I began working on The Tragedy of Great Power Politics shortly after the Soviet Union fell apart in late 1991 and finished it almost a decade later. During those years, many Americans, including a sizable number of academics, were quite optimistic about the future of international politics. It was widely believed that the end of the Cold War heralded a new age in which there would be no great-power wars and in which concepts like the balance of power would be irrelevant. Instead, we could expect to see increasing cooperation among states for many years to come. Realists like me were said to be on the verge of extinction, bound to go the way of the dinosaurs.
I wrote this book to challenge that hopeful view of international relations. I tried to make the case that the world remained a dangerous place and that realism continued to offer important insights about how it works. I devoted the bulk of the book, however, to developing my own theory of international politics, which differs in substantial ways from the famous realist theories of Hans Morgenthau and Kenneth Waltz. Even so, I went to some lengths to convince readers that my theory would be relevant in the twenty-first century.
It was a hard sell at first, mainly because there was still considerable optimism in the early 2000s about the state of world politics. That optimistic worldview began to fade as the Iraq war went south in 2004 and the United States found itself bogged down in losing wars in Afghanistan as well as Iraq. At the same time, it was becoming increasingly clear that America’s war on terror had no end in sight. Not surprisingly, the confidence of the 1990s has vanished almost completely and been replaced by a more pessimistic view of international politics, amid greater concern about where the United States is headed. Most Americans now understand that the world stage is packed with potential trouble spots and that solutions to those problems are hard, if not impossible, to find.
This changed outlook is understandable given that the United States has fought six wars since the Cold War ended twenty-five years ago: Iraq (1991), Serbia over Bosnia (1995), Serbia over Kosovo (1999), Afghanistan (2001–present), Iraq (2003–11), and Libya (2011). In fact, the American military has been at war for roughly two out of every three years since 1989. All of these wars, however, have been fought against minor powers. The United States has had the luxury of not having to worry about a rival great power threatening it in a serious way.
But that situation appears to be changing with the rise of China. If the Chinese economy continues to grow at a rapid clip over the next few decades, Washington will almost certainly be faced with a potential peer competitor for the first time since the Cold War. In fact, a recent survey by the Pew Research Global Attitudes Project found that, “in 23 of 39 nations, majorities or pluralities say China either already has replaced or eventually will replace the U.S. as the top superpower.”* Even in the United States, 47 percent of the surveyed respondents believe China is on its way to being number one; 47 percent disagree.
China’s rise raises an obvious question: can it happen peacefully? I addressed this issue in the first edition of Tragedy, because there was good reason by the late 1990s to think China would become an especially powerful country. I maintained that if China continued its ascent, it would build formidable military forces and try to dominate Asia the way the United States dominates the Western Hemisphere. Becoming a regional hegemon, I argued, is the best way for a country to maximize its prospects for survival. I also predicted that China’s neighbors as well as the United States would try to contain China and prevent it from becoming a regional hegemon. The ensuing security competition would make Asia an increasingly dangerous region.
Since Tragedy was published in 2001, I have given numerous talks in which I argued China’s rise would not be peaceful. Some of those talks were in China itself. And in 2004, I debated Zbigniew Brzezinski, the former national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter, on the subject.* For the first few years, I found most audiences were not persuaded by my argument, or at least they were skeptical about my claims. But that skepticism began to soften after 2008, in part because China continued to grow more powerful, but also because China began throwing its weight around in ways that frightened its neighbors as well as the United States. Today, I find audiences much more receptive to my arguments about future Sino-American relations.
Given that China’s rise is likely to be the most important event of the twenty-first century, and given the real chance that it will not be peaceful, I thought it would make sense to lay out my views in detail in a new concluding chapter to this book. Although I addressed the subject in the original conclusion, it was a somewhat cursory treatment, simply because I also covered a host of other topics in the 2001 version. Nor have I provided a broad statement of my views on China’s rise in any other writings. Thus, the new concluding chapter focuses exclusively on China and provides a comprehensive explanation of why I think there will be big trouble in Asia if China grows significantly more powerful.
Aside from this preface and the new conclusion, the remainder of the book is virtually unchanged from the first edition. Most important, I have not altered my theory of offensive realism. This decision may surprise some readers, given that the theory has been read and analyzed by a wide variety of scholars, a few of whom have offered sharp criticisms. I am gratified by the attention, and I take the criticisms—both large and small—seriously. After all, the highest compliment one scholar can pay another is to engage with his or her work in a thoughtful manner. Nevertheless, I believe that my theory has held up well in the face of these criticisms. This is not to say that the theory is perfect, or that it will not eventually be supplanted. But it is to say I remain satisfied with the theory as it is presented in the first edition of Tragedy.
In the new conclusion, I use that theory to answer a question that policymakers, scholars of all persuasions, and concerned citizens around the world are likely to pay an enormous amount of attention to in the decades ahead: can China rise peacefully? Regrettably, my answer is no.
I would like to thank eight individuals who offered extensive comments on the new conclusion and helped improve it markedly: Jessica Alms, Charles Glaser, Michael J. Reese, Marie-Eve Reny, Michael Rowley, Luke Schumacher, Yuan-Kang Wang, and especially Stephen Walt. I also presented an early version of it at a workshop sponsored by the Program on International Political Economy and Security (PIPES) at the University of Chicago. The participants offered extensive comments that were invaluable to me in preparing the final version. I deeply appreciate all this help. Of course, I bear full responsibility for any remaining problems.
Finally, I would like to thank Roby Harrington, my editor at Norton, for coming up with the idea of producing an updated edition of Tragedy. His thought was to have it come out in 2011, the book’s ten-year anniversary. But as with the original version of the book, it took me longer than I anticipated to reach the finish line. Roby has been a close friend for almost twenty-five years, and I owe him a lot. In addition, I would like to thank the editor for this updated edition, Lisa Camner McKay, who has done a superb job supervising the production of this new edition.
* “America’s Global Image Remains More Positive Than China’s: But Many See China Becoming World’s Leading Power,” Pew Research Global Attitudes Project, Washington DC, July 18, 2013.
* For an edited transcript of this debate, see Zbigniew Brzezinski and John J. Mearsheimer, “Clash of the Titans,” Foreign Policy, No. 146 (January–February 2005), pp. 46–49.