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Neg:No Senkakus WarJapan will give up—no interest in military conflictNewsham, senior research fellow at the Japan Forum for Strategic Studies, August 12, 2020 (Grant Newsham, 8-12-2020, "Why Japan may cede the Senkakus to China," Asia Times, , DoA 8/19/2020, DVOG) The People’s Republic of China is turning up the heat around Japan’s Senkaku Islands, which the Chinese also claim and call the Diaoyu Islands.It is challenging Japanese control and has warned Tokyo not to complain the next time a host of Chinese fishing boats swarm the area with Chinese Coast Guard and PLA Navy ships providing cover.And this is likely to happen sooner rather than later.Japan’s defense minister, Taro Kono,?said at an early August news conference?that the Japanese Self Defense Forces (JSDF) “will act firmly when necessary while joining hands with the Japan Coast Guard.”Kono declined to provide details, saying: “We do not want to show our cards.”Many Western observers have long assumed that if backed into a corner Japan would fight – despite its reticence about things military. The prospect of losing territory to the Chinese is presumably such a corner.And despite their shortcomings, the Self Defense Forces – particularly the Maritime Self Defense Force (MSDF) with its highly professional surface, submarine and anti-submarine forces – have the capability to bloody an opponent’s nose.But maybe the assumption is wrong.It could be that in Japan – or, better said, in those parts of its ruling political and business classes that make such decisions – there is no intention of “going kinetic” to defend the Senkakus.If the Chinese presence becomes overwhelming, Tokyo may simply cede the area to the PRC. It would complain of course, but would it shoot? Or would it reckon that the cost of military confrontation with China would far exceed the value of “some rocks”?Far-fetched? Maybe not.A recently retired JSDF officer, unprompted, recently confided his belief that, even if the Senkaku?Islands are invaded by China,?the “Japanese government will not choose war.”He expained: “I’m very sorry but Japanese statesmen think?these affairs” – in this case he was referring both to the Senkakus and the South Korean-controlled Takeshima Islands – “are?not military matters but political matters.”I take his point. The Japanese would sort of resist but my own guess is that, if the only way to remove the Chinese were to shoot, Japan wouldn’t do it.This assumes the Chinese don’t start shooting first. If China just comes in and parks itself and even lands some people on the Senkakus and says, “wuddyugonnadoaboutit?,” the government of Japan just might do nothing much.Recall that the Barack Obama administration allowed the PRC to take de facto control of the South China Sea without putting up a fight – or much of an argument. And back then the US military still had the advantage over the People’s Liberation Army.There are of course Japanese – including factions in the ruling LDP and most members of the JSDF – who think Japan should defend all of the territories it claims. But there were also Americans who thought Obama should forcefully defend US partners and interests in East Asia in the 2010s.?If letting go is what Japan’s leaders are thinking of doing, they can’t exactly publicly declare it. For one thing, Japan’s public might be outraged – if public opinion polls, overwhelmingly negative toward China, are anything to go by.But the citizenry doesn’t always matter much in Japan and the government can always simply say, after the fact, “Shoganai” – it couldn’t be helped.?One suspects that Japan Inc might be in the “Senkakus aren’t worth a war” camp. The?Abe administration recently allotted US$2 billion?to help Japanese companies move operations out of China.However, a Japanese friend whom I trust told me the other day that Keidanren – Japan’s powerful business federation – is soon to issue a call for deeper economic ties with China, while citing the PRC’s post-Corona V-shaped recovery.Toyota, Japan’s leading company, is?planning to go all-in on electric vehicle production in China.There is a precedent for Japanese business interests shaping defense policy. In 2012 anti-Japanese riots broke out in China – over the Senkakus – and targeted a Japanese supermarket chain’s stores in the PRC.Around the same time, a prominent official close to Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda convinced the leader to?cancel an upcoming amphibious exercise near Okinawa?that I was directly involved with after the Chinese complained. The official’s family owned?the stores being targeted in China.No doubt this isn’t unique to Japan. Wall Street and the American business community have pressured successive US administrations to accommodate the PRC for decades.In fairness, Japan is not ignoring defense. But it almost seems to be going through the motions – hoping China is somehow frightened off or loses interest.??Defense spending doesn’t increase much. Recruitment is lackluster. The services can’t easily operate together.Japan’s home-built stealth fighter is scheduled for operations?in 2035.?And the government still can’t figure out missile defense – or offense.Closer to the Senkakus, the GSDF is fortifying several of Japan’s southern islands and is in the process of installing anti-ship missiles and anti-aircraft systems. The MSDF and Japan Coast Guard diligently patrol near the Senkakus, and the Japan Air Self Defense Force intercepts intruding PLA jets intruding into Japanese airspace.??However, these activities are disjointed and reactive rather than part of a coherent defense scheme. And Japanese forces are increasingly outmatched numbers-wise by Chinese ships and aircraft.?Nor is Senkaku defense a fully joint US-Japan effort, even though the need has been obvious for years.If Japan does give up the Senkakus it may avoid an immediate problem, from Tokyo’s perspective – but that won’t be the end of Chinese demands.??And where would this leave the Americans?US forces have operated on the assumption that each side will do its part to defend Japan’s territorial integrity.Cede the Senkakus and it raises doubts about Japanese reliability and commitment, as well as complicating US and Japanese military operations in the East China Sea and beyond.And the Americans might reasonably ask: Are there other parts of Japan you intend to give away? Or other instances where you will stand down?If the new American ambassador ever does arrive in Tokyo, his first order of business should be to ask the Japanese what they have in mind for the Senkakus.??After 60 years of alliance, one would think both sides would know by now.No Senkakus escalation or draw-inYoel Sano 15, Head of Global & Political Security Risk, BMI Research, 8/25/15, “WHY GREAT POWER CONFLICT RISK IS RISING,” dispute over Senkaku Islands: Any conflict between the world's second- and third-largest economies could pave the way for a wider conflagration. The US is committed by treaty to Japan's defense and could get dragged into a conflict with China, in the event that Tokyo and Beijing came to blows over the disputed Senkaku Islands (called Diaoyu in Chinese) in the East China Sea. In practice, though, the somewhat peripheral nature of these tiny, uninhabited islands to Japan and China means that both sides would probably contain any fighting there to the immediate vicinity. In other words, a Sino-Japanese conflict would largely be a naval one, similar to the 1982 Argentina-UK Falklands War, and would not necessarily see military strikes on their respective homelands. In BMI’s view, the US would not directly intervene in a Senkaku conflict due to the risks involved - i.e. a shooting war with China - but would provide Japan with logistical support.No China-Japan WarNo china japan warMoss, 13 (Trefor, former Asia-Pacific editor at Jane's Defence Weekly, 2/10, “7 Reasons China and Japan Won’t Go To War”, The Diplomat, )The sequel seldom improves on the original. Yet Shinzo Abe, Japan’s newly re-elected prime minister, has already displayed more conviction during his second spell at the Kantei than in the entire year of his first, unhappy premiership. Political energy is a plus only when it’s wisely deployed however, and some fear that Abe is picking a fight he can’t win when it comes to his hardline stance on China. Rather than attempting to soothe the tensions that built between Beijing and Tokyo in 2012, Abe has struck a combative tone, especially concerning their dispute over the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands – a keystone for nationalists in both countries. Each time fighter aircraft are scrambled or ships are sent to survey the likely flashpoint, we hear more warnings about the approach of a war that China and Japan now seem almost eager to wage. The Economist, for example,recently observed that, “China and Japan are sliding towards war,” while Hugh White of the Australian National University warned his readers: “Don't be too surprised if the U.S. and Japan go to war with China [in 2013].” News this week of another reckless act of escalation – Chinese naval vessels twice training their radars on their Japanese counterparts – will only have ratcheted up their concerns. These doomful predictions came as Abe set out his vision of a more hard-nosed Japan that will no longer be pushed around when it comes to sovereignty issues. In his December op-ed on Project Syndicate Abe accused Beijing of performing “daily exercises in coercion” and advocated a “democratic security diamond” comprising Australia, India, Japan and the U.S. (rehashing a concept from the 2007 Quadrilateral Security Dialogue). He then proposed defense spending increases – Japan’s first in a decade – and strengthened security relations with the Philippines and Vietnam, which both share Tokyo’s misgivings about China’s intentions. An alliance-affirming trip to the U.S.is expected soon, and there is talk of Japan stationing F-15s on Shimojijima, close to the disputed Senkaku/Diaoyu islands. However, Abe would argue that he is acting to strengthen Japan in order to balance a rising China and prevent a conflict, rather than creating the conditions for one. And he undoubtedly has a more sanguine view of the future of Sino-Japanese relations than those who see war as an ever more likely outcome. Of course, there is a chance that Chinese and Japanese ships or aircraft will clash as the dispute over the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands rumbles on; and, if they do, there is a chance that a skirmish could snowball unpredictably into a wider conflict. But if Shinzo Abe is gambling with the region’s security, he is at least playing the odds. He is calculating that Japan can pursue a more muscular foreign policy without triggering a catastrophic backlash from China, based on the numerous constraints that shape Chinese actions, as well as the interlocking structure of the globalized environment which the two countries co-inhabit. Specifically, there are seven reasons to think that war is a very unlikely prospect, even with a more hawkish prime minister running Japan: Beijing’s nightmare scenario. China might well win a war against Japan, but defeat would also be a very real possibility. As China closes the book on its “century of humiliation” and looks ahead to prouder times, the prospect of a new, avoidable humiliation at the hands of its most bitter enemy is enough to persuade Beijing to do everything it can to prevent tha t outcome (the surest way being not to have a war at all). Certainly, China’s new leader, Xi Jinping, does not want to go down in history as the man who led China into a disastrous conflict with the Japanese. In that scenario, Xi would be doomed politically, and, as China’s angry nationalism turned inward, the Communist Party probably wouldn’t survive either. 2. Economic interdependence. Win or lose, a Sino-Japanese war would be disastrous for both participants. The flagging economy that Abe is trying to breathe life into with a $117 billion stimulus package would take a battering as the lucrative China market was closed off to Japanese business. China would suffer, too, as Japanese companies pulled out of a now-hostile market, depriving up to 5 million Chinese workers of their jobs, even as Xi Jinping looks to double per capita income by 2020. Panic in the globalized economy would further depress both economies, and potentially destroy the programs of both countries’ new leaders. 3. Question marks over the PLA’s operational effectiveness.The People’s Liberation Army is rapidly modernizing, but there are concerns about how effective it would prove if pressed into combat today – not least within China’s own military hierarchy. New Central Military Commission Vice-Chairman Xu Qiliang recently told the PLA Daily that too many PLA exercises are merely for show, and that new elite units had to be formed if China wanted to protect its interests. CMC Chairman Xi Jinping has also called on the PLA to improve its readiness for “real combat.” Other weaknesses within the PLA, such as endemic corruption, would similarly undermine the leadership’s confidence in committing it to a risky war with a peer adversary. 4. Unsettled politics. China’s civil and military leaderships remain in a state of flux, with the handover initiated in November not yet complete. As the new leaders find their feet and jockey for position amongst themselves, they will want to avoid big foreign-policy distractions – war with Japan and possibly the U.S. being the biggest of them all. 5. The unknown quantity of U.S. intervention. China has its hawks, such as Dai Xu, who think that the U.S. would never intervene in an Asian conflict on behalf of Japan or any other regional ally. But this view is far too casual. U.S. involvement is a real enough possibility to give China pause, should the chances of conflict increase. 6. China’s policy of avoiding military confrontation. China has always said that it favors peaceful solutions to disputes, and its actions have tended to bear this out. In particular, it continues to usually dispatch unarmed or only lightly armed law enforcement ships to maritime flashpoints, rather than naval ships.There have been calls for a more aggressive policy in the nationalist media, and from some military figures; but Beijing has not shown much sign of heeding them. The PLA Navy made a more active intervention in the dispute this week when one of its frigates trained its radar on a Japanese naval vessel. This was a dangerous and provocative act of escalation, but once again the Chinese action was kept within bounds that made violence unlikely (albeit, needlessly, more likely than before). 7. China’s socialization. China has spent too long telling the world that it poses no threat to peace to turn around and fulfill all the China-bashers’ prophecies. Already, China’s reputation in Southeast Asia has taken a hit over its handling of territorial disputes there. If it were cast as the guilty party in a conflict with Japan –which already has the sympathy of many East Asian countries where tensions China are concerned – China would see regional opinion harden against it further still. This is not what Beijing wants: It seeks to influence regional affairs diplomatically from within, and to realize “win-win” opportunities with its international partners. In light of these constraints, Abe should be able to push back against China – so long as he doesn’t go too far. He was of course dealt a rotten hand by his predecessor, Yoshihiko Noda, whose bungled nationalization of the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands triggered last year’s plunge in relations. Noda’s misjudgments raised the political temperature to the point where neither side feels able to make concessions, at least for now, in an attempt to repair relations. However, Abe can make the toxic Noda legacy work in his favor. Domestically, he can play the role of the man elected to untangle the wreckage, empowered by his democratic mandate to seek a new normal in Sino-Japanese relations. Chinese assertiveness would be met with a newfound Japanese assertiveness, restoring balance to the relationship. It is also timely for Japan to push back now, while its military is still a match for China’s. Five or ten years down the line this may no longer be the case, even if Abe finally grows the stagnant defense budget. Meanwhile, Abe is also pursuing diplomatic avenues. It was Abe who mended Japan’s ties with China after the Koizumi years, and he is now trying to reprise his role as peacemaker, having dispatched his coalition partner, Natsuo Yamaguchi, to Beijing reportedly to convey his desire for a new dialogue. It is hardly surprising, given his daunting domestic laundry list, that Xi Jinping should have responded encouragingly to the Japanese olive branch. In the end, Abe and Xi are balancing the same equation: They will not give ground on sovereignty issues, but they have no interest in a war – in fact, they must dread it. Even if a small skirmish between Chinese and Japanese ships or aircraft occurs, the leaders will not order additional forces to join the battle unless they are boxed in by a very specific set of circumstances that makes escalation the only face-saving option. The escalatory spiral into all-out war that some envisage once the first shot is fired is certainly not the likeliest outcome, as recurrent skirmishes elsewhere – such as in Kashmir, or along the Thai-Cambodian border – have demonstrated.Economic interdependence checks warKing, 12 (Amy King – doctoral candidate in International Relations at St Antony’s College, Oxford University, 10/22, “Japan and China: warm trade ties temper political tensions”, East Asia Forum, )The Sino–Japanese relationship is paradoxical.The two countries enjoy major trade and investment ties but also suffer persistent, damaging political rifts. The negative side of the relationship is familiar. Since the late 1980s, Chinese diplomatic rebukes and popular protests over issues relating to the legacy of World War II have become increasingly strident. During Prime Minister Koizumi’s era the Chinese government protested against his visits to the Yasukuni Shrine, and opposed Japan’s bid for UN Security Council membership.In more recent years the main source of tension has been territorial disputes over the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands. In 2010 the Japanese coast guard arrested the captain of a Chinese fishing boat that had allegedly rammed two Japanese coast guard vessels in contested waters. The arrest prompted government protests in China. The Chinese government called off political talks with Japan and temporarily suspended a series of bilateral student exchanges. The response in Japan was chilly. A Yomiuri Shimbun survey published in October 2010 reported that 89 per cent of Japanese believed that the Chinese government ‘went too far’ on the Senkaku/Diaoyu issue. Worse, the survey found that only 13 per cent of Japanese respondents felt any trust in China.Routine political and territorial rifts make it easy to conclude that the Japan–China relationship is dominated by intractable animosity. But the economic connection that has long brought these two states together should not be overlooked. China is Japan’s largest trade partner, and Japan is China’s second-largest trade partner after the US. More importantly, Japan is one of China’s major sources of foreign capital. Over the past decade Japanese foreign direct investment in China has grown tenfold as Japanese firms have shifted their manufacturing operations to China. Both large firms and small- and medium-sized enterprises are part of this trend.Sino–Japanese economic interdependence is set to deepen following the Chinese government’s decision in May 2012 to allow direct convertibility between the yen and the renminbi. This makes the yen the first currency other than the US dollar to establish direct convertibility with the renminbi. As China’s second most important economic partner, Japan was a natural first choice for Beijing, whose efforts to internationalise the renminbi and reduce its reliance on the US dollar have received much publicity in recent months.Sino–Japanese ‘hot economics, cold politics’ make this relationship a poster child for the liberal thesis that economic interdependence is a source of peace.This may seem counterintuitive. After all, the strength of economic ties has not actively improved other aspects of the relationship. However, strong economic interdependence has helped to raise the costs of conflict. Since the end of World War II economic ties have prevented sour political relations from turning into outright conflict. Even during the most difficult years of the Cold War, when the US put pressure on Japan not to trade with ‘Red China’, Japanese and Chinese business leaders, politicians and government officials worked hard to negotiate a set of small, unofficial trade agreements. Even during the worst years of the Cold War era, the two sides relied on economics to build a relationship where politics and diplomacy could not.Yet the ‘hot economics, cold politics’ that have worked so well in sustaining the bilateral relationship for over six decades is based on US primacy in East Asia. This East Asian regional order has allowed Japan to pursue economic engagement with China while being backed up by the security guarantees of a hegemonic US. The rise of China may change all this. Will the paradoxical quality of Sino–Japanese relations be sustained at a time of shifting power relations in East Asia, or is this a new phase in Japan–China relations?There are some worrying signs that the basis of the Japan–China relationship is changing. Both the 2011 and 2012 Defence of Japan: Annual White Paper raised detailed concerns about China’s growing military budget, lack of military transparency and the intensification of China’s military activity in the East and South China Seas. There is also strong and growing concern among the Japanese public over China’s military rise. Polling by Pew Research in 2011 found that 87 per cent of Japanese view China’s growing military strength as a ‘bad thing’ for Japan.Linked to this, more and more Japanese are finding comfort in the US alliance. The Democratic Party of Japan came to power with plans to reach out to China and take a more independent stance toward the US. But support for this approach was lost when the Japanese public grew concerned that the Hatoyama government was taking a cavalier attitude towards the US–Japan alliance. In the last two or three years China’s behaviour has become increasingly provocative, and this has helped to push Japan closer to the US. A 2011 joint statement by the US and Japan explicitly referred to China’s lack of military transparency as an area of mutual concern, and Tokyo and Washington have strengthened their cooperation in areas such as intelligence, missile defence, space security and cyber security.Even more worrying is the development of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a new US-led exclusive economic grouping in the Asia Pacific. Although the TPP is still being developed, the strict standards on intellectual property rights, labour, the environment and the regulation of state-owned enterprises the US is pushing for will make it extremely difficult for China (and other transitional economies) to qualify for membership. Any perception that China is being deliberately locked out of a key regional economic grouping creates a risk that economics will be used to enhance rather than constrain political and strategic tensions between China and its neighbours. So far official statements suggest that Beijing has adopted a wait-and-see attitude toward the TPP, although in late 2011 a Chinese Foreign Ministry official stated that ‘we hope all [trade] mechanisms could remain transparent and inclusive’. China’s official Xinhua news was more blunt: ‘The TPP, which pointedly excludes China, is widely seen as a thinly disguised counterweight to free trade blocs in the region’.Yet there are positive signs that ‘hot economics’ will continue to temper the ‘cold politics’ of the Japan–China relationship. The Japanese government is dragging its feet on the TPP, and it is unlikely that the prime minister, Yoshihiko Noda, will be successful in taking on the Japanese agricultural lobby and so enable Japan to join the new economic grouping. At the same time, Japan has strengthened its free trade negotiations with China and South Korea, and the three countries recently concluded an agreement that will deepen trilateral investment. There are also clear signs that despite growing concerns about China’s military rise, the Japanese public continues to support increased and open economic ties with China. In December 2010 an Asahi Shimbun survey found that 64 per cent of Japanese believed that the most important issue in the US–Japan–China relationship was not strengthening the US–Japan alliance against China, but finding ways to deepen the mutually beneficial economic ties between the three countries.Japan and China have long used economics to sustain an otherwise difficult relationship. There are a number of reasons to expect that they will continue to do so for many years to come.China Heg BadChinese hegemony ensures nuclear warLiu 13 [Feng, assistant professor and vice chair of the Department of International Relations at Nankai University, “China, the United States, and the East Asian Security Order,” Issues and Studies 49.1 (Mar 2013): 99-140]The United States' Guarantee of Security Expectations East Asian countries have a long history of suffering from colonial aggression through the modern era, and the region's traditional security challenges remain serious. Because of this, the need for security continues to be one of the top concerns for countries in the region. Since the end of the Cold War, some competitive and complementary security frameworks have emerged in the East Asian security order, such as the regional alliance system led by the United States, the new security concept and regional security cooperation advocated by China,38 and the ASEAN Regional Forum initiated and dominated by the ASEAN countries. The U.S.-led hub-and-spokes system is doubtlessly the most inflectional among these frameworks.39 Since the 1990s, by maintaining a moderate military presence in East Asia, supported by bilateral military alliances and quasi-alliances, and supplemented by a regional multilateral security mechanism, the United States has improved the hub-and-spokes regional security network it constructed during the Cold War. This facilitates Washington's involvement in East Asian regional security affairs. It is worth emphasizing that, regarding the role the United States has played in East Asian security affairs, we should distinguish between "providing a security guarantee/protection" and "stabilizing security expectations." The former refers to the protecting and protected relationship between the security provider and receiver, while the latter does not require this type of relationship between the two sides in the security interaction. Although the United States provides security guarantees to only some countries (namely its allies and security partners) rather than the whole region, it has objectively stabilized the security expectations of most of the countries in the region. In practice, the security system dominated by the United States has served the function of stabilizing the security situation in East Asia. First, for quite a long period after the Cold War, it pacified Japan, the largest economic power in the region, preventing it from taking the leading role in regional security affairs, and reduced other countries' worries about power competition in the region. To many observers, Japan's reluctance to translate its economic muscle into military power has been primarily determined by some domestic constraints, such as Japan's institutional arrangements and pacifist norms.40 However, some analysts have emphasized external factors, especially the role played by the United States. The United States has contributed to Japan's postwar pacifism in at least two interrelated ways: on the one hand, given its alliance with Washington, Japan is willing to ride cheaply, if not completely free of charge, on the United States for national security;41 on the other hand, U.S. protection also prevents Japan from remilitarizing, which in turn has helped mitigate the fears of other countries in the region. As Richard J. Samuels, an expert on Japanese domestic politics, has stated, "without the U.S. military as a 'pacifier,' . . . Japan will become a great (and nuclear armed) power."42 The United States' military presence in East Asia has long won the approval of a number of countries (especially small and medium-sized countries) in the region, as they are worried that Japan and China, the two regional powers, will acquire regional leadership roles. While the United States actively encourages and supports Japan taking additional international responsibility, and even supports Japan becoming a permanent member of the UN Security Council, Washington has restricted Japan's nuclear-weapons development, its attempts to eliminate limits contained in its so-called peace constitution and seek autonomy from the United States, and its desire to play the leading role in Asia. Second, the United States helps to reduce the worries of other East Asian countries concerning the rapid rise of China. The attitude of many of these countries to the acceleration of China's rise since the 1990s has been extremely complicated. On the one hand, China's neighbors have become increasingly dependent on China's rapidly developing economy, and they seek to benefit from it; on the other hand, because of several complex geo- political, strategic, and historical factors, a number of conflicts have arisen between China and its East Asian neighbors over territorial disputes, historical problems, ideological differences, etc., which have further intensified these countries' worries about the rise of China. Given this situation, some countries have attempted to improve their political and military relations with the United States, which has provided excuses for the United States to strengthen its political and military power in the region.43 On the issue of territorial disputes between China and its neighbors, the United States, either explicitly or implicitly, stands with the latter. Take the recent Huangyan Island (also known as Scarborough Shoal) dispute as an example. Although the Americans have reiterated that they "do not take sides on the competing sovereignty claims to land features in the South China Sea," some high level officials have underscored the U.S. commitment to the Philippines under the Mutual Defense Treaty (MDT) signed in 1951.44 In addition, with arms sales and joint military exercises, the United States has strengthened its military relationship with the Philippines throughout the dispute. Purposeful ambiguity has also been maintained in the case of the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands dispute. As tensions between China and Japan have increased in recent months, the United States has insisted that, while it does not take sides, the Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security between the United States and Japan-which commits Washington to protecting territories under the administration of Japan- covers the disputed islands. From a Chinese perspective, the United States does not hold a neutral position on these disputes. M. Taylor Fravel has quite rightly warned that, although the United States does not take sides on the sovereignty claims, its recent effort to reduce tensions "has run the risk that some claimants might be emboldened and that the United States might become unwittingly entrapped."45 China's development is crucial to the maintenance of stability in East Asia and provides an impetus for the economic development of countries in the region. However, as East Asian countries lack mutual trust, some of them may not be confident that China's rise will be a peaceful one, and may attempt to hedge against China by strengthening their relations with the United States. Finally, the United States has also prevented the escalation of crises and the spread of conflicts in the region. There are several complex political, economic, and security issues in East Asia, some of which have escalated into serious crises and conflicts at various times. Out of concern for its own strategic interests, the United States is reluctant to permit disorder in the East Asian security situation and thus attempts to bring some security conflicts under control. For example, from 2003 to 2004, when President Chen Shui-bian of Taiwan and his supporters were agitating forcefully on behalf of Taiwan independence and were attempting to change the status quo regarding Taiwan, the George W. Bush administration repeatedly sent envoys to Taiwan and adopted punitive measures to prevent an escalation of tension in the Taiwan Strait.46 President George W. Bush even publicly rebuked the Taiwanese president, stating "the comments and actions made by the leader of Taiwan indicate that he may be willing to make decisions unilaterally to change the status quo, which we oppose."47 This took place because, as Robert Ross noted, "Washington has long considered Taiwan's moves toward independence a threat to U.S. security because they could lead to war."48 Apart from Taiwan, the U.S. presence in the region has also been seen as a stabilizing force on the Korean peninsula and other conflict-prone areas.China rise causes nuclear war. Thayer & Han 19 --- Bradley A. Thayer, with Lianchao Han. * Professor of Political Science at the University of Texas San Antonio. **vice president of Citizen Power Initiatives for China and a visiting fellow at the Hudson Institute. Founder of the Independent Federation of Chinese Students and Scholars. "The ‘Xi Doctrine’: Proclaiming and Rationalizing China’s Aggression". National Interest. 6-12-2019. the occasion of the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore this month, Chinese Minister of National Defense and State Councilor Gen. Wei Fenghe, delivered a sharp message to the United States, which may be termed the “Xi Doctrine” on China’s use of force, after Chinese premier Xi Jinping. Wei declaring both China’s resolve to aggress to advance its interests and a rationalization for the use of force. Wei’s de facto threat of war should not be lost in his nuances, deliberate ambiguity, or in translation. His remarks were so bellicose that the world has noticed, as was certainly intended by the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Empirical evidence of China’s aggression is increasingly common, from its attempt to dominate the South China Sea, the neo-imperialist effort to gain control of states through the Belt and Road Initiative, to its technological imperialism to control 5G and artificial intelligence technologies. What is rather less frequent are statements from high-level Chinese officials proclaiming the country’s intent to be aggressive and offering an attempted legitimizing principle justifying that aggression. While much of the content of Wei’s remarks were in keeping with the gossamer pronouncements on China’s peaceful intentions, as well as a paean to Xi Jinping’s leadership, they still conveyed that China is ready and willing to resort to war if the United States stands in its way of global expansion; and they made clear that China must go to war, or even a nuclear war, to occupy Taiwan. Specifically, there are four elements that comprise the Xi Doctrine and are indications of China’s signaling its willingness to use force. The first component is a new and alarming proclamation of the undisguised threats to use force or wage an unlimited war. China is becoming bolder as its military power grows. This is evidenced in Wei’s muscular remarks on the People’s Republic of China’s approach against Taiwan, his explicit statement that China does not renounce the use of force against Taiwan, and his effort to deter the United States and its allies from intervention should an attack occur. Wei forcefully stated: “If anyone dares to separate Taiwan from China, the Chinese military has no choice but must go to war, and must fight for the reunification of the motherland at all costs.” “At all cost” means that China will not hesitate to use nuclear weapons or launching another Pearl Harbor to take over Taiwan. This is a clear warning of an invasion. Second, the Xi Doctrine legitimizes territorial expansion. Through his remarks, Wei sought to convince the rest of the world that China’s seizure of most of the South China Sea is an accomplished fact that cannot be overturned. He made bogus accusations, which included blaming the United States for “raking in profits by stirring up troubles” in the region. He insisted that only ASEAN and China must resolve the issue. He claimed that China’s militarization on South China Sea islands and reefs were an act of self-defense. Should this be allowed to stand, then the Xi Doctrine will set a perilous precedent of successful territorial expansion, which will further entice China and jeopardize the peace of the region. Third, the doctrine targets the United States as a cause of the world’s major problems and envisions a powerful China evicting the United States from the region. Wei obliquely identified the United States as the cause wars, conflicts, and unrest, and sought to convey that the United States will abandon the states of the South China Sea (SCS) when it is confronted by Chinese power, a typical divide and conquer strategy used by the CCP regime. The Xi Doctrine’s fourth element is the mendacity regarding China’s historical use of force and current actions. While the distortions of history were numerous, there were three major lies that should be alarming for the states of the region and the global community. First, Wei said that China had never invaded another country, which is a claim so transparently false it can only be a measure of the contempt he held for the audience. China has a long history of aggression, including against the Tibetans and Vietnamese, and perhaps soon against the Taiwanese. Second, Wei argued that hegemony does not conform to China’s values when, in fact, China proudly was Asia’s hegemon for most of the last two thousand years. Lastly, he claimed that the situation in the SCS is moving toward stability—from China’s perspective this stability is caused by its successful seizure of territory. In fact, the SCS is far less stable as a result of China’s actions. Efforts to counter this grab are denounced by Wei as destabilizing, which is a bit like a thief accusing you of a crime for wanting your property returned. Wei’s belligerent rhetoric is an indication that the CCP regime faces deep external and internal crises. Externally, the Trump administration has shocked the CCP with the three major steps it has taken. First, it has shifted the focus of the U.S. national-security strategy and now identifies China explicitly as its primary rival—abandoning the far more muted policies of previous administrations. Second, Trump has acted on this peer competitive threat by advancing tangible measures, such as arms sales to allies and the ban of Huawei. Third, the administration has made credible commitments to assure partners and allies to counter China’s aggression and bullying. These have unbalanced the CCP regime, and its natural reaction is to bully its way out. Additionally, the CCP regime has perceived that the world today has begun to consider the negative implications of China’s rise, and the United States is determined to prevent what heretofore had been considered China’s unstoppable rise. From the perspective of CCP, conflict is increasingly seen as inevitable and perhaps even imminent. Wei’s bellicosity should be seen in this light, and the PLA is tasked with fighting and winning the war. Internally, Xi’s anti-corruption campaign that selectively targets his political rivalries, and his abandoning the established rules such as term limited of presidency, have introduced deep cleavages into the unity of the regime unity. China’s economic slowdown, made worse by the U.S. trade war, is a fundamental challenge to the regime’s legitimacy. Xi’s repression and suppression of the Chinese people, particularly human-rights defenders, Christians, Kazakhs, Uighurs, and other minorities, have miscarried. Drawing from the pages of unfortunate history, in a classic social-imperialist move, the regime wants to direct these internal tensions outward. At the same time, the nationalistic fervor advanced by the CCP’s propaganda and by the rapid military modernization have made many young militant officers in the PLA overconfident. This is infrequently noticed in the West. They can hardly wait to fight an ultimate war to defeat the arch-enemy. This plainly dangerous mentality echoes the Japanese military’s beliefs before Pearl Harbor. The bellicosity evinced in Wei’s speech is serious and is not bluster intended to deter. The United States cannot meet China’s threat with half-measures, which are likely to further encourage China’s aggressive behavior. The United States must respond to China’s belligerence with greater strength, adamantine determination, and more vigorous diplomatic and military measures. With the Xi Doctrine, China has proclaimed and rationalized its aggression. A Trump Doctrine forged in response has to reveal to all global audiences, most importantly the CCP leadership, the recklessness of the Xi Doctrine and the supreme folly of aggression.Ambiguity in resolve causes warGartzke 17 - Professor @ University of California, San Diego, Jonathan N Markowitz, Assistant Professor University of Southern California, Blake R. McMahon, Assistant Professor Air War College (Erik, et al, “Shoot or Scoot: U.S. Strategy toward China in an Age of Uncertainty,” Presented at the West Coast International Relations of Asia hosted in Los Angeles, received via email but I’ve made it accessible through a shared Dropbox folder: . Any trouble accessing, email bricker312 gmail )The disagreements in this debate are manifest in United States foreign policy itself, which has tended to mix opposing strategies rather than apply any one approach exclusively. On one hand, the United States has sought to engage with the Chinese economically and diplomatically. The United States has even invited the Chinese Navy to participate in its most recent RIMPAC military exercises in 2014 and 2016. 4 On the other hand, however, the United States has continued to challenge Chinese interests in the Western Pacific and elsewhere by deploying military forces to contested areas and supplying China’s regional rivals with arms. In many ways, Washington’s approach to China is not unique. Since the end of the Cold War, the United States has sought to manage potential challengers through a compromise policy that combines engagement with elements of military containment.5 Several presidential administrations have attempted to seduce potential challengers with Western trade, while simultaneously seeking to discourage revisionism through regional military superiority. 6 Conventional wisdom holds that combining strategies in this way is a type of strategic hedge, putting the United States in the position to deter conflict should efforts at engagement fail.7 However, we argue that Washington’s ambivalence, when combined with a shift in the balance of power in Beijing’s favor, encourages China to challenge the geopolitical status quo in a way that exacerbates the risk of war. Dick Betts encapsulates the potential danger: If a crisis erupts, ambivalent deterrence may cause conflict rather than prevent it. It might prove too weak to make Beijing swerve first, but strong enough to keep Washington from swerving also, thus causing a collision. The only solution is a clear strategic decision about whether the United States will accept China’s full claims as a superpower when it becomes one or draw clear redlines before a crisis comes.8 How can states overcome this dilemma? We explore United States foreign policy through the lens of recent scholarship on the causes of war between states. The key insight from this research is that war is not caused by disagreements among states, but rather by the forces that prevent states from bargaining peacefully to resolve these disagreements. 9 In particular, uncertainty about the capabilities and intentions of competitors is thought to be a preeminent cause of bargaining failure and war because it can lead states to miscalculate during crises. 10 In this light, a mixed U.S. policy of engagement and containment is so dangerous because it enhances the type of strategic ambiguity that leads to war. Consequently, the way to resolve the strategic dilemma with China is not to hedge, but rather to adopt a more decisive policy that minimizes uncertainty about what the U.S. seeks to accomplish in the Pacific. Fully committing to a policy of accommodation and engagement is the best way to reduce the probability that China seeks to violently overthrow the existing order, while simultaneously allowing Washington to reap the benefits of economic cooperation. The goal of engagement is to alter Chinese preferences such that Beijing can envision a viable and valuable role in the existing international order, thus reducing the risk of war. The cost of pursuing such a policy is that it strengthens China, potentially increasing the severity of harm to U.S. interests if Beijing were to adopt revisionist policies in the future. Alternatively, containment backed by investments in maintaining overwhelming military dominance in China’s littoral waters is the better choice if Washington believes that China will be a revisionist type regardless of American policy, and if U.S. national interests necessitate maintaining all existing commitments and making no concessions to China. Investing in the forces to insure local military dominance will make Washington’s deterrent threats more credible, and therefore avoid the dangerous risk of Chinese miscalculation about America’s capabilities and resolve. This policy is costly in terms of both the forces that would need to be procured and deployed, as well as the political and economic costs associated with antagonizing the world’s second-largest economic power and the U.S.’ second-largest trading partner. However, if U.S. policymakers believe that maintaining current U.S. commitments is worth these costs, then this policy of containment, although expensive, should reduce the risk of conflict over U.S. commitments.China’s rise is hostile---CCP leaders deploy ambiguity to hide revisionist goals. Mastro, Jan/Feb 2019 – Assistant Prof of Security Studies at Georgetown U and Jeane Kirkpatrick Visiting Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute; “The Stealth Superpower: How China Hid Its Global Ambitions, Foreign Affairs, will not, repeat, not repeat the old practice of a strong country seeking hegemony,” Wang Yi, China’s foreign minister, said last September. It was a message that Chinese officials have been pushing ever since their country’s spectacular rise began. For decades, they have been at pains to downplay China’s power and reassure other countries—especially the United States—of its benign intentions. Jiang Zemin, China’s leader in the 1990s, called for mutual trust, mutual benefit, equality, and cooperation in the country’s foreign relations. Under Hu Jintao, who took the reins of power in 2002, “peaceful development” became the phrase of the moment. The current president, Xi Jinping, insisted in September 2017 that China “lacks the gene” that drives great powers to seek hegemony. It is easy to dismiss such protestations as simple deceit. In fact, however, Chinese leaders are telling the truth: Beijing truly does not want to replace Washington at the top of the international system. China has no interest in establishing a web of global alliances, sustaining a far-flung global military presence, sending troops thousands of miles from its borders, leading international institutions that would constrain its own behavior, or spreading its system of government abroad. But to focus on this reluctance, and the reassuring Chinese statements reflecting it, is a mistake. Although China does not want to usurp the United States’ position as the leader of a global order, its actual aim is nearly as consequential. In the Indo-Pacific region, China wants complete dominance; it wants to force the United States out and become the region’s unchallenged political, economic, and military hegemon. And globally, even though it is happy to leave the United States in the driver’s seat, it wants to be powerful enough to counter Washington when needed. As one Chinese official put it to me, “Being a great power means you get to do what you want, and no one can say anything about it.” In other words, China is trying to displace, rather than replace, the United States. The way that China has gone about this project has caused many observers to mistakenly conclude that the country is merely trying to coexist with American power rather than fundamentally overturn the order in Asia and compete with U.S. influence globally. In fact, ambiguity has been part of the strategy: Chinese leaders have recognized that in order to succeed, they must avoid provoking an unfavorable response, and so they have refrained from directly challenging the United States, replicating its orderbuilding model, or matching its globally active military. Although Beijing has pursued an indirect and entrepreneurial strategy of accumulating power, make no mistake: the ultimate goal is to push the United States out of the Indo-Pacific and rival it on the global stage. Until now, China has succeeded in growing without provoking. Yet there is a limit to how powerful a country can get without directly challenging the incumbent power, and China is now reaching that point. Under Xi, China has begun confronting American power head-on. Given the country’s internal challenges, China’s rise could still stall. But history has shown that in the vast majority of cases in which a country was able to sustain its rise, the rising power ended up overtaking the dominant power, whether peacefully or through war. That does not mean that the United States cannot buck the historical trend. To remain dominant, Washington will have to change course. It will have to deepen, rather than lessen, its involvement in the liberal international order. It will have to double down on, rather than abandon, its commitment to American values. And perhaps most important, it will have to ensure that its leadership benefits others rather than pursue a strategy based on “America first.” HOW CHINA ROSE Throughout history, would-be powers have invented new ways of growing. The Mongol Empire connected lands through trade, the Qing dynasty built a tributary system, the United Kingdom collected colonies, the Soviet Union created ideologically linked spheres of influence, and the United States established an institutionalized order and a global military presence. China, too, has looked for new sources of power and has used it in ways not previously attempted. In the political realm, China has undertaken a combination of covert actions and public diplomacy to co-opt and neutralize foreign opposition. To shape the discourse on sensitive topics, it has set up hundreds of Confucius Institutes at universities around the world and launched English-language media outlets to disseminate the Chinese Communist Party’s narrative. Chinese intelligence agents have even recruited Chinese citizens studying abroad to act as informants and pass along what Chinese students and professors are saying about their country. In Australia and New Zealand, China has sought to influence politics more directly, secretly donating money to preferred candidates. Beijing has been especially innovative in its use of economic power. The strategy here has been to finance infrastructure in the developing world in order to create dependent, and thus compliant, foreign governments. Most recently, those efforts have taken the form of the Belt and Road Initiative, a massive regional infrastructure project launched in 2013. China has spent about $400 billion on the initiative (and pledged hundreds of billions of dollars more), and it has convinced 86 countries and international organizations to sign some 100 related cooperation agreements. Chinese aid, which primarily takes the form of loans from banks controlled by the Chinese Communist Party, doesn’t come with the usual Western strings attached: there are no requirements for market reforms or better governance. What China does demand from recipients, however, is allegiance on a number of issues, including the nonrecognition of Taiwan. As the analyst Nadege Rolland has written, the Belt and Road Initiative “is intended to enable China to better use its growing economic clout to achieve its ultimate political aims without provoking a countervailing response or a military conflict.” The key is that Beijing has left the military dimensions of this project ambiguous, generating uncertainty within Washington about its true intentions. Many observers have wondered whether the Belt and Road Initiative will eventually have a strong military component, but that misses the point. Even if the initiative is not the prelude to an Americanstyle global military presence—and it probably isn’t—China could still use the economic and political influence generated by the project to limit the reach of American power. For instance, it could pressure dependent states in Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia to deny the U.S. military the right to enter their airspace or access their ground facilities. China’s entrepreneurialism is not limited to the economic and political realms; it also has a hard-power component. Indeed, perhaps nowhere has Beijing been more entrepreneurial than in its military strategy. Its “anti-access/ area-denial” (A2/AD) doctrine, for one thing, was a masterstroke of innovation: by developing relatively low-cost asymmetric military capabilities, the country has been able to greatly complicate any U.S. plan to come to the aid of Japan, the Philippines, or Taiwan in the event of war. For another thing, instead of confronting the United States to push its military out of the Asia-Pacific region, China has engaged in subtler activities, such as harassing U.S. ships and aircraft with nonmilitary means, which allow it to maintain a degree of deniability and discourage a U.S. response. Thanks to such tactics, China has made significant political and territorial gains without crossing the threshold into open conflict with the United States or its allies. China has also avoided sparking a concerted response from the United States by deliberately delaying the modernization of its military. As Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping famously put it, “Hide your strength, bide your time.” Since countries tend to draw inferences about a challenger’s intentions from the size and nature of its armed forces, China opted to first build up other types of pow ereconomic, political, and cultural—in order to project a less threatening image.US Heg sustainable Unipolarity is sustainable and creates a structural disincentive for great power war and escalation – power vacuums cause cascade prolif and extinctionHal Brands 15. On the faculty at the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University The Elliott School of International Affairs The Washington Quarterly Summer 2015 38:2 pp. 7–28The fundamental reason is that both U.S. influence and international stability are thoroughly interwoven with a robust U.S. forward presence. Regarding influence, the protection that Washington has afforded its allies has equally afforded the United States great sway over those allies’ policies.43 During the Cold War and after, for instance, the United States has used the influence provided by its security posture to veto allies’ pursuit of nuclear weapons, to obtain more advantageous terms in financial and trade agreements, and even to affect the composition of allied nations’ governments.44 More broadly, it has used its alliances as vehicles for shaping political, security, and economic agendas in key regions and bilateral relationships, thus giving the United States an outsized voice on a range of important issues. To be clear, this influence has never been as pervasive as U.S. officials might like, or as some observers might imagine. But by any reasonable standard of comparison, it has nonetheless been remarkable. One can tell a similar story about the relative stability of the post-war order. As even some leading offshore balancers have acknowledged, the lack of conflict in regions like Europe in recent decades is not something that has occurred naturally. It has occurred because the “American pacifier” has suppressed precisely the dynamics that previously fostered geopolitical turmoil. That pacifier has limited arms races and security competitions by providing the protection that allows other countries to under-build their militaries. It has soothed historical rivalries by affording a climate of security in which powerful countries like Germany and Japan could be revived economically and reintegrated into thriving and fairly cooperative regional orders. It has induced caution in the behavior of allies and adversaries alike, deterring aggression and dissuading other destabilizing behavior. As John Mearsheimer has noted, the United States “effectively acts as a night watchman,” lending order to an otherwise disorderly and anarchical environment.45 What would happen if Washington backed away from this role? The most logical answer is that both U.S. influence and global stability would suffer. With respect to influence, the United States would effectively be surrendering the most powerful bargaining chip it has traditionally wielded in dealing with friends and allies, and jeopardizing the position of leadership it has used to shape bilateral and regional agendas for decades. The consequences would seem no less damaging where stability is concerned. As offshore balancers have argued, it may be that U.S. retrenchment would force local powers to spend more on defense, while perhaps assuaging certain points of friction with countries that feel threatened or encircled by U.S. presence. But it equally stands to reason that removing the American pacifier would liberate the more destabilizing influences that U.S. policy had previously stifled. Long-dormant security competitions might reawaken as countries armed themselves more vigorously; historical antagonisms between old rivals might reemerge in the absence of a robust U.S. presence and the reassurance it provides. Moreover, countries that seek to revise existing regional orders in their favor—think Russia in Europe, or China in Asia—might indeed applaud U.S. retrenchment, but they might just as plausibly feel empowered to more assertively press their interests. If the United States has been a kind of Leviathan in key regions, Mearsheimer acknowledges, then “take away that Leviathan and there is likely to be big trouble.”46 Scanning the global horizon today, one can easily see where such trouble might arise. In Europe, a revisionist Russia is already destabilizing its neighbors and contesting the post-Cold War settlement in the region. In the Gulf and broader Middle East, the threat of Iranian ascendancy has stoked region-wide tensions manifesting in proxy wars and hints of an incipient arms race, even as that region also contends with a severe threat to its stability in the form of the Islamic State. In East Asia, a rising China is challenging the regional status quo in numerous ways, sounding alarms among its neighbors—many of whom also have historical grievances against each other. In these circumstances, removing the American pacifier would likely yield not low-cost stability, but increased conflict and upheaval. That conflict and upheaval, in turn, would be quite damaging to U.S. interests even if it did not result in the nightmare scenario of a hostile power dominating a key region. It is hard to imagine, for instance, that increased instability and acrimony would produce the robust multilateral cooperation necessary to deal with transnational threats from pandemics to piracy. More problematic still might be the economic consequences. As scholars like Michael Mandelbaum have argued, the enormous progress toward global prosperity and integration that has occurred since World War II (and now the Cold War) has come in the climate of relative stability and security provided largely by the United States.47 One simply cannot confidently predict that this progress would endure amid escalating geopolitical competition in regions of enormous importance to the world economy. Perhaps the greatest risk that a strategy of offshore balancing would run, of course, is that a key region might not be able to maintain its own balance following U.S. retrenchment. That prospect might have seemed far-fetched in the early post-Cold War era, and it remains unlikely in the immediate future. But in East Asia particularly, the rise and growing assertiveness of China has highlighted the medium- to long-term danger that a hostile power could in fact gain regional primacy. If China’s economy continues to grow rapidly, and if Beijing continues to increase military spending by 10 percent or more each year, then its neighbors will ultimately face grave challenges in containing Chinese power even if they join forces in that endeavor. This possibility, ironically, is one to which leading advocates of retrenchment have been attuned. “The United States will have to play a key role in countering China,” Mearshimer writes, “because its Asian neighbors are not strong enough to do it by themselves.”48 If this is true, however, then offshore balancing becomes a dangerous and potentially self-defeating strategy. As mentioned above, it could lead countries like Japan and South Korea to seek nuclear weapons, thereby stoking arms races and elevating regional tensions. Alternatively, and perhaps more worryingly, it might encourage the scenario that offshore balancers seek to avoid, by easing China’s ascent to regional hegemony. As Robert Gilpin has written, “Retrenchment by its very nature is an indication of relative weakness and declining power, and thus retrenchment can have a deteriorating effect on relations with allies and rivals.”49 In East Asia today, U.S. allies rely on U.S. reassurance to navigate increasingly fraught relationships with a more assertive China precisely because they understand that they will have great trouble balancing Beijing on their own. A significant U.S. retrenchment might therefore tempt these countries to acquiesce to, or bandwagon with, a rising China if they felt that prospects for successful resistance were diminishing as the United States retreated.50 In the same vein, retrenchment would compromise alliance relationships, basing agreements, and other assets that might help Washington check Chinese power in the first place—and that would allow the United States to surge additional forces into theater in a crisis. In sum, if one expects that Asian countries will be unable to counter China themselves, then reducing U.S. influence and leverage in the region is a curious policy. Offshore balancing might promise to preserve a stable and advantageous environment while reducing U.S. burdens. But upon closer analysis, the probable outcomes of the strategy seem more perilous and destabilizing than its proponents acknowledge.U.S. heg is sustainable --- neg authors are wrong --- it doesn’t cause overstretch or free-riding Carla Norloff 18, Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto, PhD in International Relations from the Graduate Institute of International Studies, Hegemony and inequality: Trump and the liberal playbook, January 2018, International Affairs, Volume 94, Issue 1, = Liberal International Order The second relevant theoretical approach is grounded in Waltzian realism. According to this approach, states should pursue their national interest defined narrowly, responding to threats that affect them directly. The doctrine of restraint, also called selective engagement, sees the maintenance of long-term hegemony as exceedingly costly and futile, breeding resentment and requiring rivals to be defeated and outcompeted in a continuous effort to thwart attempts at balancing. Balancing occurs when states seek to reduce the military power of exceptionally dominant states. The tendency for states to balance power is a hard systemic law, which no state can escape, and which guarantees that a unipolar distribution of power will eventually become bipolar or multipolar. Academic advocates of selective engagement approve of Trump's call for a more restrained foreign policy while distancing themselves from his other ideas.44 They believe America's postwar grand strategy spills too much blood and treasure and carries high opportunity costs,45 and that the United States should instead pursue a strategy of offshore balancing, refocusing policies around a narrow definition of the national interest limited to preserving regional hegemony in the western hemisphere and preventing the rise of regional hegemons.46 They consider US security interests to be at stake in three areas—Europe, east Asia and the Persian Gulf—with only east Asia requiring significant onshore engagement.47 Broadly agreeing with Trump, they say allies have to learn how to fend for themselves, and that the US should introduce uncertainty about forthcoming military support.48 In order to improve the plight of fellow Americans, the United States should reorientate public policy around domestic goals, giving up some international goals. For proponents of these arguments, America's international commitments clash with its domestic commitments.? Three flawed assumptions? Three features of the LIO emerge as problematic from these two perspectives. First, other countries free-ride on US political and economic leadership. Second, there are fundamental trade-offs between America's military and economic capability: US security commitments are responsible for US economic decline. Third, there are fundamental trade-offs between America's international and domestic posture. On the basis of this analysis, to promote America's national interest, the grand strategy supporting the LIO should be replaced with strategic restraint; the US should stop bearing a disproportionate share of the costs associated with solving global problems and let others take care of themselves, restricting US involvement to protecting vital security interests, defending the homeland and preventing the emergence of a regional hegemon.? However, the three assumptions underlying this analysis, and criticisms of the LIO, mischaracterize America's liberal dilemma. The first questionable assumption is that international cooperation resembles a public goods problem whereby the US, as the largest state, bears disproportionate costs while free-riding allies reap disproportionate benefits. Second, the negative repercussions of US security commitments for US economic strength are rarely balanced against the full benefits of US security commitments to the United States itself. Third, the assumption that there is an international–domestic trade-off and that whatever resources have been ‘squandered’ on international engagement can readily be diverted to the pursuit of productive, welfare-enhancing, domestic goals grossly understates both US benefits from the LIO and the risks attached to dismantling ‘selected’ parts of the LIO.49? When international cooperation is cast as a public goods dilemma, it is easy to come to the conclusion that the hegemon is in a disadvantageous position. But the public goods analogy does not adequately capture the essence of international cooperation, because few issues are characterized by the properties that define public goods—non-rivalry and non-exclusion.50 Rather, the hegemon provides a mix of public and private goods, or imperfect public goods.51 Despite these recognized flaws, and much scholarship to the contrary, the public goods version of HST remains influential.? Rejecting the ‘exploited hegemon’ version of HST, several scholars point to the ways in which the hegemon is positionally primed to benefit disproportionately from underwriting the LIO.52 They argue that public goods provision offers more opportunities than constraints, and, while they recognize that free-riding is a possible threat to the hegemon's long-term rule,53 they emphasize the ways in which the hegemon can use its dominance to internalize positive externalities and externalize negative externalities.54 As long as the hegemon is not providing pure public goods, the distribution of gains will not necessarily favour other states. And as long as the distribution of gains does not favour other states, providing an open economy does not necessarily compromise the hegemon's security interests or its position of dominance.55? The founders of HST, Robert Gilpin and Stephen Krasner, believed that hegemonic orders were particularly robust during the hegemon's ascendancy, and therefore worried greatly about the future of US hegemony and the LIO as the US underwent relative decline in the 1970s and 1980s.? Contemporary scholars, on the other hand, emphasize the cyclical property of postwar hegemony, seeing the United States as capable of reversing phases of decline by using different levers of power to avoid absolute decline.56 They see different forms of power interacting favourably for the hegemon, with financial dominance reinforcing commercial dominance, commercial dominance facilitating financial dominance, and security dominance boosting both commercial and financial dominance.57? Since the 1980s, IR scholars have tended to view the United States as militarily strong yet economically weak, a development hastened with the rise of China and other emerging economies in the third millennium.58 But even today, after many rounds of decline (and ascent), the United States has no peer competitor either militarily or economically. Commercially robust but financially vulnerable, China ranks as the world's third largest military power after Russia and the United States. While Russia's military continues to be the US military's principal rival, it is not as potent as it was under the Soviet Union. And while Russia's economy is not as debilitated as it was under the Soviet Union, it continues to be frail. Japan and Germany, two of America's principal allies, are economically strong, but militarily weak.? As figures 1 and 2 reveal, the United States has sustained its economic lead throughout the postwar era, boasting the world's first economy with an unrivalled capacity for economic output, an impressive commercial record and an unsurpassed financial position. US economic performance is grossly underrated. First, as shown in figure 1, which displays US GDP, trade and company size, US GDP is still roughly a quarter of global GDP (just below the dotted 25 per cent line). Declinists take the considerable fall in America's postwar share of global GDP as a sign of weakness. But it is unrealistic to think that the United States would continue to command a third of global GDP as it did immediately after the Second World War—particularly since much of the observed decline was the result of deliberate efforts by the United States to bolster its allies in western Europe and east Asia through the Marshall Plan and other initiatives.59 What is rather remarkable is that, even with the rise of non-allies such as China, America's share of world GDP has stabilized around a quarter and continues to be nearly twice as large as China's share. Second, as also shown in figure 1, US commercial capability aggregated into its combined share of world exports and imports—trade—is slightly higher than China's. But exports and imports are not the best way to measure commercial prowess, because the contemporary web of production globalizes manufacturing. Owing to global supply chains, imported final goods include intermediate inputs and technology produced and developed in the United States that do not show up as exports but nonetheless provide American jobs and income. And when exporting final goods, US firms depend on low trade barriers to import low-cost intermediate inputs. The United States' ability to spread production worldwide has been accompanied by long-term rising trends in numbers of foreign affiliates, value added and net income, generating significant profits for the United States.60 As shown in figure 1, the aggregate value of US companies far exceeds that of any other country.? Figure 1:? Great Power production and commercial capability, 2016? View largeDownload slide? Great Power production and commercial capability, 2016? Figure 2:? Great Power financial and military capability, 2016? View largeDownload slide? Great Power financial and military capability, 2016? Third, few assessments compare the relative financial capabilities of Great Powers. Studies often favour narrow definitions of financial power over broader assessments. Some focus on the relative size of US financial markets, some on financial networks, some on reserve currency issuance, but few provide an aggregate picture.61 These incomplete portrayals lead to gross underestimation of US financial power.62 As shown in figure 2, US financial markets account for slightly more than a quarter of the global total, and US reserve currency provision far surpasses that of any other state or states, and that of the eurozone.? Fourth, as also demonstrated in figure 2, the United States is the world's most formidable military power, its capabilities far exceeding those of any other nation. Taking into account front-line capabilities on the ground, on the sea and in the air, as well as the capacity for reconnaissance, strategic transport and communication to project power, the United States has no rival.63? The United States' multidimensional power base clearly puts it in a class above rival powers. Yet its privileged position in the international system is even greater than what these snapshot barometers indicate, because significant synergies exist between the various dimensions.64? US security dominance supports US commercial and monetary dominance, and its commercial and monetary dominance are mutually supportive. First, by providing security guarantees, stabilizing hot-spots and securing sea lanes, the United States ensures that international trade and finance can occur without disruption. This is of great value to the United States itself because, as the world's single largest economy, it has a high stake in guaranteeing stable economic relations. Second, propping up the financial realm, America's vast security network provides incentives for allies to continue supporting the dollar's role as the number one global currency.65 Third, the dollar's global role gives the United States the capacity to borrow at exceptionally low rates, providing it with extraordinary macroeconomic flexibility to ease balance of payments adjustments, particularly trade adjustments.66 Fourth, America's commercial position bolsters the dollar's global role by facilitating trade adjustment as governments, particularly in emerging markets, continue to finance US deficits by holding dollar assets in the hope of gaining continued access to US markets.67? ‘America first’ promises to touch all of these areas, overhauling longstanding US policies in the security, commercial and monetary spheres. But its real menace lies in its potential for sparking drastic changes by overturning policies in just one sphere. If the United States ceases to defend allies, and reduces its commitment to secure the international environment, cross-border trade and investment will operate in a more uncertain setting. While it is impossible to predict which policy is most likely to unleash an unfavourable chain of events, a hypothetical example can be used to illustrate the presumptive cascade. If we assume the United States follows through with significant commercial retreat, then we should expect monetary consequences. With the United States ceasing to account for a significant portion of international trade, official and private investors will increasingly hold alternative currencies for reserves and payment. If the diversification out of dollars is substantial, the dollar could gradually lose its centrality in the monetary order, complicating the adjustment of US trade imbalances. Balance of payments difficulties could very well ricochet back in the monetary sphere, with a crisis of confidence over trade imbalances triggering a run on the dollar. With the dollar under pressure, its international role for governments and private actors could come into question. If the dollar is no longer widely used for reserves and payments, US financial markets will lose importance relative to other financial markets. A diminished role for US financial markets implies lower demand for US assets, raising US borrowing costs. And the loss of US borrowing privileges will have security ramifications, since financing US military power will become more expensive.68 With these developments, America's slippage in the ranks of Great Powers will be assured.? The real liberal dilemma? President Trump misidentifies the nature of the redistribution problem confronting America, misinterpreting unequal internal redistribution as unequal external redistribution. The liberal dilemma is not that the LIO distributes gains unfavourably to the United States, but that not everyone in the United States wins because US domestic policies have not kept pace with global economic integration. Economic globalization can deepen domestic inequality. Import competition causes some sectors to shrink, and workers employed in contracting sectors may not be fully absorbed in expanding sectors. Neo-classical trade theory predicts that economic activity will increase in the sector using the country's abundant factor since its reward will increase relative to that of the scarce factor.69 In the case of an advanced capital-abundant country such as the United States, this means that the reward to capital will increase relative to labour. Financial globalization has even more acute effects on the distribution of income, further raising the reward to capital relative to labour.70 However, since suspending international economic exchange reduces national welfare gains, countries are better off expanding the pie, and compensating losers with the higher gains available from economic globalization. The United States needs to bring back ‘embedded liberalism’ to redistribute benefits from openness through greater safeguards and labour adjustment programmes, including trade adjustment, so that the LIO can begin to work for all Americans.71? Dissatisfaction with the international distribution of income is, however, insufficient to explain the backlash against globalization. President Trump correctly identified the liberal dilemma inside the United States as the clash between liberal ideals and the preservation of a racial hierarchy which put ‘white America first’—a contradiction which has resulted in a racial and educational divide at the ballot box.72 To fully understand waning American support for the LIO, one must look to the unravelling of America's liberal identity as a principal cause of the less secure domestic foundations of the LIO. Some elements of America's liberal identity, such as ‘political democracy, constitutional government, individual rights [and] private property based economic systems’, remain intact. However, other elements, such as ‘toleration of diversity in non-civic areas of ethnicity and religion’ are in jeopardy.73 In fomenting an ‘us and them’ division between Americans and foreigners alleged to be exploiting the United States, and by stoking an internal division between Americans of different ethnicities and faiths, Trump unveiled an international and domestic hierarchy that some thought no longer existed. How did these factors intermingle with income inequality in the 2016 US elections?? The extent of inequality in the United States? Income inequality in the United States has increased since the late 1960s. By 2015, the top 5 per cent earned 28 times as much, and the top 20 per cent 16 times as much, as the lowest 20 per cent of Americans. This share has risen over time irrespective of the incumbent president's party affiliation, as shown in figure 3, which traces this development back to the late 1970s. Below I use mean income data from the US Census Bureau to discern the effect of income inequality on different ethnic groups. Ideally, this analysis would be performed using median income data, but this is not consistently available across all measures of interest.74? Figure 3:? Income inequality between the top and bottom income earners in the United States, 1978–2016? View largeDownload slide? Income inequality between the top and bottom income earners in the United States, 1978–2016? Concerns about income may have loomed large in the 2016 presidential elections. It could be, for instance, that by 2016 income inequality in the United States had reached a tipping point, a level that Americans were no longer prepared to tolerate. The only vote margin—that is, the difference in percentage of votes between Republicans and Democrats—that was consistently and substantially different from those in the 2008 and 2012 elections was the margin for those earning less than US$50,000 a year. Although this group—arguably the most affected by the widening income gap—still supported the Democratic candidate overall (though to a lesser extent than in the two previous elections), the margin between the Democratic and Republican votes narrowed to 12 points from 22 points in 2008 and 2012. The margins for higher-income groups were not as wide, nor were they significantly different from the levels recorded in the 2008 and 2012 elections. In an anti-establishment election, factors other than income, such as Clinton's ‘elitism’, might have been a liability. But the unfavourable opinion of Clinton (81 per cent) was less strong among those who voted for Trump than disapproval of former President Obama (89 per cent).75 It is, however, possible that dissatisfaction with Clinton was greater within the group earning under US$50,000.? While income did matter in the 2016 election, it was not, on its own, the most important predictor of the outcome. As shown in figures 4 and 5, income did play a role, but primarily as it intersected with other factors, particularly education and colour.76 In the following paragraphs I consider the income growth of non-college-educated whites relative to college-educated whites; and the absolute income (including income growth) of non-college-educated whites relative to the overall non-college-educated population.? Figure 4:? Income growth among US citizens with education below college degree level, 1998–2016? View largeDownload slide? Income growth among US citizens with education below college degree level, 1998–2016? Figure 5:? Income growth among US citizens with education above college degree level, 1998–2016? View largeDownload slide? Income growth among US citizens with education above college degree level, 1998–2016? In 2016, white voters without a college degree voted for Trump (66 per cent) with much higher percentages than in 2012 (61 per cent) and 2008 (58 per cent), and with much higher margins (see figure 4). But white voters without a college degree (both those with and those without a high school diploma) supported Trump despite experiencing greater income growth during the full span of Obama's presidency than any other white group defined by educational level. Their income expansion was also stronger than any other education group during Obama's second term (2012–2016). However, during Obama's first term (2008–2012), their income did not grow as fast as that of white Americans with advanced degrees, although they did better than those with an associate (i.e. two-year college) degree or bachelor's degree. Despite stronger income development than college-educated income earners, whites without a college degree voted for Trump with a 37-point margin, whereas whites with a college degree favoured Trump with only a 3-point margin. Although these numbers suggest that something other than income explains Trump's victory, it could still be that the higher margins for white voters without college degrees reflect discontent with low real incomes.? If low real incomes explain Trump's support among white voters without college degrees, we should find general support for Trump among voters with low real incomes. However, since 1998 the mean income of whites without college degrees has always been higher than the mean income of all those without college degrees. If their income remained higher, was their income growth slower? During the full length of Obama's presidency, and during his first term, whites without a college degree experienced higher growth than all income earners without a college degree. Only during Obama's second term did the mean income of whites without a college degree underperform the income of all earners without a college degree. The growth differential between the two groups during this period,77 however, is quite small, for both those with and those without a high school diploma: the mean income of workers without a high school diploma increased by 13.41 per cent, compared to 12.99 per cent growth for whites without a high school diploma. The mean income of all workers with a high school diploma increased by 5.73 per cent; of whites with a high-school diploma, by 5.60 per cent. It is noteworthy that during Obama's second term the overall mean income of all earners with a college degree increased less than for whites with a college degree. The biggest difference was for whites with an advanced degree, who earned US$1,394 a year less than the mean income of all recipients of advanced degrees. Yet despite slower income growth, white college graduates were disinclined to vote Republican in the 2016 elections (see figure 5).? If dissatisfaction with income played a role in explaining why white voters without a college degree endorsed Trump, the only evidence for it is the relatively lower income growth of white earners without college degrees compared to all earners without college degrees between 2012 and 2015. Disaggregating the income differential for non-college-educated whites, those without a high-school diploma experienced 0.43 per cent lower income growth, and those with a diploma 0.13 per cent lower income growth, than all non-college-educated earners within the corresponding educational group. It is highly unlikely that these small percentage differences explain why whites without a college degree favoured Trump with a 37-point margin whereas all earners without a college degree favoured Trump with only a 7-point margin.? If income mattered only in conjunction with education and colour in the 2016 elections, income might have been more decisive in distressed regions. One of the biggest surprises in the 2016 presidential election was how the Democrats lost the ‘blue wall’ states in the ‘Rust Belt’—Pennsylvania in the north-east; Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan and Ohio in the mid-west. The Democrats also lost Florida in the south, a traditionally Republican state, which Obama won in 2008 and 2012.? Declining employment and income are said to have contributed to support for Trump in conventionally Democratic states. But there are several problems with this explanation. While the decline in the mid-west is real, it has been in the making for a very long time. During the Obama years, specifically between 2008 and 2016, income in the mid-west rose more sharply than in all other regions. During Obama's second term, both white and overall income growth was stronger in the mid-west than in any other region. Yet the Republican vote exceeded the Democratic vote in the mid-west by the second-highest margin of any region (see figure 6). Moreover, during the same period, income growth for whites was higher than for all ethnic groups combined; and yet whites in the mid-west voted Republican by a margin of 20 points, compared to a margin of 5 points for the region overall. However, during Obama's second term, white income growth in the mid-west was lower than in all other regions except for the west. Overall income growth was worse in the mid-west than in all other regions. Yet the white margin in favour of Trump was stronger in the mid-west (20 points) than in the west (5 points), and the overall margin in favour of Trump in the mid-west (5 points) was considerably lower than for whites in the mid-west (20 points).? Figure 6:? Income growth by region and race, 1998–2015? View largeDownload slide? Income growth by region and race, 1998–2015? Given the higher proportion of whites in the mid-west (76 per cent) than nationally (61 per cent), and the higher number of voters in the region aged over 25 years without a college degree (71 per cent) than nationally (55 per cent),78 it is likely that factors of education, colour and income combine to explain the level of support for Trump in 2016.? In the 2016 election, racial polarization, as measured by the difference between white and non-white preferences for Trump, was highest in the south, second to highest in the mid-west and north-east, and lowest in the west. These cleavages were most apparent in the south and mid-west. White voters were aligned with Trump in the south (67 per cent) and the mid-west (57 per cent), non-white voters with Clinton in the south (77 per cent) and mid-west (75 per cent).? Racially differentiated voting patterns do not necessarily mean that voting is racially motivated. It could be that whites are generally more conservative on a range of issues and that their views were therefore better aligned with the policies espoused by the Republican than the Democratic candidate. Yet that would not explain why so many white college-educated voters fled the Republican presidential nominee in 2016 (see figure 5). Rather, there exists some evidence that racist attitudes encouraged a portion of the white electorate to align with Trump. For example, 80 per cent of white evangelical Christians supported Trump.79 Their vote is important because although they account for a lower share of the population today (17 per cent) than in 2008 (21 per cent), they still account for 26 per cent of the vote because a lot of them turn out to vote.80 Their high proportion of the vote suggests that racism might have been a relevant issue. In the months before the elections, a non-partisan study by the American Values Atlas revealed that white evangelicals were less likely to perceive discrimination against blacks, with only 36 per cent saying blacks were discriminated against ‘a lot’, compared to the national average of 57 per cent.81? Trump and the liberal playbook? In 2016, socio-cultural fissures within the United States played a critical role in the election of the presidential candidate most disparaging of the LIO. Trump's call to put America ‘first’ internationally, and white Christians ‘first’ domestically, resonated with non-college-educated white voters who saw their historic privileges fading. Not all grievances were racially motivated; certainly, some poorer non-college-educated whites compared their present situation unfavourably with the rosier circumstances of their families' past.82? The relationship between education and race was first noted over seven decades ago. Gunnar Myrdal's 1944 book An American dilemma was famously cited in the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), and helped desegregate education in the United States by demonstrating that education could not be separate but equal for blacks.83 Myrdal went further, calling for an ‘educational offensive against racial intolerance’ and the forging of an ‘American creed’, a civic culture with equal rights for all Americans, to overcome the contradiction between American liberal ideals and the reality of racial discrimination.84? Since then, great progress has been made. Blacks, and other minorities, in the United States are equal before the law and have equal political rights, and greater social and economic opportunities, than before. Education has no doubt played a significant role in reducing explicit racist behaviour or individual racism, that is, ‘overt acts by individuals, which cause death, injury or the violent destruction of property’.85 But discrimination is a problem beyond what most people would recognize as specific instances of racist behaviour. Institutional racism is a ‘less overt, far more subtle, less identifiable’ form of racism, which ‘originates in the operation of established and respected forces in society’.86 The concept of white privilege is the flip side of institutional racism and refers to the unearned benefits enjoyed as a result of being white.87 The concept is not intended to mean that every white person is ‘privileged’ or that no other form of privilege exists. It is intended to expose the existence of an implicit racial hierarchy in society and the political, economic and legal inequality which it reproduces.88 Attempts to attenuate white privilege are met with suspicion and opposition by those who benefit from it. For example, today a majority of white Americans (55 per cent) believe they are discriminated against, and nearly half of them (26 per cent) attribute this to US ‘laws and government policies’.89 Whites who believe they face institutional racism are unlikely to see a difference between policies designed to reduce unmerited privileges and policies that reduce merited privileges. They are also unlikely to appreciate how restrictive the scope for affirmative action is. For example, in the case of university admissions policies, quotas have been unconstitutional since the 1978 Supreme Court decision in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke. Many states even forbid the use of race in admissions procedures. Where states do permit the use of race, it may be used only as one criterion in promoting diversity, and only if all other methods fail, as laid down in the 2013 Supreme Court decision in Fisher v. University of Texas.? The political scientist and public intellectual Walter Russell Mead has explained the 2016 election outcome as a ‘Jacksonian revolt’ in which many ‘white Americans find themselves in a society that talks constantly about the importance of identity, that values ethnic authenticity, that offers economic benefits and social advantages based on identity—for everybody but them’.90 Another political scientist, Mark Lilla, proposes an end to identity politics as a way to secure broader support for liberal policies.91 I agree with Mead that identity politics cannot be unilateral, and I agree with Lilla that the American habit of categorizing individuals according to essentialist criteria is contrary to liberal principles. But I am not sure either of them would agree that there has been an essentialist identity politics in the United States, going back at least to the eighteenth century, constructed around the primacy of a white American identity of European Christian descent. Reactions against this unspoken identity politics lay beneath claims of institutional racism long before Trump gave voice to a ‘white America first’ policy at home.? College-educated white Americans are more likely to recognize the advantages attached to being white (47 per cent) than white Americans without college degrees (17 per cent).92 A possible reason for this is that higher education fosters liberal attitudes, and provides exposure to different ethnic groups, limiting blatant forms of racism.93 But even though college-educated whites are less inclined to vote for their privilege, and more prepared to see their privilege, there is plenty of room in the liberal playbook for race-based discrimination. There's a playbook in force that liberals are supposed to follow. The playbook prescribes responses to different forms of racism, and these responses tend to be outraged responses. When no colleague or friend is threatened by charges of racism, the playbook works. But the playbook can also be a trap leading to bad decisions because discriminatory practices often implicate someone's colleague, friend, family or wider community. The trap is especially pernicious in higher education, where people tend to overestimate their liberal inclinations, and where opportunities, support and intellectual attribution are largely network-based.94 It is therefore unsurprising that a higher percentage of college-educated blacks (55 per cent) say they have been disadvantaged by their race than non-college-educated blacks (29 per cent). An even higher percentage of all blacks (81 per cent) who at some point attended college say they were treated differently because of their race: perhaps an overlooked factor in the reasons why blacks are less likely to finish college.95? In addition to the different experiences and beliefs about race to which education gives rise, a partisan divide exists, with Republicans (43 per cent) more likely than Democrats (27 per cent) to say whites, rather than blacks, experience a lot of discrimination.96 Only 37 per cent of Republicans (against 76 per cent of Democrats) say racism is a problem.97 Attitudes towards blacks also extend to other groups. From the 2016 exit polls, we know that Trump voters were more likely to support a wall along the Mexican border (85 per cent) than Clinton voters (10 per cent), to support deportation of illegal immigrants (83 per cent vs 14 per cent) and view immigration as the most pressing problem for the country (64 per cent vs 33 per cent).98? Overall, the evidence presented in this article suggests not only that education and race were strong predictors of the 2016 presidential vote, but that racism was a contributing factor.? Summary and conclusion? Trump did not create angst about America's dominant position in the world, or about white America's dominant position vis-à-vis other ethnic groups, but he tapped into these two currents more unabashedly than any other presidential candidate in postwar history. This article deconstructs ‘America first’ into two components, an international component and a domestic component, which share common symptoms (lost greatness) and common remedies (redistribution).? In the first two sections of this article, I discussed the international component, and how ‘America first’ threatens to undermine the LIO. I showed how ‘America first’ reflects concerns about American decline and American overextension in three areas: the security, trade and monetary spheres. A common theme in this narrative is how the United States is being exploited by other countries, and how disengaging from the LIO presents a better path forward. In the security area, the world should no longer count on the US to act as global policeman or to tolerate unfair burden-sharing within security alliances. In trade, the US will no longer stand by as other countries free-ride on America's openness. In the monetary realm, the dollar's global role is not as good as gold. While Trump's views on the LIO are quite idiosyncratic, and have yet to be fully implemented, declinists and proponents of retrenchment share certain aspects of this outlook.? In opposition to this perspective, I have provided broad-based metrics demonstrating that the United States remains by a long way the leading state in the world today, and argued that it would be a lot worse off under alternatives to the LIO than it has been in the postwar era and is today. A counterfactual setting, where the United States does not provide international security, would be a more uncertain and more economically fragile one, with more limited commerce and investment. A United States of America in which the commercial and financial playing field, including the dollar's role, no longer spans the globe, but is domestically confined, will reduce US prosperity and geopolitical reach. Yet there is a growing sense, correctly identified by President Trump, that America's global engagement is not benefiting all Americans.Trump can't unilaterally dismantle hegemony---administrative personnel will sustain the grand strategyLayne, 17 - University Distinguished Professor of International Affairs, and Robert M. Gates Chair in National Security, at Texas A & M University (Christopher, "The Big Forces of History," American Conservative, 2-10-2017, )Taken together, Trump’s campaign statements about foreign policy did not add up to a new vision of American grand strategy. At best, they were impressionistic, a series of hints at what a Trump administration might do rather than a road map. Moreover, some of Trump’s foreign-policy views were contradictory. How, for example, could he lead America out of the Middle East quagmire while demonstrating unrestrained bellicosity toward Iran? But whatever Trump’s jumbled foreign-policy pronouncements will add up to in policy terms, they did not signal a “neo-isolationist” foreign policy, as many of his critics have alleged. It’s always wise to be skeptical when the “I” word is injected into debates about U.S. grand strategy; usually it signals a desire to stifle debate. In fact, America has always been deeply connected with the world economically and culturally, even when it chose to remain aloof from great power conflicts abroad. So what really is meant when the term “isolationism” is invoked with respect to a specific set of grand-strategic proposals? University of Pennsylvania diplomatic historian Walter A. McDougall expressed it well in his book, Promised Land, Crusader State. Isolationism is a term of opprobrium—“a dirty word that interventionists, especially since Pearl Harbor, hurl at anyone who questions their policies.” It’s still true today, when America Firsters of 1940–41 are lumped with Charles A. Lindbergh as either overt Nazi sympathizers or as fellow travelers. Susan Dunn’s 2014 book, 1940: FDR, Willkie, Lindbergh, and Hitler—The Election Amid the Storm, is an especially egregious example. In fact, most of those who believed in non-intervention in the European war in 1940–41 had sound strategic and national-interest reasons for doing so. Britain and the Soviet Union (with the help of U.S. economic support and war materiel) were tying down Nazi Germany. At the same time, geography and rapidly increasing American naval and air power effectively insulated North America from German attack. Of course, the received wisdom is that the United States was drawn into World War II because its “isolationist” policy failed. This is false. In fact, the U.S. became involved in the war because it was not isolationist enough. Far from taking a hands-off stance in 1940–41, the United States actively opposed Japan’s ambitions to become the hegemon of its own region, East Asia. American policymakers knew full well that U.S. policies toward Japan—including a crippling oil embargo—could culminate in war between the United States and Japan. Washington nevertheless deliberately ran that risk. The result was Pearl Harbor. Thus can we see that sometimes, despite the pejorative name-calling, non-interventionism (restraint, offshore balancing, even neo-isolationism, if one wants to call it that) can be a good grand strategy that keeps the United States from spilling its blood and treasure in otherwise avoidable wars of choice. Will this be Trump’s outlook and strategy? Apparently perceiving that America’s “unipolar moment” is a thing of the past, he offered a tantalizing hint that America’s “neo-isolationist moment” might be just around the corner. Specifically, his campaign comments at the least suggested that a Trump administration would recalibrate America’s alliances in Europe and East Asia, pursue rapprochement with Moscow, and curtail U.S. involvement in the Middle East. But this shouldn’t be overblown. True, Trump’s advisers want America’s European and East Asian partners to pick up more of the slack with respect to defense. But this is a purely transactional concern—over who pays how much for defense. America’s foreign-policy establishment has been wrestling with burden-sharing issues for decades, dating back almost to NATO’s beginning. And Trump’s foreign-policy team doesn’t include people who seem inclined to fundamentally rethink America’s alliance commitments. Nor is there any indication that Trump’s senior appointees share his desire to heal Washington’s relations with the Kremlin. On the contrary, they view Russia through a Cold War lens. Nor is there any reason to believe that any of his senior appointees will pick up on Trump’s suggestion that South Korea and Japan should provide their own nuclear deterrence instead of relying on the American nuclear shield. Far from disengaging from the Mideast quicksand, many key members of the Trump national-security team seem bent on plunging the United States even more deeply into the region. Indeed some, such as National Security Adviser-designate Michael Flynn, are champing at the bit to trigger a civilizational war between the United States and the Islamic world. By the same token, there is no sign that any senior Trump appointee dissents from the idea of American exceptionalism, or questions whether the United States is the world’s “indispensable nation.” In other words, the senior foreign- and defense-policy figures in the Trump administration are very much in the mold of the foreign-policy establishment types who have staffed every administration since FDR’s. There is a big reason why America’s grand strategy under Trump probably will not break in any significant way with the establishment’s post-1945 foreign-policy consensus. Even if Trump wanted to redirect U.S. grand strategy along the lines of offshore balancing and restraint, it would be nearly impossible for him to do so. Policy is decided by personnel, and there just aren’t enough qualified non-interventionist realists to fill the key positions at the assistant secretary, deputy assistant secretary, and NSC staff levels of an administration.US hegemony goodUS heg is key to restraint – aff causes entanglement, lashout, transition warMichael Beckley 15, research fellow in the International Security Program at Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs., “The Myth of Entangling Alliances Michael Beckley Reassessing the Security Risks of U.S. Defense Pacts”, finding that U.S. entanglement is rare has important implications for international relations scholarship and U.S. foreign policy. For scholars, it casts doubt on classic theories of imperial overstretch in which great powers exhaust their resources by accumulating allies that free ride on their protection and embroil them in military quagmires.22 The U.S. experience instead suggests that great powers can dictate the terms of their security commitments and that allies often help their great power protectors avoid strategic overextension. For policy, the rarity of U.S. entanglement suggests that the United States’ current grand strategy of deep engagement, which is centered on a network of standing alliances, does not preclude, and may even facilitate, U.S. military restraint. Since 1945 the United States has been, by some measures, the most militarily active state in the world. The most egregious cases of U.S. overreach, however, have stemmed not from entangling alliances, but from the penchant of American leaders to define national interests expansively, to overestimate the magnitude of foreign threats, and to underestimate the costs of military intervention. Scrapping alliances will not correct these bad habits. In fact, disengaging from alliances may unleash the United States to intervene recklessly abroad while leaving it without partners to share the burden when those interventions go awry.U.S. hegemony is vital to global stability --- decline causes nuclear great power war --- best scholarship provesBrooks, Ikenberry, and Wohlforth 13 (Stephen, Associate Professor of Government at Dartmouth College, John Ikenberry is the Albert G. Milbank Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University in the Department of Politics and the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, William C. Wohlforth is the Daniel Webster Professor in the Department of Government at Dartmouth College “Don’t Come Home America: The Case Against Retrenchment,” International Security, Vol. 37, No. 3 (Winter 2012/13), pp. 7–51)A core premise of deep engagement is that it prevents the emergence of a far more dangerous global security environment. For one thing, as noted above, the United States’ overseas presence gives it the leverage to restrain partners from taking provocative action. Perhaps more important, its core alliance commitments also deter states with aspirations to regional hegemony from contemplating expansion and make its partners more secure, reducing their incentive to adopt solutions to their security problems that threaten others and thus stoke security dilemmas. The contention that engaged U.S. power dampens the baleful effects of anarchy is consistent with influential variants of realist theory. Indeed, arguably the scariest portrayal of the war-prone world that would emerge absent the “American Pacifier” is provided in the works of John Mearsheimer, who forecasts dangerous multipolar regions replete with security competition, arms races, nuclear proliferation and associated preventive war temptations, regional rivalries, and even runs at regional hegemony and full-scale great power war. 72 How do retrenchment advocates, the bulk of whom are realists, discount this benefit? Their arguments are complicated, but two capture most of the variation: (1) U.S. security guarantees are not necessary to prevent dangerous rivalries and conflict in Eurasia; or (2) prevention of rivalry and conflict in Eurasia is not a U.S. interest. Each response is connected to a different theory or set of theories, which makes sense given that the whole debate hinges on a complex future counterfactual (what would happen to Eurasia’s security setting if the United States truly disengaged?). Although a certain answer is impossible, each of these responses is nonetheless a weaker argument for retrenchment than advocates acknowledge. The first response flows from defensive realism as well as other international relations theories that discount the conflict-generating potential of anarchy under contemporary conditions. 73 Defensive realists maintain that the high expected costs of territorial conquest, defense dominance, and an array of policies and practices that can be used credibly to signal benign intent, mean that Eurasia’s major states could manage regional multipolarity peacefully without the American pacifier. Retrenchment would be a bet on this scholarship, particularly in regions where the kinds of stabilizers that nonrealist theories point to—such as democratic governance or dense institutional linkages—are either absent or weakly present. There are three other major bodies of scholarship, however, that might give decisionmakers pause before making this bet. First is regional expertise. Needless to say, there is no consensus on the net security effects of U.S. withdrawal. Regarding each region, there are optimists and pessimists. Few experts expect a return of intense great power competition in a post-American Europe, but many doubt European governments will pay the political costs of increased EU defense cooperation and the budgetary costs of increasing military outlays. 74 The result might be a Europe that is incapable of securing itself from various threats that could be destabilizing within the region and beyond (e.g., a regional conflict akin to the 1990s Balkan wars), lacks capacity for global security missions in which U.S. leaders might want European participation, and is vulnerable to the influence of outside rising powers. What about the other parts of Eurasia where the United States has a substantial military presence? Regarding the Middle East, the balance begins to swing toward pessimists concerned that states currently backed by Washington— notably Israel, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia—might take actions upon U.S. retrenchment that would intensify security dilemmas. And concerning East Asia, pessimism regarding the region’s prospects without the American pacifier is pronounced. Arguably the principal concern expressed by area experts is that Japan and South Korea are likely to obtain a nuclear capacity and increase their military commitments, which could stoke a destabilizing reaction from China. It is notable that during the Cold War, both South Korea and Taiwan moved to obtain a nuclear weapons capacity and were only constrained from doing so by a still-engaged United States. 75 The second body of scholarship casting doubt on the bet on defensive realism’s sanguine portrayal is all of the research that undermines its conception of state preferences. Defensive realism’s optimism about what would happen if the United States retrenched is very much dependent on its particular—and highly restrictive—assumption about state preferences; once we relax this assumption, then much of its basis for optimism vanishes. Specifically, the prediction of post-American tranquility throughout Eurasia rests on the assumption that security is the only relevant state preference, with security defined narrowly in terms of protection from violent external attacks on the homeland. Under that assumption, the security problem is largely solved as soon as offense and defense are clearly distinguishable, and offense is extremely expensive relative to defense. Burgeoning research across the social and other sciences, however, undermines that core assumption: states have preferences not only for security but also for prestige, status, and other aims, and they engage in trade-offs among the various objectives. 76 In addition, they define security not just in terms of territorial protection but in view of many and varied milieu goals. It follows that even states that are relatively secure may nevertheless engage in highly competitive behavior. Empirical studies show that this is indeed sometimes the case. 77 In sum, a bet on a benign postretrenchment Eurasia is a bet that leaders of major countries will never allow these nonsecurity preferences to influence their strategic choices. To the degree that these bodies of scholarly knowledge have predictive leverage, U.S. retrenchment would result in a significant deterioration in the security environment in at least some of the world’s key regions. We have already mentioned the third, even more alarming body of scholarship. Offensive realism predicts that the withdrawal of the American pacifier will yield either a competitive regional multipolarity complete with associated insecurity, arms racing, crisis instability, nuclear proliferation, and the like, or bids for regional hegemony, which may be beyond the capacity of local great powers to contain (and which in any case would generate intensely competitive behavior, possibly including regional great power war). Hence it is unsurprising that retrenchment advocates are prone to focus on the second argument noted above: that avoiding wars and security dilemmas in the world’s core regions is not a U.S. national interest. Few doubt that the United States could survive the return of insecurity and conflict among Eurasian powers, but at what cost? Much of the work in this area has focused on the economic externalities of a renewed threat of insecurity and war, which we discuss below. Focusing on the pure security ramifications, there are two main reasons why decisionmakers may be rationally reluctant to run the retrenchment experiment. First, overall higher levels of conflict make the world a more dangerous place. Were Eurasia to return to higher levels of interstate military competition, one would see overall higher levels of military spending and innovation and a higher likelihood of competitive regional proxy wars and arming of client states—all of which would be concerning, in part because it would promote a faster diffusion of military power away from the United States. Greater regional insecurity could well feed proliferation cascades, as states such as Egypt, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Saudi Arabia all might choose to create nuclear forces. 78 It is unlikely that proliferation decisions by any of these actors would be the end of the game: they would likely generate pressure locally for more proliferation. Following Kenneth Waltz, many retrenchment advocates are proliferation optimists, assuming that nuclear deterrence solves the security problem. 79 Usually carried out in dyadic terms, the debate over the stability of proliferation changes as the numbers go up. Proliferation optimism rests on assumptions of rationality and narrow security preferences. In social science, however, such assumptions are inevitably probabilistic. Optimists assume that most states are led by rational leaders, most will overcome organizational problems and resist the temptation to preempt before feared neighbors nuclearize, and most pursue only security and are risk averse. Confidence in such probabilistic assumptions declines if the world were to move from nine to twenty, thirty, or forty nuclear states. In addition, many of the other dangers noted by analysts who are concerned about the destabilizing effects of nuclear proliferation—including the risk of accidents and the prospects that some new nuclear powers will not have truly survivable forces—seem prone to go up as the number of nuclear powers grows. 80 Moreover, the risk of “unforeseen crisis dynamics” that could spin out of control is also higher as the number of nuclear powers increases. Finally, add to these concerns the enhanced danger of nuclear leakage, and a world with overall higher levels of security competition becomes yet more worrisome. The argument that maintaining Eurasian peace is not a U.S. interest faces a second problem. On widely accepted realist assumptions, acknowledging that U.S. engagement preserves peace dramatically narrows the difference between retrenchment and deep engagement. For many supporters of retrenchment, the optimal strategy for a power such as the United States, which has attained regional hegemony and is separated from other great powers by oceans, is offshore balancing: stay over the horizon and “pass the buck” to local powers to do the dangerous work of counterbalancing any local rising power. The United States should commit to onshore balancing only when local balancing is likely to fail and a great power appears to be a credible contender for regional hegemony, as in the cases of Germany, Japan, and the Soviet Union in the midtwentieth century. The problem is that China’s rise puts the possibility of its attaining regional hegemony on the table, at least in the medium to long term. As Mearsheimer notes, “The United States will have to play a key role in countering China, because its Asian neighbors are not strong enough to do it by themselves.” 81 Therefore, unless China’s rise stalls, “the United States is likely to act toward China similar to the way it behaved toward the Soviet Union during the Cold War.” 82 It follows that the United States should take no action that would compromise its capacity to move to onshore balancing in the future. It will need to maintain key alliance relationships in Asia as well as the formidably expensive military capacity to intervene there. The implication is to get out of Iraq and Afghanistan, reduce the presence in Europe, and pivot to Asia— just what the United States is doing. 83 In sum, the argument that U.S. security commitments are unnecessary for peace is countered by a lot of scholarship, including highly influential realist scholarship. In addition, the argument that Eurasian peace is unnecessary for U.S. security is weakened by the potential for a large number of nasty security consequences as well as the need to retain a latent onshore balancing capacity that dramatically reduces the savings retrenchment might bring. Moreover, switching between offshore and onshore balancing could well be dif?cult. Bringing together the thrust of many of the arguments discussed so far underlines the degree to which the case for retrenchment misses the underlying logic of the deep engagement strategy. By supplying reassurance, deterrence, and active management, the United States lowers security competition in the world’s key regions, thereby preventing the emergence of a hothouse atmosphere for growing new military capabilities. Alliance ties dissuade partners from ramping up and also provide leverage to prevent military transfers to potential rivals. On top of all this, the United States’ formidable military machine may deter entry by potential rivals. Current great power military expenditures as a percentage of GDP are at historical lows, and thus far other major powers have shied away from seeking to match top-end U.S. military capabilities. In addition, they have so far been careful to avoid attracting the “focused enmity” of the United States. 84 All of the world’s most modern militaries are U.S. allies (America’s alliance system of more than sixty countries now accounts for some 80 percent of global military spending), and the gap between the U.S. military capability and that of potential rivals is by many measures growing rather than shrinking. 85Only U.S. hegemony prevents global instability---alternatives can't maintain peaceHaass, 17 - President of the Council on Foreign Relations (Richard, "Who Will Fill America’s Shoes?," Project Syndicate, 6-24-2017, )Still, a shift away from a US-dominated world of structured relationships and standing institutions and toward something else is under way. What this alternative will be, however, remains largely unknowable. What we do know is that there is no alternative great power willing and able to step in and assume what had been the US role.China is a frequently mentioned candidate, but its leadership is focused mostly on consolidating domestic order and maintaining artificially high economic-growth rates to stave off popular unrest. China’s interest in regional and global institutions seems designed mostly to bolster its economy and geopolitical influence, rather than to help set rules and create broadly beneficial arrangements.Likewise, Russia is a country with a narrowly-based economy led by a government focused on retaining power at home and re-establishing Russian influence in the Middle East and Europe. India is preoccupied with the challenge of economic development and is tied down by its problematic relationship with Pakistan. Japan is held back by its declining population, domestic political and economic constraints, and its neighbors’ suspicions.Europe, for its part, is distracted by questions surrounding the relationship between member states and the European Union. As a result, the whole of the continent is less than the sum of its parts – none of which is large enough to succeed America on the world stage.But the absence of a single successor to the US does not mean that what awaits is chaos. At least in principle, the world’s most powerful countries could come together to fill America’s shoes. In practice, though, this will not happen, as these countries lack the capabilities, experience, and, above all, a consensus on what needs doing and who needs to do it. ................
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