Unavoidable anarchy: John J. Mearsheimer on Trump’s China, Russia instincts

John J. Mearsheimer is the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, where he has taught since 1982. He has written extensively on security issues and international politics and is best known for his theory of offensive realism in international relations, which holds that to dominate the international system, great powers must constantly engage in security competition with each other, sometimes leading to war.

In this interview, Mearsheimer discusses the biggest threats to a liberal democracy, Donald Trump’s good instincts and the top need driving China’s rise to global power.

This interview first appeared in SCMP Plus. For other interviews in the Open Questions series, click here.

In terms of US-China relations, they’re going to be fundamentally competitive for the rest of this century. But I don’t think in the foreseeable future they are going to be intensely competitive. There are two reasons for that.

The first is that the United States is pinned down in the Middle East and in the war in Ukraine. It is deeply committed in both those conflicts. And that makes it very difficult for the US to pay much attention to East Asia. So the US does not want any trouble with China in East Asia.

The US understands it has a competitive relationship with China, but it does not want to have a crisis and it certainly does not want to have a conflict. Again, because the US is foolishly, in my mind, concentrating on the Middle East and on Ukraine instead of East Asia.

South China Morning Post