Your third-last paragraph gives the game away--you're clearly as motivated by a domestic politics-driven agenda (isolationism) as Allison is (by internationalism). A serious analysis of the nature and degree of the threat posed to the US by the current Chinese regime would--as you yourself concede--involve detailed study of the regime itself, its leaders and their goals, roles and incentives, as well as a prior understanding of the US and its concrete global interests and priorities. Broad, vague historical claims about great power competition can't answer these difficult questions--but neither can facile 60s-radical slogans about an evil US military industrial complex. Unfortunately, the alternative--serious, clear-eyed analysis of America's national interests and its interactions with current global conditions--is simply nowhere to be found in the intellectually bereft, partisanship-scarred landscape of contemporary international relations scholarship.
Great piece. I would like to hear your take on Mearscheimer’s work. Your examples from the 20th Century all require the US as ultimate guarantor of the peace.
Your third-last paragraph gives the game away--you're clearly as motivated by a domestic politics-driven agenda (isolationism) as Allison is (by internationalism). A serious analysis of the nature and degree of the threat posed to the US by the current Chinese regime would--as you yourself concede--involve detailed study of the regime itself, its leaders and their goals, roles and incentives, as well as a prior understanding of the US and its concrete global interests and priorities. Broad, vague historical claims about great power competition can't answer these difficult questions--but neither can facile 60s-radical slogans about an evil US military industrial complex. Unfortunately, the alternative--serious, clear-eyed analysis of America's national interests and its interactions with current global conditions--is simply nowhere to be found in the intellectually bereft, partisanship-scarred landscape of contemporary international relations scholarship.
https://scholars-stage.org/everybody-wants-a-thucydides-trap/
Great piece. I would like to hear your take on Mearscheimer’s work. Your examples from the 20th Century all require the US as ultimate guarantor of the peace.
What do you think of "The Tragedy of Great Power Politics" by John Mearsheimer?