Who's afraid of China? Neo-conservative, realist and liberal-internationalist assessments of American power, the future of “the West” and the coming new world order

Abstract

In 2012, three of America's most influential public intellectuals – Robert Kagan, Zbigniew Brzezinski and Charles A. Kupchan – published books which reflect on what the rise of China entails for the future world order and which foreign policy the USA should pursue in response to the Chinese challenge. Since these authors represent three different political ideologies with significant bearing on the American foreign-policy establishment – neo-conservatism, realism and liberal internationalism – a comparison of their analyses will allow us to systematize current trends in American debates about world affairs and to identify today's fault lines between the political-ideological camps. As the article will demonstrate, at the root of the disagreements between the three schools of thought as represented by these authors are their diverging evaluations of America's relative power, their different conceptions of the nature of America's alliances, the unequal degree of importance they each attach to a state's form of government for its foreign policy and consequently their competing views on America's role in the coming world order.

Keywords:

• China
• international order
• liberalism
• neo-conservatism
• realism
• US foreign policy

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Timothy A. Sayle of Temple University for his valuable comments on an earlier draft of this article.

Notes on contributor

Jasper M. Trautsch is a lecturer of American history at the University of Regensburg. His dissertation Inventing America: U.S. foreign policy and the formation of national identity, 1789–1815 was awarded the Rolf Kentner Dissertation Prize in 2013. He has published articles on US and Canadian history and foreign policy in journals such as Early American Studies, the Journal of Military History, the Journal of Transatlantic Studies, National Identities, Historisches Jahrbuch, Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft and the Zeitschrift für Kanadastudien as well as the Routledge Handbook on American Military and Diplomatic History and has taught US history and foreign policy at the Free University of Berlin, the Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich and the University of Kassel. His current research project examines the ideological foundations of the transatlantic alliance in the cold war.

Notes

1. In his previous book, Kagan (2008, p. 97) had already envisioned a new global conflict between democracies and autocracies calling on democracies to unite in a “concert of democracies”.

2. In The grand chessboard, Brzezinski (1997) had already identified an anti-American alliance of China, Russia and Iran as the worst geopolitical scenario and had, therefore, suggested that the USA should engage Russia in a transcontinental system of security and cooperation (for the position that attempts to prolong US primacy in East Asia would be ultimately futile and that the USA should hence accept China's aspirations to become a hegemonic power in this region also see Ciorciari, 2010; White, 2012).

3. Kagan's position that American power is not declining is supported by Lieber (2012) and Nye (2010). Kupchan's and Brzezinski's position that in terms of power America is in relative decline is supported by Zakaria (2008).

4. For the divergent view that China will seek to replace the USA as the hegemonic global power, the fear that this power transition could involve a Sino-American war and the theory of power transition or long cycle theory that underlies this perspective see Friedberg (2011), Mearsheimer (2010) and Yan (2010).

5. Stefan Halper (2010) also believes that the USA and China will necessarily find themselves at odds with each other in the twenty-first century because of their different values and ideologies warning that China's “market authoritarian model” is becoming increasingly attractive throughout the non-western world.

6. In this respect, Kupchan agrees with the conservative Samuel Huntington (1996) who had argued that in the post-cold war order nations would group themselves into “civilizations”. Kupchan, however, draws very different conclusions from this assumption than Huntington who predicted a “clash of civilizations”.

7. A leading adherent of the more traditional liberal internationalism is G. John Ikenberry (2011b) who believes that the liberal international order will survive the gradual fading away of American hegemony, as rising powers will find it in their interest to integrate into this order.

8. Scholars found little proof for the thesis that democracies are more likely to ally with each other, instead emphasizing other factors such as common enemies, historical legacies, cultural affinity and distance for successful alliance formation (see Gibler & Wolford, 2006; Lai & Reiter, 2000; Simon & Gartzke, 1996).

9. Applying Patricia Weitsman's (2004) theory of alliance cohesion to an enlarged NATO, one would come to the conclusion that the internal would match the external threat perception of such an alliance, which would hence be inherently unstable.

10. President Barack Obama endorsed Kagan's thesis about “the myth of American decline” (Landler, 2012).