The Slowly Sinking Hegemon’s Dilemma

By Matthew Yglesias

Ezra Klein came away from our meeting at the Shanghai Institute for International Studies thinking that America’s problem with China’s rise isn’t so much that China is threatening our dominance as that China is actually declining to step up and exert influence:

[T]he more common policy conflict between America and China right now is that we want them to step up and do more on the international stage and they want to be left alone to do less. That goes for Afghanistan, global stimulus, global warming, Iran, North Korea and a host of other issues. The Chinese phrase for their approach is “Keeping a Low Profile and Taking a Proactive Role When Feasible,” and they’re putting a fair amount of effort into arguing for it.

Spencer Ackerman doesn’t see it this way:

Maybe this is a where-you-stand-is-where-you-sit question. Ezra wonks about in economics and domestic-policy circles. I wonk about in defense, intelligence and diplomacy circles. And my sense of what that slice of the public “wants” from China is accordingly different: not to challenge American power. Not in Africa. Not in the Middle East. And definitely not in the Pacific rim or Northeast Asia. When China starts spending its money on its military or sending its diplomats overseas, it doesn’t look like burden-sharing. It looks like a provocation. Just imagine if China actually offered to play a bigger role in Afghanistan.

This is one of these things where everyone is right. The issue is that the US national security establishment suffers from a bit of schizophrenia with regard to burden-sharing and you see it manifest itself in basically the same way with regard to both Europe and China. We want other major powers to “do more” to address major world problems, but at the same time we want them to just do exactly what we want whereas they want to look after their own interests. We don’t want the loss of control that would come from washing our hands of certain important situations, but we also don’t actually want to carry the load of dealing with everything ourselves.

And I think it’s more-or-less baked into the cake of the current structure of the situation that we’re going to keep banging our head against these kind of walls. The US is still by far the dominant country in the world and will continue to be the dominant country for a good long while. But with each passing year that dominance slips just a little. It’s harder and harder to play a truly hegemonic role and yet still temptingly feasible.