Ideology, power and the U.S.-China rivalry
Aaron Friedberg has a good piece in the latest issue of the National Interest on why conflict between the U.S. and China is inevitable:
Deep-seated patterns of power politics are thus driving the United States and China toward mistrust and competition, if not necessarily toward open conflict. But this is not all there is to the story. In contrast to what some realists claim, ideology matters at least as much as power in determining the course of relations among nations. The fact that America is a liberal democracy while China remains under authoritarian rule is a significant additional impetus for rivalry, an obstacle to stable, cooperative relations, and a source of mutual hostility and mistrust in its own right.
To which Larison responds:
If there is an â??additional impetus for rivalryâ? between America and China on account of ideology, whence does this impetus come? Does it not come mainly from the American push for political change inside other countries? In other words, as Andrew Nathan says in his response:As long as the West wants to change the Chinese political system, Beijingâ??s rulers will, as Friedberg says, quite rationally â??believe that they are engaged in an ideological struggle, albeit one in which, until very recently, they have been almost entirely on the defensive.â?The question that comes to mind is this: why does the U.S. insist on waging such an ideological struggle, when it is likely to intensify any rivalry with China? Thereâ??s no question that ideology matters as much as power, but what remains puzzling is why states permit themselves to be held hostage to the dictates of ideology when these promise to fuel dangerous rivalries with other major powers.
There are, I think, two inter-related explanations for this. The first is that ideology is a form of power and states wield it when they think it helps them advance more mundane geo-strategic interests. To take the U.S.-China example - America's liberal democratic ideology is still fairly attractive globally, whereas not many people want to live in a single party communist autocracy that jails artists and Nobel Prize winners. Throwing this in China's face puts them on the defensive in the eyes of global public opinion and, by extension, makes it harder for China to plead its case on other issues of strategic importance. This is why many people who want to take a "harder line" with China over its growing "assertiveness" in Asia usually begin by urging American politicians to call out Beijing's human rights abuses.
The second explanation is that ideological parries are easy and demagogic. It's difficult, time consuming and complicated to suss out which states have legitimate claims to various pieces of aquatic territory and then to rally people around those issues. It's quite easy, by contrast, to call China (or any other state) "evil" and leave it at that.
