Irregular: Does China or the US rule the world?

A debate worth having.

Representatives of Athens and Corinth at the Court of Archidamas, Hans Schaufelein, 1533, engraving, The Metropolitan Museum, New York.

Hello from Melbourne,

In today’s Irregular, I would like to share with you a transcript of a debate that Michael and I had last week at a public event in Sydney.

The topic: Does China or the United States rule the world?

We covered quite a lot of ground, comparing each country’s military strength, economic depth, record of innovation, diplomatic clout, and its overall trajectory and influence in international affairs.

We were hosted at Florence Guild, an organisation dedicated to stimulating debate. And so that’s what we tried to do. We flipped a coin to choose sides – I got saddled with arguing that the United States remains the preeminent global power, while Michael had to take up the case that China is likely already the world’s most powerful country – and even if it isn’t quite there yet, that’s where things are headed.

As a result, as in much of life, we didn’t necessarily mean everything that we said. Nevertheless, we hope you find the debate interesting and thought-provoking. And we would be very curious to hear how you land.

After all, the stakes are quite high. The United States and China shape world affairs in myriad ways that affect us all. And, as was the topic of yesterday’s Week Signals, how they deal with each other matters perhaps even more.

You can find the transcript below.

Best wishes,

Damien

Damien:

Just by way of introduction, Michael and I started a firm called Geopolitical Strategy a few years ago, advising corporates on geopolitics – something that was a bit niche until Donald Trump returned to power for a Second Coming.

But we actually met back in 2013 when we both joined the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. I recall the final question in our interview process was about how Australia should manage its relationship with the United States and China. So this is an old question and one we’ve been debating for a long time. But it’s taken on a new and important resonance because, back then, the United States was clearly much more powerful than China. Today, it’s a bit more of a close call.

The topic of tonight’s debate is “The US and China: Who Rules the World?” And I want to start by saying that clearly neither rules the world. We’re not living in Roman Empire times or in the Pax Britannica. Nor are we in the unipolar moment after the fall of the Soviet Union, when a sole superpower could do what it pleased. Clearly, we’re in a different state of affairs. So, to reframe the topic a little bit, I want to ask which country is more powerful now and which will become more powerful in the future – and what does it all mean.

So, we’re going to take turns, and then we’ll turn over to the audience for questions.

First off, it’s very easy to mistake size and power. If you were in the 1830s, asking the question “who’s more powerful: the United Kingdom or China?” you would have said China — if you were focusing on size alone. Back then, China accounted for 35% of GDP, it had more soldiers than the United Kingdom by a long way, and it was the economic centre of gravity of the world in many ways. But who was more powerful? The United Kingdom wiped the floor in both the First and the Second Opium Wars. Size, as I often get told, isn’t everything – it’s what you do with it that matters.

Fast forward to today. You can look at power in multiple dimensions. But the foundation of national power really is economic. And if you compare the American and Chinese economies today, it’s hard to view China as more powerful. In nominal terms, the United States is 55% bigger than China. In purchasing power terms – basically how much can you spend at home – China is bigger, but it can’t spend its money abroad nearly as much because of capital controls and limited use of its currency. Just as what was decisive in the Opium Wars was not economic mass but wealth – or GDP per capita, which also serves as a proxy for how technologically advanced a society is — so today America’s advantage is just how much richer it is. And on that score, the average American has about $85,000 compared to an average Chinese person having about $13,000.

Then you compare the two militarily. Here, China is significantly weaker than the United States. Both nations have enormous armies – the Chinese army has about two million men, and the Americans have about 1.3 million. So China, on that score, is bigger. China also has more naval vessels, but they are significantly less advanced when compared in “fleet tonnage”, that is, what you can do with them and how powerful they are. American ships are significantly superior in that respect. While both have aircraft carriers – important for measuring how far you can project your power – the Americans have 11, and the Chinese have, I think, three. Each nation has roughly the same number of submarines, but the American ones are almost all nuclear-powered. And as Australians, we all by now know the difference between nuclear and diesel-powered subs – they’re not just more expensive with long delivery timeframes, but they allow you to stay underwater and go a lot further undetected for a really long time. All of which gives the Americans massive naval superiority over the Chinese.

And, yes, while China is building more ships at a greater rate and they are catching up in many ways, for now, both in economic terms and in military terms – and notwithstanding any efforts at self-sabotage – the United States is predominantly and significantly more powerful on at least those two metrics than China today.

Michael:

To begin, it’s worth noting just how thin power can be and how quickly it can change.

Just think about the British Empire: the role of sterling in global currency markets and global trade was suddenly replaced by the US dollar, UK manufacturing faded equally abruptly, and decolonisation happened extremely quickly. Or take the Soviet Union, which had – right up until the end – close to parity in nuclear weapons and space technology, but then suddenly fell in a heap.

Similarly, it won’t take much for the United States’ preeminence to fade, especially with technology changing and being diffused so rapidly. To be honest, today the US doesn’t have that same lead that it had over the Soviet Union during the Cold War. In many ways, it’s behind in the key technologies. Sure, submarines matter, but as we can see in Ukraine, the ways that wars are fought today are with advanced asymmetric technologies. There’s a lot of drones on that battlefield, and many of them are made, if not entirely, at least partly in China.

The other thing about China’s power is that we are talking in 2025. We’re having this debate in Australia, in an English-speaking country, and we can very easily succumb to biases towards another English-speaking country because that’s the information system that we’re in. But imagine that you’re an alien looking at the Earth from Mars or an archaeologist from 5,000 years in the future looking at the physical evidence. Where’s all the stuff made? Who’s building the pyramids of this era? It’s the Chinese, not the Americans, both in terms of the artefacts – probably most things in this room were made in China or at least have a lot of Chinese stuff in them – and, increasingly, in terms of IP, even though American IP, of course, is embedded in a lot of things. And then in terms of intensive physical infrastructure, you only need to look at the debate that has been taking place in California over high-speed rail, which makes Australia’s many infrastructure failures look good in comparison. Then compare that to China’s infrastructure.

Now, the most common argument you get in response to this point about infrastructure is that China has too much infrastructure, as if that is somehow a problem. Maybe it is from that kind of thinking that this overload of infrastructure is coming too early. But China is a socialist state: it does have a market economy on top of that, but fundamentally, it’s the Communist Party that makes decisions. I don’t think they think that having too much infrastructure is necessarily a bad thing — and they are happy to absorb that. And this also matters if China were ever to go to war with the United States: having a lot of excess energy infrastructure will come in handy if the US tries to control maritime chokepoints.

Damien:

I’ll start by responding to the perspective of the alien looking down at Earth or the archaeologist doing excavations 5,000 years hence. This is precisely the sort of error I was talking about at the start – confusing mass and power. The pyramids are heavy, but that does not mean that Egypt was more powerful than the Roman Empire when they coexisted.

If you are comparing two sumo wrestlers, weight is really important. But international relations is more like a street fight than a sumo wrestling contest. Weight might help you a bit, but there are a lot of other physical characteristics and skills that you need to be able to win a street fight. One of them is power: your ability to move a lot quickly. Another is diplomatic skill. And in a street fight, by far the most effective strategy is to get your mates involved, to have them fight with you, and to outnumber your opponent.

On that score, to put it bluntly, China’s got no friends. America has a deep and incredibly broad system of alliances that massively multiplies its influence around the world. Now, Donald Trump obviously does not treat alliances in the same way that Joe Biden or Barack Obama or really any president in the post-Second World War era did. Clearly, alliances are not quite as sacrosanct as they once were. In fact, very little is sacred. But they still assist, and they’re very, very important. Why has Russia not been more aggressive in Europe? It’s because of the NATO alliance.

This really can’t be underestimated. Because when you ask the question “Is China or the United States more powerful?” you really need to be asking “Is China or the United States plus Japan, plus Korea, plus Europe, plus Australia more powerful?”.

To continue the street-fight analogy, another good strategy in any street fight is talking your opponent down and convincing others. Your tongue can be as important as your fists. Diplomatically, even putting aside its formal alliances, the United States is significantly more successful – both historically and even now – in bringing other countries around to its point of view. Look at China’s so-called “Wolf Warrior” diplomacy over the last 10 years or so. It’s sort of like employing its ambassadors to be public relations officials for hostage takers: extremely aggressive, and it fell flat pretty much everywhere.

The United States, by contrast, has been much more successful in diplomacy. Consider even Trump’s really aggressive or “transactional” diplomacy over the last year: everyone has been coming to Trump and kowtowing to the United States in a way that countries do not do with China. Even Australia, after China imposed bans on our wine and other things a few years ago, barely bent to China’s demands. So that normative influence – the ability to persuade and dissuade others – is significantly stronger in the case of the United States.

And then a lot of China’s sort of quasi-alliances – the BRICS, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, its partnership with Russia –they’re pretty paper-thin. Brazil, Indonesia, India, South Africa and China don’t have that much in common. They have neither shared values nor complementary economic systems. They talk shop – especially about how they don’t like the United States and want a more multipolar order, which is all well and good – but, as the Americans say, “there’s no there there”. So on the diplomatic front, on that alliances front, the United States is clearly the more powerful.

Michael:

Alliances matter, until they don’t. Having the world’s currency that everyone uses for trade and a system of alliances can disappear extremely rapidly. The logic of the US alliance system is essentially a hangover from the Cold War: you were allied to the Soviet Union, or you were allied to the United States, or you were in the so-called “Third World”, with international relations largely being a contest between the two superpowers. That logic no longer exists.

Americans would like to think – and I’m sympathetic to this view – that beneath these alliances lie shared values. But does the US still share the values that we would normally ascribe to the United States? Further, does it even matter anymore for most of the world? The reality is that even for countries like Australia that emphasise values over interests, it has actually always been interests that have caused our alliance with the United States. Why? Because it provides a cheap way to defend a large continent.

But not everybody is in the same boat, and so they don’t see the logic of aligning with the US, particularly if the US is threatening them. So if you’re in Latin America or Canada or Denmark, or if you’re one of those many countries that Trump is eyeing off, you might not think it’s in your national interests to be allied with this guy. So whilst we might see some kowtowing temporarily – because the US is perceived to be the dominant power, at least at the moment – that won’t necessarily last.

The reason why China doesn’t have allies is because it is very realistic in its view that alliances often are not worth it, [and] that countries will work with you based on interests, not on a piece of paper. And, certainly, in the case of Russia, they don’t have an alliance, but they do work closely together. In the case of the BRICS, that’s not really a security arrangement but more of an economic talking shop. But you could say that there’s a lot of policy coordination going on. Same thing with the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, which does what it says on the tin. It’s a group of Eurasian countries – Russia, China, India and Pakistan are interestingly in that – and there’s a lot of alignment that’s going on that we don’t necessarily see in Australia, and it’s going to be quite pivotal in the years ahead.

Meanwhile, the United States’ system of alliances – NATO, for example – has probably never looked as unwell as it has in its eighty-year history. Then you look at the United States’ other alliance relationships. On paper, they’re allies with Thailand, they’re allies with a whole host of countries which are acting against United States’ interests and are getting away with it. And then there are China’s partnerships with other countries like Egypt and Turkey, which are happy to be “swing states” more than “allies” in the way that Australia perceives itself.

So whilst the US has in the past been able to bring a large group of countries to its “street fights” progressively since the Cold War, you’ve seen fewer and fewer people turn up. In the Cold War, the US was quick in pulling a lot of its allies into joining its war in Vietnam. But you had a much smaller group join in Afghanistan, and an even smaller group still join in Iraq. And I don’t think anyone is going to join in any possible intervention in Venezuela – even erstwhile Australia might not send anyone this time.

So as for alliances, well, they’re only as good as the alignment of interests – and I just don’t see that alignment sticking around, sadly. Equally important, the interests are aligning for most countries in China. That’s primarily because of trade – because it’s good business to be friendly with China, even if you don’t like how the Chinese Communist Party governs domestic affairs and even if you don’t want to be a communist country yourself or an authoritarian country, for that matter. It’s still good to do business with China.

We’ve seen that in, say, South Korea this week and where China’s been bullying Japan over some comments over Taiwan. Not only have you had no protest from the United States, at least publicly, but you haven’t heard anything from South Korea. I think President Lee at the G20 summit last week said something along the lines of “yes, we’re watching this with interest, and we are great friends with everybody”. That sort of comment wouldn’t have passed muster in the 1990s when the US clearly was the only game in town.

Damien:

Thankfully, in our business meetings, we tend to agree much more.

The elephant in the room, and one I should address, is Donald Trump. And, more specifically, the question of whether he is reducing America’s power not only through his foreign and trade policies but also through his impact on the domestic polity.

We need to address that because I think what’s really going on here is – notwithstanding potential intervention in Venezuela – that Trump is adopting a much more isolationist approach, restricting the United States’ definition of its vital interests to the Western Hemisphere, and retrenching from its post-Second World War “global policeman” role in service of not committing Americans to any more “forever wars”. The last thing you can really imagine from Trump is him dragging the United States – or its allies, for that matter – into an Iraq or Vietnam-style imbroglio. Obviously, another characteristic of his term so far is using tariffs like they’re going out of fashion.

To many, this has been a really strange turn of events over the last nine months. But it’s extremely consistent with how the US has run its foreign policy for most of its history, up until kamikazi pilots from Japan hurled themselves into American aircraft carriers at Pearl Harbour. Essentially, up until that point, that’s exactly how America brandished its foreign policy. For the most part, it stayed within its hemisphere, being girt by two seas. And it used tariffs liberally, including as a principal way of collecting revenue.

Did that make it less powerful? Actually, those policy settings correlated with — even if they did not necessarily cause — America’s rapid industrialisation in the nineteenth century and its emergence as the most powerful country in the world in the twentieth. So while we all may have views on Donald Trump – including questions around whether his policies will cause inflation or civil unrest or further polarisation or any number of other self-inflicted wounds – but from a historical vantage point, much of what he’s doing is reverting to a quite traditional American foreign policy. One that is not overextended and is not going to spend trillions of dollars on wars in Afghanistan and the like. And he’s effectively adopting the same policies that were coterminous with America’s industrial rise. So in that respect, I would say if we look to the future, and if we do have any question marks in our heads about whether Donald Trump is making America weaker or stronger, he may well be making it stronger.

Michael:

Well, this is a good point for me because you pointed out that the United States’ default setting is isolationist, and to just stick to its own hemisphere. And over the broad sweep of histor,y the role of China is traditionally that of the Middle Kingdom. China has never had that sort of missionary impetus like the Europeans or the Americans to make everybody in their own image. Certainly, they are the linchpin of at least the regional Asian economy, and that’s largely how it’s been for thousands of years.

I think what we’re seeing is a reversion to mean here. The United States is reverting to mean as a wealthy, large but isolationist country. And the reversion to mean of China is that it’s becoming again a wealthy, large and classically imperial country – not in the sense of seeking conquest, but that imperial concept of the metropole and the periphery. Where the manufacturing is done in the metropolitan centre, with the periphery supplying the markets and a sort of tributary relationship existing between the two. That’s how historically the region has worked. And I suspect that’s how it’s going to work in the future, for better or worse.

For a country like Australia, we are already part of that dynamic. We get stuff like phones, and we provide some rocks, and ordinarily that works out for us. Again, if you’re an archaeologist in 5000 years looking back at the 21st century, you would probably think, well, it was just the inevitable natural things that China was always going to return to this central role. China had several hundred years where it had a policy, in hindsight a crazy one, where it prevented new technology from coming into its country and where it ossified culturally, politically and economically.

Now, however, they are going back to being the centre of gravity of the world. This is a country that invented gunpowder, papermaking, printing, the compass, so many things. And today, it’s probably ahead of the United States in applied artificial intelligence, if not the frontier models, and many other advanced technologies. It’s publishing more scientific papers, and especially stuff that matters: the United States is probably still leading in sociology dissertations and advanced cultural studies, but in terms of engineering, space, the technologies that will cure diseases, robotics, China has the lead.

Damien:

Just before we turn to Q&A, I would like to briefly touch on one thing we haven’t covered: demographics. There’s a saying that “demographics is destiny”. You can’t really get around it. China’s demographic situation is very challenging, forecast to drop by 200 million over the next 25 years. So China’s population will reduce from something like 1.4 to 1.2 billion, whereas America’s will go up to about 350 million by 2050. So obviously there is no parity there, nor will there be soon, in terms of number of bodies, even if there may be roughly the same total kilograms of human mass.

I don’t see how you can call a country the leading power, or even a rising one, when it is going to lose 200 million people, especially given the major economic consequences that will follow. And when you have big economic consequences that will affect its ability to develop all those new technologies that you were talking about. So it’s a really fundamental problem that they need to somehow deal with.

Michael:

On America’s population, they do have a high birth rate for a Western society. But it’s grown through immigration. China is certainly trying to fix its demographic problem, and it is beginning to play around with ideas of guest workers, including issuing visas to people coming in from countries like Laos, Cambodia and Central Asia. Admittedly, it’s starting from a very, very, very low base. But it is changing. And we’ve seen how transitions like this have worked in other parts of the world. Really, up until the 1950s, very few countries were migrant countries. Australia is an exception: we’ve always had migration since European settlement. But for most countries, migration is a relatively new thing, and so it is for China. That doesn’t mean that it’s always going to be case, however.

The other thing I would say about the demographics is that it may not matter as much in today’s advanced industrial societies as in the past. It would be a bigger problem if China needed to find people to go work in cutting-edge Chinese factories. But these days, advanced manufacturing is largely done by robots, especially in China, where in the factories, there are just a few supervisors whose role is largely limited to fixing the robots. And with artificial intelligence potentially driving productivity more than humans, demographic decline might not be a problem but an asset.

I would also add that the United States is very different in that they haven’t diffused the technologies that they’ve developed as well as China. So whilst somebody in the United States may well have invented a certain robotic arm or a foundational AI model in one of America’s innovative companies, it’s generally Chinese factories and companies that implement them at scale. So I don’t think that the demographics crisis in China is the same type of crisis that it would have been 100 years ago.

Damien:

Alright, let’s turn it over to some questions.

Audience question:

I would argue that, historically, one of the great strengths of the US is that it has attracted international talent from around the world, exemplified by the fact that most of the CEOs of the high-tech firms on the West Coast are immigrants. Could that be reversed given the current US politics? I would also argue that, politically, China is really just 100 people isolated over minorities, bases, or leaders, and so on. Can that be reversed? Where do you see that going?

Damien:

So my approach to these types of questions is that the best way of looking at the future is to look at the past. What does the past suggest? The past suggests that people have wanted to go to America, and have gone to America, for a really long time. Very few foreigners have wanted to go to China. And therefore, rather than expecting any massive changes there, we should expect a continuation of that trend.

There are also structural obstacles. English is the lingua franca of the world. If you speak English, you can get a job at, say, Harvard. It’s pretty hard to get over the language barrier with China, as it’s a very difficult language. But, Michael, you’ve been looking at this issue from a different perspective as well.

Michael:

So, recently, the US cracked down on H-1B visas. At least, the policy setting at the moment is that they’ll cost $100,000 each to migrate as a high-skilled worker. I don’t know the precise statistics, but those numbers are going down. China, conversely, has introduced something called the K-visa, which is like their version of the H-1B but a little bit different. It’s focused more on younger people. It’s an experiment for them.

As Damien said, people have wanted to go to America for many reasons, not just economic. So just because China has an easier visa pathway for highly skilled STEM workers, that doesn’t mean that they’re going to go. The initial data suggests people are very interested in this, and a lot of people who were once looking at Silicon Valley are now looking at Shanghai.

The thing that China is going to have to get over is a kind of cultural supremacy. It seems to be an instrument of national power that the Chinese government will tell the Chinese people that they are very special and that foreigners are very bad. They’re going to have to change that propaganda if they want more people, and also if they want to stay cutting-edge in attracting equal talent. I think they’re doing that.

If you look through history, there have been times when a lot of foreign talent entered China, even though the circumstances were very different. If you went to Shanghai in the 1920s, it was almost as cosmopolitan as New York City is today. There were Russians, Germans, Brits, French, Indians — same for Hong Kong, including now; it is still incredibly cosmopolitan. There’s no reason why more Chinese cities can’t follow that pattern.

I’ve never lived in China, but I’ve spent a lot of time there. You feel comfortable as a foreigner; you don’t feel like you are not wanted. I know that’s not true for everybody, but I think China can change the narrative on this without too much effort.

Audience question:

It’s fantastic to have a civilised debate in this day and age. I was wondering if you could comment on the thesis from the social historian Ian Morris who wrote Why the West Rules – For Now, back in 2010. Has anything changed?

Michael:

It’s interesting because that’s what I was thinking of when I was talking about the archaeologist analogy. In Morris’s book, the archaeologist looks at a definition of power based on energy — essentially, if I’m remembering it correctly — material output. And I think on those measures, China will probably be ahead of the United States already. So whilst the paper measures like currency size or stock market size are still weighted in the United States’ favour, if you’re looking at it in a hard materialist way, the way the archaeologist would, I think China is already rolling forward. It’s got more material than the US.

Damien:

I think one thing we haven’t discussed that matches that is the rules — international rules, norms, laws, treaties — and really, since the end of the Second World War, the West wrote the rules. It got its way a lot of the time. Every other non-Western country would sort of tinker around the edges, but the default was that Western norms would prevail in international discussions. I don’t think that’s the case now.

We actually did a study not long ago on forecasting which countries will become more powerful and less powerful over the next five years. It was interesting because, despite power being the unit of international relations, there are no commonly accepted ways of measuring power. You can look at it in the ways we’ve done in this debate — military, economics, demographics — but it’s not necessarily all that objective. So what we did was create a composite metric of national power. We took three constant metrics: GDP, GDP per capita, and GDP per capita in purchasing-power-parity terms. Each is a proxy for different things: how big a country is, how wealthy it is, and how much can a government do with that wealth, through, for instance, buying tanks or funding a diplomatic service.

What we saw was that in 2000, the US was by far the most powerful. Since 2000, China’s line went straight up until about 2020. At that point, it started levelling off, still catching up with the United States. Today, on our metric at least, China has about 69% of America's total capacity. By 2030 — and this is based on IMF data that projects five years out — it will be at 75%. So yes, it’s catching up. That’s a huge gain — a 20% gain — but it’s still only three-quarters of absolute US power.

China will have more influence everywhere, sure. But the biggest thing we saw — and this goes to a part of your question — is that over the next five years, India is going to have the same trajectory China had in the first quarter of this century. And that’s going to be a big changer. Right now, you could probably characterise the international system as bipolar or maybe multipolar. In five or ten years, it’s going to be tripolar, and that alone will really change things. And I wouldn’t be surprised if American policymakers started to squirm about India’s rise in much the same way as they did about China’s during the first quarter of this century.

Audience question:

Could you touch on China’s diplomatic efforts, especially its Belt and Road Initiative and its efforts in Africa?

Damien:

We didn’t touch on Belt and Road, but it’s a really good point. China has invested a lot in Africa. People who watch this closely have basically told me that China has “won” Africa. They were there when the West was not, putting aside even the colonial history or hang-ups and very good reasons African nations have to feel ill will toward Western countries. China’s been enormously influential there.

But their spending spree is pretty much over. They’re not spending nearly as much now. But they’ve done really well. They’ve created a lot of business links and economic linkages with the rest of the world. They’re clearly building out infrastructure, the digital Silk Road as well. Meanwhile, America has been absolutely missing in action. And now, with their current president’s attitude towards Africa, they are losing African nations even more quickly.

Audience question:

How does Europe play into all this and the broader balance of power?

Michael:

There’s a lot of doomsaying around Europe, but it’s not going away. It’s just not going to have the power potential that its economic weight suggests unless it changes its tune and essentially creates a NATO-minus-the-US. That is slowly emerging. There are other alliance systems forming — like NATO-plus systems, the Northern/Baltic group, and also a Mediterranean group. So we may see more of that in the coming years.

Damien touched on India. The rise of India is really going to shake things up — not just because it’s India, but because in a multipolar system, it is simply easier for a fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh power to come up. Maybe that’s the point where Europe gangs up and becomes the fourth pole.

Then you have Russia — which I think will economically recover from this disastrous war in Ukraine. For all its demographic problems, Russia will still be a great power in the years ahead — maybe the fifth power. Turkey is another one — people don’t talk about Turkey, but it is definitely one of the powers. Maybe not so much Saudi Arabia, because I think oil will no longer be as valuable over the next 50 years, but you never know. They’ve got a lot of latent potential which they’ve stuffed up for the last 50 years, but historically they have always been a power, and I think they’ll be there in the future. Brazil is another one.

Audience question:

I’m reading John Mearsheimer — you probably know him — and The Tragedy of Great Power Politics. He argues that great powers are self-interested entities that will offend if it means they can become the hegemon. In this multipolar world you describe, I would argue that China is looking at Japan, Taiwan, and so forth. America is looking at Europe and the Americas and so on. And then in the Middle East, Israel, or Saudi Arabia, or Iran, or Turkey are competing for hegemony. In that kind of world, the main determinants are geography and demographics, right? And I would put economic theory in second place because I think geography and demographics decide more. So my question is: how much space is there for offensive realism? How much do you think that a lot of the things that take up the headlines — the economy, the dollar, the yuan — are actually secondary to geographic realities that we cannot bypass?

Michael:

I’m a fan of Mearsheimer. It wasn’t politically correct for him to be seen to excuse Russia invading Ukraine, but I think he was just applying his realist theories to reality, and the evidence is kind of showing it in his favour, for better or worse.

I think geography is less and less a factor due to technology. The father of the realist school of geopolitics was Halford Mackinder in the 19th century, a British geographer. He talked about “he who controls the world island controls the heartland,” and it was all about Central Asia — the British versus the Russians in the Great Game. That was the theory that compelled this battle for Central Asia, and then in the Second World War, it became Eastern Europe. It was the animating feature behind George Kennan’s Long Telegram, and behind Eisenhower’s and Kennedy’s Cold War policies.

But as we saw in Afghanistan, just being there has a cost and doesn’t guarantee positive outcomes. Geography — having that battle space — Russia’s perspective on nature, danger fields, and the need to expand outward to prevent invasion from neighbours — that logic made sense. But in a world of hypersonic missiles and data flows that are as important as physical goods, geography doesn’t really matter as much. If it did, countries like Singapore — which has no natural resources, a small landmass, and is surrounded by larger, historically hostile states — wouldn’t be so wealthy and stable.

So yeah, I’m sympathetic to the argument, but I think geography is becoming less and less decisive than it once was.

One final reflection: I think the big thing going on in the world now is the slow collapse of the post–World War II consensus. There’s a lot of hand-wringing over what that means — the liberal international rules-based order, and so on. But it is fundamentally changing.

Damien:

Where are we heading? I think we’re heading toward a system that existed before: the most obvious historical parallel being the 19th-century Concert of Europe. A multipolar system where no one hegemon dominated, but each of the big powers would align temporarily to offset the power of others. That was actually a very stable system — until a bullet went into Franz Ferdinand’s head and all of Europe’s young men went into trenches to be massacred by new technologies.

In terms of great-power politics, there is no one hegemon. All the countries you mentioned — Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Brazil — are trying to have some sort of regional hegemony. At the global level, we will have a much more pluralistic international order. Maybe that will help get things done — including on transnational problems like climate change, migration, and others. But it might, sadly, make cooperation even harder.

That’s all we have time for. Thank you very much for joining us, and have a lovely evening.