Professor John Mearsheimer is the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago and one of the most well-known international relations scholars today. In this two-part interview, editors Jason Chau and Andrew Wang ask Prof Mearsheimer about some of the primary forces influencing international politics today. The first part of this series focuses on China, and particularly the US-China rivalry.
Let’s start with what’s happening in China right now. Xi Jinping has recently cemented his grip on power after the 20th Party Congress, but there have been widespread protests over the regime’s zero-COVID policies, in many of which the language has escalated to challenging the regime itself. Might this domestic unrest create incentive for Xi to pursue diversionary tactics, particularly in the form of a more aggressive foreign policy?
I don’t think that’s likely to happen at all. I find it hard to imagine that there is a war worth starting for China that would justify using that conflict as a way of dampening down the protests at home. I think what Xi Jinping and his lieutenants will do is concentrate on figuring out a way to deal with the COVID problem and the lockdown [protests] problem at the same time. The main focus here will be inward, not outward.
Are you concerned about China using normative shifts and other tools on the international stage to distract from domestic problems such as human rights issues at home?
I think China is deeply involved in international politics at all levels, and I think what the Chinese believe today is that it’s best for them not to rock the boat and antagonise other countries unnecessarily. I think they’ve come to the conclusion that ‘Wolf Warrior’ diplomacy backfired, and if anything they want to cut in the other direction and emphasise soft power. I think that’s a smart strategy, and I find it difficult to believe that they would pursue some hard-nosed diplomatic strategy to deal with the problems at home.
With deep ideological differences between the US and China, do you think the two can collaborate on important issues like climate change?
There is no ideological conflict between the US and China, but a conflict about power. China is a communist country and the United States is a liberal democracy, and yet they got along perfectly well from 1990 up until around 2017. Something changed around then, and it wasn’t an ideological change.
What changed was the balance of power: China and the United States are now bitter rivals because China has become a peer competitor of the United States, and China is interested in dominating Asia the way the United States dominates the Western hemisphere. This makes perfect sense from China’s perspective, but from America’s perspective this is completely unacceptable. That has caused an intense security competition, which might lead to a hot war down the road. Hopefully, that won’t be the case, but there is a serious possibility of that. Whether Joe Biden and Xi Jinping get together and talk about how to ameliorate the security competition matters little. The security competition is going to take place regardless of what they say to each other. So when I hear that there was a meeting between these two leaders and that there is some hope that we could greatly ameliorate the security competition, I don’t believe it. The United States and China are destined to compete against each other.
One consistent theme throughout your writing and research is the idea of balance of power. Do you think this is an account of international relations that the leaders of superpowers subscribe to? Or might they see ideology as an important tool?
I think that ideology is the velvet glove that covers the mailed fist. What you see in the American case, in a bipolar or multipolar world, is that they behave in a very realist fashion. However, they cover up that realist behaviour with liberal rhetoric. Liberal rhetoric is the velvet glove in the American case.
I would imagine, in the Chinese case, that they will behave in the years ahead as they have behaved in past years, in a very realpolitik fashion. And they will cover it up with ideological arguments that make it look like they are the good guy and America is the bad guy. What I have discovered in my past visits to China is that my Chinese interlocutors like to make the argument that China is a Confucian culture, and Confucianism is a defensive ideology – the Chinese are never the aggressors, always the victims. It sounds a lot like American exceptionalism: Americans also like to think that they are the good guys, that they never do anything wrong, that it’s always the other side that misbehaves. So ideology is the instrument that is disguising realpolitik in all great powers.
What matters the most is the balance of power, and states like China and the United States recognize that it’s important for their survival to have as much power as they can possibly garner. The Chinese talk at great lengths about the “Century of National Humiliation,” which ran from the late 1840’s to the late 1940’s. The cause of that was that China was weak, of which the Great Powers in the system took advantage. So if you’re Chinese today, you understand full well that you don’t want to be weak, because you don’t want to suffer another Century of National Humiliation. What the Chinese are trying to do now is make China even more powerful than it is now to optimise its chances for survival in this game of Great Power politics.
You mentioned that the US and China are basically destined for competition. In this dynamic, do you think war is likely?
I do think a cold war, by which I mean an intense security competition, is already taking place. There is a serious possibility of a hot war between the US and China; more likely than a war was between the US and the Soviet Union in the Cold War.
The focal point of the competition between the US and the Soviet Union during the Cold War was central Europe, where NATO was faced off against the Warsaw Pact. Because you had a situation in central Europe where there were two massive armies on either side of the inter-German border, each armed to the teeth with thousands of nuclear weapons, it was extremely unlikely that you could get a war started because the risk of escalation to the thermonuclear level was so great. Europe was remarkably stable.
If you look at the US-China competition, there are three main potential points of conflict: the South China Sea, Taiwan, and the East China Sea. It’s much easier to imagine a war breaking out over Taiwan or the South China Sea. A war in these places would not involve massive armies crashing into each other on the mainland with thousands of nuclear weapons. In that sense, war is more likely.
The situation in Taiwan is especially dangerous because the Chinese are deeply committed to reintegrating Taiwan into the mainland – they view it as sacred territory. At the same time, the Americans are deeply committed to maintaining an independent Taiwan because the US believes it is of great strategic importance to dealing with the Chinese threat. So here we have a situation where the more committed the Chinese are to getting Taiwan back, the more committed the Americans are to keeping Taiwan out of China’s hands. This is an issue that makes me very nervous.
Stay tuned for Part Two of the OPR’s interview with Mearsheimer, where we will discuss Russia, Ukraine, NATO, and more.