Who's afraid of China? Neo-conservative, realist and liberal-internationalist assessments of American power, the future of “the West” and the coming new world order

Abstract

In 2012, three of America's most influential public intellectuals – Robert Kagan, Zbigniew Brzezinski and Charles A. Kupchan – published books which reflect on what the rise of China entails for the future world order and which foreign policy the USA should pursue in response to the Chinese challenge. Since these authors represent three different political ideologies with significant bearing on the American foreign-policy establishment – neo-conservatism, realism and liberal internationalism – a comparison of their analyses will allow us to systematize current trends in American debates about world affairs and to identify today's fault lines between the political-ideological camps. As the article will demonstrate, at the root of the disagreements between the three schools of thought as represented by these authors are their diverging evaluations of America's relative power, their different conceptions of the nature of America's alliances, the unequal degree of importance they each attach to a state's form of government for its foreign policy and consequently their competing views on America's role in the coming world order.