"A struggle with china awaits us."
Professor John J. Mearsheimer is an University of Chicago political scientist who calls himself an “offensive realist” in international politics. He thinks China will seek hegemony in Asia. In The Atlantic article “Why John J. Mearsheimer Is Right (About Some Things)” Robert D. Kaplan writes (here):
Such thinking is prologue to Mearsheimer’s admonition that a struggle with China awaits us. “The Chinese are good offensive realists, so they will seek hegemony in Asia,” he tells me, paraphrasing the conclusion to Tragedy. China is not a status quo power. It will seek to dominate the South China Sea as the U.S. has dominated the Greater Caribbean Basin. He continues: “An increasingly powerful China is likely to try to push the U.S. out of Asia, much the way the U.S. pushed European powers out of the Western Hemisphere. Why should we expect China to act any differently than the United States did? Are they more principled than we are? More ethical? Less nationalistic?” On the penultimate page of Tragedy, he warns:
Neither Wilhelmine Germany, nor imperial Japan, nor Nazi Germany, nor the Soviet Union had nearly as much latent power as the United States had during their confrontations … But if China were to become a giant Hong Kong, it would probably have somewhere on the order of four times as much latent power as the United States does, allowing China to gain a decisive military advantage over the United States.
Ten years after those lines were written, China’s economy has passed Japan’s as the world’s second-largest. Its total defense spending in 2009 was $150 billion, compared with only $17 billion in 2001. But even more revealing is the pattern of China’s military modernization. “Force planning—the product of long-term commitments and resource allocation decisions—is the heart of strategy,” the military expert Thomas Donnelly, of the American Enterprise Institute, wrote last year. And for more than a decade now, China’s military
has shifted its focus from repelling a Soviet invasion and controlling domestic unrest to the sole problem of defeating U.S. forces in East Asia. This has been a strategic surprise to which no American administration has appropriately responded.
China is increasing its submarine fleet from 62 to 77 and has tested a stealth fighter jet as part of a buildup also featuring surface warships, missiles, and cyber warfare. Andrew F. Krepinevich, the president of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, believes that nations of the Western Pacific are slowly being “Finlandized” by China: they will maintain nominal independence but in the end may abide by foreign-policy rules set by Beijing. And the more the United States is distracted by the Middle East, the more it hastens this impending reality in East Asia, which is the geographical heart of the global economy and of the world’s navies and air forces.
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