John Mearsheimer: belief

Transcript context

…So a big component of that is making sure the US military is bigger than the Chinese military. Not necessarily. It’s an interesting question. A lot of people think that to make deterrence work, you have to be able to beat the Chinese and therefore, you need a much bigger military. And I don’t think over time that’s possible. I think it’s probably not even possible now to beat the Chinese in a war over Taiwan or in a war in the South China Sea. I think what you want to do is make it clear to the Chinese either that there will be no winner… In other words, you don’t have to win, but you want to make sure they don’t win. It’s a lose-lose proposition if they go to war over Taiwan or what have you. And if you can’t do that, you think that they’re so powerful that they’re ultimately going to win, you want to convince them that victory would be a Pyrrhic victory. In other words, they would pay a godawful price to win the war. You follow what I’m saying? So the best strategy for deterrence is you win, China loses. Second best strategy is a stalemate, nobody wins. Third best strategy is they win, but they pay a godawful price. And the fourth possibility, which you don’t want, is they went quickly and decisively. If that’s the case, then you don’t have much deterrence. What does a world with China as the sole dominant superpower look like? I mean, a little bit underlying our discussion is this kind of idea that US is the good guys and China is the bad guys. First of all, dividing the world into good guys and bad guys seems to somehow miss the nuance of this whole human civilization project we’re undertaking. But what does the world look like where China is the dominant sole superpower in a unipolar world?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.