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Ultimately, while there are inevitable disconnects between, and within, words and actions, these initiatives represent the discursive mechanism through which Chinese officials articulate their preferences for the international order and, therefore, warrant deeper engagement. Importantly, their articulation of the international order precludes the binary of status quo-revisionist power competition.

In a traditional sense, China cannot be a revisionist power if it centers core bodies and principles of the existing order in their vision of the future. This complicates general arguments that China seeks to upend the existing system. However, China is not a status quo power either. Despite centering key international bodies like the U.N. and associated institutions, the promotion of multipolarity and particularistic universalism indicates that Chinese officials seek to erode what they view as American hegemony and the centrality of the Western liberal values the U.S. promotes as universal.

[David, “Climate change is not an ‘existential threat’” Washington Examiner, March 14, 2022, https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/2618947/climate-change-is-not-an-existential-threat/ Accessed 7.22.24 GDI-HB]

The Biden administration’s climate change policies have sharply increased oil prices, damaging the domestic economy and increasing the cost of nearly everything consumers buy. By increasing revenues for Russian President Vladimir Putin’s regime, they also made Russia stronger and more dangerous at a critical time, thus damaging national security. It is worth noting that Russia’s invasions of Georgia in 2008, Ukraine in 2014, and Ukraine again this year each happened after an oil price spike.

[David, “The threat from China is no fairytale” GIS, Jan. 5, 2024, https://www.gisreportsonline.com/r/threat-from-china/ Accessed 7.22.24 GDI-HB]

The great polluter

Artificial intelligence is not limited to entertaining chatbots: increasingly effective programs trained with machine learning have become integral to uses ranging from smartphone GPS navigators to the algorithms that govern social media. But as AI’s popularity keeps rising, more researchers and experts are noting the environmental cost. Training and running an AI system requires a great deal of computing power and electricity, and the resulting carbon dioxide emissions are one way AI affects the climate. But its environmental impact goes well beyond its carbon footprint.

“It is important for us to recognize the CO2 emissions of some of these large AI systems especially,” says Jesse Dodge, a research scientist at the Allen Institute for AI in Seattle. He adds, however, that “the impact of AI systems in general is going to be from the applications they’re built for, not necessarily the cost of training.”

Today data centers run 24/7 and most derive their energy from fossil fuels, although there are increasing efforts to use renewable energy resources. Because of the energy the world’s data centers consume, they account for 2.5 to 3.7 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, exceeding even those of the aviation industry. A data center can have thousands of computers or more. Photo: Sivaserver Most of a data center’s energy is used to operate processors and chips. Like other computer systems, AI systems process information using zeros and ones. Every time a bit—the smallest amount of data computers can process—changes its state between one and zero, it consumes a small amount of electricity and generates heat. Because servers must be kept cool to function, around 40 percent of the electricity data centers use goes towards massive air conditioners. Without them, servers would overheat and fail. In 2021, global data center electricity use was about 0.9 to 1.3 percent of global electricity demand. One study estimated it could increase to 1.86 percent by 2030. As the capabilities and complexity of AI models rapidly increase over the next few years, their processing and energy consumption needs will too. One research company predicted that by 2028, there will be a four-fold improvement in computing performance, and a 50-fold increase in processing workloads due to increased use, more demanding queries, and more sophisticated models with many more parameters. It’s estimated that the energy consumption of data centers on the European continent will grow 28 percent by 2030. Moore’s Law charts the continuing increase in computing power. Each dot represents an attempt to build the best computer of the day. Photo: Steve Jurvetson With AI already being integrated into search engines like Bing and Bard, more computing power is needed to train and run models. Experts say this could increase the computing power needed—as well as the energy used—by up to five times per search. Moreover, AI models need to be continually retrained to keep up to date with current information. Training In 2019, University of Massachusetts Amherst researchers trained several large language models and found that training a single AI model can emit over 626,000 pounds of CO2, equivalent to the emissions of five cars over their lifetimes. A more recent study reported that training GPT-3 with 175 billion parameters consumed 1287 MWh of electricity, and resulted in carbon emissions of 502 metric tons of carbon, equivalent to driving 112 gasoline powered cars for a year. Inference Once models are deployed, inference—the mode where the AI makes predictions about new data and responds to queries—may consume even more energy than training. Google estimated that of the energy used in AI for training and inference, 60 percent goes towards inference, and 40 percent for training. GPT-3’s daily carbon footprint was been estimated to be equivalent to 50 pounds of CO2 or 8.4 tons of CO2 in a year. Inference energy consumption is high because while training is usually done multiple times to keep models current and optimized, inference is used many many times to serve millions of users. Two months after its launch, ChatGPT had 100 million active users. Instead of employing existing web searches that rely on smaller AI models, many people are eager to use AI for everything, but a single request in ChatGPT can consume 100 times more energy than one Google search, according to one tech expert. Northeastern University and MIT researchers estimated that inference consumes more energy than training, but there is still debate over which mode is the greater energy consumer. What is certain, though, is that as OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and the Chinese search company Baidu compete to create larger, more sophisticated models, and as more people use them, their carbon footprints will grow. This could potentially make decarbonizing our societies much more difficult. “If you look at the history of computational advances, I think we’re in the ‘amazed by what we can do, this is great, let’s do it phase,’” said Clifford Stein, interim director of Columbia University’s Data Science Institute, and professor of computer science at the Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science. “But we should be coming to a phase where we’re aware of the energy usage and taking that into our calculations of whether we should or shouldn’t be doing it, or how big the model should be. We should be developing the tools to think about if it’s worth using these large language models given how much energy they’re consuming, and at least be aware of their energy and environmental costs.”

Meanwhile, the extraordinary progress of AI carries a growing, but often hidden, environmental footprint. The proliferation of tech applications such as and the expansion of ubiquitous cloud services remain tethered to digital infrastructure and supply chains. This elevates the of stimulating economic growth without comparable increases in emissions—a task that University of Florence Assistant Professor has said is Verdecchia has also highlighted that environmental sustainability is often overlooked: “In the race to produce faster and more-accurate AI models, environmental sustainability is often regarded as a second-class citizen.” Technological innovation is often promoted as a mechanism to decrease carbon emissions, with digital operations and infrastructure in particular cited as “cleaner” advancements from industrial production reliant on fossil fuels. Yet this remains unclear and has lacked a compelling demonstration. Despite their operation in a virtual space, AI and the cloud have considerable tangible effects. They will intensify greenhouse gas , consume increasing amounts of energy, and require larger quantities of natural resources. This emerges, in one form, through rising energy demands. Greater access to —systems designed to create content based on previous data—embodies this . suggests a single generative AI query consumes energy at four or five times the magnitude of a typical search engine request. Image-generating are also far more energy-intensive compared to those involving text alone. By high-carbon-emitting behaviors, AI systems play a significant role in exacerbating the climate crisis. And as the popularity of chatbots and image generators surges—intensifying the integration of generative models and spurring between tech titans—it will propel explosive growth in daily queries and further deepen environmental concerns.

[Erika, “Report: Artificial Intelligence A Threat to Climate Change, Energy Usage and Disinformation” Friends of the Earth, March 7, 2024, https://foe.org/news/ai-threat-report/ Accessed 7.22.24 GDI-HB]

WASHINGTON – Today, partners in the Climate Action Against Disinformation coalition released a report that maps the risks that artificial intelligence poses to the climate crisis.

These numbers are expected to increase, exacerbated by climate change and population growth.

In developing countries, the water footprint of AI data centres is more concerning. These countries often have limited water resources and are already struggling to meet the needs of their growing populations.

However, “pressure on existing limited water resources [from data centres] may have significantly strained the provision of adequate clean water,” she added.

“The establishment of AI and data centres in Nigeria can facilitate technological development, foster collaboration with global tech companies, and generally improve economic growth,” said Ajijola.

Since ChatGPT was unleashed upon humanity, tech companies have raced to put artificial intelligence (AI) into their offerings, prompting Microsoft to call 2023 “the Year of AI.” Recent reports of Google’s decision to integrate the Gemini image generator on iPhones and in Google Image searches exemplifies a pervasive trend: AI is everywhere. To be sure, the ability to generate text, images, and videos with just a few prompts—as new AI models allow you to do—is a technological marvel, but beneath the simplicity of that text box lies the massive physical reality and environmental footprint of the resources required to run these AI models.

Building a model like GPT can be resource intensive, and those costs pale in comparison to the resources needed to actually run it. AI’s power consumption comes in two phases: the energy required to train the model, and the energy required to run the model.

The second shortcut, perhaps even more popular than the first, is to stand up always against “imperialism”—or, a shortcut inside the shortcut, always to oppose American policies abroad. Anti-Americanism is a common left politics, which, again, sometimes gets things right, and sometimes doesn’t. I believe that it got things right in Vietnam in 1967; it mostly got things right from the beginning of the twentieth century to the end in Central and South America; it got Iran right in 1953 (when leftists criticized the anti-Mossadegh coup), and Iraq in 2003; it gets NAFTA right, and the IMF, too. But that’s still not enough to make it a reliable shortcut. Remember that the defeat of Nazism and Stalinism, the two most brutal political regimes in world history, was in significant ways American work. This was work that many people on the left supported, as we should have. In 1967 Dwight Macdonald wrote to Mary McCarthy that the American war in Vietnam proved “that despite all the good things about our internal political-social-cultural life, we have become an imperialist power, and one that, partly because of these domestic virtues, is a most inept one.” We have continued to be inept: in December 2005, with 100,000 American soldiers in Iraq, we organized an election—and our man came in third. This is a result, I think, without precedent in imperial history. Macdonald’s understanding of U.S. imperialism reflects a political intelligence and a moral balance that is mostly missing in contemporary anti-American writing. The anti-American shortcut sometimes produces a short-circuited politics—as in the Syrian case where leftist writers predicted terrible consequences if the Americans inter - vened on the side of the anti-Assad forces. The predictions have come true even though the United States didn’t intervene, but once it was clear that the awfulness was not America’s fault, many leftists simply lost interest— except for an ongoing but not very effective engagement on behalf of the war’s victims. Who was responsible for the ongoing war, for the killing, the terror, and the refugee crisis; what social forces were involved; what should we (on the left) make of them and how should we respond to them? This kind of analysis, standard in left critiques of impe - rialism, has mostly been missing. One reason for its absence is that it offers no opportunity to criticize America; a second reason is that it would require a close reading and sharp critique of Islamist politics. Another much-used shortcut (though it doesn’t work in the Syrian case) is to oppose everything Israel does and to blame it for much that it hasn’t done, since it is the “lackey” of American imperialism or, alternatively, the dominant force in shaping American foreign policy. The policies of the current Israeli government require radical criticism—the occupation, the settlements, the refusal to suppress Jewish hooliganism on the West Bank. Nonetheless, the anti-Israel shortcut is an example, to paraphrase August Bebel, of the leftism of fools. The last shortcut is simply to support every government that calls itself leftist or anti-imperialist and sets itself against American interests. This is different from the old Stalinist shortcut: support the Soviet Union whatever it does because it is the first proletarian dictatorship and the first workers’ paradise. That kind of politics is, I think, definitively finished, though it had a brief afterlife, focused on China and then, with very few believers, on Albania and North Korea. The more recent version celebrates Maximal Leaders like Nasser, Castro, or Hugo Chávez— along with occasional short-lived infatuations, as in the case of Michel Foucault and the future Ayatollah Khomeini. Leftist enthusiasm for populist dictatorships is one of our sad stories, which ends when resources run out, the failure to build the economy is suddenly apparent, and the military takes over. But often the Maximal Leader is a military man himself, and the repressive role of the army simply becomes more obvious over time. In Latin America today, the better left is repre - sented by socialists and social democrats who reject demagogic populism and struggle to produce economic growth, greater equality, and a stronger welfare state—and who attract less enthusiasm from American leftists than they deserve. Most leftists are idealists, and so we tend to idealize other people and to imagine that the world is more hospitable to our ideas than it actually is. At the same time, we know better; so I call this the politics of pretending. Consider the response of many leftists to the al Qaeda attack of 9/11. They argued that the United States should call the attack a crime and look to the UN and the International Criminal Court to deal with the criminals. That was the “Dial 911” response to 9/11 (it has been repeated again and again in response to later terrorist attacks), and it would have made sense if we lived in a world that was actually run by the UN and the ICC. But, as I argued in Dissent at the time, there was no one answering the phone at 911. Self-help isn’t, indeed, the only effective and justified response to criminal attacks; different forms of mutual assistance and collective security are possible, and the left should take a forward position in exploring them. But self-help has to be part of the story, given the world we live in, and it isn’t a good idea to pretend otherwise. Another example: some leftists who opposed the Kosovo intervention argued that it didn’t have what every legal and justified use of force requires: UN authorization. Indeed, it didn’t. The UN Security Council is incapable, almost all the time, of acting in a timely way. Think of the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia to shut down the killing fields; or the Indian invasion of East Pakistan, now Bangladesh, to end the terror there; or the Tanzanian invasion of Uganda to overthrow the murderous regime of Idi Amin. None of these had or could have gotten UN approval. Many leftists opposed each of these interventions, pretending that the UN was already what leftists want it to be, an effective political agent. It isn’t that, and so the unilateral use of force is often, as Jürgen Habermas said of the Kosovo case, “illegal but morally necessary.” The best and last example of leftist pretending is the insistence on the reason - ableness of people who give no sign of being reasonable. Paul Berman writes of the large numbers of French socialists who supported the Munich Agreement that “they gazed across the Rhine and simply refused to believe that millions of upstanding Germans had enlisted in a political movement whose animating principles were paranoid conspiracy theories [and] blood-curdling hatreds. . . .” In the same spirit, many leftists were eager to describe the Chinese communists as “agrarian reformers.” And many today have been quick to grant the legitimacy of Islamist opposition to American bases in Saudi Arabia, say, or to the exis - tence of Israel—and to ignore the demand for a shari’a state and the radical subordination of women. I am fairly sure that most of the people involved in all these cases knew, deep down, that they were pretending. There is a lot to be said for the default position. We should work in the place we know best to make things better. The improvement of humanity begins at home. This argument has special force for Americans, who live in an increasingly inegalitarian society that is also a near-hegemonic world power: we need to be wary of adventures abroad that make our work at home more difficult. Still, good leftists can’t avoid internationalism. We can’t escape what Václav Havel in 1993 called “the feeling of co-responsibility for the world.” Our deepest commitment is solidarity with people in trouble, and some of the worst troubles—poverty, hunger, tyranny, and mass murder—are being experienced right now in other people’s countries. So we are going to be engaged again and again in arguments about what we can do to help. There is no magical way of getting these arguments right. But certain ideological positions, rigidly held, are almost certain to get them wrong: that the use of force is never justified; that “imperial” powers, like the United States, can never act well in the world; and that revo - lutionaries and fighters for liberation, populist leaders and political vanguards, must never be criticized. In all these cases, ideological commitment means that we will only get things right by accident. Political intelligence and moral sensitivity work much better than ideology, and it is these two that should guide our choice of comrades and our decisions about when and how to act abroad. Dictators and terrorists are never our comrades, but only those men and women who really believe in, and who practice, democracy and equality. We should act abroad only with those who share our commitments, and we should act only in ways consistent with those commitments. Leftists have done that often in the past, but often also, we have not: we have mistaken or betrayed our comrades and acted in ways that did not serve either democracy or equality. We need to learn from our history—and the first lesson is this: no more shortcuts, no more pretending.

This is a book about the ‘liberal way of war’. But the liberal referred to in the title remains under theorized. On several occasions the authors highlight the distinction between the liberal way of war and the general framing of war in the modern liberal era as a geo-strategic contestation, taking the territorial state as its referent object. For Dillon and Reid, ‘liberalism never fitted this model of modern politics and the modern problematization of war very well’（p.83). They therefore seek to define liberalism and the liberal way of war as distinct from war in the liberal era. The liberal way of war refers not to real wars and conflicts but to an abstract model of conflict, defined as a desire to‘remove war from the life of humanity’which‘derives from the way in which liberalism takes the life of the species as its referent object of politics ─ biopolitics’（p.84）. In this framing, the liberal nature of war very much depends on the self-description of the conflict by its proponents: these range from Gladstone’s occupation of Egypt in the cause of‘suffering humanity’, to US liberal ideological constructions of the cause of‘freedom’in the Cold War struggle against the Soviet Union up to Bush and Blair’s war on Iraq in the cause of humanity（p.6）. As the authors state, of course, wars may be fought on other grounds than universal humanity: ‘liberal states may…also act as geopolitical sovereign actors as well…and may also have geopolitical motives for the wars they wage’（p.84）.¶ It is clear from the beginning that the distinctiveness of ‘the liberal way of war’ which they seek to explore cannot be more than a fool’s quest. They assert that they will critically uncover the paradox of liberal war: why it is that Realist or geostrategic war accepts the necessity of war but attempts to limit it, while liberals wish to end war but, to do so, are willing to fight unlimited wars. Yet, they admit that this starting point is already an ideological dead end ─ the wars of the twentieth century give the lie to the idea that there is some distinction between ‘unending crusades’ and ‘limited jousts between rationally calculative political subjects’: war has its own dynamic（p.7). Nevertheless, Dillon and Reid press on and seek to go beyond a Schmittian critique to ground this paradox in the biopolitical‘driver’of the liberal way of rule ─ biopolitics: wars waged under the banner of the human（against humans）are liberal and, allegedly biopolitical, as human life is declared to be the referent in need of being secured. These wars are alleged to be fought differently to geo-political wars for territory, because the ‘drivers’ of war are not territorialized interests but the biopolitical framings of the needs of the human, how human life can and should be lived. Inevitably there are insuperable methodological hurdles to this Sisyphusian task. Already, there occurs the first fundamental aporia: how do we tell the difference between a liberal and non-liberal war? There appears to be no way of preventing the category of liberal war from becoming a lifeless and descriptive one: wars are liberal and fought biopolitically only if we are told that these are the motives by those fighting them.¶ This separation of liberal ways of war from territorialised framings of geostrategic contestation makes little sense as a framework for understanding either liberal rule or liberal ways of war. In fact, in defining liberal war in this way the connection between liberal rule and war is entirely severed. ‘Liberal war may on occasions also be geopolitical; which is to say that war may be simultaneously geopolitical as well as biopolitically driven since the imperatives behind war are never uniform or simple; but what distinguishes the liberal way of war as liberal are the biopolitical imperatives which have consistently driven its violent peace-making.’（p.85）Liberal rule has also resulted in wars for territory or in defence of territories; nevertheless, a story, of course, could have been told about how views of the human fitted those of struggles to command territory. This is acknowledged, but sits uneasily with the narrow view of liberal war for species life. If the racial doctrines of European empires, up to and including the genocidal racism of the Nazi regime, were also biopolitically driven ─ and the authors, indeed, write of race as part of the‘liberal biopolitics of the seventeenth century’─ then it seems difficult to separate a liberal way of war from allegedly ‘non-liberal’ wars of territorial control.¶ It seems clear that Dillon and Reid do not seek to take the logical step of arguing that the view of the human reflects, and is reflected by, how the human is ruled and how wars are both thought and fought. Why? Because for them there is something suprahistorically unique and distinct about the liberal way of war: a distinctly liberal view which foregrounds the human as the referent of security. Therefore, a second aporia arises: on what basis is this specifically ‘liberal’? It would appear that every form of rule and of war has at least an implicit view of the ‘human’ and through this view of the human the form of rule and the way of war are rationalized. There is not and cannot be anything specifically ‘liberal’ about this. The humanity in need of securing, through war on other humans, could be formed by Alexander the Great’s stoic cosmopolitan vision, or could be‘God’s chosen people’, ‘the master race’, or ‘the gains of the proletarian revolution’: there is little doubt that beliefs of what the human is, or could become, were a vital part of many non-Liberal dispositifs ─ the discourses and practices - of both rule and war. ¶ The key starting assumption, that the liberal way of war can be isolated from any other - and its alleged specific form, of ‘unending violence’, explained by its referent of the human - appears to be a particularly unproductive one. At the level of abstraction at which Dillon and Reid choose to work, there is very little here that would help to distinguish between a liberal and a non-liberal way of war（the asserted purpose of the book）. Of course, what matters is what this view of the human is. Here Dillon and Reid appear to recognise the limits of their essentializing approach: …just as the liberal way of rule is constantly adapting and changing so also is the liberal way of war. There is, in that sense, no one liberal way of rule or one liberal way of war. But there is a fundamental continuity which justifies us referring to the singular…the fact that each takes the properties of species existence as its referent object…finding its expression historically in many changing formations of rule according…to the changing exigencies and understanding of species being…（p.84）¶ Rather than understand our forms of post-political rule and post-territorial war today on their own terms and then consider to what extent this way of rule and war can be theorized, and to what extent, if any, Foucault’s conception of biopolitics may be of assistance, Dillon and Reid start out from the assumption that we live in a liberal world of rule and war and that therefore both can be critiqued through the framework developed by Foucault in his engagement with understanding the rise and transformation of liberal forms of rule. In transposing Foucault’s critical engagement with liberal ways of rule to an understanding of liberal ways of war, Dillon and Reid take a body of historical work about the changing political nature of liberal rule and transpose it into an essentialised and under theorized understanding of liberal war. This is no mean feat; how they manage this accomplishment will be discussed in the next two sections.

The Resilient Order,” https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/world/2018-06-14/liberal-world

Modern liberalism holds that world politics requires new levels of political integration in response to relentlessly rising interdependence. But political orders do not arise spontaneously, and liberals argue that a world with more liberal democratic capitalist states will be more peaceful, prosperous, and respectful of human rights. It is not inevitable that history will end with the triumph of liberalism, but it is inevitable that a decent world order will be liberal.

Moreover, theory is too “Western”. Thus, even among those writers on Asian IR that are theoretically oriented, disagreement persists as to whether IR theory is relevant to studying Asia, given its origin in, and close association with, Western historical traditions, intellectual discourses and foreign policy practices. International relations theory, like the discipline itself, has been, and remains, an “American social science” to quote Stanley Hoffman’s much quoted phrase.3 The recent advances made by the “English School” and continental European constructivism have not made IR theory “universal”; it might have entrenched and broadened the Western dominance. The question of how relevant is IR theory to the study of Asian security have evoked strikingly different responses. On the one hand, David Kang has seized upon the nonrealization of realist warnings of post-war Asia being “ripe for rivalry” to critique not just realism, but Western IR theory in general for “getting Asia wrong”.4 In analyzing Asian regionalism, Peter Katzenstein comments: “Theories based on Western, and especially West European experience, have been of little use in making sense of Asian regionalism.”5 Although Katzenstein’s remarks specifically concern the study of Asian regionalism, they can be applied to Asian IR in general. And it is a view widely shared among Asian scholars. On the other side, John Ikenberry and Michael Mastanduno, defend the relevance of Western theoretical frameworks in studying the international relations of Asia. While intra-Asian relationships might have had some distinctive features historically, this distinctiveness had been diluted by the progressive integration of the region into the modern international system. The international relations of Asia has acquired the behavioral norms and attributes associated with the modern inter-state system which originated from Europe and still retains much of the features of the Westphalian model. Hence, the core concepts of international relations theory such as hegemony, the distribution of power, international regimes, and political identity, are as relevant in the Asian context as anywhere else.6

To this writer, this debate is a healthy caveat, rather than a debilitating constraint, on analyzing Asian international relations with the help an admittedly Western theoretical literature. To be sure, theoretical paradigms developed from the Western experience do not adequately capture the full range of ideas and relationships that drive international relations in Asia. But IR theories - realism, liberalism, constructivism and critical IR theories - are relevant and useful in analyzing Asian IR provided they do not encourage a selection bias in favor of those phenomena (ideas, events, trends, relationships) which fit with them and against that which does not. IR scholars should feel free to identify and study phenomena that are either ignored or given scarce attention by these perspectives. They should also develop concepts and insights from the Asian context and experience, not just to study Asian developments and dynamics, but also other parts of tGutmhe world. In other words, Western IR theory, despite its ethnocentrism, is not to be dismissed or expunged from Asian classrooms or seminars, but universalized with the infusion of Asian histories (Sam Kim essay), personalities, philosophies, trajectories and practices.

Notwithstanding this Western fascination with China and the positive response of former Marxists, such as Jacques, to the new China, Pan discerns an Orientalist ideology distorting Western commentary on the party state, and especially its international relations (6). Following Edward Said, Pan claims that such Western Orientalism reveals ‘not something concrete about the orient, but something about the orientalists themselves, their recurring latent desire of fears and fantasies about the orient’ (16). In order to unmask the limits of Western representations of China’s rise, Pan employs a critical ‘methodology’ that ‘draws on constructivist and deconstructivist approaches’ (9). Whereas the ‘former questions the underlying dichotomy of reality/knowledge in Western study of China’s international relations’, the latter shows how paradigmatic representations of China ‘condition the way we give meaning to that country’ and ‘are socially constitutive of it’ (9). Pan maintains that the two paradigms of ‘China threat’ and ‘China opportunity’ in Western discourse shape China’s reality for Western ‘China watchers’ (3). These discourses, Pan claims, are ‘ambivalent’ (65). He contends that this ‘bifocal representation of China, like Western discourses of China more generally, tell us a great deal about the west itself, its self -imagination, its torn, anxious, subjectivity, as well as its discursive effects of othering’ (65). This is a large claim.¶ Interestingly, Pan fails to note that after the Tiananmen incident in 1989, Chinese new left scholarship also embraced Said’s critique of Orientalism in order to reinforce both the party state and a burgeoning sense of Chinese nationalism. To counter Western liberal discourse, academics associated with the Central Party School promoted an ideology of Occidentalism to deflect domestic and international pressure to democratise China. In this, they drew not only upon Said, but also upon Foucault and the post-1968 school of French radical thought that, as Richard Wolin has demonstrated, was itself initiated in an appreciation of Mao’s cultural revolution. In other words, the critical and deconstructive methodologies that came to influence American and European social science from the 1980s had a Maoist inspiration (Wolin 2010: 12–18).¶ Subsequently, in the changed circumstances of the 1990s, as American sinologist Fewsmith has shown, young Chinese scholars ‘adopted a variety of postmodernist and critical methodologies’ (2008: 125). Paradoxically, these scholars, such as Wang Hui and Zhang Kuan (Wang 2011), had been educated in the USA and were familiar with fashionable academic criticism of a postmodern and deconstructionist hue that ‘demythified’ the West (Fewsmith 2008: 125–29). This approach, promulgated in the academic journal Dushu (Readings), deconstructed, via Said and Foucault, Western narratives about China. Zhang Kuan, in particular, rejected Enlightenment values and saw postmodern critical theory as a method to build up a national ‘discourse of resistance’ and counter Western demands regarding issues such as human rights and intellectual property.¶ It is through its affinity with this self-strengthening, Occidentalist lens, that Pan’s critical study should perhaps be critically read. Simply put, Pan identifies a political economy of fear and desire that informs and complicates Western foreign policy and, Pan asserts, tells us more about the West’s ‘self-imagination’ than it does about Chinese reality. Pan attempts to sustain this claim via an analysis, in Chapter 5, of the self-fulfilling prophecy of the China threat, followed, in Chapters 6 and 7, by exposure of the false promises and premises of the China ‘opportunity’. Pan certainly offers a provocative insight into Western attitudes to China and their impact on Chinese political thinking. In particular, he demonstrates that China’s foreign policy-makers react negatively to what they view as a hostile American strategy of containment (101). In this context, Pan contends, accurately, that Sino–US relations are mutually constitutive and the USA must take some responsibility for the rise of China threat (107). This latter point, however, is one that Australian realists like Owen Harries, whom Pan cites approvingly, have made consistently since the late 1990s. In other words, not all Western analysis uncritically endorses the view that China’s rise is threatening. Nor is all Western perception of this rise reducible to the threat scenario advanced by recent US administrations.¶ Pan’s subsequent argument that the China opportunity thesis leads to inevitable disappointment and subtly reinforces the China threat paradigm is, also, somewhat misleading. On the one hand, Pan notes that Western anticipation of ‘China’s transformation and democratization’ has ‘become a burgeoning cottage industry’ (111). Yet, on the other hand, Pan observes that Western commentators, such as Jacques, demonstrate a growing awareness that the democratisation thesis is a fantasy. That is, Pan, like Jacques, argues that China ‘will neither democratize nor collapse, but may instead remain politically authoritarian and economically stable at the same time’ (132). To merge, as Pan does, the democratisation thesis into its authoritarian antithesis in order to evoke ‘present Western disillusionment’ (132) with China is somewhat reductionist. Pan’s contention that we need a new paradigm shift ‘to free ourselves from the positivist aspiration to grand theory or transcendental scientific paradigm itself’ (157) might be admirable, but this will not be achieved by a constructivism that would ultimately meet with the approval of what Brady terms China’s thought managers (Brady:

The notable feature of the perilous times that humanity has faced over the past half century is that the response has made them seem manageable enough that we roll up our collective sleeves and work on practical solutions. There have been relatively few panics involving spontaneous outbreaks of irrational behavior. Work, family life, and other routine activities have continued. Individuals have sometimes shouldered the small tasks of learning about impending crises and pitching in to support research or protect their families. These responsibilities, though, have seldom required great sacrifices on the part of large populations, at least not in the Western world. Social movements have emerged and policies have been affected, but regimes have rarely been toppled as a result. None of this can be understood simply as denial. Were denial the correct interpretation, billions would not have been spent on weapons, deterrence programs, research, and communication. Millions of readers and television viewers would not have paid attention to warnings and documentaries. People responded, but in ways that incorporated the problem solving into ordinary roles and competencies. Nor can the normality of the response be explained by arguing that the dangers envisioned generated little upheaval because they never happened. A nuclear holocaust did not occur, but enough destruction did take place that people could imagine the results. There were also chemical spills, accidents at nuclear plants, terrorist attacks, and natural disasters. Enough went wrong, even with well-intentioned planning, that danger could not be ignored. Indeed, it is truly surprising that more chaos, more panic, more soul searching, and more enervating fear did not ensue.

Yet that is not our inescapable destiny. We can still push forward with a truly global agenda, going beyond mere trade agreements, and stressing the loyalty all humans should owe to our species and our planet. Identities are forged through crisis. Humankind now faces the triple crisis of nuclear war, climate change and technological disruption. Unless humans realise their common predicament and make common cause, they are unlikely to survive this crisis. Just as in the previous century total industrial war forged “a nation” out of many disparate groups, so in the 21st century the existential global crisis might forge a human collective out of disparate nations.

Creating a mass global identity need not prove to be an impossible mission. After all, feeling loyal to humankind and to planet Earth is not inherently more difficult than feeling loyal to a nation comprising millions of strangers I have never met and numerous provinces I have never visited. Contrary to common wisdom, there is nothing natural about nationalism. It is not rooted in human biology or psychology. True, humans are social animals through and through, with group loyalty imprinted in our genes. However, for millions of years Homo sapiens and its hominid ancestors lived in small intimate communities numbering no more than a few dozen people. Humans therefore easily develop loyalty to small groups such as families, tribes and villages, in which everyone knows everyone else. But it is hardly natural for humans to be loyal to millions of utter strangers.

Even when hostile narratives, group fears, and opportunity are strongly present, war occurs only if these factors are harnessed. Ethnic narratives and fears must combine to create significant ethnic hostility among mass publics. Politicians must also seize the opportunity to manipulate that hostility, evoking hostile narratives and symbols to gain or hold power by riding a wave of chauvinist mobilization. Such mobilization is often spurred by prominent events (for example, episodes of violence) that increase feelings of hostility and make chauvinist appeals seem timely. If the other group also mobilizes and if each side’s felt security needs threaten the security of the other side, the result is a security dilemma spiral of rising fear, hostility, and mutual threat that results in violence.¶ A virtue of this symbolist theory is that symbolist logic explains why ethnic peace is more common than ethnonationalist war. Even if hostile narratives, fears, and opportunity exist, severe violence usually can still be avoided if ethnic elites skillfully define group needs in moderate ways and collaborate across group lines to prevent violence: this is consociationalism.17 War is likely only if hostile narratives, fears, and opportunity spur hostile attitudes, chauvinist mobilization, and a security dilemma.

All this could hold true for a just securitization theory. Not only does such a theory promise to morally constrain securitization, making its occurrence less likely, but also general knowledge of such a theory could help to democratize the process of securitization itself. Both results are desirable because, like war – and regardless of what analysts might wish – securitizations are a recurrent feature of international relations, and the abnegation of moral reflection on securitization is simply not an option (see Rengger, 2002: 363). With this in mind, I will now discuss my three criteria in detail.

Objective existential threats

We may argue about the wisdom of invading Iraq in the first place. We can enter into what is now an extensive debate upon the success or failure of the 2007 “surge” or the advisability of withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq in 2010. But the bottom line remains: the experience of the Iraq invasion is a cautionary tale about the limits of U.S. power— however immense—to remake fractured polities. Afghanistan, where the U.S. has been fighting for 13 years without a conclusive victory over the Taliban, is another case in point.

One might contend that the U.S. response to such failures should be to increase the human and financial resources it commits to “victory,” however defined: more troops, more budgetary outlays, permanent stationing of significant numbers of U.S. troops in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. Putting aside the question of whether such a response would merely mire the U.S. even more deeply in never-ending conflict, there is little evidence that the American public would support such a policy. U.S. power is not just limited by its ability to shape developments on the ground; it is also limited by the necessity of creating and, more importantly, sustaining domestic support for costly foreign military ventures. Finally, there are real financial limits to U.S. freedom of action. After all, the U.S. already spends immense sums on defense; a major new military intervention would further increase the cost. The public might accept substantially higher taxes, sharply reduced expenditures, or the acquisition of even greater debt in a true national emergency. But there is little taste to do so, for the sake of yet another large-scale intervention in Iraq.