Transcript: A Future of Great Power Politics and Peer Hegemons – John Mearsheimer & Joshua Byun

And the question we set out to answer is this: Why would the only regional hegemon in the international system fear the emergence of a peer hegemon elsewhere in the world? Put differently, how would the rise of a new regional hegemon affect the security environment of the current lone regional hegemon? What exactly is there to worry about?

Our central argument focuses on the dangers of security competition that would invariably set in between 2 regional hegemons. And when we say security competition, we describe a situation where 2 great powers fear each other and constantly take risky steps to outmatch each other for military advantages. And our claim is that no matter how bad or intense security competition gets in a world with one regional hegemon, it won’t be as bad as it will be in a world where you have 2 regional hegemons.

If you’re a solitary regional hegemon, you just don’t face many threats to your vital interests from other great powers. Your position, number one, makes it easy for you to maintain military preponderance in your own neighborhood, and number two, to maintain robust access to the globe’s core economic regions.

But in a world of 2 regional hegemons, each side has a strong incentive to undermine its peer’s regional dominance and thereby become the sole regional hegemon. And the resulting security competition is bound to put significant strain on both hegemons’ ability to safeguard their vital interests.

And finally, I’ll later be showing you why, if you’re someone who thinks US foreign policy toward China over the coming years matters and that the broader conversation over the future of American grand strategy matters, you should care deeply about what John and I have to say.

Background: The United States as the Sole Regional Hegemon

Now for some background, security scholars widely agree that the United States became the globe’s sole regional hegemon sometime in the late nineteenth century. In 1895, US Secretary of State Richard Olney famously told his British counterpart that “the United States is practically sovereign on this continent. Its fiat is long upon the subjects to which it confines its interposition.”

In a few slides, I’ll be offering a more detailed definition of what regional hegemony is. But for now, what you need to understand is that among traditional security scholars, the term hegemony has a very specific meaning. It involves the ability to veto or control established bounds on the foreign policy behaviors of subordinate states. And note that the United States does not enjoy anything close to this ability for most states outside the Western Hemisphere, which is why it’s normally considered inaccurate in our profession to call the United States a global hegemon.

The mere fact that it’s possible to speak of the United States having military adversaries or rivals abroad means that it’s not a global hegemon. That’s a term that’s kind of loosely used sometimes by pundits or journalists. The United States is a solitary regional hegemon. And the question on the table is: how valuable is this position for US security?

The Traditional View vs. the Revisionist View

The traditional view holds that the United States reaps enormous security benefits from its solitary regional hegemony and that it should go to great lengths to prevent the emergence of peer regional hegemons in Eurasia. Historian Samuel Flagg Bemis, who is often called the father of the field of American diplomatic history, reached this conclusion inductively based on his reading of US foreign policy successes since the founding. Geopolitical thinkers like Nicholas Spykman used the same logic to argue that the United States should intervene in World War II to prevent the rise of a Nazi hegemon in Europe and a Japanese hegemon in East Asia.

But another view that is gaining more and more traction in American academia nowadays holds that the security benefits of being a sole regional hegemon are grossly exaggerated. That the US is really not getting its money’s worth by getting all worked up over that prospect. The theoretical logics and scholars that support this view are quite powerful. You do not want to underestimate how formidable this kind of thinking is.

Just to take a few examples, Bob Art, a Brandeis professor who is something of a guru in the grand strategy community, published a simply magisterial paper in 2005 where he used counterfactual analysis to conclude that even if the US were to allow the rise of 2 hypothetical regional hegemons in World War II, there’s just no realistic way in which they could have meaningfully harmed American security. So his argument was there might have been moral or ideological justifications for getting involved in World War II, but he’s saying it wasn’t strictly necessary from the perspective of US security interests.

Art’s conclusion was reached without even taking nuclear weapons into account. And as you know, if you’re an IR scholar who has any expertise on nuclear weapons today, 8 or 9 times out of 10 you’re going to be a nuclear revolution theorist. And based on the idea of the nuclear revolution, scholars like Chris Lane argue that the traditional fear of a Eurasian regional hegemon might be a strategic artifact of the pre-nuclear era.

In an important book published just last year, Charlie Glaser distills the implications of this kind of thinking for US policy toward China. He writes that “China’s rise strengthens the neo-isolationist case for ending US security commitments in East Asia. And the reason is that the US homeland would remain highly secure whether or not those commitments are maintained, while the US military presence in East Asia raises the probability of a war that the US does not need to and should not fight.”

And again, let me just stress that it’s impossible to overstate how accomplished and knowledgeable and smart the people who are making these kinds of claims are. As a general rule, these are not the kinds of intellects you want to get into an argument with.

The Case for Maintaining Solitary Regional Hegemony

And yet John and I argue that a current lone regional hegemon should see tremendous value in maintaining that privileged status. If you are the United States, you should go to tremendous lengths to prevent another state like China from dominating its own region like the United States dominates the Western Hemisphere. And why do we say that?

Just to begin with some conceptual groundwork, we use the term vital interests in this paper in reference to 2 quantities: survival and economic prosperity. Survival encompasses territorial integrity and the autonomy of internal political order. Economic prosperity is also a vital interest primarily because it is a key ingredient of the military power needed to ensure long-term survival. And we can quibble about this during the discussion, but the point I want to drive home for the moment is that it’s reasonable for a state to see any development in international politics as an existential threat if that development makes it systematically harder to defend these vital interests.

Defining Regions and Regional Hegemony

A region is a large geographical area recognized as politically distinct due to physical or historical features, and we recognize that there is no universal agreement on how to identify regions or where to draw the boundaries between different regions. At the same time, leaders and states and institutions act as if regions like East Asia or Europe or Africa or the Middle East exist and seem to take these distinctions seriously when formulating policy. And for our purposes, that is enough.

More specifically, what matters in great power politics are the so-called core regions that feature outsized shares of global wealth and populations. And on this planet that we live in, scholars of geopolitics have traditionally agreed that these are Europe, East Asia, the Western Hemisphere, and the Middle East.

Now a regional hegemon is a great power that is so militarily dominant in a core region that it can credibly threaten to handily defeat any state or plausible combination of states that reside in that neighborhood in a conventional war, with or without the support of extra-regional powers. And since the nineteenth century, again, the United States has enjoyed this ability throughout the Western Hemisphere, which makes it the only regional hegemon in modern history.

The key political effect of regional hegemony is that local states moderate their foreign policies to avoid triggering overwhelming punishment from the dominant great power. Another way to put this is that regional hegemony spares a great power from having to deal with serious military competition in its own neighborhood. A region without a hegemon is one that features 2 or more centers of military power that vie for advantage.

Theory: Key Premises

Alright. Our theory is guided by 2 key premises. The first is that geographically proximate military competitors radically intensify a great power’s threat environment. Security scholars widely recognize that land-based military power remains the ultimate currency of international politics. There are many reasons for this, but the short reason, the fundamental reason, is that people live on land — not the seas, not the air, but on land.

The Primacy of Land Power and Regional Hegemony

JOSHUA BYUN: The primacy of land power means that geographically proximate adversaries who can use armies to cross territorial frontiers and seize territory represent the severest threat to a great power’s vital interests. We can get a snapshot of this key insight by looking at some statistics on intra-regional war. By intra-regional war, we mean a war that takes place in your home region. It’s useful to focus on these wars because they give us a good sense of how exposed a given state has historically been to the cost of war. You can certainly fight a war outside your home region, but those are much more likely to be so-called wars of choice that you could possibly have avoided.

So using the most widely used data set on historical conflict statistics, we calculated the probability that a great power would be involved in an intra-regional war in any given year. And we see here that the United States, which as a regional hegemon by definition faces no proximate military competitors, has been orders of magnitude less likely to fight a war in its home region than all other great powers in the modern era. By extension, it has also been less likely to suffer battle deaths due to such wars. Additionally, if you look at research on foreign subversion by Melissa Lee at UPenn, it becomes clear that geographical proximity also conditions the extent to which foreign adversaries can sponsor hostile non-state groups within a great power territory to undermine its internal political order. And the reason is that distance affects things like delivery costs of support for insurgent groups and the availability of safe havens and training camps.

So if you want to safeguard your vital interests in international politics, simply put, the best way to go about it is to ensure that you don’t have geographically proximate military competitors. That’s why it’s so nice to be a regional hegemon, since you by definition don’t have proximate military competitors.

The Threat of a Peer Regional Hegemon

The second premise of our argument is that a distinct great power can conceivably reintroduce proximate military threats against the regional hegemon by either deploying its military forces to the territory of a local state in its region, or grooming a local state into a new military challenger against the regional hegemon, or number three, sponsoring insurgent forces within the regional hegemon’s borders, which as I noted earlier, again would be conditional on whether you have a local state as a collaborator. If a distant great power succeeds in establishing a substantial military presence in a regional hegemon’s neighborhood, or succeeds in building up a local state into a serious adversary that can resist the regional hegemon’s impositions, regional hegemony is gone. That’s off the table.

Now given that setup, let’s talk about why, if you are a regional hegemon, it’s ideal if you have that position for yourself in international politics and not have any great power in another region achieve that same privilege. The key point to note is that when you’re a solitary regional hegemon, distant adversaries face stark limits to projecting power into your neighborhood, simply because the bulk of their strategic resources and attention are tied down by local military competition. Should a non-hegemonic great power nonetheless try to establish a military foothold in your region or support the growth of a new adversary there, you as this lone regional hegemon can swiftly counter-concentrate resources at this attempted point of breakthrough. So the distant great power doesn’t have very many capabilities to spare for your region to begin with, and whatever resources it does manage to deploy to your region can swiftly come crashing down on it, because there’s nothing to impede the maneuver of your own forces within your own region.

Also, you can make it even harder for the distant great power to threaten your regional dominance by sponsoring its local adversaries and redirecting its strategic efforts back to its own neighborhood. Remember, as a regional hegemon, your resources aren’t tied down by local competitors. You can project ample resources abroad. Your adversary by definition is surrounded by local competitors who are eager to receive your support. And this is a remarkably favorable situation.

Economic Advantages of Solitary Regional Hegemony

Yet another advantage of solitary regional hegemony is that you enjoy favorable access to the globe’s core economic regions. If you believe that trade is important for long-term economic vitality, you understand why this can be important. And here the idea is that if there’s a core region abroad that’s rich in industrial resources, raw materials, and markets, the resident great power has a hard time trying to restrict your economic access to this region, because it is again surrounded by competing powers who have an interest in enriching themselves while trying as much as possible to reduce their dependence on the local great power. They have an economic incentive to invite you into their neighborhood. Moreover, because the regional hegemon has more freedom to roam outside its own region, it can easily put up the military capabilities to defend its economic interest in so-called neutral regions.

By neutral regions, we mean regions that are geographically removed from both great powers. Think the Middle East when it comes to the US-China competition.

What Changes With a Peer Regional Hegemon

Now what changes if you get a peer regional hegemon? Both sides now have abundant military capabilities that are not tied down by local competitors and thus can be freely deployed outside the region. The advantages you enjoyed as a solitary regional hegemon disappear. And this doesn’t necessarily mean that the peer regional hegemon will find it easy to reinstate local military competition in your neighborhood, but this can plausibly happen if several conditions are met.

First, there may be aggrieved local states that are willing to cooperate with the distant hegemon. And this was one of the concerns that people like Nicholas Spykeman had about a Nazi or Japanese hegemon with regard to the Latin American countries. And if you’re someone who thinks the Latin American countries or US neighbors more generally don’t really have many reasons to be aggrieved about the United States’ historical conduct in this region, I can point you to some educational resources.

Second, one regional hegemon can experience a severely distracting crisis that limits its ability to counteract the distant hegemon’s intrusions. One illustration comes from the American Civil War. Although the US wasn’t quite a regional hegemon at this time, it was the militarily preponderant state in North America by the mid-1850s. But upon the outbreak of the Civil War, US leaders found themselves constantly having to fend off moves by Britain to support the Confederacy or French efforts to establish a friendly regime in Mexico. So ambassador to Mexico Thomas Corwin’s view was that “Europe is quite willing to see us humble and is trying to execute purposes of which she would not have dreamed of had we remained at peace.” And after the Civil War, Washington succeeded in ejecting French military forces from Mexico, for example. And what historian Samuel Flagg Bemis found was that the core reason behind that success wasn’t smart diplomacy on Washington’s part, it’s the fact that France had to contend with the rise of Prussian power.

And the final condition to note is that one regional hegemon’s ability to exploit such opportunities will be conditioned by the competitive measures the other takes to defend itself. And one of the most effective things you can do to keep your peer from having enough forces to project to your neighborhood is to cause trouble in its own neighborhood to tie down its resources there.

The Logic of Mutual Hegemonic Competition

You see where I’m going with this? Given the gigantic benefits of being a solitary regional hegemon, each side understands that the peer has incentives to erode its regional dominance and relegate it to being a normal or non-hegemonic great power. And the best way to avoid being inflicted with this terrible outcome is to do unto your rival what you fear it might do to you — reintroduce military competition into its backyard to tie down its capabilities. In effect, the best way to keep your regional hegemony over the long haul is to take away the other side’s regional hegemony.

So the aggregate outcome we expect is that an intense security competition would transpire between the two regional hegemons that gradually puts more and more duress on each side’s ability to defend their vital interests. Simply put, if you are a formerly lone regional hegemon, you will find yourself defending your vital interests under greater and greater strain over time. You do not want to find yourself living in that kind of world.

I should also note that a corollary to military competition is that each hegemon has a powerful incentive to weaken its peer’s economy so as to erode its military capabilities. Both sides now militarily dominate their regions and thus have more ability to obstruct their neighbor’s trade with the peer. Both sides now have to contend with each other’s power projection capabilities in neutral regions on a relatively equal footing. And as this competition unfolds, both regional hegemons are likely to do real damage to the other’s prosperity, which as you recall is a vital interest in its own right.

Historical Evidence: Imperial Germany

Now turning to some historical evidence, one cannot design a direct test of our arguments given that there is no past case of an international system with more than one regional hegemon. So in a chapter of the book, we turn to what we believe is the best available alternative, which is to scrutinize the plans and behaviors of past great powers that came close to achieving regional hegemony in a world that had already one regional hegemon, the United States. The idea here is that by looking at the plans and initiatives that these powers crafted in anticipation of becoming a regional hegemon, we can get a handle on the kind of relationship the United States is likely to have with such a peer if one ever comes into being.

So I’m just going to give you a very brief taster of the kinds of evidence that we marshal in that chapter. Our first case is Imperial Germany. Many people don’t realize this, but Imperial Germany arguably came closer than any other great power in history to becoming a European hegemon. Closer than Nazi Germany, closer than Napoleon of France, closer than the Soviet Union. And scholars have documented a wide array of military incursions and political schemes that Imperial Germany pursued in the Western Hemisphere both before and during World War I as it tried to make a grab for European hegemony.

For example, many historians agree today that the US invasion and occupation of Haiti in 1915 and the Dominican Republic in 1916 were largely motivated by evidence that Germany was gaining a larger and larger foothold in those places. And as many of you know, Germany also tried to stir up trouble in Mexico and bait the United States into fighting a war with Mexico during this time.

Now what matters most for us is why Germany plotted these things. And we show in the book that German encroachments were driven by the idea that Germany would have an easier time achieving European hegemony and maintaining it into the future if the United States was tied down by local antagonisms in the Western Hemisphere. German ambassador to the United States, pictured on the left over there, cabled to Berlin in June 1915 that “so long as the Mexican question holds the stage here, we are, I believe, safe from an act of aggression on the part of the American government.” We also show that Germany crafted a host of economic plans for its future European dominion that would almost certainly have degraded the US ability to access key markets in Europe. Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg’s vision was explicitly to unify Europe’s economic strength so as to “compete against other world powers over the conditions of the admission of each to the markets of the others.”

And at this point you may say, well, but none of these plans actually came to fruition. But you want to ask yourselves, why didn’t these visions come to pass? Why weren’t they more successful? The fundamental reason was that Germany could not muster enough power to project into the Western Hemisphere as long as it was occupied by adversaries in its own neighborhood.

There’s a historian by the name of Nancy Mitchell who wrote a great book on German policy in Latin America. It’s called The Danger of Dreams. Her basic argument is that US policymakers were paranoid about German encroachments in the Western Hemisphere in the lead-up to World War I, which led them to adopt all sorts of hostile policies against both Germany and any Latin American state they saw as cooperating with Germany. But her thesis is that all this was just much ado about nothing. The German danger to the Western Hemisphere was greatly exaggerated. It was never going to amount to much.

But you want to pay attention to why she says German ambitions were always bound to be far-fetched and impossible to realize. If you read through her book carefully, it becomes clear that she believes the reason was that as a non-hegemonic great power, Imperial Germany’s capabilities were pinned down by more pressing antagonisms in Europe. She quotes a remark by Admiral Paul von Hintze, who served as the ambassador to Mexico before World War I. He said, “the great powers of Europe are occupied by problems more important and more pressing than those posed by Mexico. And therefore, for any single European power to try to oppose or break into US hegemony in Mexico or Latin America more generally would be to invite dire consequences and failure.”

Historical Evidence: Nazi Germany

Turning to Nazi Germany just briefly, again historians have documented a wide array of plans and initiatives that Hitler’s Germany hatched against the United States and the Western Hemisphere, which if pursued to their logical conclusion could well have endangered American regional hegemony.

Objections to the Argument

Now I won’t go into much detail about these except to say that these incursions were substantial enough and serious enough that no responsible US leader could have treated them nonchalantly. What matters to us most again is why Nazi Germany these endeavors were worth pursuing despite their obvious risks. We argue that the central reason was that Nazi leaders understood that the United States, the regional hegemon of the Western Hemisphere, the US itself could not credibly commit to respecting Germany’s future regional Germany in Europe. The United States had all these capabilities that were unencumbered by local rivalries. In the language of IR theory, even if it wanted to, Washington could not tie its hands tightly enough to reassure German leaders that it wouldn’t train its gun sights on Germany’s hegemony in Europe at some point in the future.

German Naval High Command, July 1940, even if Great Britain recognizes German European supremacy, if we manage to subordinate countries like Britain under German regional hegemony, it may someday still seek the support of the United States, which will still have a firm interest in a strong European England. Hitler himself described the problem of a US German rivalry as one that is decisive beyond the present war for the whole future. Someday a European state might invite America to establish herself here in Europe. Then the European Monroe Doctrine — he called it the European Monroe Doctrine — it will be finished.

How do you keep that from happening? You want to create antagonisms and flash points in the other side’s region so that they will be pinned down there. You want to do it to them before they do it to you.

Let me now consider a number of potential objections to our arguments.

Turning first to objections specific to these cases, some of you might be thinking, well, Imperial Germany and Nazi Germany were such uniquely aggressive states that their plans and behavior simply don’t tell us much about how future regional hegemons might deal with one another. We agree that Hitler’s Germany in particular was an extraordinarily depraved regime. But the question on the table is whether there was something pathological or idiosyncratic or uniquely evil in the logics that drove them to plan and execute these policies toward the United States. And the answer is no. In fact, their hostile initiatives in the Western Hemisphere were mirrored in the behaviors that Washington pursued in Europe.

Another objection would be that all of our evidence is drawn from a time when the two Germanies were trying to become a regional hegemon and preparing to become a regional hegemon. So they don’t really tell us much about how these states would have behaved once they had achieved full blown regional hegemony. Now some might say that once these states established that elevated position, they would have become so secure and satisfied that they would see no need to pick a fight with the distant regional hegemon, the United States. Now that’s an interesting argument. It would essentially have you believe that a nation that tried its best to undermine US regional Germany when it did not have the capabilities to do so would have done an about face and abandoned these hostile plans once it finally acquired the capabilities that might allow it to actually pull it off.

Now let’s say you believe in that scenario. We would argue that the leaders of a German regional hegemon who want to sink into such a live and let live policy would have no assurance that America would return the favor. Then we’re back to square one. Security competition kicks in again.

General Theoretical Objections

In the book, we also address some more general theoretical objections in great detail. I won’t go into great detail here. But the first of these says that our prediction of intense security competition between peer regional hegemons is a “self fulfilling prophecy.” It essentially says that the security competition need not materialize, but people like us are the problem. We think that a security competition is inevitable and therefore end up bringing it about even though things could have gone differently.

A second objection says this whole hand wringing about another regional hegemon is moot because America’s rise to regional hegemony was a one time event that can’t be replicated. If China makes a run for regional hegemony today, it will be hit with the triple whammy of balancing by local powers, nationalist opposition, and nuclear deterrence. A third objection says that the two regional hegemons would have no reason to fear each other because they would be highly secure in their own region, thanks to the stopping power of modern and nuclear weapons. And the final objection says that yes, a peer regional hegemon might be dangerous, but it’s even more dangerous to pick a fight with a potential hegemon in the name of stifling its hegemony.

In the interest of time, I’ll leave these alone for the time being. John would be more than happy to indulge them during the Q&A. But all I’ll say for now is that we carefully consider each of these in the book and effectively, we believe, knock them down. None of these objections really hold water in our view.

Conclusion

By way of conclusion, what we offer in this paper is the first dedicated theoretical analysis of great power security competition in an international system with peer regional hegemons. The thrust of our argument is that a great power who is currently a solitary regional hegemon has good reason to fear the emergence of another regional hegemon and that it’s right to go to enormous lengths to prevent that from happening. And obviously, this analysis has huge implications for US policy toward China, as well as the broader American grand strategy debate.

Just to drive that home a bit, let me go back to the call for restraint in US foreign policy. As I mentioned at the outset, a growing group of scholars in the United States have been raising their voice against what they see as the prevailing atmosphere of militarism and excess and hyperactivity and interventionism in both US foreign policy behavior and the discourse undergirding US foreign policy. And John and I are deeply sympathetic to this basic point.

Now what do we mean by discourse of militarism and access and hyperactivity and interventionism you ask? Stuff like this. Long before the current administration came online, mainstream political discourse in the United States was routinely spewing proposals like these. Bomb North Korea before it’s too late. Bomb Syria even if it’s legal. To stop Iran’s bomb, bomb Iran. Bombing Iraq isn’t enough. Just utterly disheartening and also unnecessary.

The United States is a remarkably powerful country. And the events that happen in most areas of the world today have little impact on its ability to protect its vital interests. But by falsely believing that it has the need and the right to use military force outside the Western Hemisphere and tell people how to run their governments and society, the United States has done much more harm than good and has strayed from its own democratic values as well. Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Gaza, Ukraine, and now Iran. So we get that.

The Exception: Preventing Chinese Hegemony in East Asia

However, there is one exception that US policymakers should recognize. This is the possibility that a hegemon might arise in one of the three core regions of Eurasia, Europe, East Asia, or the Middle East. It’s vanishingly unlikely today that Russia will become a regional hegemon in Europe or that some state will become a hegemon in the Gulf. But East Asia is a different story.

And the main policy takeaway from our analysis is that the mission of preventing Chinese hegemony in East Asia merits departure from policies of restraint. China is already closer today to being a regional hegemon than it was a decade ago. It’s hard to deny that the reason why it’s not even closer to being a regional hegemon is precisely that the United States has tried so hard to prevent that from happening.

Moreover, there are ways in which the United States has indirectly contributed to raising the prospects of China’s East Asian hegemony. For example, by needlessly antagonizing Russia and Eastern Europe, the US has made it difficult for Russia to behave, to do its own pivot as an Asian great power that could help counterbalance China. Also, US involvement in what are essentially Israel’s conflicts have kept it from fully pivoting its strategic resources to East Asia. All this is to say that Chinese regional hegemony isn’t a foregone conclusion, but this prospect will be conditioned by some of the choices that the United States makes.

Implications of Being Wrong

The final takeaway I would leave you with is this, think about the implications of us being wrong. You consider all of our logics and evidence and you say John and Josh are just wrong. If we are wrong and a peer regional hegemon is really just nothing to worry about, isolationism would logically reemerge as the optimal American grand strategy. Isolationism here describes a foreign policy vision that says there is no situation outside the Western Hemisphere that’s threatening enough for the United States to commit its military might. As of today, isolationism doesn’t enjoy a large following in US academic or policy circles. But imagine if someone comes along and shows beyond a shred of a doubt that a peer hegemon would not be a serious threat to the United States.

In that case the intellectual basis of an array of grand strategies that do command respect among students of US foreign policy would be undermined. And if you’re plugged into the US grand strategy debate, know exactly what these are. Think about deep engagement, which has long been regarded as the default US grand strategy. This grand strategy holds that the United States should forward deploy large scale military forces in the core regions, Europe, East Asia, and the Persian Gulf, to maintain stability in those regions. Stability is the watchword of deep engagement because it sees any major disruption to the status quo as being inherently bad for US vital interests. However, it is difficult to imagine a greater disruption to the status quo in the core regions of Eurasia than the rise of a regional hegemon. If even that momentous shift in the balance of power cannot hurt US vital interests, it boggles the mind to argue that lesser forms of instability can do so.

Also consider offshore balancing, which prescribes US military intervention in Eurasia only when there is a potential hegemon on the scene. But in the nuclear age, even this conditional military intervention should be deemed too costly and too risky if we conclude that a peer regional hegemon would not be able to seriously threaten interests.

Finally, there’s restraint, which argues that the United States should be somewhat vigilant about another regional hegemon, but it shouldn’t get too worked up over that prospect. Restrainers doubt, first of all, that another regional hegemon can emerge under today’s conditions. But even if one does come online, they say it wouldn’t necessarily be threatening to the United States. Washington should just wait and see how that peer would possibly threaten US vital interests given all these difficulties. And if it turns out to be a threat, then it should make a move.

So all this is to say that restrainers think we should be moderately concerned about the threat of another regional hegemon, but we shouldn’t get ahead of ourselves too much. To that we say either the cost and risks and dangers of security competition we predict for a world of rival regional hegemons are bound to materialize, in which case a peer regional hegemon would be very threatening. Or they will not come to pass, in which case a peer hegemon should be of no concern at all. The one thing a peer hegemon cannot be is moderately threatening.

So if you read our book, which again is coming out next year, early next year, and you find yourself saying, Josh and John are just wrong. I just don’t see how a peer regional hegemon would be able to do any serious damage to US security. I would then urge you to ask yourself, why aren’t you an isolationist? On that note, we look forward to your questions. Thanks so much.

Q&A Session

AUDIENCE: So I’m skeptical of the argument. One reason being it seems like if there are two regional hegemons, they would have huge incentives to make a deal. Why wouldn’t they make a deal where they both recognize it’s in each, it’s in their own interest not to interfere in somebody else’s region if they don’t interfere in mine? And I think about the sort of literature on cooperation from the ’80s with like Lipsch and Axelrod and whatnot. And this would be a situation that would be really ripe for cooperation. Small numbers, right, long time horizons, the ability to monitor what each side is doing, and the costs of defection are not very high in an incremental level because economic impacts take a long time to be realized. So why wouldn’t this be a situation ripe for cooperation between regional hegemons as opposed to competition?

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: I’d make two points, Rose. First of all, great powers hardly ever cooperate. They almost always compete. Second point I’d make to you is if you look at the historical record, there have been four potential hegemons that we faced in our history. Imperial Germany, Imperial Japan, Nazi Germany, and the Soviet Union. We didn’t cooperate with them. They weren’t regional hegemons, but they were great powers. We didn’t cooperate with them. We played a key role in putting all four of them on the scrap heap of history. We don’t tolerate regional hegemons. Cooperation is not in our playbook. And the basic logic that underpins this is you live in a radically uncertain world. You can never be sure what’s going on, and in a competition between two regional hegemons, you want to make sure you get in the first step in the competition.

The Dynamics of Regional Hegemony and Great Power Competition

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: You may take the first step in the competition and you do everything you can to make sure that the competition takes place in the other side’s backyard. In other words, if you have 2 regional hegemonies, you and I are regional hegemonies, and you decide, you form some sort of cooperative agreement, we’re going to be basically well behaved, but then all of a sudden I change my mind and I go to work on you, and the competition takes place in your backyard, you’re in trouble. You’d much prefer the competition take place in my backyard, not in your backyard. So the incentives for each side to gain advantage over the other side by getting the first blow in, so to speak, or taking the first step, are just enormous because you just can’t be sensible. So come back a bit.

JOSHUA BYUN: Yeah, so I’ll come back 1 time and then I’ll cut myself off. But so that would be the case if taking 1 step meant disaster immediately. But what I think would happen is if you mess in my neighborhood, I retaliate by messing in yours, we play tit for tat, and then we realize we’re better off if neither 1 of us messes in each other’s neighborhood. And by your initial messing, if that doesn’t completely blow me out of the water, then it doesn’t matter. Right?

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: No. I don’t have to completely blow you out of the water. All I have to do is get the competition taking place in your backyard and not in my backyard. All I have to do is put you in a position where you have no choice but to defend yourself on your own front because I have snuck in, and I have presented you with an existential threat that you have to deal with.

You’d be much better off if you got in the first floor. You anticipated potential trouble for me, and you caused trouble in my backyard. And the focus of the competition—

Q&A Session

JOSHUA BYUN: So just a reminder, we’re going to take questions every other. So we have parents at the other room. This is from 1 of our undergraduate fellows, Jason, who’s asking, given all this, do you believe the United States should be part of any defensive alliances?

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Well, I do believe, and Josh, of course, believes it as well, that what we should do is create a balancing coalition against China, that we should go to great lengths to contain China. And I think that rhetoric is defensive in nature. I think that the last thing that the United States wants to do is get highly aggressive with China.

During the Cold War, when we dealt with the Soviet Union, we used to talk about containment all the time. But as the Cold War wore on, it became very clear that we were deeply interested in rollback. We were attempting to rollback the Soviet Union. Rollback is very offensive in nature. And I think that we should minimize the amount of rollback to almost 0 that we do vis-a-vis the Chinese, and that we should concentrate on containment. And I think that is basically the defense in the world.

JOSHUA BYUN: Can people hear me now better? Sorry. Yes. Great. So I think, Mike, you’re up next. Maybe you can pass the mic if you don’t mind.

The Question of Regional vs. Global Hegemony

AUDIENCE: Thanks, Rose. And thanks, Josh and John, for coming. Fascinating book project. I’m hung up on 1 thing, subjection number 3. I can’t figure out how in the absence of global hegemony, regional hegemony matters.

I read a very important book, came out in 2001, that taught me largely as a function of the stopping power of water why global hegemony was impossible. And without it, why does regional hegemony matter? Now you say that a consolidated regional hegemon somewhere else could somehow undermine our position of regional hegemony. Seems to me that’s an empirical issue that you’ve got to settle. And especially if global hegemony, which it seems to me is a very plausible argument about how, for example, China or before it the USSR or Nazi Germany or Wilhelmine Germany could have been a threat to us.

But I’m having a hard time squaring that circle. You take global hegemony off the table, out of the equation, how does that threaten us?

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: I’m not terribly clear what your question is. It seemed that there were sort of 3 issues here. 1 is why is regional hegemony good?

AUDIENCE: No, there’s 1 question, John. If global hegemony is off the table, how can even a regional hegemon in another region threaten us? It’s not clear to me that regional hegemony is sufficient to project power given everything you’ve argued very cogently in your earlier work could present to us? It’s just 1 question, 1 key question.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Well, the point is that if you have regional hegemony and you’re dealing with another regional hegemon that’s free to roam, it can roam into your backyard. It is in a position where it may be able to put military forces in your region, and you can’t do anything about it.

I mean, just think about the Cuban Missile Crisis. The Soviet Union was not a regional hegemon, but they put nuclear armed missiles in Cuba, and they were later, as you well know, talking about building a naval base at Cienfuegos. We were able to deal with that because we were a regional hegemon, and they were not. They were actually tied down in Europe.

If they’re free to roam, they’re a regional hegemon, and they have this awesome power. They may be able to do something like what happened during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and you, the United States, might not be able to prevent that. So my basic argument is what you want to do is create a Cuban Missile Crisis in their backyard before they create a Cuban Missile Crisis in your backyard.

AUDIENCE: But without global hegemony, it doesn’t seem to me that the threat is overwhelming. And it’s not even clear to me that without global hegemony, a great power can roam.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Well, the Soviet Union, which was not even a regional hegemon, roamed into our backyard. And furthermore, I often say to people, have you ever thought why the United States roams all over God’s little green acres, sticking its nose in everybody’s business, building military bases here, there and everywhere? It’s because we’re a regional hegemon. We have no threats in our backyard, so we’re free to roam. The Chinese can’t do that at this point in time.

Imperial Germany couldn’t do it. Nazi Germany couldn’t do it, and the Soviet Union couldn’t do it. It was wonderful that the Soviet was pinned down in Eastern Europe dealing with all these irascible so called allies like the East Germans, the Poles, the Czechs, the Hungarians, the Romanians, the Albanians. You remember all of them. It was wonderful that they had to deal with them, that they had to invade Hungary in ’56, Czechoslovakia in ’68, and so forth and so on.

If they don’t have those problems and they look like Godzilla the way we look like Godzilla, there is the danger that they will wander into our region and cause us trouble. And states care greatly about their security. They don’t want this to happen. And a distant regional hegemon is going to look like an existential threat because it is an existential threat. Just like the United States looks like an existential threat to China, and just like the United States looks like an existential threat to Russia.

Great powers, as you know as well as I do, basically act like ruthless rogue states. The United States, as you know, is a ruthless rogue state. Just look at our behavior around the world. Right? We go in the areas as Josh was describing, that are not even important. Right? You just don’t want to take a chance. That’s the basic argument. You live in an uncertain world. You can’t be sure. And you’d rather have everybody else out there be what we call a normal great power rather than a rival hegemon.

Nuclear Deterrence and China’s Path to Regional Hegemony

JOSHUA BYUN: Okay, I’m going to go to a question from 1 of our graduate students, Mariise. Is regional hegemony typically a stepping stone to becoming a global power? And if so, does the nuclearization of Asia alter that sequence for China? So does the nuclear deterrence in the region constrain China’s ability to dominate its region? And if so, does that fundamentally change the pathway to great power?

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Well, there are too many questions in there. Can you just start? An old guy like me who’s suffering from early Alzheimer’s, you’ve got to ask 1 question at a time. Let’s start with 1 at a time.

JOSHUA BYUN: Is regional hegemony a stepping stone to becoming a global power?

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: No. As Josh said, you can’t achieve global hegemony. The globe is just too big. During the unipolar moment, you have 1 great power on the planet. Right? And a lot of people said that we were a global hegemon. Our argument is that we weren’t the global hegemon, given Josh’s definition of what a hegemon is and how you think about the distribution of power in the unipolar moment. If you think about Russian and Chinese military power, just to take 2 examples, we didn’t dominate them at the conventional level to where we were a global hegemon.

So our argument is whether you’re the United States or whether you’re China, you cannot be a global hegemon. You could be a unipole, but our argument is, number 1, you want to be a regional hegemon, and number 2, you don’t want a peer competitor or peer hegemon.

JOSHUA BYUN: Okay. What was the second question? I think it goes to 1 of your potential objections on nuclear deterrence in Asia. Does that change the concerns about the rise of China given that there is nuclear, the umbrella projected into Asia?

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Who’s umbrella?

JOSHUA BYUN: US nuclear umbrella.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Oh, there’s no question that as long as we’re in East Asia, the Chinese are not a regional hegemon. As I often say, if I was the national security adviser to Xi Jinping, I’d tell him, contrary to what Rose and Mike think I should tell Xi Jinping, that he should try to be a regional hegemon. The Chinese should try to push the United States — this gets to the question — excuse me, China should try to push the United States out beyond the first island chain and then out beyond the second island chain. Get them out of East Asia. If we have a Monroe Doctrine, they should have a Monroe Doctrine. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.

And then furthermore, if you’re China, you want to make sure you’re much more powerful than every other country in East Asia. You dominate them conventionally as Josh described. That’s what you want to do. Now if you push the Americans out, you get their nuclear umbrella out of the equation.

If that happens, what’s likely to then take place is Japan and South Korea will acquire nuclear weapons. And as you folks all know, North Korea already has nuclear weapons. And Josh addressed this issue, but I’ll just say a few more words about it. Does that mean that China can’t be a regional hegemon because North Korea, South Korea, and Japan have a nuclear deterrent?

And as Josh said, and I, of course, agree with him, nuclear weapons have little offensive capability. They’re basically good for deterrence. And the key question is what kind of conventional forces does North Korea have, South Korea have, and would Japan have in this scenario? And would those conventional forces be formidable enough to check China in a way that it would not be a regional hegemon? And our answer to that is no. And I think almost everybody agrees.

Let’s just assume North Korea was the only country that had nuclear weapons in East Asia. The Americans went away. Japan melted down. And China was by far the most powerful state in East Asia. It was a hegemon. Would you then say, no, it’s not because North Korea has nuclear weapons? Our argument is you wouldn’t say that because they don’t have the conventional wherewithal to challenge the hegemon in any meaningful way. So that’s how we would answer the question about Japanese and South Korean nuclear weapons.

Iran, the Middle East, and Chinese Power

JOSHUA BYUN: Next on my list is all the way in the back by the door, if we can get the mic passed back there.

AUDIENCE: Given what I mean, you said that you don’t think that the U.S. should pursue an offensive strategy to prevent China. But given the current administration’s actions in Iran, and from what I understand, most Iranian or most oil shipments through the Strait of Hormuz go to China, is an action like that beneficial in, I don’t know, harming Chinese power long term? Like if there’s a destabilized Middle East, is that beneficial if it cuts off oil to the Chinese?

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Well, let me say a couple points about this whole question of Iran and containing China. First of all, at some point if the international economy goes off a cliff and we have a great depression that is along the lines of 1929 in the world, in other words a world depression, that will not be good for China or Russia or the United States or any other state on the planet.

And it is therefore no accident that the Chinese put pressure on the Iranians and on the Pakistanis to set up the discussions in Islamabad this past weekend. It was the United States that wanted the negotiations. The Iranians didn’t want the negotiations. The Chinese leaned on them big time because the Chinese understand that we’re on the Titanic heading for the iceberg and they want to shut that down.

Second point I’d make to you is in the short term this works to China’s advantage because what we’re doing is we’re pivoting away from East Asia. Just very important to understand that. We were supposed to be pivoting to East Asia. We pulled THAAD missiles, Patriot missiles out of South Korea and Japan, and 1 of those 2 marine expeditionary units that came into the Middle East came out of Japan.

The Middle East, China, and the Limits of American Strategy

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: President Trump is now talking about the Koreans, South Koreans, and Japanese sending their navy to help us free the Strait of Hormuz. This is a disaster for purposes of containing China. Furthermore, if you look at the rate at which we’re expending those boutique weapons that we built, oh my lord, I’d hate to think what happens if we get into a war with China that lasts more than 2 or 3 weeks. We wouldn’t have any weapons left. So I think in the short term, maybe even in the middle term, what’s happening there is not to our advantage.

Third point I’d make is that the Chinese have said they’re going to continue to send ships to get oil from Iran in the Gulf, and they’ve told us basically keep your hands off. And the interesting question is what are we going to do? As I was telling Josh, we got some Starbucks coffee beforehand. I got a — somebody sent me an X message from a prominent Chinese scholar. He’s a defensive realist, very smart guy.

And he said on X, he said, “For the first time in my life, I’m really scared that we’re facing a global catastrophe.” And I just raised that issue because if you sort of look at what’s going on here with regard to these problems that are arising in the Middle East, and the Chinese actually talking about continuing to go get Iranian oil and what that all means — who knows where this is all going to end up? So I think we’re going to give you that mic. Yes. Just to make sure it’s working.

Q&A Session

AUDIENCE: You’re going to give it to me? Yes. Really? Thank you. For some reason Zoom can’t hear you, you get 2 mics.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Really? In any case. I get to feel like Elvis Presley.

AUDIENCE: Yes. No more questions.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: That’s right. No. Other one. We have the roaming. I’ll just make you guys — you didn’t think I had an ulterior motive.

AUDIENCE: No doubt.

The British Empire and the Rise of American Regional Hegemony

JOSHUA BYUN: So this question is from another graduate student, Bryce Ricker. During the US’s rise to regional hegemony, British policy makers made a conscious effort to avoid confrontation with the growing American empire in the western hemisphere. Do you see our situation as being different to the British empire in the nineteenth century, and if so, how?

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Well, the way I think of the British empire — or Britain — and how it dealt with the rise of the United States, they fully understood throughout the course of the nineteenth century that the United States was becoming a regional hegemon. And they did everything they could to stop it, but there was not much they could do to stop it because they had no real allies. The Native Americans, for a variety of complicated reasons that I could talk about but won’t do here, were not in a position to work with the British to stop it.

The other thing is, once we open the sluice gates on immigration — and this starts about 1835 and the Germans and the Irish start piling in and then everybody else follows in their footsteps — we just grow by leaps and bounds in terms of how much power we have. And then later in the nineteenth century, the industrial revolution kicks in and we bring in even more immigrants because we need immigrants to work in the factories.

You all understand that there are 2 huge waves of immigration. The first one largely involved filling up the land. We get the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. You have this big piece of real estate that you have to fill up. You bring in immigrants. Furthermore, once the Industrial Revolution kicks in, you need huge numbers of workers. So you bring in even more immigrants.

And the British see this happening, and they understand that this country, the United States, is controlling more and more territory, and it has more and more people. And as you all know, the 2 principal building blocks of power — of military power — are population size and wealth. Population size, wealth, industrial revolution. So you can see what’s happening.

I’d say by the time of the Civil War, the British understand it’s all over. The British have a vested interest in seeing the Confederacy win the Civil War. If you just think about it, it makes common sense given everything Josh said. If the Confederacy wins the Civil War, you have 2 great powers on the North American continent, and that’s manna from heaven from the British point of view, because the North is then pinned down dealing with the South. And that’s in large part why the British wanted to prevent us from becoming a regional hegemon and then thought about working with the Confederacy. But they understood it was too late.

Final point: it was incredibly lucky that the British failed, because the fact that we became a regional hegemon in the Western Hemisphere and we became Godzilla allowed us to bail them out in World War 1. As Josh pointed out, it’s when we came in at the very end in World War 1 that tipped the balance in favor of the British and the French. Otherwise, imperial Germany would have won the war. You, of course, have even written about this as well. Right?

And then in World War 2, again, Uncle Sugar comes in and plays a critical role in winning that war. The Soviet Union, of course, plays the key role in defeating Nazi Germany, but we’re essential for making that happen. So the British, despite their best efforts to undermine our emerging regional hegemony in the Western Hemisphere, were lucky that we achieved regional hegemony because in the end, we bailed them out twice in the twentieth century.

Debate on the Definition of Regional Hegemony

JOSHUA BYUN: Okay, so we have 2 questions over here. I’ll go to you first, sir, and then we’ll keep the mic over on that side.

AUDIENCE: So a very nice presentation. I’m sure it’ll be a good book. And by the way, thank you for being provocative because political scientists sometimes were too boring. So the one thing I wonder about is your definition of regional hegemony. And that is because it sounds like you’re really talking about the United States, and your definition is based, as far as I can tell, upon the idea that there’s water between us and Europe, and water between us and China.

And to take the Soviet Union, which I know something about, if the Soviet Union wasn’t a regional hegemon, I’m not sure what it was. Now, it wasn’t the water issue, but people in Europe were afraid of it — the Japanese, the Chinese, the Middle East. So I would say this too, and it’s also just a little disagreement if I may. I think it was remarkably stable — the Soviet Union was. It was a remarkably stable empire. And I feel bad in saying that, but it wasn’t a matter of states, particularly in Eastern Europe, constantly challenging its hegemony. To be sure, and that’s why I feel bad about saying this, there was Poland, East Germany in 1953, there was Czechoslovakia, but the other states — the Soviet Union wasn’t threatened by Albania or Yugoslavia. So I still see it as being remarkably stable. And so the question then is, is your argument only about the United States? When it comes down to it, is it so that only the United States can be a true regional hegemon?

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: No. At least we didn’t intend it that way. What we tried to do was come up with a generic definition of what is a regional hegemon. And, of course, it applies to the United States as you make clear. And then what we tried to do is take that generic definition and apply it to imperial Germany, Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, dot dot dot. And the question is, how does it apply to China today?

Now with regard to your point about the Soviet Union, I would just note to you that if you just talked about Eastern Europe, you could say the Soviet Union was a regional hegemon. Some people actually do that. But you were talking about Europe.

AUDIENCE: Well, Central Asia.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Well, let’s leave Central Asia aside.

AUDIENCE: You can’t leave Central Asia aside from the Union.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: No. But in the realist literature, on the whole subject of regional hegemony and grand strategy and so forth and so on, as Josh pointed out, there are 3 areas of the world that matter. One is Europe, two is East Asia, and three is the Persian Gulf. Those are the 3 key areas. Central Asia just doesn’t matter for these purposes. Who cares about Afghanistan? We were stupid to go into Afghanistan. Just like the Soviets were stupid to go into Afghanistan. I fully understand that.

AUDIENCE: Is this basically an argument about the United States?

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: No. You’re not letting me finish. Okay? You’re changing the subject.

AUDIENCE: I know about it. Right. It’s a familiar tactic that I deal with.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Right? You were talking about Europe, and you were talking about Eastern Europe.

AUDIENCE: I was talking about the Soviet Union. You’re not letting me finish.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: No. I listened to you. You should listen to me.

AUDIENCE: Absolutely. Okay.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: The basic point here is that in Europe from 1945 until the end of the Cold War in 1989, there were not only the states of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, but there was France, Germany, Britain, and the United States was physically located with a large military force in the region. It was all there for the purposes of preventing the Soviet Union from becoming a regional hegemon, and it did not become a regional hegemon.

If we, after World War 2, had exited Europe much the way we did in 1923 when we left Europe after World War 1, and the Soviets basically put France, Britain, and Germany underneath their thumb, then they would have been by our definition a regional hegemon.

AUDIENCE: Do I dare respond?

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Sure. But I just wanted you to let me finish my points.

AUDIENCE: I’m doing this because you are provoking me and I’m trying to provoke you. You’ve always provoked me. We once argued about Germany somewhat along these lines. So again, the Soviet Union after World War 2 basically advanced into all of these countries which are significant countries during World War 2. Well, also politically in terms of setting up new regimes after World War 2, one of which was half of Germany. And so I see that as significant. I also see Soviet success in moving its power eastward, Soviet success in Central Asia. It’s been very, very significant, particularly because of the threat that it represented to countries around it. I also see it successfully — next to Japan, and also China.

So what I’m trying to say is I don’t want to argue about definitions, but I want to think about your definition so I can understand its implications. If this is primarily an argument about the United States, then it has interesting implications. But if that argument doesn’t include countries like the Soviet Union, then I’m not quite sure where to take it.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: It does include the Soviet Union, and the argument was the Soviet Union, according to our definition and the definition of almost everybody in the literature, is that it was not a regional hegemon.

AUDIENCE: I care about what you say. I don’t care about what they say.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Okay. Our argument is it was not a regional hegemon. Josh went to great lengths to define what a region is, what the regions in the world that matter are, what a hegemon would have to have to qualify as a regional hegemon. And by almost all accounts in the literature and in history, there’s only one regional hegemon in modern history. It’s the United States.

Power Metrics and the Question of Chinese Regional Hegemony

JOSHUA BYUN: I think, Amy, next. Sorry, here.

AUDIENCE: Hi, I’m Amy McAuliffe. I’m a visiting professor here. Thank you for your talk. I agree with your conclusion and your bottom line. I did not collaborate with my colleague next to me, but I also have a question about your definition of regional hegemon. I wonder if you’re using what I would call kind of old power metrics. And I’m someone who spent my whole career in government on hard power, nuclear weapons, advanced conventional weapons.

But I think it’s really difficult to separate military power and economic power, particularly when you’re talking about China, which I would argue is very close to being a regional hegemon. So I think about things like resource dominance. I think about technology as part of economic power and military power. So could you just address that issue? Thank you.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Yeah. Thank you. Great question. First of all, with regard to definitions, there’s no such thing as a correct definition. You can define a hegemon or democracy any way you want, as you well know. So we have a specific definition. And the question is, how useful is our definition? That’s the only interesting issue. Again, no such thing as a correct definition.

And you are raising the question of really how you measure power. This is how we measure power, which I think directly addresses your point. For us, there’s latent power. These are the 2 building blocks of military power, and I alluded to this before. It’s population size and wealth. And you were riveting on wealth, and you were also talking about technological development, which I think is incorporated in that. So I have no disagreement with you in terms of the importance of wealth. I just throw in population size as well.

Our argument is that the balance of power — if you’re talking about the global balance of power — it’s based on military power. And military power is a function of population size and economic power. So when we talk about being a hegemon, we talk about power, we’re talking about military power. But we are fully aware, I appreciate your comments, that sitting underneath that military power is population size and economic might.

And just very quickly, as some of you probably know, I was deeply opposed to economic engagement with China during the unipolar moment.

Venezuela, Cuba, and the Western Hemisphere

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: This is when we pursued a policy that was designed to make China rich and prosperous. And my view was, are you crazy? You’re going to take a country that has 4 times as many people as the United States. You’re going to make them rich, and you’re going to teach them to develop sophisticated technology so they can compete with us. This is crazy.

Right? But you see my logic. Population, 4 times the size of the United States. Make them wealthy, allow them to develop all these sophisticated technologies like AI, dot dot dot. They’re eventually going to generate a huge amount of military power.

That’s the balance of power. Again, I just want to reiterate, I’m not saying we have the right definition, but that’s how we define things.

Okay. So a question from the other room, 1 of our undergraduate fellows, Andre. This is a question about Venezuela and Cuba and the recent events there.

So to what extent did President Trump’s recent efforts to pressure Venezuela and Cuba function as an attempt to reintroduce military and political competition into the western hemisphere following China’s expansion?

Yeah. This is a very interesting issue, Venezuela and Cuba. If you read President Trump’s national security strategy that was issued last November of 2025, okay? It basically says that the most important area of the world to the United States is the Western Hemisphere. And then it says the second area of the world that we should care about is China.

And if you read the rhetoric, just after having listened to Josh, right, and to a lesser extent having listened to me, go back and look at the national security strategy and see what President Trump says about dealing with China. It’s pure Josh Byun and John Mearsheimer. Right? We’re going to contain China and we’re going to prevent them from dominating Asia. That’s what President Trump says.

But again, he says the most important area of the world is the Western Hemisphere. And everybody who does grand strategy understands that the Western Hemisphere is the most important area of the world for the United States. It’s our backyard. That’s what a lot of the back and forth here is about. Okay? We understand that.

The reason we don’t pay attention to the backyard is because we’re so secure in the Western Hemisphere. What is President Trump doing? Putting the Western Hemisphere up in bright lights? You don’t have to put it up in bright lights. Are any of you going to bed at night worried about somebody in the hemisphere coming after us? You worried about Cuba? You worried about Venezuela? I hope not. Right? There’s no threats in the Western Hemisphere. The only threat’s the 1 that he described, which is if China becomes a hegemon and wanders into the Western Hemisphere.

So the question is what’s going on here? I give you my simple view on this, and it really deserves much more commentary. I believe that we’re allergic to left wing regimes. We have a long standing allergy to left wing regimes. And when I say left wing, if you’re mildly left leaning, you can rest assured the United States will put its gun sights on you and try and overthrow you. We hate left wing regimes in the western hemisphere.

And as soon as this guy, what’s his name who won in Venezuela? A number of years ago. Maduro.

Chavez, Chavez, thank you Gene. Chavez, remember, as soon as Chavez won in Venezuela, I said it’s only a matter of time before we finish him off. Right? And he of course died, Maduro took his place and we went in and kidnapped Maduro. And now we’re still exercised about Cuba.

This is really remarkable. This is a remnant of 1959. Fidel Castro had the audacity to try to form a military alliance with the Soviet Union and invite them to put missiles in Cuba. We have never forgotten that. We have never gotten over the fact that there’s a left wing government running Cuba.

For people like me, good realists, who cares? Right? They can’t do anything to us. And really, if you’re interested in wrecking the government in Cuba, you want to play kissy face with them. That’s the best way to bring the regime down. Liberal ideology, if you can bring it in in a benign way, it’s like acid. It’ll just tear the place apart. But anyway, nobody buys that argument.

So here we are, right? Here we are kidnapping Maduro. President Trump is saying foolish things like he’s going to run Venezuela. We’re going to take their oil. This, by the way, is old fashioned imperialism. It’s really quite remarkable to listen to him talk. Didn’t he get the message that we tried this? It didn’t work very well. And you can survive in this international system very well without instituting old fashioned imperialism in places like Venezuela and Cuba.

But anyway, this is a huge distraction. It’s something we shouldn’t be doing. And by the way, how about making Canada the 51st state? Governor Trudeau. I mean, what good does this serve? Oh, let’s take Greenland. Right? You know, it only belongs to Denmark, which is the best ally we have on the planet. They do anything we want. It just kinda doesn’t make sense. So I really wish he had stuck —

China as a Regional Hegemon

Excellent questions. And then, David, you’re next.

AUDIENCE: I’m here. Sorry. Oh. Hi. Thanks for your time. I’m Edward, an undergraduate here. Can you expand on what China as a regional hegemony would look like? Because earlier, you said that China would achieve regional hegemony if it could push the United States behind the first and potentially the second island chain. But to me, that seems like that’s defining hegemony based off of US presence instead of the balance of power. Because could the United States still plausibly scale back some of its military commitments and still prevent Chinese hegemony? What does China as a regional hegemon look like, and to what extent can the United States have presence in the region if China were to be a regional hegemon?

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Yeah. Great question. Just a great set of questions, actually. If they were a regional hegemon, and I’d love to talk for an hour on this. I understand I can’t.

I think ideology matters here. If the Soviets had won the Cold War, they would have behaved much like we behaved. Because both of us, the Soviets and the Americans, have a universal ideology. Right? Liberalism and communism are universal ideologies. We want to spread them all over the planet, which is, of course, what we did in the unipolar moment. China’s a completely different case. It does not have a universal ideology.

So I think if China became a regional hegemon, to go right to your question, it would not have an ideological impulse like the United States does. What makes the United States so ruthless and so roguish is that it not only has a strategic impulse built into it, it has an ideological impulse built into it as well. So that’s very important.

Second, just on China being a regional hegemon, they have to get us out of East Asia. As long as we’re there, apropos everything Josh said, as long as we’re there they’re not a regional hegemon.

Then you raise the really fascinating question of how you contain China. And there are a lot of people who argue that it would be reasonably easy to contain China with a lot less force than we have, and weapons are really the magic instrument for making this work. So you can make an argument that John, you’re worrying too much about Chinese regional hegemony. They of course want it, but we’re there, we’re not going home, we have nuclear weapons, we have good allies in countries like Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines, and so forth and so on. So it can be done much more cheaply, much easier, and much less provocatively than the way, say, Josh and John want to do it.

So how you prevent them from becoming a regional hegemon is a question that’s up for debate. There’s no question about that. Your excellent question gets at that. The more important issue that Josh was raising, which I think is the core issue, is do you think it matters? That’s what we’re saying. Do you think that it matters whether they become a regional hegemon? And you have folks like Rose who make the argument that you can actually get around this in a rather benign way, which for us was the core issue.

China’s Global Ambitions and the Playbook Question

Let’s take 2 of them back to back. So David and then all the way in the back.

AUDIENCE: Good evening, John and Josh. My name is David. I’m a visiting War College fellow of the Marine Corps. I do see Josh’s point where it might be very hard for China to be a regional hegemon, especially with South Korea, Japan, the Philippines, a lot of countries nearby. But my primary question would be, do you believe, you and Josh, believe that China might have figured out our playbook? I say this with my experience in the Middle East and recently in Africa, you’re seeing a lot of Chinese involvements in Djibouti, Somalia, Sudan. And even with recent United Nations abstaining votes, there seems to be a lot of support or awareness of Chinese involvements in the Arctic, in Africa. I wonder if you all believe or see any reason for China kinda figuring out the playbook.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Yeah. Good questions. 2 good questions. And then last 1, and we’ll have to wrap up after that.

AUDIENCE: After that. We can’t go on for another half hour?

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: It’s up to you guys.

AUDIENCE: No. Sorry. Sorry. Hi. Yeah. Professor Mearsheimer, last time you visited, I asked you how do grad students write as clearly as you do. You said do not be afraid to be wrong. So please allow me to ask a silly question. Are you sure China is the right hegemon to worry about in this region, given the literature on authoritarian governments having weak armies because of the issue of loyalty competence trade off.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Okay. With regard to your 2 questions, it’s an interesting question what would happen if the United States was not there in East Asia in terms of stopping China from becoming a regional hegemon. Let’s just say the United States decides to go home. Could the Japanese, the South Koreans, and others do it? I think the answer is clearly no. And I may be wrong, but I don’t think they can do it. I just don’t think the Japanese have the population size and would have the power projection capability. But you could make an argument that they would do it.

And by the way, in the Cold War, 10 after World War II ended, there were people who said, we ought to get out of Europe. Let the Germans — this is the West Germans, the French, and the British — come together and deal with the Soviet threat. We shouldn’t deal with it. We rejected that logic, and we stayed there. This is the offshore balancer argument. And that’s what we’re doing in East Asia today.

You could argue that preventing China from becoming a regional hegemon is absolutely essential, but we don’t have to do it. We can act as an offshore balancer, and in this context, actually stay offshore. But obviously, Josh and I don’t agree with that in the case of China today or the Soviet Union.

You all understand that in the case of Imperial Germany, Nazi Germany, and Imperial Japan, we buck passed and we stayed out until the last minute, and then we came in. Right? We tipped the balance against Imperial Germany in 1918, but we don’t declare war against Imperial Germany until April 1917, and the war ends in November 1918.

Soviet case, Chinese case, just very different.

Your second question, really important question. You’re saying that what you’re seeing is the Chinese operating all over the planet. Right? And what Josh and I have done here is we have focused on China becoming a regional hegemon in East Asia. But the other thing that China is doing in terms of imitating Uncle Sam is that China is building a blue water navy and it is interested in projecting power all over the planet.

You folks all know about Belt and Road. Right? Belt and Road — the Chinese have economic interests here, there, and everywhere. Every country you go to these days, you hear about Belt and Road. Right? The Chinese, they’re incredibly rich. They’re projecting power. This is what you see in the Middle East, by the way. The amount of money that the Chinese have invested in the Middle East, Saudi Arabia, even Iran, UAE — you go look at the data on this.

Okay. Uncle Sam can teach you that when you have economic interests all over the planet, you have to build a blue water navy, you have to build military assets to protect those economic and political interests all over the planet. So what the Chinese are doing is, number 1, working to establish regional hegemony in East Asia, and number 2, developing significant power projection capability all over the world. And your question actually got right at that. And you all want to keep that in mind.

And going back to this gentleman on my left in the rear, the question about China and Iran, there it is. The Chinese run the risk today of getting into a firefight with the United States in the Arabian Gulf or God knows where, the Indian Ocean. And they’re going to be at a disadvantage because our navy is far more powerful than their navy, as you understand. Well, they are going to rectify that problem.

And by the way, then you get into the whole business of shipbuilding, all these geniuses who ran American foreign policy during the unipolar moment and wrecked their shipbuilding capability and wrecked our industrial base. And now we’re trying to compete with a country that has a huge capacity for building ships and has a very powerful industrial base. We better have a defensive strategy vis-a-vis the Chinese. We do not want to pick a fight with those people given the stupidity of our policy in the past.

And then finally, the woman in the rear, who I actually remember from way back when you asked me that question about the importance of being simple. Because as I told you at the time, and as I don’t have to tell you anymore, you know theory is God, right?

China’s Military Challenges and the Taiwan Question

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: And you know theory is simple. So we always want to be simple when we think about the world and we write about the world. But anyway your question is, is China really a threat? It has an authoritarian government and it’s weak. That’s sort of your argument, right?

I think you’ve got to be really careful here. Look at the Soviet Union in World War II. I think it was much worse than an authoritarian government. This was Stalin’s Soviet Union. And I could go into this chapter in verse, but you know who defeated the Wehrmacht in World War 2.

It was the Red Army. And it was that giant steamroller that rolled across Eastern Europe and rolled into Berlin and finished off Adolf Hitler. It was a very formidable military. And by the way, the Wehrmacht, right, the Wehrmacht was Adolf Hitler’s instrument. And as formidable as the Red Army was, if you could control for size, I’d take the Wehrmacht over the Red Army.

Oh my god. So I wouldn’t buy this argument. You can talk to Mike Desch. He’s an authority on this. The armies in democracies are said to be brilliant at winning wars here in the land of the free.

Because this is part of the narrative that we’ve invented to portray ourselves as noble warriors and authoritarian governments. They can’t fight like we democracies can. I wouldn’t put a lot of money in that.

China’s Military Weaknesses

Here’s the Chinese problem. It’s twofold.

One is they haven’t fought a war since 1979. That’s because they’ve been getting rich. It gets back to the discussion that we had about how you measure power. We fight all these cockamamie wars in places like Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Vietnam. Oh my god.

Chinese haven’t fought a war since 1979 when they made the foolish mistake of going into Vietnam. After we had made a foolish mistake in following France’s footsteps in going into Vietnam. But they haven’t fought in a long time. That’s one problem they face.

Another problem they face is the one child policy. The one child policy creates very powerful incentives not to fight a war because you don’t want to have your one child die in the war. Because who’s going to take care of you when you get old? And actually this idea never crossed my mind. It’s probably because I grew up in a family of 5, and I have 5 kids of my own, and I’m just used to having lots of kids, and if one or two get bumped off, that just happens, right? But if you have only one kid, it’s a very different story.

So actually I’ve been to China and the Chinese talk about this.

The Taiwan Strait Challenge

Final point to you is the big mission that the Chinese have in terms of fighting a war against us is to take Taiwan. And the problem there is that they have to cross the Taiwan Strait. It has to be a major amphibious operation. And I don’t know what you know about amphibious operations, but they’re among the toughest operations you can imagine.

You can explain to her as a good marine what it’s like when you’re floating on the water across a huge body of water. Right? And underneath that water are submarines, hundred killers, and up on top are 8 gazillion drones. You’ve been watching the Ukraine Russia war. Right?

And not only are those killer drones up there that will be shooting at you, but more importantly, they’re these drones that are designed to gather intelligence, send the information back to the missiles, the rockets, and the artillery, and allow those forces to pound the living daylights out of you.

And when you talk about you coming across, you know, here we are where the Chinese were coming across the Taiwan Strait. Everybody’s got to be close together. Right? You can’t be spread out all over the water. Right? You’re coming together in a rather tight knit package. You’re sitting on top of the water. You’re moving slowly. This is what I call a target rich environment.

Closing Remarks

And so I think it’s rather easy to deter or to contain the Chinese. Our biggest problem today is Iran and what the consequences of Iran are. I don’t want to get in this in any detail, but I find it hard to imagine how we’re going to get out of there and how we’re going to be able to get back to East Asia, pivot back to East Asia. And given everything Josh has said and I’ve tried to reinforce, you can see where this worries us greatly.

Anyway, I just want to say thanks for the excellent questions. Thanks to Josh for a great presentation. And thanks to Jenna and to Mike and others for inviting us here.

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