Resistant rise of US-China conflict as this century unfolds

This reflects the widespread hardening of the US attitude towards China. When Foreign Affairs magazine recently asked leading US experts whether US “foreign policy has become too hostile to China,” nearly half of the respondents (32 out of 68) disagreed or disagreed—an even tougher US approach to China. Suggesting priority for the stance.

This is a puzzle for economists who look at the world in a positive light. Countries can better themselves and others by cooperating in conflict and staying away from it.

The most obvious application of this principle is the profit from trade that countries receive—the bread and butter of professional economists. Opening up its domestic markets to others is usually to the advantage of each country. But the same idea extends to policy areas where there can be tensions between domestic and global interests. Yes, countries can pursue beggar-neighbor policies, such as restricting access to domestic markets to improve their terms of trade, or decarbonization policies such as free rides on global public goods. But wouldn’t it be better to stay away from such actions so that they can do better collectively?

In contrast, geopolitical strategists tend to see the world as zero-sum. Nation-states compete for power—the ability to bend others to their will and pursue their own interests unhindered—which is necessarily relative. If one country has more power, its rival must have less. Such a world as the great powers (US) or emerging powers (China) jockeys for regional and global dominance is essentially averse.

In a recent article, John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago offers a powerful expression of this view. Mearsheimer was among those in the Foreign Affairs Survey who strongly disagreed with the proposal that US policy could be too hostile towards China. “All great powers, whether they are democracies or not,” he writes, “have little choice but to compete for power in a zero-sum game.” The implications for US-China relations are bleak: China wants to expand its power, and the US has no choice but to try to stop it. This perspective poses a significant challenge to economists and others who believe in the viability of a stable, peaceful and largely cooperative world in which both the US and China can prosper together.

‘Realistic’ theorists of international relations such as Mearsheimer and my Harvard University colleague Stephen Walt are clearly right when they argue against the ‘liberal’ notion that open markets and rules-based multilateralism in the US will produce a China The US policy of engagement with China that “looks like us” until the Trump administration came to power may have helped China become richer, but it has made the country neither more democratic nor less prone to power and influence. less likely to compete.

But does China certainly have an inevitable conflict with the West with separate economic and political systems and its own strategic interests? Maybe not. Realists’ argument about the primacy of power rests on assumptions that need to be qualified.

First, while nation-states may prioritize national security and survival above all else, there is a vast difference between meeting these narrow objectives and maximizing power. America will be safe from destruction or invasion even without a military presence on every continent. Historian Stephen Wertheim has argued that an expansionist vision of American foreign policy has always competed with a more restrained approach, often misleading and dismissively labeled as ‘isolationism’. China’s territorial integrity will remain uncontested without tinkering with its neighbors. Beyond the security baseline, the pursuit of power competes with other national goals, such as domestic economic prosperity, which require less bullying globally.

It is true, as realists like to point out, that the world lacks an enforcer of rules. There is no world government to ensure that states act according to rules that they have an interest in enacting but little interest in obeying. This makes collaboration more difficult – but not entirely so. Game theory, real-world experience and laboratory experiments all suggest that reciprocity drives cooperation. No third party promoter is required to uncover cooperative behavior in repeated interactions.

Finally, it is also true that uncertainty and the risk of misunderstanding the intentions of other states complicate the prospects for international cooperation between great powers. Purely defensive measures—whether economic or military—can be regarded as threats, which accumulate through a vicious cycle of escalation. But this problem can also be reduced to some extent. As Walt and I have argued, what can help is a framework that facilitates communication and encourages mutual justification of actions that may be misinterpreted by the other side.

Mearsheimer suspects that creative institutional design can make a big difference. “The driving force behind [US-China] Great-power rivalry is structural,” he writes, “meaning that the problem cannot be eliminated with clever policymaking.” But the structure does not completely determine the balance in a complex system where national interests The definition of, the strategy adopted and the information available to the actors all depend to some degree on our choices. The structure of superpower rivalry may exclude a world of love and harmony, but it does not require a world of irreversible conflict. Nothing precludes any of the myriad choices that lie between the extremes. Structure is not destiny: we retain agency to create a better (or worse) world order. ©2021/Project Syndicate

Dani Roderick is Professor of International Political Economy at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, and author of ‘Straight Talk on Trade: Ideas for a Sensible World Economy’.