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National Observer Home > No. 51 - Summer 2002 >Book Reviews

The Tradegy of Great Power Politics

by John J. Mearsheimer

New York City, 2001: W. W. Norton & Co., pp. 448 and index.

This important book provides a basis for the realistic and accurate appreciation of the behaviour of major powers, which is referred to by the author as “offensive realism”.

Professor Mearsheimer is the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, and is co-director of the Program on International Security Policy. He is concerned to analyse his subject in a realistic and unsentimental way. This is highly desirable ­— indeed, necessary — because in this context sentimentality and the desire to justify unproven conclusions are two of the greatest enemies of accuracy.

Mearsheimer notes,

“The twentieth century was a period of great international violence. In World War I (1914-18), roughly nine million people died on European battlefields. About fifty million people were killed during World War II (1939-45), well over half of them civilians. Soon after the end of World War II, the Cold War engulfed the globe. During this confrontation, the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies never directly fought the United States and its North Atlantic Treaty Organisation allies, but many millions died in proxy wars in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Nicaragua, Angola, El Salvador, and elsewhere. Millions also died in the century’s lesser, yet still fierce, wars, including the Russo-Japanese conflicts of 1904-05 and 1939, the Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War from 1918 to 1920, the Russo-Polish War of 1920-21, the various Arab-Israeli wars, and the Iran-Iraq War of 1980-88.

This cycle of violence will continue far into the new millennium. Hopes for peace will probably not be realised, because the great powers that shape the international system fear each other and compete for power as a result. Indeed, their ultimate aim is to gain a position of dominant power over others, because having dominant power is the best means to ensure one’s own survival. Strength ensures safety, and the greatest strength is the greatest insurance of safety. States facing this incentive are fated to clash as each competes for advantage over the others. This is a tragic situation, but there is no escaping it unless the states that make up the system agree to form a world government. Such a vast transformation is hardly a realistic prospect, however, so conflict and war are bound to continue as large and enduring features of world politics.”

Mearsheimer discusses and rejects the optimistic view that after a century of many conflicts there will now be a time of peace. He points to various repressed attitudes of hostility amongst many states in Europe and Asia, and comments,

“The sad fact is that international politics has always been a ruthless and dangerous business, and it is likely to remain that way. Although the intensity of their competition waxes and wanes, great powers fear each other and always compete with each other for power. The overriding goal of each state is to maximise its share of world power, which means gaining power at the expense of other states. But great powers do not merely strive to be the strongest of all the great powers, although that is a welcome outcome. Their ultimate aim is to be the hegemon — that is, the only great power in the system.”

Mearsheimer comments that great powers are rarely content with the current distribution of power; on the contrary, they face a constant incentive to change it in their favour, and since no state is likely to achieve global hegemony the world is condemned to perpetual great-power competition.

Mearsheimer’s analysis is of particular interest in regard to China. Despite China’s increasingly strong economic position, its authoritarian régime has continued repressive policies, which prevent its people from obtaining democratic rights and freedom of expression and activity. Mearsheimer does not however see that a change in this position would change China’s desire to increase its influence and achieve hegemony, in Asia at least. He comments,

“Although it is depressing to realise that great powers might think and act this way, it behooves us to see the world as it is, not as we would like it to be. For example, one of the key foreign policy issues facing the United States is the question of how China will behave if its rapid economic growth continues and effectively turns China into a giant Hong Kong. Many Americans believe that if China is democratic and enmeshed in the global capitalist system, it will not act aggressively; instead it will be content with the status quo in Northeast Asia. According to this logic, the United States should engage China in order to promote the latter’s integration into the world economy, a policy that also seeks to encourage China’s transition to democracy. If engagement succeeds, the United States can work with a wealthy and democratic China to promote peace around the globe.

Unfortunately, a policy of engagement is doomed to fail. If China becomes an economic powerhouse it will almost certainly translate its economic might into military might and make a run at dominating Northeast Asia. Whether China is democratic and deeply enmeshed in the global economy or autocratic and autarkic will have little effect on its behaviour, because democracies care about security as much as non-democracies do, and hegemony is the best way for any state to guarantee its own survival. Of course, neither its neighbours nor the United States would stand idly by while China gained increasing increments of power. Instead, they would seek to contain China, probably by trying to form a balancing coalition. The result would be an intense security competition between China and its rivals, with the ever-present danger of great-power war hanging over them. In short, China and the United States are destined to be adversaries as China’s power grows.”

Although Mearsheimer’s realistic and unsentimental analysis is very valuable, there are definitional difficulties in deciding on what basis one should categorise a state as a great power. For example, he does not view the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy and Russia as great powers, but considers the possibility that at a future time Germany may seek to become a European hegemon. In Asia he considers China, Japan and Russia to have the ability to become great powers at some future time. He notes that if, for example, China had the same per capita income as Japan, its G.N.P. in 1998 would have been $40.08 trillion (instead of its actual G.N.P. of $1.18 trillion), whereas the G.N.P. of the United States was $7.9 trillion. Mearsheimer notes that “China, in short, has the potential to be considerably more powerful than even the United States”.

Mearsheimer concludes that the United States has a profound interest in seeing Chinese economic growth slow considerably in the years ahead. He notes that in fact the United States has pursued a strategy intended to have the opposite effect: “This U.S. policy on China is misguided. A wealthy China would not be a status quo power but an aggressive state determined to achieve regional hegemony.” His concern is that American political culture is “deeply liberal and correspondingly hostile to realist ideas”; and it would be “a grave mistake” for the United States to adopt liberal and unrealistic attitudes.

I.C.F. Spry

 

 

National Observer No. 51 - Summer 2002