[Despite] China’s rise, which potentially threatens to alter international polarity, a preponderance of evidence suggests that the era of conventional large-scale war may be behind us.
For the purposes of my argument, the United States and China are defined as “great powers” because they have stable governments and large populations; influential economies and access to raw materials; professional militaries and a nuclear arsenal.
Apparently, because there hasn't been great power war since World War II, it can't happen. Why that argument wasn't true in August 1914, I don't know.
But the main part of his argument is that nuclear weapons keep wars from starting. I'd argue that at best nuclear weapons keep war objectives limited, but he doesn't apparently want to rule out a war between great power and a small nuclear power, so he defines great powers to exclude that problem with his rule.
Yet the idea that China is a great power because it is stable begs the question of whether it really is stable and what happens if its government becomes unstable? In what world is it relevant that China merely becomes a non-great power and so war with America doesn't interfere with the author's theory any more than war with North Korea would?
I could argue more, including wondering why someone assumes that starting a war is always completely rational, but the author writes something that in my mind immediately disqualifies him for offering an opinion on this issue of war:
Democratic Peace Theory—championed by Thomas Paine and international relations theorists such as New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman—presumes that great-power war will likely occur between a democratic and non-democratic state. However, as information flows freely and people find outlets for and access to new ideas, authoritarian leaders will find it harder to cultivate popular support for total war—an argument advanced by philosopher Immanuel Kant in his 1795 essay “Perpetual Peace.”
I just about had to perform a self-Heimlich maneuver as I choked on my lunch. Thomas Friedman is an "international relations theorist?"
In what world is that perveyor of the banal (when he is in spitting distance of being correct), whose only talent seems to be coming up with trite bumper sticker slogans to describe the world, qualified as a theorist in anything but fooling left-leaning elites into thinking Friedman has a clue about anything at all?
If this is the best that can be said for the impossibility of war between nuclear great powers, I wouldn't rule out a US-China war by the end of the year.
It is always comforting to assume something rules out war. Once, serious people thought the machine gun made war so horrible that it could never be contemplated.
Great powers will go to war. That is one constant in history.
