The Anti-Realism of Great-Power Competition
The Anti-Realism of Great-Power Competition
Why it’s a mistake to brand power balancing as a “quartet of chaos,” plus some philosophical stuff about international relations.
Two new pieces have a troubling thematic similarity.
The first, from The Economist, claims a “quartet of chaos” involving Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran is out to get us all and destroy our morally innocent order made of rules. Lol, I wish I was kidding.
In the second, Reuters broke a story about how Russia has a drone factory in China and Chinese-made drones are being transferred to Russia, presumably for use on the battlefield in Ukraine. China says it’s not aware of any such transfers, which at the senior levels of the CCP might actually be true even though it is happening.
The brand “quartet of chaos” mocks itself so not a lot needs to be said about that. But a predictable who’s who is amplifying the drone news while making no attempt to explain anything about it.
There’s a politics in that kind of move, which works to smear a little more of Moscow’s earned enemy status onto Beijing. After all, we’re at war with Russia (no, we’re not) and these same amplifiers of great-power competition have been ringing alarm bells about China for years. As Kurt Campbell recently spouted, China is “the most significant challenge in our history” (no, it’s not). Policymakers spend time coming up with labels like “quartet of chaos” because branding substitutes rallying around the flag for realistic analysis.
The idea that we ought to be scandalized by Russia and China collaborating on military production exposes a hollowness in the worldview that erases the cause-and-effect of what’s happening in favor of seeing only terror and villainy. Flags have a tendency to distort your analysis in precisely that way.
Sino-Russian collaboration is not a good thing! But to bemoan it after advocating for the policies that brought it about is to assume that policy blowback doesn’t exist; that alliances are not born out of a shared threat; and that states don’t balance against stronger powers. Some of us have opposed the trajectory of US policy during the Biden years precisely because this turn of events was predictable enough.
In short, Sino-US partnership illustrates the folly of assuming a competitive framework for international relations. And in so doing, it reveals the immense anti-realism of US and Anglophile foreign policy.