State competition originates from the perception that rising powers threaten existing racial structures – the aff fundamentally tries to maintain the neoliberal racial hierarchy through securitization

To explain the racialization of American opinion on China requires a deeper understanding of how race and racism figure in the dynamics of international politics in general and great power relations in particular. Recent studies on international hierarchy in IR have opened the door for theorizing race as a prominent force that shapes and sustains inter-state relations that are often hierarchical in nature (Freeman, Kim, and Lake 2022). In world politics, many powerful states have succeeded in translating their superior material capabilities into inter-state hierarchies, defined as an ordered ranking of states “organized into vertical relations of super- and subordination” (Zarakol 2017, 1). As with any form of political authority, however, inter-state hierarchy demands legitimacy (Lake 2010) and as Freeman, Kim, and Lake (2022) point out, racial norms have frequently served to justify such an unequal order as a rightful rule of one superior race over the other. Dominant actors in international politics, in other words, tend to perceive the subordinate state as racially inferior yet potentially dangerous – a view that legitimates and thus helps maintain a hierarchical international order at any given time. These notions of deficiency and hostility of racial others, therefore, straddle a key feature of racialized inter-state hierarchy and can have lasting effects on how dominant states perceive and ultimately respond to subordinate states (Freeman, Kim, and Lake 2022). In IR, a few studies have demonstrated the far-reaching foreign policy implications of such racialized views: Maass (2020), for example, shows that the limited American territorial expansion in Mexico in the 19th century was due primarily to American perception of the native population as racially inferior, hostile, and therefore inherently ineligible for republican governance. Similarly, Hemmer and Katzenstein (2002) explain the absence of a NATO-like multilateral security community in Asia with the beliefs of postwar American foreign policy elites [believe] that Asians are both racially inferior and 53 untrustworthy, better suited for bilateral alliances instead. Racial hierarchy, in short, can shape foreign policies by conditioning how dominant actors conceive of their interests, interpret the identity and interests of racial others, and act accordingly.