft DPG referred were Germany and Japan—both of which were democracies and US Cold War allies. 32 Defense Strategy for the 1990s: The Regional Defense Strategy (Washington, D.C.: Department of Defense, 1993), https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu//nukevault/ebb245/doc15.pdf. 33 For an excellent intellectual history of the key policymakers who shaped American grand strategy during the Bush 41 and Bush 43 administrations, see James Mann, The Rise of the Vulcans: A History of Bush’s War Cabinet (New York: Viking, 2004). 34 William J. Clinton, A National Security Strategy of Engagement and Enlargement (Washington, D.C.: The White House, 1995). Then Secretary of State Madeleine Albright described the United States as the world’s ‘indispensable nation’ during a February 19, 1998 television interview on NBC’s Today Show. 35 Joint Chiefs of Staff, Joint Vision 2020 - America’s Military: Preparing for Tomorrow (Washington, D. C.: Department of Defense, 2000), https://www.hsdl.org/?abstract&did=446826. 36 National Security Strategy of the United States of America (Washington, D.C.: The White House, 2002), p. 30. 37 National Security Strategy of the United States of America (Washington, D. C.: The White House, 2010), p. 1. Then Secretary of State Hilary Clinton proclaimed a ‘new American moment’. Hillary Rodham Clinton, ‘Remarks on United States Foreign Policy’, Council on Foreign Relations, Washington, D.C., 8 September, 2010, http://www.state.gov/secretary/rm/2010/09/146917.htm. 38 Peter Baker and David E. Sanger, ‘Security Strategy Recognizes U.S. Limits’, The New York Times, 5 February, 2015 http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/06/us/politics/security-strategy-recognizes-us-limits.html. 39 See National Security Strategy of the United States of America (Washington, D.C.: The White House, 2017), p. 28. Of course, given the chaotic, erratic nature of Donald Trump’s foreign policy decision making—and his expressed disdain for U.S. alliances and key attributes of the post-1945 international order—it is difficult to know for certain whether he is committed to preserving American primacy in the sense which that concept heretofore has been understood by US policymakers and security studies scholars. 40 Kurt Campbell, The Pivot: The Future of American Statecraft in Asia (New York: Twelve, 2016); Jeffrey A. Bader, Obama and China’s Rise: An Insider’s Account of America’s Asian Strategy (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2012). 41 Indo-Pacific Strategy Report: Preparedness, Partnerships, and Promoting a Networked Region (Washington, D. C.: Department of Defense, 2019). 42 Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (New York: Random House, 1987). 43 David Calleo, The Imperious Economy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982); James Chace, Solvency: The Price of Survival (New York: Random House, 1981); Robert Gilpin, The Political Economy of International Relations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987); Samuel P. Huntington, ‘Coping with the Lippmann Gap’, Foreign Affairs, Vol. 66, No. 3 (1987), pp. 453–77. Huntington was on both sides of the ‘decline’ debate. See Samuel P. Huntington, ‘The U.S. – Decline or Renewal?’, Foreign Affairs, Vo. 67, No. 2 (1988), pp. 76–96. 44 For example, see Herman Kahn, The Emerging Japanese Superstate: Challenge and Response (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1970); Clyde V. Prestowitz, Trading Places: How We Are Giving Our Future to Japan and How to Reclaim It (New York: Basic Books, 1988); Ezra Vogel, Japan as Number One: Lessons for America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979); James Fallows, ‘Containing Japan’, The Atlantic, Vol. 263, No. 5 (1989), pp. 40–54. Polling during the 1988 election campaign showed that more Americans were concerned about the threat to US economic security posed by Japan than were concerned with the military posed by the Soviet Union. In popular culture, American fears of Japan’s economic challenge were reflected in movies like Gung Ho (1986), and novels like Michael Crichton’s Rising Sun (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1992), which was made into the movie starring Sean Connery and Wesley Snipes (1993). 45 Huntington, ‘Decline or Renewal?’; Nye, Bound to Lead. As noted earlier, Huntington’s views on decline were inconsistent. In ‘Coping with the Lippmann Gap’, Huntington explicitly acknowledged that ‘the relative decline of U.S. power vis-à-vis other countries’ was real. Half a year later in ‘The U.S. – Decline or Renewal’, however, Huntington’s view had shifted. Initially, he had attributed American decline to the US trade and budget deficits of the 1980s (the latter of which were caused from the Reagan administration’s policies of big tax cuts and a massive defense build-up). His change of heart reflected his belief that the budget and trade deficits would be brought under control relatively soon. Here, Huntington was well wide of the mark. More than 30 years later, we still are waiting. 46 Kennedy’s thesis about the cyclical rise and fall of great powers fits nicely with that in Robert Gilpin, War and Change in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). 47 The concept of ‘termite decline’ was suggested to me by Ted Galen Carpenter, who, at the time, was the Cato Institute’s Vice President for Foreign and Defense Policy Studies. On how differential growth rates among states cause shifts in the distribution of power, see Gilpin, War and Change in World Politics. 48 Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, p. 534. 49 See Remarks by the President in the State of the Union Address (Washington, D.C.: The White House Office of the Press Secretary, 2012), https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2012/01/24/remarks-president-state-union-address. 50 Quoted in Jennifer Rubin, ‘Romney’s White Paper: A Guide to a Post-Obama Foreign Policy’, The Washington Post, 9 October, 2011, https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/right-turn/post/romneys-white-paper-a-guide-to-a-post-obama-foreign-policy/2011/03/29/gIQA318wXL_blog.html. 51 ‘Huntsman Says Decline is “Un-American” in First Speech’, 21 June, 2011, http://kcpw.org/blog/local-news/2011-06-21/huntsman-says-u-s-decline-is-un-american-in-first-speech/. Huntsman, a Republican, was governor of Utah and then served as US ambassador to China during the President Obama’s first term. He ran unsuccessfully for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination. He served in the Trump administration as ambassador to Russia. 52 It is difficult to characterize the Trump administration’s stance on the question of US decline. His 2016 campaign slogan—‘make America great again’—could be interpreted as a subtle admission of US decline and the need to reverse it. Regardless of where Donald Trump himself comes down on the issue of American decline, as discussed in the text earlier, it is clear that the American foreign policy establishment rejects—or at least claims to reject—the argument that US power is declining. 53 Beckley, Unrivaled, p. 2. 54 Fareed Zakaria, The Post-American World (New York: W.W. Norton, 2008), pp. 219, 234. Zakaria acknowledges that his foreign policy prescriptions build on the work of John Ikenberry, Joseph S. Nye, Jr., William C. Wohlforth, each of whom has argued that US primacy can be perpetuated well into the future. Zakaria, The Post-American World, pp. 232–5, 241. 55 For a critique of Zakaria’s Post-American World, see Christopher Layne, ‘The Unipolar Exit and the End of the Pax Americana’, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, Vol. 24, No. 2 (2011), pp. 149–64; and Christopher Layne, ‘The Real Post-American World: The Pax Americana’s End and the Future of World Politics’, in Sean Clark and Sabrina Hoque, eds., Debating a Post-American World: What Lies Ahead? (London: Routledge, 2011). Curiously, as Zakaria saw it, US decline and the coming of the purported post-American world would have no serious consequences for US foreign policy. He did not ask whether the United States can—or should—maintain its Cold War era alliance commitments in Europe and East Asia. He did not question whether the United States was on the right track in Iraq and Afghanistan. He never considered whether a declining United States would still be able to determine the structures and agendas of international institutions or whether the soft power of emerging states like China would eclipse that of the United States. He did not even entertain the idea that the US commitment to globalization might have undermined America’s own economic performance. On the contrary, Zakaria argued that the United States should stick with the same basic foreign policy it has followed since the end of World War II. There is something weird about a book that claims that America’s world role is undergoing big changes, yet concludes that the United States need not make any fundamental changes in its foreign policy. Who knew that ‘decline’ could be so easy? 56 Robert Kagan, The World America Made (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012); Robert J. Lieber, Power and Willpower in the American Future: Why the United States is Not Destined to Decline (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Joseph Joffe, Myth of American Decline: Politics, Economics, and a Half-Century of False Prophecies (New York: Liveright, 2013); Beckley, Unrivaled; Brooks and Wohlforth, America Abroad; Brooks and Wohlforth, World Out of Balance. 57 Beckley, Unrivaled, p. 2. 58 Ibid., p. 14. 59 Brooks and Wohlforth, America Abroad, pp. 45–6. 60 See Beckley, Unrivaled; Brooks and Wohlforth, America Abroad. 61 Beckley, Unrivaled, pp. 12–3. Although they do not offer an alternative to GDP as fully developed as Beckley’s, in America Abroad, Brooks and Wohlforth do argue that there are superior yardsticks to GDP for measuring, and comparing states’ relative power. Brooks and Wohlforth, America Abroad, pp. 38–47. 62 Brooks and Wohlforth, America Abroad, p. 28. 63 Ibid., pp. 16–7. 64 For example, see Lieber, Power and Willpower in the American Future. 65 Brooks and Wohlforth, America Abroad; Monteiro, Theory of Unipolar Politics. 66 Brooks and Wohlforth, America Abroad, p. 8. 67 Brooks and Wohlforth contend that the asserted US-China technology gap matters because ‘Developing and using top-end military equipment is much more difficult and complex, and such an effort is therefore much harder and takes longer’. Thus, they say, the ‘critical question is whether’ China ‘has the technological capacity to produce and field a defense force that can effectively match-up with’ the United States’ military capabilities. Brooks and Wohlforth, America Abroad, pp. 49, 60. 68 Brooks and Wohlforth, America Abroad, p. 11. 69 This was a theme at the spring 2015 meetings of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. Jonathan Weisman, ‘U.S. Primacy on Economics Seen as Ebbing’, The New York Times, 18 April, 2015, p. A1. 70 Ralph Atkins and Geoff Dyer, ‘Germany Loses Export Leader Title to China’, The Financial Times, 10 February, 2010, http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/f65659fc-15e3-11df-b65b-00144feab49a.html?ft_site=falcon&desktop=true#axzz4nVqqnsC1. 71 Peter Marsh, ‘China Noses Ahead as Top Goods Producer’, The Financial Times, 13 March, 2011, https://www.ft.com/content/002fd8f0-4d96-11e0-85e4-00144feab49a. 72 Keith Fray, ‘China’s Great Leap Forward: Overtaking the US as the Largest Economy’, The Financial Times, 8 October, 2014, https://www.ft.com/content/166230a2-a18c-38f1-bcac-cbbdd495503a. 73 ‘GDP Based on PPP, Share of World’, International Monetary Fund, https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/PPPSH@WEO/USA/CHN. 74 ‘China to Become World’s Largest Economy in 2024, Reports IHS Economics’, IHS Markit, September 7, 2014, http://news.ihsmarkit.com/press-release/economics-country-risk/china-become-worlds-largest-economy-2024-reports-ihs-economics. According to the IMF, calculated by MER, in 2019, the US share of world GDP was 24.7% and China’s was 16.3%. ‘GDP, Current Prices’, https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/NGDPD@WEO/USA/CHN. 75 I thank my Texas A & M colleague Gabriela Marin Thornton for calling my attention to this point. Norway currently has the world’s highest per capita GDP. 76 See Justin Lahart, ‘Six Reasons Why China Matters’, The Wall Street Journal, 11 October, 2017, https://www.wsj.com/articles/six-reasons-why-china-matters-1507742854. These figures are based on PPP. 77 There is concern that the coronavirus outbreak that began in Wuhan could be the catalyst for a global economic recession. If a recession does occur, it would, in an ironic way, underscore the increasing centrality of China’s economy to global economic growth and the corresponding diminishment of the American economy’s role. As The Financial Times columnist Rana Foroohar observes: ‘We might be about to see something new: a global slowdown led by China, rather than the US. The past four global recessions have been triggered by American consumers. But China’s place in the global economy has grown dramatically over that time. China today accounts for about one-third of global growth, a larger share than the US, Europe and Japan combined’. As she notes, ‘The US still matters a lot in the global economy, but much less than it used to. China, on the other hand, matters much more’. Rana Foroohar, ‘Coronavirus Will Hit Global Growth’, The Financial Times, 3 February, 2020, p. 17, https://www.ft.com/content/8be84270-4430-11ea-a43a-c4b328d9061c. 78 Actually, the United States is an extra-regional hegemon. Once it gained regional hegemony in North America, it used that as a springboard to establish its dominance in (Western) Europe, East Asia, and the Middle East following World War II. See Layne, The Peace of Illusions. 79 John J. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001). 80 John J. Mearsheimer, ‘China’s Unpeaceful Rise’, Current History, Vol. 105, No. 690 (2006), pp. 160–2; Christopher Layne, ‘China’s Challenge to U.S. Hegemony’, Current History, Vol. 107, No. 705 (2008), pp. 13–8. 81 Eric Hegenbotham and Michael Nixon, eds., The U.S.-China Military Scorecard: Forces, Geography, and the Evolving Balance of Power, 1996-2017 (Santa Monica: RAND Corporation, 2015), p. 321. 82 Ibid., p. 324. 83 Roger Cliff, China’s Military Power (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 244–5. 84 Ibid., p. 246. 85 Chris Buckley and Adam Wu, ‘China Hunts for Scientific Glory, and Aliens, With New Telescope’, The New York Times, 25 September, 2016, p. A8, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/26/world/asia/china-telescope-fast-space-seti.html. 86 Edward Wong, ‘China Launches Satellite in Bid to Lead Quantum Research’, The New York Times, 17 August, 2016, p. A5, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/17/world/asia/china-quantum-satellite-mozi.html. 87 John Markoff, ‘China Crowds Top Computer List’, The New York Times, 21 June, 2016, p. B1, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/21/technology/china-tops-list-of-fastest-computers-again.html. The United States subsequently reclaimed the number one supercomputer position, but the competition with China continues. 88 Paul Mozur, ‘China Sets Goal to Lead in Artificial Intelligence’, The New York Times, 21 July, 2017, p. B1; John Markoff and Matthew Rosenberg, ‘China’s Intelligent Weaponry Gets Smarter’, The New York Times, 5 February, 2017, p. B1, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/03/technology/artificial-intelligence-china-united-states.html/. 89 ‘The Algorithm Kingdom’, The Economist, 15 July, 2017, pp. 53–4. 90 See Keith Bradsher, ‘China Hastens a Global Move to Electric Cars’, The New York Times, 10 October, 2017, p. A1, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/09/business/china-hastens-the-world-toward-an-electric-car-future.html; Andrew Brown, ‘China Charges Ahead on Electric Cars’, The Wall Street Journal, 10 October, 2017, https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-charges-toward-electric-car-supremacy-1507627801 https. 91 John Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York: W. W. Norton, 1986), pp. 98–105. On the role race and racial stereotypes have played in US foreign policy, also see Michael Hunt, Ideology and American Foreign Policy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987). 92 Gilpin, War and Change in World Politics. 93 See Christopher Layne, ‘The Unipolar Illusion: Why New Great Will Rise’, International Security, Vol. 17, No. 4 (1993), pp. 5–51; Christopher Layne, ‘The Unipolar Illusion Revisited: The Coming End of the United States’ “Unipolar Moment”’, International Security, Vol. 31, No. 2 (2006), pp. 7–41. 94 See Ludwig Dehio, The Precarious Balance: Four Centuries of the European Power Struggle, trans. Charles Fullman, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1962). 95 France’s unipolar moment under the Sun King was ended by the rise of British power. Victorian Britain’s unipolar moment was brought to an end by the nearly simultaneous late 19th-century emergences of three new great powers: the United States, Imperial Germany, and Imperial Japan. 96 As Henry Kissinger famously observed, absolute security for one state means absolute insecurity for the other. The diplomatic historian Brendan Sims offers a concrete example of this maxim. During the late 1790s, led by Napoleon Bonaparte, Revolutionary France extended its power into Germany, conquered most of the Italian Peninsula, invaded Egypt, waged an aggressive war at sea against British commerce, and tried to support an Irish rebellion against British rule. Paris claimed its strategy was defensive. But, as Simms observes: ‘In practice, there was little difference between defensive and offensive here: the absolute security of France could only be achieved through the absolute insecurity of all her neighbors far and near’. Brendan Simms, Europe: The Struggle for Supremacy, 1453 to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 2013), p. 156. 97 The classic statement is Kenneth N. Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Reading: Addison-Wesley, 1979). 98 Kenneth N. Waltz, ‘America as a Model for the World: A Foreign Policy Perspective’, PS: Political Science & Politics, Vol. 24, No. 4 (1991), p. 669. 99 Waltz, Theory of International Politics, pp. 118, 168; Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, pp. 156–7; Jack S. Levy, ‘What Do Great Powers Balance Against and When?’, in T. V. Paul, James J. Wirtz, and Michel Fortmann, eds., Balance of Power: Theory and Practice in the 2st Century (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), pp. 29–51. 100 The classic work on the geopolitical effect of uneven growth rates is Gilpin, War and Change in World Politics. 101 Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, p. 22. 102 Robert Bickers, The Scramble for China: Foreign Devils in the Qing Empire, 1832–1914 (London: Allen Lane, 2011). 103 Ezra Vogel, Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China (Cambridge: Harvard/Belknap Press, 2011), p. 696. 104 Quoted in Vogel, Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China, p. 674. 105 Fareed Zakaria, From Wealth to Power: The Unusual Origins of America’s World Role (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), pp. 184–5. 106 Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics; Layne, The Peace of Illusions. 107 Gilpin, War and Change in World Politics, p. 106. For similar arguments, see A. F. K. Organski, World Politics (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1968), p. 47; Zakaria, From Wealth to Power. 108 Zakaria, From Wealth to Power, p. 3. 109 T. V. Paul, Deborah Welch Larson, and William C. Wohlforth, eds., Status in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Michelle Murray, The Struggle for Recognition in International Relations: Status, Revisionism, and Rising Powers (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018); Steven Ward, Status and the Challenge of Rising Powers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017); Jonathan Renshon, Fighting for Status: Hierarchy and Conflict in World Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017); Joslyn Barnhart, The Consequence of Humiliation: Anger and Status in World Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2020). 110 On ‘power transitions’ and their consequences, see Organski, World Politics; A. F. K. Organski and Jacek Kugler, The War Ledger (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); Jacek Kugler and Douglas Lemke, eds., Parity and War: Evaluations and Extensions of the War Ledger (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996); William R. Thompson, ed., Systemic Transitions: Past, Present, and Future (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Jack Levy, ‘Power Transition Theory and the Rise of China’, in Robert Ross and Zhu Feng, eds., China’s Ascent: Power, Security, and the Future of International Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008), pp. 11–33. 111 It is easy to understand why a declining hegemon would initiate war against the rising challenger. It’s the logic of ‘preventive war:’ better to attack now before the distribution of power shifts even more in the challenger’s favor. There is, however, a—as yet definitively answered—puzzle as to why a rising challenger would begin a war with the declining hegemon. After all, if it just waits patiently, it should displace the declining hegemon peacefully. 112 The classic exposition of this conundrum is Edward Hallett Carr, The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1919–1939 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). 113 For a concise statement of the Cold War orthodoxy, see Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., ‘Origins of the Cold War’, Foreign Affairs, Vol. 46, No. 1 (1967), pp. 22–52. The leading example of post-Cold War neo-orthodoxy is John Lewis Gaddis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). On the roots of the ideological clash between American liberalism and Soviet communism, see N. Gordon Levin, Woodrow Wilson and World Politics: America’s Response to War and Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968). 114 On neorealism, see Waltz, Theory of International Politics. For early works by (traditional) realist scholars ascribing the Cold War to clashing great power interests, see Louis J. Halle, The Cold War as History (New York: Harper & Row, 1967); William H. McNeill, America, Britain, and Russia: Their Cooperation and Conflict, 1941–1946 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1953); Walter Lippmann, The Cold War: A Study in U.S. Foreign Policy (New York: Harper & Row, 1947); Hans J. Morgenthau, In Defense of the National Interest: A Critical Examination of American Foreign Policy (New York: Knopf, 1951). 115 Deborah Welch Larson, The Origins of Containment: A Psychological Explanation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), p. 19. 116 Robert L. Messer, ‘Paths Not Taken: The United States Department of State and Alternatives to Containment, 1945–46’, Diplomatic History, Vol. 1, No. 4 (1977), pp. 297–319; Lippmann, The Cold War. 117 Daniel Yergin, Shattered Peace: The Origins of the Cold War and the National Security State (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977), p. 11. 118 The classic statement of offensive realism is Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics. 119 For those who ascribe to this view, the nature of the Soviet Union’s domestic political system was the cause of the First Cold War. ‘As long as Stalin was running the Soviet Union’, the historian John Lewis Gaddis says, the First Cold War was ‘inevitable’. Gaddis, We Now Know, p. 292. 120 America’s postwar strategy conforms with basic postulate of offensive realist theory: as a great power’s wealth and military capabilities grow, its geopolitical ambitions increase. On offensive realism, See Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics; Zakaria, From Wealth to Power; Eric Labs, ‘Beyond Victory: Offensive Realism and the Expansion of War Aims’, Security Studies, Vol. 6, No. 4 (1997), pp. 1–49. 121 Yergin, Shattered Peace, pp. 12–3. This is one of Leffler’s key conclusions both in A Preponderance of Power and in ‘The American Conception of National Security’. Melvyn P. Leffler, A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992); Melvyn P. Leffler, ‘The American Conception of National Security and the Beginnings of the Cold War, 1945-48’, American Historical Review, Vol. 89, No. 2 (1984), pp. 346–81. 122 Leffler, ‘The American Conception of National Security’, p. 379. 123 Ibid. 124 Yergin, Shattered Peace, p. 197. Similarly, Leffler says that American policymakers ‘realized that their security interests stretched across the globe and required a favorable configuration of power on the Eurasian land mass. They wanted to resist Soviet expansion in Western Europe, the Middle East, and Northeast Asia. They wanted control over western Germany and all of Japan. They wanted to contain the communist left in France, Italy, Greece, Korea, and China. They wanted to modify traditional imperial practices, co-opt the forces of revolutionary nationalism, and ensure Western control of the underdeveloped world’. Leffler, A Preponderance of Power, p. 97. 125 Leffler, A Preponderance of Power, pp. 182, 504. 126 Yergin, Shattered Peace, p. 270. Also, see Leffler, A Preponderance of Power, pp. 186, 204. 127 George F. Kennan, Memoirs: Volume I, 1925–1950 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1967), pp. 401–2. 128 Yergin, Shattered Peace, p. 12. 129 Leffler, A Preponderance of Power, p. 512. 130 See Walter Lafeber, America, Russia, and the Cold War (New York: McGraw-Hill Education, 2006); Leffler, A Preponderance of Power; Yergin, Shattered Peace; Norman Naimark, Stalin and the Fate of Europe: The Postwar Struggle for Sovereignty (Cambridge: Harvard/Belknap Press, 2019); Odd Arne Westad, The Cold War: A Global History (New York: Basic Books, 2017). Also, see Caroline Kennedy-Pipe, Stalin’s Cold War: Soviet Strategies in Europe, 1943–1956 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995); Vladislav Zubok and Constantine Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War: From Stalin to Khrushchev (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), p. 7; Vladimir O. Pechantnov, ‘The Big Three After World War II: New Documents on Soviet Thinking About Post War Relations with the United States and Great Britain’, Cold War International History Project, Working Paper, No. 13 (Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, 1995). 131 On FDR, see Warren Kimball, The Juggler: Franklin Roosevelt as Wartime Statesman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 169, 182–3, and also Chapter 6. On the factors driving—and limiting—US attempts to keep open the Soviet sphere in East Central Europe, see Geir Lundestad, The American Non-Policy Towards Eastern Europe, 1943–1947: Universalism in an Area not of Essential Interest to the United States (Tromso: Universitetsforlaget, 1978), especially pp. 39–80. Also, see Eduard Mark, ‘Charles E. Bohlen and the Acceptable Limits of Soviet Hegemony in Eastern Europe: A Memorandum of 18 October 1945’, Diplomatic History, Vol. 3, No. 2 (1979), pp. 201–13; Eduard Mark, ‘American Policy toward Eastern Europe and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941–1946: An Alternative Interpretation’, Journal of American History, Vol. 68, No. 2 (1981), pp. 313–6. 132 In 1943, the Joint Strategic Survey Committee told the Joint Chiefs of Staff that, when War II ended, ‘Russia will be in a military position to impose whatever territorial settlements it desires in Central Europe and the Balkans’. Quoted in Mark Stoler, Allies and Adversaries: The Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Grand Alliance, and U.S. Strategy in World War II (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), p. 127. During the war, FDR himself acknowledged that there would be little the United States could do to prevent the Soviets from imposing their rule in regions occupied by the Red Army. See ibid., pp. 126, 189. Also, see Lundestad, The American Non-Policy Towards Eastern Europe, 1943–1947, p. 188; Yergin, Shattered Peace, p. 58. Truman, too, was aware that ‘he could not eliminate Soviet predominance in countries that were occupied by the Soviet army’. Leffler, A Preponderance of Power, p. 34. 133 US Soviet differences over East Central Europe were exacerbated by the ambiguity in the US policy bequeathed to the Truman administration by FDR. FDR’s policy toward the Kremlin was fundamentally based on realpolitik, but it was sold to the American public (and Congress) in Wilsonian terms that rejected ‘spheres of influence’ diplomacy. See Yergin, Shattered Peace, pp. 45–6, 48, 57–8, 66, 68. 134 See Edward Mark, ‘Bohlen and the Acceptable Limits of Soviet Hegemony’; Messer, ‘Paths Not Taken’. In December 1945, the State Department reaffirmed that the United States ‘should continue to maintain that events’ in Soviet occupied East Central Europe ‘are the responsibility of the three nations signatory to the Yalta Declaration on Liberated Europe’. The State Department also decried the Soviet-imposed “economic blackout” of East Central Europe. In conformity with its Open-Door policies of ‘favoring access to all raw materials by all nations and of equal economic opportunity in all areas’, the State Department said the United States should use its ‘full influence to break down the firm hold which the Soviet Government is endeavoring to fasten on Eastern and Central Europe’, in Foreign Policy of the United States, 1 December, 1945, FRUS 1946, I, p. 1137. 135 Yergin, Shattered Peace, p. 8. 136 Odd Arne Westad, ‘The New International History of the Cold War: Three (Possible) Paradigms’, Diplomatic History, Vol. 24, No. 4 (2000), p. 554. 137 See Robert Divine, Second Chance: The Triumph of Internationalism in America During the Second World War (New York: Atheneum, 1967). Having prevailed in World War II, Yergin has written, ‘The American leaders no longer simply found dictatorship abhorrent; they felt responsible for what happened all over the world. They were gripped again by messianic liberalism, the powerful urge to reform the world that has been called liberalism’. Yergin, Shattered Peace, p. 84. 138 Lundestad, The American Non-Policy Towards Eastern Europe, 1943–1947, p. 41. 139 LaFeber, Russia, America, and the Cold War, pp. 28–9. 140 Yergin, Shattered Peace, p. 84. 141 Illustrative is a spring 1946 memorandum written by H. Freeman (‘Doc’) Matthews, chief of the State Department’s West European Division. ‘As long as present Soviet policies and attitude in regard to other countries remain unchanged’, Matthews wrote, ‘the U.S. must accept the fact that it is confronted with the threat of an expanding totalitarian state which continues to believe and act on the belief that the world is divided into two irreconcilably hostile camps, i.e., Soviet and non-Soviet’. He postulated that Soviet expansion would be ‘continuous and unlimited’, and rejected the view that ‘Soviet actions are motivated primarily be a legitimate desire to obtain security for the Soviet Union …’. Instead, he asserted, ‘Soviet expansion aims are unlimited and not confined to areas of immediate concern to the Soviet Union’. See ‘Memorandum by the Acting Department of State Member (Matthews) to the State-War-Navy Coordinating Committee, April 1, 1946’, in FRUS 1946, I, p. 1167. 142 See below. 143 Robert G. Kaiser and Steven Mufson, ‘“Blue Team” Draws a Hard Line on Beijing’, The Washington Post, 22 February, 2000, p. A1, https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPcap/2000-02/22/004r-022200-idx.html. 144 2002 National Security Strategy of the United States, p. 161. 145 Remarks Delivered by Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, Shangri-La Hotel, Singapore, 4 June, 2005, http://www.defenselink.mil/speeches/2005/sp20050604-secdef1561.html; The Military Power of the People’s Republic of China, p. 13. 146 Annual Report to Congress: The Military Power of the People’s Republic of China, 2005 (Washington, D.C.: Office of the Secretary of Defense), p. 14. 147 During 1945, Washington was torn between two narratives with respect to US-Soviet Union: one held that the wartime collaboration with Moscow could be perpetuated in the postwar world and the other held that the Soviet Union was aggressive and hostile. Two early 1946 landmarks that laid the foundations of the (First) Cold War consensus by crystalling US perceptions of the Soviet threat were George F. Kennan’s ‘Long Telegram, and Winston Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” speech delivered at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri. 148 ‘Acting Secretary Shanahan’s Remarks at the IISS Shangri-La Dialogue 2019’, 1 June, 2019, https://www.defense.gov/Newsroom/Transcripts/Transcript/Article/1871584/acting-secretary-shanahans-remarks-at-the-iiss-shangri-la-dialogue-2019/. Shanahan’s description of the U.S. role in Asia recalls Richard Holbrooke’s description of American as a “European power”. Either American policymakers are bad at map reading and geography, or they possess some magical device that allows them to shift the location of continents at the snap of a finger. See Richard Holbrooke, ‘America, A European Power’, Foreign Affairs, Vol. 74, No. 2 (1995), pp. 38-51. Officials attending the 2019 Shangri-La Dialogue from smaller regional states expressed disquiet over deepening Sino-American tensions, and worried that they will be forced to choose sides between Washington and Beijing. See Niharika Mandhana and Jeremy Page, ‘U.S., China Spar Over Security’, The Wall Street Journal, 3 June, 2019, p. A10, https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinese-defense-minister-warns-of-a-fight-to-the-end-in-trade-spat-11559447898?mod=searchresults&page=1&pos=4; Kathrin Hille and Stefania Palma, ‘Asian Ministers Warn U.S.-China Tensions Raise Risk of War’, The Financial Times, 2 June, 2019, https://www.ft.com/content/12221dae-8512-11e9-a028-86cea8523dc2. 149 Department of Defense, Indo-Pacific Strategy Report: Preparedness, Partnerships, and Promoting a Networked Region, 1 June, 2019, p. 8, https://media.defense.gov/2019/Jul/01/2002152311/-1/-1/1/DEPARTMENT-OF-DEFENSE-INDO-PACIFIC-STRATEGY-REPORT-2019.PDF 150 Indo-Pacific Strategy, p. 4, What the Trump administration (like its predecessors) actually means is that no one nation other than the United States can or should dominate the Indo-Pacific. 151 Elbridge Colby, ‘Don’t Let Iraq Distract from China’, The Wall Street Journal, 23 September, 2019, p. A21, https://www.wsj.com/articles/dont-let-iran-distract-from-china-11569366901. Colby served in the Trump administration in 2017–18 as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Strategy and Force Development. In this article, he links the specter of China’s geopolitical dominance in Asia to its economic threat to the United Sates: ‘The state that sets the rules in Asia will therefore set them for the world. And China would likely apply an economic model to the region similar to the one it has practiced at home. China’s state capitalism has flouted global economic trading rules, leading to serious economic pain among America’s middle and working classes. If China attains mastery over Asia, Americans will suffer’. 152 Indo-Pacific Strategy, pp. 16, 53. 153 Michael R. Gordon, ‘U.S. Tests Missile After Withdrawing From 1987 Treaty’, The Wall Street Journal, 12 December, 2019, https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-tests-missile-after-withdrawing-from-1987-treaty-11576194207. 154 Walter McDougall, Promised Land, Crusade State: America’s Encounter with the World Since 1776 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997). 155 NSC-68 was written by Paul Nitze. It depicted the Cold War as a struggle pitting ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ against the ‘grim oligarchy of the Kremlin’. It warned that a ‘defeat for freedom anywhere was a defeat everywhere, and that the world could not exist “half slave and half free’. NSC-68, ‘U.S. Objectives and Programs for National Security’, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1950, Volume I: National Security Affairs; Foreign Economic Policy. 156 Indo-Pacific Strategy, p. 53 (emphasis added). 157 Ibid., p. 7. 158 ‘Remarks by Vice President Pence at the Frederic V. Malek Memorial Lecture’, 24 October, 2019, https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-vice-president-pence-frederic-v-malek-memorial-lecture/; Remarks by Vice President Pence on the Administration’s Policy Toward China, 4 October, 2018, https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-vice-president-pence-administrations-policy-toward-china/. 159 Quoted in Marc Santora, ‘Pompeo Calls Chinese Communist Party “The Central Threat of Our Times”’, The New York Times, 31 January, 2020, p. A4, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/30/world/europe/pompeo-uk-china-huawei.html. 160 Ibid. 161 Marco Rubio, ‘China is Showing Its True Nature in Hong Kong. The U.S. Must Not Watch from the Sidelines’, The Washington Post, 3 September, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/marco-rubio-china-must-respect-hong-kongs-autonomy–or-face-the-consequences/2019/09/03/7399e69a-ce80-11e9-b29b-a528dc82154a_story.html. 162 Gordon Chang, ‘Hong Kong May Topple Communism’, The Wall Street Journal, 20 September, 2019, p. A19, https://www.wsj.com/articles/hong-kong-may-topple-communism-11569453043. Since the early 2000s, Chang has been predicting the collapse of the Chinese Communist Party with metronomic regularity. 163 Austin Ramzy and Chris Buckley, ‘Show Absolutely No Mercy: Inside China’s Mass Detentions’, The New York Times, 17 November, 2019, p. A1, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/11/16/world/asia/china-xinjiang-documents.html. 164 Edward Wong and Catie Edmondson, ‘Congress Uniting to Compel Trump on Human Rights’, The New York Times, 28 December, 2019, p. A1, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/27/us/politics/trumps-human-rights-congress.html. Few other governments, however, have joined Washington in its condemnation of China. Jane Perlez, ‘Buying the World’s Silence on Muslim Detention Camps’, The New York Times, 26 September, 2019, p. A4, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/25/world/asia/china-xinjiang-muslim-camps.html; FT Reporters, ‘China’s Might Dampens Criticism of Uighur Crackdown’, The Financial Times, 22 December, 2019, https://www.ft.com/content/51a1bf9a-2015-11ea-92da-f0c92e957a96. 165 Zoellick, ‘Wither China?’. 166 Indo-Pacific Strategy Report, p. 3. As Vice President Pence said, the United States supported China’s admission to the World Trade Organization ‘in the hope that freedom in China would expand in all its forms- not just economically but with a newfound respect for classical liberal principles …’. Pence, ‘Remarks on Administration’s Policy Toward China’. 167 Pence, ‘Remarks on Administration’s Policy Toward China’. 168 Quoted in Allison Mitchell, ‘Meager Progress as China Leader and Clinton Meet’, The New York Times, 25 October, 1995, p. A1. 169 As Vice President Pence said, ‘[W]e will continue to believe that the values of democracy - of individual liberty, of religion and conscience, the rule of law - serve American and global interests because they are, and ever will be, the best form of government to unleash human aspirations and guide the relations between all the world’s nations and peoples’. 170 As the political scientist Samuel P. Huntington wrote, American policy based on the universal applicability of liberal democracy reflects the ‘ideology of the West [that is, the United States]’ and is a recipe ‘for confrontation with non-Western cultures’. Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), p .66. 171 Benjamin Miller, ‘Explaining Changes in U.S. Grand Strategy: 9/11, the Rise of Offensive Liberalism, and the War in Iraq’, Security Studies, Vol. 19, No. 1 (2010), pp. 26–65. 172 ‘Remarks by Vice President Pence at the Frederic V. Malek Memorial Lecture’. 173 John R. Oneal and Bruce Russett, ‘The Classical Liberals Were Right: Democracy, Interdependence, and Conflict, 1950–1985’, International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 41, No. 2 (1997), pp. 267–93; John R. Oneal, Frances H. Oneal, Zeev Maoz, and Bruce Russett, ‘The Liberal Peace: Interdependence, Democracy, and International Conflict, 1950–85’, Journal of Peace Research, Vol. 33, No. 1 (1996), pp. 11–28. In the hands of US policymakers, the democratic peace theory often becomes a democratic war theory. For critiques of the democratic peace theory, see Christopher Layne, ‘Kant or Cant? The Myth of the Democratic Peace’, International Security, Vol. 19, No. 2 (1994), pp. 5–49; Sebastian Rosato, ‘The Flawed Logic of Democratic Peace Theory’, American Political Science Review, Vol. 97, No. 4 (2003), pp. 585–602. 174 NSC 20/4, ‘U.S. Objectives with Respect to the USSR to Counter Soviet Threats to U.S. Security’, FRUS 1948, Vol. I, p. 2. On American efforts to destabilize the Soviet Union in the early Cold War years, see Gregory F. Mitrovich, Undermining the Kremlin: America’s Strategy to Subvert the Soviet Bloc, 1948–1956 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000). 175 Jack Snyder, Myths of Empire: Domestic Politics and International Ambition (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991). 176 Stefan Halper, The Beijing Consensus: How China’s Authoritarian Model Will Dominate the Twenty-First Century (New York: Basic Books, 2010); Joshua Kurlantzik, Charm Offensive: How China’s Soft Power is Transforming the World (New Haven: Yale University Press); Joshua Cooper Ramo, The Beijing Consensus (London: Foreign Policy Center, 2004). 177 This creeping self-doubt among US policy makers is alluded to by Kenneth Lieberthal and Wang Jisi. As they state, for American officials, ‘The fact that China’s global impact and ranking has been increasing rapidly in recent years and that the U.S. is experiencing serious difficulties domestically is itself producing particular sensitivities’. Kenneth Lieberthal and Wang Jisi, Addressing U.S.-China Strategic Distrust, Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution John L. Thornton China Center Monograph Series, No. 4 (2012), p. 21. 178 Ian Bremmer and David Gordon, ‘U.S. Needs Japan as its Best Ally in Asia’, The Financial Times, 9 September, 2012, https://www.ft.com/content/3b8ffadc-f82c-11e1-bec8-00144feabdc0. 179 Friedberg, A Contest for Supremacy, p. 44 (emphasis added). 180 For an extended discussion of how America’s liberal ideology causes the fear of closure—and the impact of this on U.S. foreign policy—see Layne, The Peace of Illusions. 181 For example, see Gideon Rachman, ‘The Shadow of 1914 Falls Over the Pacific’, The Financial Times, 4 February, 2013, https://www.ft.com/content/e29e200a-6ebb-11e2-9ded-00144feab49a; Martin Wolf, ‘China Must Not Copy the Kaiser’s Errors’, The Financial Times, 9 December, 2013, https://www.ft.com/content/672d7028-5b83-11e3-a2ba-00144feabdc0; ‘Could Asia Really Go to War Over These?’, The Economist, 22 September, 2012, p. 13; Banyan, ‘Chasing Ghosts’, The Economist, 11 June, 2009; Jane Perlez, ‘Japan’s Leader Compares Strain with China to Germany and Britain in 1914’, The New York Times, 23 January, 2014, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/24/world/asia/japans-leader-compares-strain-with-china-to-germany-and-britain-in-1914.html; Kurt Campbell, ‘Threats to Peace are Lurking in the East China Sea’, The Financial Times, 23 June, 2013, https://www.ft.com/content/b924cc56-dda1-11e2-a756-00144feab7de; Gideon Rachman, ‘The Origins of the First World War Revisited’, The Financial Times, 10 February, 2013, https://www.ft.com/content/fdcfecee-bd95-3d49-81ec-8f1d95618fcf. To be sure, the Anglo-German rivalry, and its accompanying naval arms race, was not the direct cause of World War I. But it caused the British foreign policy elite increasingly regard Germany as a threat, and thus made London more inclined to go to war in August 1914 than it otherwise might have been. 182 Both Organski, World Politics, and Gilpin, War and Change in World Politics, highlight the importance of the rising power(s) dissatisfaction with the status quo. 183 Gilpin, War and Change in World Politics, p. 10. 184 Carr, The Twenty Years’ Crisis. 185 Quoted in Howard W. French, Everything Under the Heavens: How the Past Helps Shape China’s Push for Global Power (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2017), p. 6. 186 See the sources cited at f.n. 108. 187 William C. Wohlforth, ‘Unipolarity, Status Competition, and Great Power War’, World Politics, Vol. 61, No. 1 (2009), p. 52. 188 Andrew Nathan and Andrew Scobell, ‘How China Sees America’, Foreign Affairs, Vol. 91, No. 5 (2012), p. 47. 189 John J. Mearsheimer, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), p. 223. 190 Ibid., p. 228. 191 The early twentieth-century British geopolitical thinker Sir Halford Mackinder famously argued that if a single great power dominated the European/Eurasian ‘heartland’, it would be able to gain global hegemony. See Halford Mackinder, ‘The Geographical Pivot of History’, The Geographical Journal, Vol. 23. No. 4 (1904), pp. 421–37. Mearsheimer’s view of US grand strategy reflects this Mackinderesque nightmare of a Eurasian hegemon threatening the United States. Mackinder’s fear of a Eurasian hegemon, however, is a relic of the pre-nuclear age in which national power was based on coal, steel, and population. Nuclear weapons rendered obsolete traditional balance of power calculations based on these metrics—and negates the basis of American fears of a European (or Eurasian) hegemon. Robert W. Tucker, The New Isolationism: Threat or Promise? (New York: Universe Books, 1972). 192 Edmondson, ‘China Hawks See Opening to Push for Punitive Measures Against a Nation’; Martin and Haberman, ‘G.O.P. Aiming to Make China the Scapegoat’. 193 Josh Hawley, ‘End “Forever Wars” and Face China’s Threat’, The Wall Street Journal, 24 November, 2019, https://www.wsj.com/articles/end-forever-wars-and-face-chinas-threat-11574634656?mod=article_inline. 194 Lippmann, The Cold War, p. 60. 195 David Calleo, The German Problem Reconsidered: Germany and the World Order, 1870 to Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), p. 6. © The Author(s) 2020. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Institute of International Relations, Tsinghua University. All rights reserved. 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TI - Preventing the China-U.S. Cold War from Turning Hot
JF - The Chinese Journal of International Politics
DO - 10.1093/cjip/poaa012
DA - 2020-09-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/preventing-the-china-u-s-cold-war-from-turning-hot-wiwyCMtCBR
SP - 343
EP - 385
VL - 13
IS - 3
DP - DeepDyve
ER -