This blog discusses Mearsheimer’s deterministic reasoning on the order of priority between economic and security concerns, and how that led to the deterministic conclusion that China and the US must be enemies. As I pointed out in the previous blog, this is the second deterministic reasoning of Mearsheimer, following the first on the supervising entity.
The Fate of Enemies
Mearsheimer’s thinking was simple: No matter how much trade and economic exchanges China can have with the US and the world, national security concern always comes first. The latter, unlike economic exchanges, tends to be addressed by zero-sum solution, which produce a unipolar world with one country achieving global hegemony, defeating all its peer competitors.
It is interesting to see the teams arguing what the word “enemy” means. Based on Oxford dictionary, Rudd argued that enemies mean war. The other team however disagree. This time I would side with the latter. The answer is not in the dictionary but in real life. From the four US historical enemies listed by Mearsheimer, it is clear that enemies must be defeated through either military means (e.g., imperial Germany, imperial Japan & Nazi Germany) or self dissolution (e.g., the Soviet Union).
The implication is clear: China’s fate is either like Japan & Germany or the former Soviet Union. The world will end up with the US being the sole superpower.
Economic Or Security Concern, Which Comes First?
The fate of enemies does not fall from the sky, it grows out of the second core deterministic argument of Mearsheimer that always puts economic engagement after security concerns. When the two are in conflict, security concerns always win over economic engagement. Mearsheimer admitted that it is the security aspect that is rivalrous, not the economic aspect. However since nations must first survive in order to to grow economies, security competition will — and should — dominate economic interactions.
The argument does not stop there. The needs for national hegemony and for eliminating peer competitors — the need for winning a zero sum game — means the US should use any means to slow China’s economy down to preemptively weaken, if not eliminate altogether, peer competitor(s), at least reduce its threat to buy some time for the US. Effectively this makes economic concern a means for satisfying national security concern.
Back To Economics 101
There is a better way to look at the relationship between economic and security competitions, a way that makes international relationships more constructive and healthy, also a way that better reflects and aligns with reality.
The simple truth of fact is that no country has to sacrifice its economy for security, because it is not a sustainable goal or strategy — not even for countries like Israel, which faces perhaps the deadliest and hostile security environment among nations in the world. Instead, Israel has shown us how to develop a strong and sustainable economy without compromising — but rather strengthening — its security interests.
It makes little sense to argue that a country must first exist in order to grow its economy, because one can make the same argument that without taking care of economic condition a country cannot exist for too long. Its people may not die from being killed by external enemies, but likely from hunger and famine.
Economics 101, especially the famous production possibilities frontier, has long taught us that any country must trade off between economic and security concerns, and the so-called corner solutions, in which a country completely gives up “butter” to have all the “guns” or vice versa, are bad solutions and no realistic leaders should follow such a strategy. In other words, it is a waste of time to debate which one comes first. We should ask ourselves how to achieve balanced goals and how to translate one into another efficiently.
Of course, Mearsheimer was talking about international trade rather than domestic production. Yet the same logic applies to domestic and international. The premise of trade is win-win, while Mearsheimer’s security game is zero-sum. The two are incompatible. We must turn his game into win-win, by simply turning away from assuming that all countries seek global hegemony and all countries try to eliminate peer competitors. The simplest way of having a win-win security game is not to enter military conflict between China and the US!
Put differently, to answer Mearsheimer’s question from the debate what we should do if we had the hindsight of “turning the switch” before WWI, I would say the right move is to increase economic integration to cover the Balkan states. See below for more details.
Beware of Historical Telescopic Sight
Mearsheimer’s seemingly strongest example is WWI, when Germany and England were engaged in large volume of trade according to the Quora discussion. This seems to be convincing enough that even Henry Kissinger issued his warning about the US China catastrophe of the WWI scale.
Indeed, the same Quora piece cited above mentioned that “Economically, US-China and pre-WII England-Germany do share many elements, such as trade and interconnectedness.” “Nonetheless, war still precipitated. Trade does foster better international relations, but should not be viewed as an absolute deterrent to conflict.”
A great point. But it also means there is no ground to claim that security concerns always and absolutely defeat economic interests — just like trade does not offer an absolute deterrent to war. It is more balanced to say that the two concerns are intertwined; that economic concerns can become security concerns and vice versa; and most importantly that the order of priority between economic and security concerns is not fixed.
The danger of taking history out of its context is to make wrong and unreasonable predictions for the future. The danger is real, more likely when we look further back in time. Revisiting WWI is riskier than looking back at WWII, because inevitably we must rely on a telescope to see things better. All telescopes, unlike our naked eyes, have limited scope in order to draw the crucial details nearer.
It is fine for historians to issue warnings based on events of the past, because that’s their job. Leaders must be mindful of contextual difference however, and take historical warnings and analogies with a grain of salt. Historians and Karl Marx may claim that “capital comes dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt,” as indeed we saw the enclosure movement back in England in the 18th and 19th centuries, and as described in his book The Condition of England Working Class by Engels, “the Industrial Revolution made workers worse off.” and “in large industrial cities such as Manchester and Liverpool, mortality from disease (such as smallpox, measles, scarlet fever and whooping cough) was four times that in the surrounding countryside, and mortality from convulsions was ten times as high.” But can we predict capitalism will die because its original sins?
A similar example from the WWII is to predict this country will lock up all the Chinese as the rivalry between China and the US intensifies, like the government did for Japanese Americans during the WWII.
Speaking of WWI, the best discussion came from this essay in Washington Post in 2014 by two political scientists. “For decades, scholars and policymakers alike pointed to World War I as providing strong evidence against the liberal case.” But according to the authors, “these claims are exaggerated.”
The authors correctly pointed out the uneven economic ties before WWI. “Much of Western Europe belonged to a highly interdependent subsystem of states in which crises arose but were resolved peacefully. By contrast, economic interdependence was much shallower in most of Eastern Europe and parts of Central Europe. The Ottoman Empire, Serbia, Austria-Hungary, and several other newly independent Balkan states traded relatively little with each other.“
“It is no coincidence that World War I was sparked among the non-interdependent states in Eastern Europe.” The real danger is with weaker, less interdependent allies and client states. “These crises, however, produced the need for the more economically integrated countries, most importantly Germany and Russia, to demonstrate an increasing resolve to support their weaker, less interdependent, allies, Austria-Hungary and Serbia.”
Let us keep in mind that back then there were many colonies and client states. The marginal states could initiate a war and /or be pushed into a conflict simply because core countries wanted them to do. The situation is different today. First, the whole world, through the global supply chains, are integrated at an unprecedent degree. Secondly, the WWI started in Europe, which is geographically more condensed than China and the US across the Pacific, the largest ocean that contains more than twice the volume of water as the Atlantic Ocean. Thirdly, both the US and China are at the core of global integration, unlike the Balkan countries in WWI. Finally, the entire humanity has been far more “domesticated” than at the WWI, and domestic voices are increasingly stronger and diversified to prevent major miscalculation from being materialized.
Meanwhile, the key to avoid the same mistake of WWI is to avoid misjudgment of each other’s intent and not to be pulled into war by some marginal, not core, interests.
Saw the captain of the Berkeley women’s soccer team yesterday. Missed the girls very much. They are the best packages of physical and mental. None of them is likely to get into the US Olympic team but nonetheless, they lived their lives fuller than the rest of us.
Didn’t go to my second shot yesterday as I was too nervous to go alone. The good news is that now in Contra Costa county everyone above 12 can just walk in for the shot. Will go there next week when I visit my sister in Antioch to accompany her to a medical appointment.