台灣地區作戰計畫(代號OPLAN5077-04) (二)---(二下)

                     台灣地區作戰計畫(代號OPLAN5077-04) (二)----(二下)

第三部分

五

底下建州派將引用現實派的國際政治與國際關係學界巨擘Walt及再度引用另一位現實派的學界巨擘Mearsheimer的論著，這兩位學者在對以色列的立場上，與新保守派不同，建州派對他們在以色列的立場衝突一事上無法保持中立，因為周威霖個人在這個問題上與新保守派較接近。

Mearsheimer教授這篇演講與文章十分精彩，本應全文貼出，但如此一來，篇幅將會過長，所以只能張貼我們認為相關的部分。

"The Gathering Storm: China's Challenge to US Power in Asia" 
By John J. Mearsheimer
http://sydney.edu.au/news/84.html?newsstoryid=5351

5 August 2010
(Transcript of the fourth annual Michael Hintze Lecture in International Security
Delivered by Professor John Mearsheimer, 4 August 2010)


The United States has been the most powerful state on the planet for many decades, and has deployed robust military forces in the Asia-Pacific region since the early years of World War II. America's presence in your neighborhood has had significant consequences for Australia and for the wider region. This is how the Australian government sees it, at least according to the 2009 Defence White Paper: "Australia has been a very secure country for many decades, in large measure because the wider Asia-Pacific region has enjoyed an unprecedented era of peace and stability underwritten by US strategic primacy." The United States, in other words, has acted as a pacifier in this part of the world.

However, according to the very next sentence in the White Paper, "That order is being transformed as economic changes start to bring about changes in the distribution of strategic power." The argument here, of course, is that the rise of China is having a significant effect on the global balance of power. In particular, the power gap between China and the United States is shrinking and in all likelihood "US strategic primacy" in this region will be no more. This is not to say that the United States will disappear; in fact, its presence here is likely to grow in response to China's rise. But the United States will no longer be the preponderant power in your neighborhood, as it has been since 1945.

The most important question that flows from this discussion is whether China can rise peacefully. It is clear from the Defence White Paper—which is tasked with assessing Australia's strategic situation out to the year 2030—that policymakers here are worried about the changing balance of power in the Asia-Pacific region. Consider these comments from that document: "As other powers rise, and the primacy of the United States is increasingly tested, power relations will inevitably change. When this happens there will be the possibility of miscalculation. There is a small but still concerning possibility of growing confrontation between some of these powers." At another point in the White Paper, we read that, "Risks resulting from escalating strategic competition could emerge quite unpredictably, and is a factor to be considered in our defence planning." In short, the Australian government seems to sense that the shifting balance of power between China and the United States may not be good for peace in the neighborhood.

I would like to argue tonight that Australians should be worried about China's rise, because it is likely to lead to an intense security competition between China and the United States, with considerable potential for war. Moreover, most of China's neighbors, to include India, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, Russia, Vietnam, and yes Australia, will join with the United States to contain China's power. To put it bluntly: China cannot rise peacefully.

It is important to emphasize, however, that I am not arguing that Chinese behavior alone will drive the security competition that lies ahead. The United States is also likely to behave in aggressive ways, thus further increasing the prospects for trouble here in the Asia-Pacific region.

Naturally, not everyone will agree with my assessment of the situation. Many believe that China can rise peacefully, that it is not inevitable that the United States and a powerful China will have confrontational relations. Of course, they assume that China will have peaceful intentions and that welcome fact of life can help facilitate stability in this region, even though the underlying balance of power is expected to change dramatically.

The Case for China's Peaceful Rise

I would like to examine three key arguments that are often employed to support this optimistic prognosis. First, some claim that China can allay any fears about its rise by making it clear to its neighbors and the United States that it has peaceful intentions, that it will not use force to change the balance of power. This perspective can be found in the Defence White Paper, which states: "The pace, scope and structure of China's military modernization have the potential to give its neighbors cause for concern if not carefully explained, and if China does not reach out to others to build confidence regarding its military plans." In essence, the belief here is that Beijing has the ability to signal its present and future intentions to Australia and other countries in compelling ways.

Unfortunately, states can never be certain about each other's intentions. They cannot know with a high degree of certainty whether they are dealing with a revisionist state or a status quo power. For example, there is still no consensus among experts as to whether the Soviet Union was bent on dominating Eurasia during the Cold War. Nor is there a consensus on whether Imperial Germany was a highly aggressive state that was principally responsible for causing World War I. The root of the problem is that unlike military capabilities, which we can see and count, intentions cannot be empirically verified. Intentions are in the minds of decision-makers and they are especially difficult to discern. You might say that Chinese leaders can use words to explain their intentions. But talk is cheap and leaders have been known to lie to foreign audiences. Thus, it is hard to know the intentions of China's present leaders, which is not to say that they are necessarily revisionist.

But even if one could determine China's intentions today, there is no way to know what they will be in the future. After all, it is impossible to identify who will be running the foreign policy of any country five or ten years from now, much less whether they will have aggressive intentions. It cannot be emphasized enough that we face radical uncertainty when it comes to determining the future intentions of any country, China included.

A second line of argument is that a benign China can avoid confrontation by building defensive rather than offensive military forces. In other words, Beijing can signal that it is a status quo power by denying itself the capability to use force to alter the balance of power. After all, a country that has hardly any offensive capability cannot be a revisionist state, because it does not have the means to act aggressively. Not surprisingly, Chinese leaders often claim that their military is designed solely for defensive purposes. For example, the New York Times recently reported in an important article on the Chinese navy that its leaders maintain that it is "purely a self-defense force."

One problem with this approach is that it is difficult to distinguish between offensive and defensive military capabilities. Negotiators at the 1932 Disarmament Conference tried to make these distinctions and found themselves tied in knots trying to determine whether particular weapons like tanks and aircraft carriers are offensive or defensive in nature. The basic problem is that the capabilities that states develop simply to defend themselves often have significant offensive potential.

Consider what China is doing today. It is building military forces that have significant power projection capability, and as the Defence White Paper tells us, China's "military modernization will be increasingly characterized by the development of power projection capabilities." For example, the Chinese are building naval forces that can project power out to the so-called "Second Island Chain" in the Western Pacific. And they also say that they are planning to build a "blue water navy" that can operate in the Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean. For understandable reasons, they want to be able to protect their sea-lanes and not have to depend on the American navy to handle that mission. Although they do not have that capability yet, as Robert Kaplan points out in a recent article in Foreign Affairs, "China's naval leaders are displaying the aggressive philosophy of the turn-of-the-twentieth-century US naval strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan, who argued for sea control and the decisive battle."

Of course, most Chinese leaders think that their navy is defensively oriented, even though it has considerable offensive capability and will have much more in the future. Indeed, they refer to their naval strategy as "Far Sea Defense." As Kaplan's comments indicate, it seems almost certain that as the Chinese navy grows in size and capability, none of China's neighbors, including Australia, will consider it to be defensively oriented. They will instead view it as a formidable offensive force. Thus, anyone looking to determine China's future intentions by observing its military is likely to conclude that Beijing is bent on aggression.

Finally, some maintain that China's recent behavior toward its neighbors, which has not been aggressive in any meaningful way, is a reliable indicator of how China will act in the decades ahead. The central problem with this argument is that past behavior is usually not a reliable indicator of future behavior, because leaders come and go and some are more hawkish than others. Plus circumstances at home and abroad can change in ways that make the use of military force more or less attractive.

The Chinese case is illustrative in this regard. Beijing does not possess a formidable military today and it is certainly in no position to pick a fight with the United States. This is not to say that China is a paper tiger, but it does not have the capability to cause much trouble in this region. However, that situation is expected to change markedly over time, in which case China will have significant offensive capability. Then, we will see how committed it is to the status quo. But right now we cannot tell much about China's future behavior, because it has such limited capability to act aggressively.

What all of this tells us is that there is no good way to divine what China's intentions will be down the road or to predict its future behavior based on its recent foreign policies. It does seem clear, however, that China will eventually have a military with significant offensive potential.


Imitating Uncle Sam

What does America's past behavior tell us about the rise of China? In particular, how should we expect China to conduct itself as it grows more powerful? And how should we expect the United States and China's neighbors to react to a strong China?

I expect China to act the way the United States has acted over its long history. Specifically, I believe that China will try to dominate the Asia-Pacific region much as the United States dominates the Western Hemisphere. For good strategic reasons, China will seek to maximize the power gap between itself and potentially dangerous neighbors like India, Japan and Russia. China will want to make sure that it is so powerful that no state in Asia has the wherewithal to threaten it. It is unlikely that China will pursue military superiority so that it can go on the warpath and conquer other countries in the region, although that is always a possibility. Instead, it is more likely that Beijing will want to dictate the boundaries of acceptable behavior to neighboring countries, much the way the United States makes it clear to other states in the Americas that it is the boss. Gaining regional hegemony, I might add, is probably the only way that China will get Taiwan back.

A much more powerful China can also be expected to try to push the United States out of the Pacific-Asia region, much the way the United States pushed the European great powers out of the Western Hemisphere in the nineteenth century. We should expect China to come up with its own version of the Monroe Doctrine, as Imperial Japan did in the 1930s. In fact, we are already seeing inklings of that policy. Consider that in March, Chinese officials told two high-ranking American policymakers that the United States was no longer allowed to interfere in the South China Sea, which China views as a "core interest" like Taiwan and Tibet. And it seems that China feels the same way about the Yellow Sea. Last week the US and South Korean navies conducted joint naval exercises in response to North Korea's alleged sinking of a South Korean naval vessel. Those naval maneuvers were originally planned to take place in the Yellow Sea, which is adjacent to the Chinese coastline, but vigorous protests from China forced the Obama administration to move them further east into the Sea of Japan.

These ambitious goals make good strategic sense for China. Beijing should want a militarily weak Japan and Russia as its neighbors, just as the United States prefers a militarily weak Canada and Mexico on its borders. No state in its right mind should want other powerful states located in its region? All Chinese surely remember what happened in the last century when Japan was powerful and China was weak. Furthermore, why would a powerful China accept US military forces operating in its backyard? American policymakers, after all, express outrage whenever distant great powers send military forces into the Western Hemisphere. Those foreign forces are invariably seen as a potential threat to American security. The same logic should apply to China. Why would China feel safe with US forces deployed on its doorstep? Following the logic of the Monroe Doctrine, would not China's security be better served by pushing the American military out of the Asia-Pacific region?

Why should we expect China to act any differently than the United States has over the course of its history? Are they more principled than Americans are? More ethical? Are they less nationalistic than Americans? Less concerned about their survival? They are none of these things, of course, which is why China is likely to imitate the United States and attempt to become a regional hegemon.

And what is the likely American response if China attempts to dominate Asia? It is crystal clear from the historical record that the United States does not tolerate peer competitors. As it demonstrated over the course of the twentieth century, it is determined to remain the world's only regional hegemon. Therefore, the United States can be expected to go to great lengths to contain China and ultimately weaken it to the point where it is no longer a threat to rule the roost in Asia. In essence, the United States is likely to act toward China similar to the way it behaved toward the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

China's neighbors in the Asia-Pacific region are certain to fear its rise as well, and they too will do whatever they can to prevent it from achieving regional hegemony. Indeed, there is already substantial evidence that countries like India, Japan, and Russia, as well as smaller powers like Singapore, South Korea, and Vietnam, are worried about China's ascendancy and are looking for ways to contain it. India and Japan, for example, signed a "Joint Security Declaration" in October 2008, in good part because they are worried about China's growing power. India and the United States, which had testy relations at best during the Cold War, have become good friends over the past decade, in large part because they both fear China. Just last month, the Obama administration, which is filled with people who preach to the world about the importance of human rights, announced that it was resuming relations with Indonesia's elite special forces, despite their rich history of human rights abuses. The reason for this shift was that Washington wants Indonesia on its side as China grows more powerful, and as the New York Times reported, Indonesian officials "dropped hints that the group might explore building ties with the Chinese military if the ban remained."

Singapore, which sits astride the critically important Straits of Malacca and worries about China's growing power, badly wants to upgrade its already close ties with the United States. Toward that end, it built the Changi Naval Base in the late 1990s so that the US Navy could operate an aircraft carrier out of Singapore if the need arose. And the recent decision by Japan to allow the US Marines to remain on Okinawa was driven in part by Tokyo's concerns about China's growing assertiveness in the region and the related need to keep the American security umbrella firmly in place over Japan. Most of China's neighbors will eventually join an American-led balancing coalition designed to check China's rise, much the way Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and even China, joined forces with the United States to contain the Soviet Union during the Cold War.


Contrasts with the Cold War

(美中爭霸戰與美俄冷戰之比較)

There will be important differences, however, between the superpower competition
during the Cold War and a future rivalry between China and the
United States. For starters, the Soviet Union was physically located in both
Asia and Europe, and it threatened to dominate both of those regions.
Therefore, the United States was compelled to put together balancing
coalitions in Asia as well as Europe. China, on the other hand, is strictly
an Asian power and is not likely to threaten Europe in any meaningful way.
As a result, the major European states are unlikely to play an active role in
containing China, but will probably be content to remain on the sidelines.
The United States and the Soviet Union also competed with each other in
the oil-rich Middle East. Both superpowers had allies in the region that
sometimes fought wars with each other, and the United States was seriously
worried about a Soviet invasion of Iran following the ouster of the Shah in
1979. Given China’s dependence on oil from the Persian Gulf, it is likely to
compete with the United States for influence in that strategically important
region, much as the Soviets did. But a Chinese invasion of the Middle East is
not likely, in part because it is too far away, but also because the United
States would surely try to thwart the attack. China is more likely to station
troops in the region if a close ally there asked for help. For example,
one could imagine China and Iran establishing close ties, and Tehran
then asking Beijing to station Chinese troops on its territory. In short,
while the Americans and the Soviets competed actively in Europe, Asia,
and the Middle East, China and the United States are likely to compete in
only the latter two regions.

Although the Soviet–American rivalry spanned most of the globe, the
main battleground was in the center of Europe, where there was the
danger of a large-scale conventional war for control of the European continent.
That scenario was especially important to both sides not only because
there was considerable potential for nuclear escalation in the event of a war,
but also because a decisive Soviet victory would have fundamentally altered
the global balance of power. It is hard to imagine similar circumstances
involving China and the United States, mainly because Asia’s geography
is so different from Europe’s. Korea is probably the only place where those
two countries could get dragged into a conventional land war; in fact, that is
precisely what happened between 1950 and 1953, and it could happen again
if conflict broke out between North and South Korea. But the stakes and the
magnitude of that conflict would be nowhere near as great as a war between
NATO and the Warsaw Pact for control of Europe would have been.

In addition to Korea, one can imagine China and the United States fighting
over Taiwan, over disputed islands or islets off China’s coast, or over
control of the sea lanes between China and the Middle East. As with Korea,
the outcome of all of these scenarios would be nowhere near as consequential
as a superpower war in the heart of Europe during the Cold War.
Because the stakes are smaller and a number of the possible conflict scenarios
involve fighting at sea—where the risks of escalation are more easily
contained—it is somewhat easier to imagine war breaking out between the
China and the United States than between NATO and the Warsaw Pact. It is
also worth noting that there was no territorial dispute between the superpowers—
Berlin included—that was as laden with intense nationalistic feelings
as Taiwan is for China. Thus, it is not hard to imagine a war breaking
out over Taiwan, which is not to say that the odds of such a war are high.
Another important difference between the Cold War and a future Sino–
American rivalry concerns ideology. The superpower competition was especially
intense because it was driven by sharp ideological differences between
the two sides as well as by geopolitical considerations. Communism and
liberal capitalism were potent ideological foes not only because they offered
fundamentally different views about how society should be ordered, but also
because both American and Soviet leaders thought that communism was an
exportable political model that would eventually take root all over the globe.
This notion helped fuel the infamous ‘domino theory’, which helped convince
US leaders that they had to fight communism everywhere on the
planet. Soviet leaders had real concerns, as the spread of liberal capitalism
posed a serious threat to the legitimacy of Marxist rule. The incompatibility
of these rival ideological visions thus reinforced the zero-sum nature of the
rivalry, and encouraged leaders on both sides to wage it with unusual
intensity.

There are certainly some ideological differences between China and the
United States, but they do not affect the relationship between the two countries
in profound ways, and there is no good reason to think that they will in
the foreseeable future. In particular, China has embraced a market-based
economy, and does not see its current version of state capitalism as an
exportable model for the rest of the world. If anything, it is the United
States that shows a greater tendency to want to export its system to
others, but that ambition is likely to be tempered by setbacks in
Afghanistan and Iraq as well as the impact of the 2008 recession. This
situation should work to make a future rivalry between Beijing and
Washington less intense than the ideological-laden competition between
the superpowers.


Finally, the Soviet Union and its close allies had remarkably little economic
intercourse with the West during the Cold War. Indeed, there was little direct contact between the elites, much less the broader publics, on the two sides. The opposite is the case with China, which is not only deeply integrated into the world economy, but is also actively engaged with Western elites of all kinds. For those who believe that economic interdependence produces peace, this is good news.29 However, it is bad news for those who think that these ties are often a major source of friction between great powers. My view is that economic interdependence does not have a significant effect on geopolitics one way or the other. After all, the major European powers were all highly interdependent and prospering in 1914 when First World War broke out.


六

再來，建州派要請鄉親們讀美國一名資深媒體人Robert Kaplan對Mearsheimer教授的觀點的介紹，他指出，

由於Mearsheimer教授與Walt教授在美國對以色列的政策上，與包括新保守派在內的美國親以派呈現巨大的反差，因而遭到勢力強大的親以派的抨擊，並因此讓Mearsheimer的對中政策沒有得到應得的注意、討論與讚揚。

建州派已說過幾次，屬於現實主義派的Mearsheimer與Walt雖然在許多方面與新保手派有很大的不同與鴻溝，但他們這兩派卻有一點不約而同，那就是美國必須正視及全力對付中國。

建州派現在請鄉親們來讀Kaplan一篇文章的一部分 。


Why John J. Mearsheimer Is Right (About Some Things)
The Atlantic, Jan./Feb. 2012

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/01/why-john-j-mearsheimer-is-right-about-some-things/8839/


“A disgrace” and “anti-Semite” were two of the (more printable) barbs launched last fall at John Mearsheimer, a renowned political scientist at the University of Chicago. But Mearsheimer’s infamous views on Israel—in the latest case, his endorsement of a book on Jewish identity that many denounced as anti-Semitic—should not distract us from the importance of his life’s work: a bracing argument in favor of the doctrine of “offensive realism,” which can enable the United States to avert decline and prepare for the unprecedented challenge posed by a rising China. 
By Robert D. Kaplan
(The Atlantic, Jan/Feb, 2012)


--------“Realism is alien to the American tradition. It is consciously amoral, focused as it is on interests rather than on values in a debased world. But realism never dies, because it accurately reflects how states actually behave, behind the façade of their values-based rhetoric.”

The real tragedy of such controversies (指親以色列的人士與Mearsheimer就美以外交問題所產生的爭論), as lamentable as they are, is that they threaten to obscure the urgent and enduring message of Mearsheimer’s life’s work, which topples conventional foreign-policy shibboleths and provides an unblinking guide to the course the United States should follow in the coming decades. Indeed, with the most critical part of the world, East Asia, in the midst of an unprecedented arms race fed by acquisitions of missiles and submarines (especially in the South China Sea region, where states are motivated by old-fashioned nationalism rather than universal values), and with the Middle East undergoing less a democratic revolution than a crisis in central authority, we ignore Mearsheimer’s larger message at our peril.

In fact, Mearsheimer is best-known in the academy for his equally controversial views on China, and particularly for his 2001 magnum opus, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics. Writing in Foreign Affairs in 2010, the Columbia University professor Richard K. Betts called Tragedy one of the three great works of the post–Cold War era, along with Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man (1992) and Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996). And, Betts suggested, “once China’s power is full grown,” Mearsheimer’s book may pull ahead of the other two in terms of influence. The Tragedy of Great Power Politics truly defines Mearsheimer, as it does realism. Mearsheimer sat me down in his office, overlooking the somber Collegiate Gothic structures of the University of Chicago, and talked for hours, over the course of several days, about Tragedy and his life. 

The best grand theories tend to be written no earlier than middle age, when the writer has life experience and mistakes behind him to draw upon. Morgenthau’s 1948 classic, Politics Among Nations, was published when he was 44, Fukuyama’s The End of History was published as a book when he was 40, and Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations as a book when he was 69. Mearsheimer began writing The Tragedy of Great Power Politics when he was in his mid-40s, after working on it for a decade. Published just before 9/11, the book intimates the need for America to avoid strategic distractions and concentrate on confronting China. A decade later, with the growth of China’s military might vastly more apparent than it was in 2001, and following the debacles of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, its clairvoyance is breathtaking. 

Tragedy begins with a forceful denial of perpetual peace in favor of perpetual struggle, with great powers primed for offense, because they can never be sure how much military capacity they will need in order to survive over the long run. Because every state is forever insecure, Mearsheimer counsels, the internal nature of a state is less important as a factor in its international behavior than we think. “Great powers are like billiard balls that vary only in size,” he intones. In other words, Mearsheimer is not one to be especially impressed by a state simply because it is a democracy. As he asserts early on, “Whether China is democratic and deeply enmeshed in the global economy or autocratic and autarkic will have little effect on its behavior, because democracies care about security as much as non-democracies do.” Indeed, a democratic China could be more technologically innovative and economically robust, with consequently more talent and money to lavish on its military. (A democratic Egypt, for that matter, could create greater security challenges for the United States than an autocratic Egypt. Mearsheimer is not making moral judgments. He is merely describing how states interact in an anarchic world.) 

In the course of his 500-plus-page defense of his own brand of realism, Mearsheimer popularizes two other concepts: “buck-passing” and the “stopping power of water.” The latter concept leads Mearsheimer to propose—in 2001, mind you—an American foreign policy of restraint. But first, consider buck-passing. Whenever a new great power comes on the scene, one or more states will end up checking it. But every state will initially try to get someone else to do the checking: buck-passing “is essentially about who does the balancing, not whether it gets done.” The United Kingdom, France, and the Soviet Union all buck-passed prior to World War II, each trying to get the other to be the one to bear the brunt of Hitler’s onslaught. In Asia today, the United States quietly encourages Japan and India to build up their militaries in order to check China, but in the end, it has no country to whom it can pass the buck. Hence Mearsheimer’s plea from a decade ago that we need to focus on China. 

The “stopping power of water” is where Tragedy, in an analytical sense, builds toward its powerful conclusion. “Large bodies of water are formidable obstacles that cause significant power-projection problems,” Mearsheimer writes. Great navies and air forces can be built, and soldiers transported to beachheads and airstrips, but conquering great land powers across the seas is difficult. This is why the United States and the United Kingdom have rarely been invaded by other great powers. It is also why the U.S. has almost never tried to permanently conquer territory in Europe or Asia, and why the United Kingdom has never tried to dominate continental Europe. Therefore, the “central aim of American foreign policy” is “to be the hegemon in the Western Hemisphere” only, and to prevent the rise of a similar hegemon in the Eastern Hemisphere. In turn, the proper role for the United States is as an “offshore balancer,” balancing against the rise of a Eurasian hegemon and going to war only as a last resort to thwart it. But better to try buck-passing first, Mearsheimer advises, and come into a war only at the last moment, when absolutely necessary.

Mearsheimer tells me that the U.S. was right to enter World War II very late; that way it paid a smaller “blood price” than the Soviet Union. “Before D-Day, 93 percent of all German casualties had occurred on the eastern front,” he says, adding that the devastation of the Soviet Union helped the U.S. in the Cold War to follow. 
“How is offshore balancing different from neo-isolationism?,” I ask him. “Isolationists,” he responds, “believe that there is no place outside of the Western Hemisphere to which it is worth deploying our troops. But offshore balancers believe there are three critical areas that no other hegemon should be allowed to dominate: Europe, the Persian Gulf, and Northeast Asia. Thus,” he goes on, “it was important to fight Nazi Germany and Japan in World War II. American history suits us to be offshore balancers—not isolationists, not the world’s sheriff.” Later, when I ask Mearsheimer about the Obama administration’s slightly standoffish policies toward Libya and whether they are a good example of buck-passing, he says the problem with leading from behind in this case was that America’s European allies lacked the military capacity to do the job efficiently. “If mass murder was truly in the offing, as it was in Rwanda,” he tells me, “then I would have been willing to intervene in Libya. But it is unclear that was the case.” 

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. 

Mearsheimer’s critics say that offensive realism ignores ideology and domestic politics altogether. They argue that he takes no account of China’s society and economy and where they might be headed. Indeed, simple theories like offensive realism are inherently superficial, and wrong in instances. Mearsheimer, for example, is still waiting for NATO to collapse, as he predicted it would in a 1990 Atlantic article. The fact that it hasn’t owes as much to the domestic politics of Western states as it does to the objective security situation. And the stopping power of water did not prevent Japan from acquiring a great maritime empire in the early and middle part of the 20th century; nor did it prevent the Allied invasion of Normandy. More generally, Mearsheimer’s very cold, mathematical, states-as-billiard-balls approach ignores messy details—like the personalities of Adolf Hitler, Mao Zedong, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Slobodan Milošević—that have had a monumental impact in deciding how wars and crises turn out. International relations is as much about understanding Shakespeare—and the human passions and intrigues that Shakespeare exposes—as it is about understanding political-science theories. It matters greatly that Deng Xiaoping was both utterly ruthless and historically perceptive, so that he could set China in motion to become such an economic and military juggernaut in the first place. Manifest Destiny owes as much to the canniness of President James K. Polk as it does to Mearsheimer’s laws of historical determinism. 

But given the limits of social-science theories, even as we rely on them to help us make some sense of the Bruegelesque jumble of history, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics is a signal triumph. As Huntington once told his protégé Fareed Zakaria: “If you tell people the world is complicated, you’re not doing your job as a social scientist. They already know it’s complicated. Your job is to distill it, simplify it, and give them a sense of what is the single [cause], or what are the couple of powerful causes that explain this powerful phenomenon.” 

Truly, Mearsheimer’s theory of international relations allowed him to get both Gulf wars exactly right—and he’s one of the few people to do so. As a good offshore balancer, Mearsheimer supported the First Gulf War against Saddam Hussein, in 1991. By occupying Kuwait, Iraq had positioned itself as a potential hegemon in the Persian Gulf, justifying U.S. military action. Moreover, as Mearsheimer asserted in several newspaper columns, the United States could easily defeat the Iraqi military. This assertion made him something of a lone wolf in academic circles, where many were predicting a military quagmire or calamity. The Democratic Party, to which most scholars subscribed, overwhelmingly opposed the war. Mearsheimer’s confidence that fighting Saddam would be a “cakewalk” was based in part on his trips to Israel in the 1970s and ’80s, when he was studying conventional military deterrence. The Israelis had told him that the Iraqi army, mired as it was in Soviet doctrine, was one of the Arab world’s worst militaries. 
But Mearsheimer’s finest hour was the run-up to the Second Gulf War against Saddam, in 2003. This time, offshore balancing did not justify a war. Iraq was already contained and was not on the brink of becoming the hegemon of the Persian Gulf. And Mearsheimer felt strongly that a new war was a bad idea. He joined with Harvard’s Stephen Walt and the University of Maryland’s Shibley Telhami to lead a group of 33 scholars, many of them card-carrying academic realists, to sign a declaration opposing the war. On September 26, 2002, they published an advertisement on the New York Times op-ed page that cost $38,000, and they paid for it themselves. The top of the ad ran, WAR WITH IRAQ IS NOT IN AMERICA’S NATIONAL INTEREST. Among the bullet points was this: “Even if we win easily, we have no plausible exit strategy. Iraq is a deeply divided society that the United States would have to occupy and police for many years to create a viable state.”

Mearsheimer opposed not only the Iraq War, but also the neoconservative vision of regional transformation, which, as he tells me, was the “polar opposite” of offshore balancing. He was not against democratization in the Arab world per se, but felt that it should not be attempted—and could not be accomplished—by an extended deployment of U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. And as he explains to me, he now sees an attack on Iran as yet another distraction from dealing with the challenge of China in East Asia. A war with Iran, he adds, would drive Iran further into the arms of Beijing. 

During the buildup to the Iraq War, Mearsheimer and Walt began work on what would become a London Review of Books article and later The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy. (The Atlantic had originally commissioned the piece, only to reject it owing to a profound disagreement between the editors and the authors over its objectivity.) In some respects, The Israel Lobby reads as an appendix to The Tragedy of Great Power Politics—almost a case study of how great powers should not act. Many of those loosely associated with the lobby supported the Iraq War, which Mearsheimer saw as a diversion from the contest with China. The so-called special relationship between the United States and Israel, by further entangling the United States in the problems of the Middle East, contradicted the tenets of offshore balancing. And proponents of the special relationship have routinely justified it by citing Israel’s status as a stable democracy in the midst of unstable authoritarian states—but that internal attribute, in Mearsheimer’s view, is largely irrelevant. 

Mearsheimer, who is not modest, believes it is a reliance on theory that invigorates his thinking. Returning to his principal passion, China, he tells me: “I have people all the time telling me that they’ve just returned from China and met with all these Chinese who want a peaceful relationship. I tell them that these Chinese will not be in power in 20 or 30 years, when circumstances may be very different. Because we cannot know the future, all we have to rely upon is theory. If a theory can explain the past in many instances, as my theory of offensive realism can, it might be able to say something useful about the future.” And it is likely to be China’s future, rather than Israel’s, that will ultimately determine Mearsheimer’s reputation. If China implodes from a socioeconomic crisis, or evolves in some other way that eliminates its potential as a threat, Mearsheimer’s theory will be in serious trouble because of its dismissal of domestic politics. But if China goes on to become a great military power, reshaping the balance of forces in Asia, then Mearsheimer’s Tragedy will live on as a classic. 


(待續)