Reverse-Thucydides, and a China-RAND Conspiracy Theory
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Two quick missives that are sort of related.
Thucydides Entrapment
I was pleasantly surprised to find I was quoted in the New York Times this weekend. The piece, by one of their best, Lydia Polgreen, comments on US hegemonic decline in the context of rivalry with China. Polgreen argues that the US is Thucydides’ trapping itself. I generally bristle against any reference to the Thucydides’ Trap analogy, but the point she’s making is important and not wrong.
In fact, “hegemonic stability theory” always posited two directions from which great-power war might come. The direction that hawks obsess about is from below, the rising challenger that asserts itself in new, aggressive ways.
But the theory also accommodated the possibility of war from above, as a consequence of a declining hegemon lashing out to hoard their remaining share of power in the world-system. It’s this latter possibility that has been at the core of my many, many, many warnings. American exceptionalism not only makes it hard to foresee war from above; it makes it the more likely scenario.
Her paragraph quoting my contribution:
Trump or no, the military adventurism of the past two decades has become an unmistakable sign of decline. “If we’re having to maintain primacy by invading this country that’s not posing a threat to us and launching a global campaign of antiterror, clearly, we’re on the decline,” Van Jackson, a progressive foreign policy scholar and an author of “The Rivalry Peril,” told me. “It has always been the case in these cycles of history that when the dominant power starts investing and playing this military role globally, you have rising powers who are stepping up, playing a more important economic role globally.”
What I’m explaining here is simply what world-systems scholars like Immanuel Wallerstein been telling us since the 1970s:
To maintain hegemony, the hegemonic power must divert itself into a political and military role...its use of military power is not only the first sign of weakness but the source of further decline.
It’s ironic that the national security state’s obsession with military primacy as a tool of order enforcement has been the leading indicator of hegemonic decline. If you have to coerce, bomb, and invade countries in order preserve the international order of your choosing, then you aren’t really hegemonic. You’re just an asshole.
China-RAND Conspiracy Theory
A controversial, new RAND Corporation report on China-US competition just got yanked from public distribution for mysterious reasons:
As it happens, I wrote about this report when I came out a few weeks ago…and I am not in the business of amplifying RAND reports. But this one was different.
To be sure, the report was bland, and I leveled a number of criticisms against it. But it draws a number of conclusions that are remarkably consistent with progressive critics of Washington’s militarist, Cold War-liberal approach to China:
China has limited aims (i.e., there is almost no evidence to suggest it seeks global hegemony);
Sino-US relations were on an unstable trajectory;
Decoupling and economic containment were both undesirable;
War with China over specifically Taiwan would be catastrophic and might not be winnable without nuclear escalation;
Both sides needed to show greater restraint, and acknowledge mutual vulnerability of each others’ nuclear arsenals;
The US should re-commit to the “One China” policy in word and deed; and
A new modus vivendi was needed that would allow the US to ensure that great-power competition stayed within “guardrails.”
The imagination spins with conspiratorial possibilities for why this report would be withdrawn from publication—a highly unusual move. But there can only be one of two reasons. One is that there was a flaw in the methodology or citations that needed to be corrected, in which case the report will be re-issued. The other is that the report is being politically suppressed, because it undercuts much of the thrust of official US policy toward China. Given the censorship of Hegseth’s Pentagon, the latter would not surprise.
I guess I just want to stress that this particular RAND report was pragmatic—not radical. It didn’t even propose an account of China or great-power rivalry. But, in the context of Washington’s China discourse, which has been unhinged in recent years, pragmatism is kind of radical. And that’s what was noteworthy about it. The national security state has to have an unhinged analysis of China in order to sustain a war machine that costs a trillion dollars per year. To see someone pushing back against that from the inside was refreshing…while it lasted.
Did you catch the latest episode of The Bang-Bang Podcast? Lyle Rubin and I were joined by returning guest Paul Adlerstein to talk about Under Fire, the 1983 war-journalism adventure in the final days of Nicaragua’s dictatorship. In the clip below, we relate the Sandinista’s fight back to a discussion about Frantz Fanon’s hatred of nationalism.