Posts tagged Japan

This follows the traditional structural realist argument, made most prominently by John Mearsheimer toward the end of of his book The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, where Mearsheimer argues that Sino-American rivalry is basically inevitable, and the U.S. should start preparing for that day now (for more nuanced takes on this, see this pair of academic pieces). So there is nothing new or surprising about this line of thinking.

Now, as a good Chicago student who privileges structure, you might think I am sympathetic to this argument, but I am not. For me, to horribly mangle a phrase, all structure is local.

What I mean by that is that China is unlikely to be given the freedom of maneuver in Asia that the U.S. was afforded in the Western hemisphere. The U.S. hasn’t had to worry about its security in about two hundred years. It’s had weak powers to the north and south, and two massive oceans to the east and west. This, in turn, has allowed it to accumulate power in far-off regions, and throw its weight around.

By contrast, China has Japan and Korea to its east, India to its south, and Russia to its north. These states are unlikely to allow China a free hand in the region; to the contrary, as China grows, it will face a balancing coalition from at least two of those states (probably India and one of Russia/Japan). Make no mistake, there are no Canadas, Mexicos, or Haitis in this neighborhood to politely stand aside.

In fact, China’s rise is more likely to resemble Germany’s in the late 19th and early 20th century than the U.S.’s — recall that the U.S. had to do very little to check German aspirations. The real price of German ambition was paid by, first, the British and French (WW I) and then by the Soviets (WW II). All these European powers beating up on each other allowed the U.S. to grow basically unfettered, and by the end of World War II, the U.S. had more than 40% of the world’s GNP.

I’m not saying we’ll something exactly similar here — for one thing, the presence of nuclear weapons precludes the possibility of great power war as seen on the scale of the two world wars. But it is important to note that by the simple virtue of geography, the American rise has been almost historically unique. For it to get locked into a sustained power competition with another state, that state will have to be given an empty highway in front of it to speed ahead, which China most definitely does not enjoy.