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of Chinese student textbooks today,” writes the Cambridge Universityhistorian Piers Brendon, “the Chinese are not necessarily prisoners of their past and they have overwhelming economic reasons to seek a political modus vivendi with America.” 17 But the issue is not as simple as that. The best rebuttal to Brendon is provided by John Mearsheimer in
The Tragedy of Great Power Politics
, who explains that because the international system is anarchic, with no one in charge—no night watchman—to enforce the rules, there are actually few status quo powers: for the aim of each great state—democratic or not, its internal character makes no difference—“is to maximize its share of world power,” and therefore “especially powerful states usually pursue regional hegemony.” 18 The implication is that China will pursue regional hegemony as a matter of course, regardless of whether or not its political system becomes more open. A faltering economy may make it only more nationalistic.
    In fact, both Brendon and Mearsheimer can be right. China is likely to seek a political modus vivendi with America, even as it seeks regional hegemony. China will continue to build an oceanic navy, with accompanying air and missile capabilities. The geographical focus of these assets will be on the South China Sea, control of which allows regional hegemony to be realized. At the same time, Beijing will work tirelessly in its pursuit of good economic and political relations with Washington. Washington, for its part, will resist the moves of Beijing toward regional hegemony, even as it works with Beijing on as many issues as it can. The South China Sea, as much as the East China Sea and the Korean Peninsula, will provide the center stage for this tense and contradictory relationship. For the path to Chinese hegemony in the Korean Peninsula—because of the uncertainties surrounding North Korea’s future—is less clear and fraught with much more difficulty than is the path to Chinese hegemony in the South China Sea, where China only faces an assortment of comparatively weak and divided states, of which Vietnam is the strongest. Thus, the South China Sea, more than any other part of the world, best illustrates, once again, what would be the cost of a U.S. decline, or even of a partial U.S. withdrawal from its forward military bases. As such, the South China Sea shows what exactly the United States providesthe world that is now at risk, and concomitantly, what the bad things are that could happen were the world, in an air and naval sense, to become truly multipolar.
    Because the United States dominates the Western Hemisphere, and has power to spare to affect the balance of power in the Eastern Hemisphere, the U.S. not only keeps the peace (aside from small wars that erupt here and there), it guards the global commons, that is, the sea lines of communication that allow for international trade. Without the U.S. Navy and Air Force, globalization as we know it would be impossible. The fact that Russia is still constrained in its attempts to seriously undermine the sovereignty of states in Eastern and Central Europe; the fact that the Middle East has so far at least avoided an interstate Holocaust of sorts; the fact that India and Pakistan have not engaged in a full-scale war in decades, and have never used their nuclear weapons; the fact that North Korea merely threatens South Korea and Japan with large-scale military aggression rather than actually carrying it out, is all in large measure because of a U.S. global security umbrella. The fact that small and embattled nations, be it Israel or Georgia, can even exist is because of what ultimately the U.S. military provides. Indeed, it is the deployment of American air and naval platforms worldwide that gives American diplomacy much of its signal heft, which it then uses to support democracy and freer societies everywhere. Substantially reduce that American