John Glaser — The Ugly Truth About Avoiding War With China

While ISIS is the threat that keeps Washington policymakers up at night, it’s the rise of China that has international relations theorists in a panic. Graham Allison argues persuasively that China’s rise portends a classic Thucydides Trap. His research shows that in twelve of the last sixteen cases over the past five hundred years, when a rising power challenged an established one, the result was war. John Mearsheimer, somewhat more bluntly, warns that “China cannot rise peacefully.” It’s an impending great power clash that makes the threat from ISIS look like child’s play.

But China threatens the United States only insofar as America insists on being the dominant power in China’s backyard, a policy that actually contributes very little to U.S. security. If we abandon our strategy of primacy, the risk of a clash will shrink away. If we try to contain China’s rise, on the other hand, these predictions of doom may prove right.…

The cost of trying to maintain a "unipolar" (read imperialistic) world order.

Primacy could conceivably be justified if the United States derived commensurate benefits. That does not appear to be the case. As Robert Jervis has written, “the pursuit of primacy was what great power politics was all about in the past,” but in a world of nuclear weapons, with “low security threats and great common interests among the developed countries,” the game is not “worth the candle.” Charles Glaser similarly argues, “Unipolarity is much overrated.” It is not necessary to protect core national interests and in fact causes the U.S. to “lose track of how secure it is and consequently pursue policies that are designed to increase its security but turn out to be too costly and/or to have a high probability of backfiring.” Nor does U.S. dominance reap much in the way of tangible economic rewards. Daniel Drezner contends, “The economic benefits from military predominance alone seem, at a minimum, to have been exaggerated. . . . There is little evidence that military primacy yields appreciable geoeconomic gains” and therefore “an overreliance on military preponderance is badly misguided.”

The struggle for primacy in East Asia is not fundamentally one for security or tangible economic benefits. What is at stake is largely status and prestige. As the scholar William Wohlforth explains, hegemonic power transitions throughout history actually see the rising power seeking “recognition and standing rather than specific alterations in the existing rules and practices that constituted the order of the day.” In Thucydides’ account of the Peloponnesian War, for example, “the rise of Athens posed unacceptable threats not to the security or welfare of Sparta but rather to its identity as leader of the Greek world.” Similarly, the power transition between a rising Germany and a dominant Great Britain in the lead up to World War I was characterized by an “absence of tangible conflicts of interests.” U.S. paranoia over the rise of China is less about protecting significant strategic and economic returns, which are marginal if not actually negative, and more about a threat to its status, prestige and reputation as the world’s sole superpower. In no way is that a just cause for war.…

The National Interest
The Ugly Truth About Avoiding War With China
John Glaser