A few weeks ago, Alastair Iain Johnston—a heavy hitter both among China watchers and IR theorists—gave a grand lecture at my university. He’s been in residence the past few months as the honorary Kippenberger Chair at the Centre for Strategic Studies, which is housed at my university.
The lecture got quite a bit of buzz, because he paints a grim picture of Sino-US rivalry, which he sees not only as a security dilemma, but a racialized one, consumed by false certainties about the goodness of the self and the malignity of the other. (
Some of his key points:
China isn’t seeking to overturn the international order and the US doesn’t seek regime change in Beijing. So we have two sides with “defensive” intentions, meaning security-dilemma dynamics are in play.
He evinces skepticism about the existence of a “rules-based international order,” which exists primarily as an exclusionary rhetorical cudgel; a way to conceive of China as alien and threatening.
The Sino-US security dilemma is more pernicious than conventionally thought because it is driven by false certainty about the revisionist intentions of the other (as opposed to being driven by uncertainty about the intentions of the other).
National identities—constructed on the basis of patriotic exceptionalism and ethnonationalism—are the source of the false-certainty danger in both capitals.
This zero-sum identity conflict inflames ethnonationalism and racial stereotypes in both nations. He has lots of receipts documenting this.
Both the Republican Party and the CCP are increasingly hyper-racialized and hyper-certain in their views.
He’s a smart dude, and this is a smart bit of research (the academic article version is forthcoming). I would only add two points to this:
The Democratic Party seems to share the Republican Party’s false certainty (I suspect he would agree with that). Dems have much more of a crisis management-y vibe than Republicans and are therefore not as directly menacing to stability as MAGA-inflected Republican foreign policy…but Dems are part of the problem because they’re stewards of US primacy and therefore stewards of conservative foreign policy. I mean, Biden’s China policy has out-Trumped Trump in every respect except rhetoric.
We must push our understanding of Sino-US conflict much further than the crisis-conflict space, which means thinking in terms of causal layered analysis/root causes. Here we start to get into an uncomfortable world for anyone committed to methodological individualism, and perhaps even liberalism. But if ethnonationalism is a problem on both sides, we have to ask what forces give it strength, and how particular strategies of foreign policy intersect with identity issues. Those, of course, are not just lines of inquiry embedded in my Grand Strategies of the Left project, but also in The Rivalry Peril book I’m finishing now with Mike Brenes.