Rise of a Counter-Elite.

• Author: Maitra, Sumantra

Most realist international relations theories (and even most liberal ones) follow some fundamental assumptions--that the world is anarchic without a global policeman and global hegemony is unsustainable. Nation-states, the primary units of international politics, seek to survive in that anarchy. Of them, great powers are the main actors. States seeking hegemony are often balanced, as balancing is the norm. The system is amoral and Darwinian, and most hegemons overstretch and collapse, though some smart powers successfully retrench, or even "buck-pass" to other states during times of stress. Different schools of realism can, of course, claim and predict different ways on whether and how states seek survival. Some would argue that states are power maximizers, while others would argue that states are overwhelmingly security maximizers. Different schools of realism also conclude different behavior even while analyzing from the same theoretical baseline. For example, all realists agree that China is the biggest potential threat to American interests. Some might argue that the United States needs to arm Taiwan and balance China actively by facilitating an alliance network in the Asia-Pacific. Others might prefer the United States to be "offshore balancers" and buck-pass the security burden to regional powers, drawing attention to the fact that China is practically alliance-less and is surrounded by powerful and rich states (most of them ideologically aligned with the United States or opposed to potential Chinese hegemony), one with nuclear power and all with large navies. The Asia-Pacific in 2021 is dissimilar to a broken Europe in 1949, susceptible to an expansionist Soviet Union.

Regardless, all realists agree that America is a very secure great power, with a geographical advantage and hemispheric hegemony, and overwhelming aggregate power compared to peer rivals. Most top universities are in the United States, as are most top defense industrial sectors, businesses, and companies. The United States still commands the global commons and is the primary destination of trade, and while there might be trade rivals such as the EU and China, it is unlikely that there will be a great power challenger that will topple America from its perch at least in the near foreseeable future. Commensurate with the logic of realism, there are two regions that are of primary interest for American strategic security: Western Europe and the Eastern Pacific. If dominated by a rival hegemon, these regions can make the American coastline vulnerable and can result in consolidated economic power in rival hands, overwhelming American trade. In other words, these are regions where the United States did and would again do anything to prevent an expansionist hegemony of a peer rival. That said, there are no threats of Russian armor sweeping through the Belgian meadows anytime soon, nor is there any likelihood of Chinese marines landing in Japan and Australia in a war of expansion. If China starts a war with India, Taiwan, or Vietnam, it would at worst be bogged down in a gruesome war of attrition comparable to World War I, and at best be mired in a bleeding long-term counterinsurgency far worse than Iraq and Afghanistan. Either of these scenarios would almost certainly end any potential Chinese expansionism.

One of the reasons China grew so powerful is because it hasn't fought a war since 1979. Meanwhile, almost all problems that the United States currently faces are domestic, ideological, and interrelated. Primary among them are the declining education standards; activist teachers and culture war; the collapse of increasingly partisan institutions, with subsequent diminishing public trust in them; an increasingly cocooned elite out of touch with their own countrymen, leading to faulty analysis, policies, and conclusions; massive migration problems on the southern border; fraying social contract; and an ideologically neoliberal-neoconservative duopoly, most of whom are more determined to ensure women's rights in a semi-feudal backwater than solve matters like the crippling addiction problem within their own country.

While realists historically focused on human interests, modern academic realism is more aligned to structural analysis, often at the cost of ignoring domestic unit-level variables. Kenneth...