Maybe some guys like John Meisheimer share those ideas... he views CN as "hegemonic", but he failed to talk abt Aus plane near Cn coast tho...
Nah, I don’t think he specifically sees China as hegemonic. More like he believes every major power is inherently hegemonic and locked in zero-sum competition by nature.
That’s only partially true. The US operates on a zero-sum model because that’s how it developed, just like its Western predecessors, by extracting value from others in increasingly sophisticated ways. So when China pushes back or rises, the US perceives it as a zero-sum game because, for them, it really is.
The US, and broadly the West, simply can’t function in a perfectly just world where nations are left to their own devices without engaging in external conquests of some kind. If that happened, they’d collapse straight back into some form of the Dark Ages, which, honestly, is already kind of happening.
China, on the other hand, follows a more internal, positive-sum developmental model. Also, if you actually look at their history, they’ve been the dominant civilization, through that, for most of the recorded time, give or take. But, that doesn’t mean they’re okay with getting walked all over, though. Naturally, they’ll push back hard against US transgressions.
Another issue with his perspective is that while he acknowledges both China and the US as superpowers, he seems to think the US is about twice as strong as China. In reality, it’s the opposite, China is at least twice as strong overall, and in their immediate region, they outmatch the US by orders of magnitude.
Plus, the US is way more divided internally than China. In terms of internal divisions, on dozens of levels, they’re practically on par with failed states. If you factor in internal stability as part of a nation’s overall “defense,” the US isn’t even a superpower anymore.
Realistically, in today’s climate, how the hell do they think they can avoid some form of a civil war once they go into full economic and military confrontation with China?
