The United States and China in Power Transition - Strategic Studies ...

threat” quickly became synonymic buzzwords in the
U.S. media, academic, and policy circles.
Mearsheimer’s work came just in time to support
Bernstein and Munro’s views by providing a theoretical
explanation as to why China would be expected to
do the above-mentioned acts. The basic character of
the international system dictates that great powers behave
the way they do. In international politics, the first
requirement for a state is survival. In an international
system where states operate under anarchy (without a
higher authority above them) and each possesses offensive
capability and holds unpredictable intentions,
a state’s best bet for survival is to maximize its national
power. Great powers by nature have a higher order
of needs. Their need for survival is not merely to be
more powerful than their neighbor next door. There
is a natural tendency for them to strive to be the most
powerful nation in their own regions. The quest for
power has no end. Regional hegemons will naturally
aim for global hegemony. No regional hegemon likes
to see rival great powers dominate other regions, or
to have peers. The drive for global hegemony necessitates
a competition among the great powers. The most
common way for them to win is to increase their own
power base on the one hand, and to do everything
possible to prevent or undermine the development of
other regional hegemons on the other. 42
Following this logic, Mearsheimer argued that an
increasingly powerful China would try to dominate
Asia in much the same way the United States did in
the Western Hemisphere, and China’s next move must
be to push the United States out of Asia. Mearsheimer
would not blame China for having its own version of
the Monroe Doctrine directed at the United States—
that is what hegemonic powers do to each other. Indeed,
as Bernstein and Munro put it,
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