标题: The Tragedy of Great Power Politics [打印本页] 作者: chrisxsy 时间: 2009-6-1 16:17 标题: The Tragedy of Great Power Politics The Tragedy of Great Power Politics. John J. Mearsheimer. New York: W. W. Norton, 2001, 448 pp. $27.95.
John J. Mearsheimer is R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago and a regular contributor to The New Republic and The Atlantic.
Chapter 10: Great Power Politics in the Twenty-first Century
A large body of opinion in the West holds that international politics underwent a fundamental transformation with the end of the Cold War. Cooperation, not security competition and conflict, is now the defining feature of relations among the great powers. Not surprisingly, the optimists who hold this view claim that realism no longer has much explanatory power. It is old thinking and is largely irrelevant to the new realities of world politics. Realists have gone the way of the dinosaurs; they just don’t realize it. The best that might be said about theories such as offensive realism is that they are helpful for understanding how great powers interacted before 1990, but they are useless now and for the foreseeable future. Therefore, we need new theories to comprehend the world around us.
President Bill Clinton articulated this perspective throughout the 1990s. For example, he declared in 1992 that, "in a world where freedom, not tyranny, is on the march, the cynical calculus of pure power politics simply does not compute. It is ill-suited to a new era." Five years later he sounded the same theme when defending the expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to include some of the formerly communist Warsaw Pact states. Clinton argued that the charge that this expansion policy might isolate Russia was based on the belief "that the great power territorial politics of the 20th century will dominate the 21st century," which he rejected. Instead, he emphasized his belief that "enlightened self-interest, as well as shared values, will compel countries to define their greatness in more constructive ways . . . and will compel us to cooperate in more constructive ways."[1]
The optimists’ claim that security competition and war among the great powers has been burned out of the system is wrong. In fact, all of the major states around the globe still care deeply about the balance of power and are destined to compete for power among themselves for the foreseeable future. Consequently, realism will offer the most powerful explanations of international politics over the next century, and this will be true even if the debates among academic and policy elites are dominated by non-realist theories. In short, the real world remains a realist world.
States still fear each other and seek to gain power at each other’s expense, because international anarchy—the driving force behind great-power behavior—did not change with the end of the Cold War, and there are few signs that such change is likely any time soon. States remain the principal actors in world politics and there is still no night watchman standing above them. For sure, the collapse of the Soviet Union caused a major shift in the global distribution of power. But it did not give rise to a change in the anarchic structure of the system, and without that kind of profound change, there is no reason to expect the great powers to behave much differently in the new century than they did in previous centuries.
Indeed, considerable evidence from the 1990s indicates that power politics has not disappeared from Europe and Northeast Asia, the regions in which there are two or more great powers, as well as possible great powers such as Germany and Japan. There is no question, however, that the competition for power over the past decade has been low-key. Still, there is potential for intense security competition among the great powers that might lead to a major war. Probably the best evidence of that possibility is the fact that the United States maintains about one hundred thousand troops each in Europe and in Northeast Asia for the explicit purpose of keeping the major states in each region at peace.
These relatively peaceful circumstances are largely the result of benign distributions of power in each region. Europe remains bipolar (Russia and the United States are the major powers), which is the most stable kind of power structure. Northeast Asia is multipolar (China, Russia, and the United States), a configuration more prone to instability; but fortunately there is no potential hegemon in that system. Furthermore, stability is enhanced in both regions by nuclear weapons, the continued presence of U.S. forces, and the relative weakness of China and Russia. These power structures in Europe and Northeast Asia are likely to change over the next two decades, however, leading to intensified security competition and possibly war among the great powers.
In the next section, I analyze the claims that international politics has changed or is about to change in essential ways, thus undermining realism. Because of space limitations, it is impossible to deal with each argument in detail. Nevertheless, it should be apparent from my analysis that the basic structure of the international system did not change with the end of the Cold War, and that there is little reason to think that change is in the offing. I attempt to show in the following section the considerable evidence from the decade 1991-2000 that security competition among the great powers is not obsolete, either in Europe or in Northeast Asia. In the subsequent four sections, I make the case that we are likely to see greater instability in those important regions over the next twenty years. Finally, in a brief conclusion, I argue that a rising China is the most dangerous potential threat to the United States in the early twenty-first century.
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1. William J. Clinton, "American Foreign Policy and the Democratic Ideal," campaign speech, Pabst Theater, Milwaukee, WI, October 1, 1992; "In Clinton’s Words: ’Building Lines of Partnership and Bridges to the Future,’ " New York Times, July 10, 1997. Rhetoric aside, Clinton’s foreign policy was largely consistent with the predictions of realism. See Stephen M. Walt, "Two Cheers for Clinton’s Foreign Policy," Foreign Affairs 79, No. 2 (March-April 2000), pp. 63-79.
Conclusion
What are the implications of the preceding analysis for future American national security policy? It is clear that the most dangerous scenario the United States might face in the early twenty-first century is one in which China becomes a potential hegemon in Northeast Asia. Of course, China’s prospects of becoming a potential hegemon depend largely on whether its economy continues modernizing at a rapid pace. If that happens, and China becomes not only a leading producer of cutting-edge technologies, but the world’s wealthiest great power, it would almost certainly use its wealth to build a mighty military machine. Moreover, for sound strategic reasons, it would surely pursue regional hegemony, just as the United States did in the Western Hemisphere during the nineteenth century. So we would expect China to attempt to dominate Japan and Korea, as well as other regional actors, by building military forces that are so powerful that those other states would not dare challenge it. We would also expect China to develop its own version of the Monroe Doctrine, directed at the United States. Just as the United States made it clear to distant great powers that they were not allowed to meddle in the Western Hemisphere, China will make it clear that American interference in Asia is unacceptable.
What makes a future Chinese threat so worrisome is that it might be far more powerful and dangerous than any of the potential hegemons that the United States confronted in the twentieth century. Neither Wilhelmine Germany, nor imperial Japan, nor Nazi Germany, nor the Soviet Union had nearly as much latent power as the United States had during their confrontations. But if China were to become a giant Hong Kong, it would probably have somewhere on the order of four times as much latent power as the United States does, allowing China to gain a decisive military advantage over the United States in Northeast Asia. [1] In that circumstance, it is hard to see how the United States could prevent China from becoming a peer competitor. Moreover, China would likely be a more formidable superpower than the United States in the ensuing global competition between them.
This analysis suggests that the United States has a profound interest in seeing Chinese economic growth slow considerably in the years ahead. For much of the past decade, however, the United States has pursued a strategy intended to have the opposite effect. The United States has been committed to "engaging" China, not "containing" it. Engagement is predicated on the liberal belief that if China could be made both democratic and prosperous, it would become a status quo power and not engage in security competition with the United States. As a result, American policy has sought to integrate China into the world economy and facilitate its rapid economic development, so that it becomes wealthy and, one would hope, content with its present position in the international system.
This U.S. policy on China is misguided. A wealthy China would not be a status quo power but an aggressive state determined to achieve regional hegemony. This is not because a rich China would have wicked motives, but because the best way for any state to maximize its prospects for survival is to be the hegemon in its region of the world. Although it is certainly in China’s interest to be the hegemon in Northeast Asia, it is clearly not in America’s interest to have that happen.
China is still far away from the point where it has enough latent power to make a run at regional hegemony. So it is not too late for the United States to reverse course and do what it can to slow the rise of China. In fact, the structural imperatives of the international system, which are powerful, will probably force the United States to abandon its policy of constructive engagement in the near future. Indeed, there are signs that the new Bush administration has taken the first steps in this direction.
Of course, states occasionally ignore the anarchic world in which they operate, choosing instead to pursue strategies that contradict balance-of-power logic. The United States is a good candidate for behaving in that way, because American political culture is deeply liberal and correspondingly hostile to realist ideas. It would be a grave mistake, however, for the United States to turn its back on the realist principles that have served it well since its founding.
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1. Hong Kong’s per capita gross national product (GNP) in 1998 dollars is equal to about 80 percent of U.S. per capita GNP ($23,660 vs. $29,240). See World Bank Atlas 2000 (Washington, DC: World Bank, April 2000), pp. 42-43. But China has roughly five times as many people as the United States and is projected to maintain that advantage over the first half of the new century.
Mearsheimer boldly states that great-power rivalry is not over. The major powers still fear each other, and dangerous security competition lurks. This view is built on an "offensive realist" theory of world politics: the deep insecurity generated by the anarchic (hence "tragic") international system leads great powers to act aggressively toward each other, thwarting rivals from gaining power even if such moves risk war. Moreover, great powers are rarely satisfied with the status quo and instead seek hegemony. Mearsheimer tests his theory across the last two centuries, citing the territorial conquests of Japan and Germany before 1945 and Soviet policies after 1917 as evidence. The United States and the United Kingdom do not fit as well into Mearsheimer’s framework, but he argues that the "offshore balancing" strategies of these maritime states are just more sophisticated versions of calculated aggression. As a result, Mearsheimer predicts, the post-Cold War peace among great powers will soon end: without a peer competitor in Europe or Asia, the United States will retract its security commitments there and great-power security competition will return. But he does not make clear why the United States would act in this way -- even if it is a sophisticated power maximizer.
In this important and impressive book, John J. Mearsheimer elegantly lays out his theoretical approach to the study of international politics - ’offensive realism’ - and then seeks to demonstrate that this approach succeeds in explaining the key causes of war and peace. The book constitutes a major contribution to the realist canon and, given its accessible style, will likely become required reading for students of international relations. In addition, Mearsheimer is admirably thoughtful and original in laying out testable propositions from his theory and examining them against the historical record.
Offensive realism rests on the assumption that great powers ’are always searching for opportunities to gain power over their rivals, with hegemony as their final goal’ (p. 29). This perspective contrasts with defensive realism, which posits that states seek security rather than power, making the international system less predatory and less prone to conflict. According to Mearsheimer, the disposition to aggression is not intrinsic to states, but is instead the product of the constant search for survival in a world of uncertainty, offensive military capability, and a changing distribution of power.
To test the validity of offensive realism, Mearsheimer asserts that ’we should almost always find leaders thinking that it is imperative to gain more power to enhance their state’s prospects for survival’ (p. 169). He then goes on to test this claim against the past behaviour of great powers by examining several questions. Do states systematically engage in aggression and expansion as their relative power increases? What determines whether great powers balance, appease, or buck-pass when faced with a threatening aggressor? Are bipolar or multipolar systems more likely to trigger war?
As Mearsheimer navigates the historical record of the past two centuries, he marshals an impressive array of evidence to back up his claim that states onsistently capitalize on opportunities to increase their power and that this dynamic explains much of great-power behaviour. In so doing, he also advances
several novel ideas, arguing, for example, that the ’stopping power of water’ gives strategic advantage to land powers and means that leading nations aspire only to regional as opposed to global hegemony. Mearsheimer also introduces the useful notion of ’unbalanced multipolarity’, demonstrating that multipolar systems with a clear imbalance of power are more prone to war than those with a rough equilibrium.
While Mearsheimer succeeds in demonstrating the utility of offensive realism, he falls short of demonstrating that his theory has as much explanatory power as he claims. In defending his brand of realism, Mearsheimer ends up offering historical interpretations that border on the indefensible. Consider his treatment of Wilhelmine Germany in the lead-up to the First World War.
Mearsheimer characterizes German behaviour as rational and calculating, according no importance to nationalism or the domestic rivalries of the period, and dismissing the notion that Germany invited its own encirclement. But especially in light of his views on the stopping power of water and the comparative advantages of land armies, domestic pressures are essential to explaining why Germany built a world-class battle fleet, alienating Great Britain, triggering the Triple Entente, and distracting resources from the land forces it needed to cope with France and Russia.
Mearsheimer’s explanation for the absence of balancing against Nazi Germany during the 1930s is similarly unconvincing. The buck-passing of the 1930s, he asserts, ’was due in good part to the fact that Germany did not possess a formidable army until 1939, and thus no compelling reason drew Hitler’s foes together until then’ (p. 331). But from 1933 onward, Adolf Hitler gave Germany’s neighbours every reason to draw together against him. Far from being unconcerned about German strength, Britain appeased Germany at Munich precisely because British leaders felt they had no choice in the face of Germany’s military superiority.
Mearsheimer also fails to address how offensive realism explains peaceful change. Rapprochement between Britain and the United States at the turn of the twentieth century and the success of the European Union in transforming Europe’s geopolitical landscape both cast doubt on the notion that balancing and destructive rivalry are inescapable features of international life.
These objections do not diminish the importance of Mearsheimer’s book. Rather, they underscore the dangers inherent in seeking to explain the contingent course of history through a single analytic framework. Had Mearsheimer cast his light on episodes of lasting peace that defy the predictions of balance-of-power theory, perhaps he would be less convinced of the pervasive logic of offensive realism and more open to eclecticism in explaining politics among the great powers.作者: qinxiaolin 时间: 2009-6-7 14:21
貌似看起来很吃力呀
不过有机会可以好好看看的作者: someday 时间: 2009-8-10 16:48
顶……作者: sunxi1112 时间: 2009-8-17 23:33 3#someday
