01-24-2017, 02:03 PM
Quote:I don't think there is any advantage to hegemony anymore. Hegemony worked for the Brits. They used it to become the leading economy in 1850. Hegemony worked a lot worse for the US. We already were the leading economy before we became hegemon. Only the first fifth of the cycle can be interpreted as positive. Since 1965 its all been downhill.
I doubt China is going to want to take a bite of this shit sandwich. China's elites are not as comfortably in power as America's. They cannot afford the sort of stupid policy Americans pursue. So if Trump decides to make the Spratley Islands a bone of contention, the Chinese have a variety of responses available beside all-out war. I think they will make a well-considered choice.
You're taking an overly narrow, modern Anglocentric view of what the word "hegemony" means, and it is skewing your analysis. The Gladstonian/Wilsonian global policeman, defender-of-the-liberal order role that first Britain and then America took on from the mid-19th century onwards is not the only hegemonic role detailed in M & T. Britain didn't become committed to free trade until the mid-19th century with the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846, and yet it had been hegemon since the end of the War of the Spanish Succession. Neither 17th century Holland nor Portugal nor the Italian state before acted in the way you are speaking of, either. Hell, there was a large difference between the role played by Victorian Edwardian Britain and that played by the post-war United States, too.
I mean, I agree with your assessment, which is why I don't think it would work the way you are implying. A China that secured the 1st and maybe 2nd Island chains, and its sea lanes to the Middle East and East Africa, which had an economic and political weight commensurate with its demographic one, that was the epicenter (at least at first) of whatever the 20th K-wave turns out to be, would fulfill the definition of an M & T hegemon without needing to become America 2.0.