Kōtuitui: New Zealand Journal of Social Sciences Online

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China’s rise and the United States’ response:

implications for the global order and New
Zealand/Aotearoa. Part II: The US response,
emergence of a multi-polar order, and New
Zealand/Aotearoa foreign policy-making

Brian S. Roper

To cite this article: Brian S. Roper (2024) China’s rise and the United States’ response:
implications for the global order and New Zealand/Aotearoa. Part II: The US response,
emergence of a multi-polar order, and New Zealand/Aotearoa foreign policy-
making, Kōtuitui: New Zealand Journal of Social Sciences Online, 19:4, 472-482, DOI:
10.1080/1177083X.2024.2329219

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KOTUITUI: NEW ZEALAND JOURNAL OF SOCIAL SCIENCES ONLINE
2024, VOL. 19, NO. 4, 472–482
https://doi.org/10.1080/1177083X.2024.2329219

RESEARCH ARTICLE

China’s rise and the United States’ response: implications for the global
order and New Zealand/Aotearoa. Part II: The US response, emergence of
a multi-polar order, and New Zealand/Aotearoa foreign policy-making
Brian S. Roper
Politics Programme, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

China’s rise is reconfiguring the global order as it develops into the world’s second most Received 27 February 2023
powerful nation-state and becomes an increasingly serious threat to US global Accepted 24 January 2024
hegemony. In Part Two of this article, the US response to China’s rising economic,
HANDLING EDITOR
geopolitical, and military power is analysed with a focus on Obama’s ‘pivot towards Simon Barber
Asia’, Trump’s tariffs on Chinese goods, and Biden’s comprehensive strategy to ‘out-
compete’ China. These developments have important implications for Aotearoa as KEYWORDS
governments walk a tight rope between increasing economic dependence on China China’s rise; US foreign
and traditional security, military, and diplomatic relationships with Australia, the UK, policy; SINO-US relations; NZ
and the US. In contrast to realist analyses of New Zealand’s foreign policy responses, foreign policy; Marxism
which are largely anti-China and advocate closer ties to the US, this article is equally
critical of both imperialist powers, and argues for a shift towards non-alignment and
neutrality in future conflicts.

Introduction
The first part of this article deployed uneven and combined development (UCD) theory to analyse and
explain China’s rise. This part focuses on the US response, the emergence of an asymmetric multi-polar
global order, escalating tensions and rivalry between the US and China, and then considers the implications
of these developments for New Zealand / Aotearoa foreign policy-making.

US strategic responses to China’s rise since 2008

The GFC and Xi Jinping becoming Communist Party General Secretary in 2012 marks a turning point in US
policy towards China. In a nutshell, for most of the period from 1972, when the Nixon Administration
initiated a rapprochement with China centred around the Shanghai Communique which acknowledged
the one-China policy and committed both countries to the normalisation of diplomatic relations, to the elec-
tion of Obama in 2008, relations between China and the US were fractious but generally stable (Khoo 2020,
p. 57). Incidents such as the suppression of the pro-democracy movement in 1989 led to conflict but the
shared animosity of the US and China towards the Soviet Union from 1972 to 1989 followed by China’s sup-
port for the Bush Administration’s ‘war on terror’ from 2002 to 2008 militated against a fundamental depar-
ture from normalised relations and varying degrees of cooperation around foreign policy and economic issues.
In contrast, Sino-US relations have deteriorated across the three presidencies of Obama, Trump, and
Biden (Khoo 2020, p. 57). The Obama Administration was concerned about the US trade deficit with
China which it blamed, in part, on China’s management of its exchange rate (Bader 2012, pp. 111–115).
With respect to geopolitical and military strategy, it implemented a ‘pivot towards Asia’ with the US com-
mitting 60 percent of its naval forces to the Asia Pacific region, maintaining forward deployment of military
forces throughout the region, establishing ‘bases and military relationships with as many countries as poss-
ible’, increasing ‘arms sales to allies’, and increasing its naval presence in the strategic shipping lanes in the

CONTACT Brian S. Roper [email protected]

© 2024 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.
0/), which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The terms on which this
article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.
 KOTUITUI: NEW ZEALAND JOURNAL OF SOCIAL SCIENCES ONLINE 473

South China and East China seas ‘that connect China to the rest of the world economy’ (Smith 2013, p. 25;
Scappatura 2014). A lynchpin of this strategy is the presence of US military bases in Japan, South Korea and
elsewhere in the region. In 2021, the US had 73 bases and 26,414 military personnel in South Korea, 120
bases and 53,713 military personnel in Japan, and 53 bases and 6,140 military personnel in Guam.1
Smith (2013, p. 25) argues that this strategy centrally aimed at ‘the military encirclement of China’, but
this needs to be qualified in two respects. Firstly, insider participants in the foreign policy-making process
involved deny that the pivot was primarily aimed at countering China’s rising power (Bader 2012; Davidson
2014, p. 78). Secondly, although it did result in around 60 percent of US Naval forces being committed to
what the Obama Administration referred to as the ‘Indo-Pacific’, and allowed for the redeployment of mili-
tary forces no longer required in Afghanistan and Iraq, it didn’t amount to a large military build-up in the
region much beyond its already substantial forward deployment due to a federal budget driven reduction of
military expenditure (De Castro 2018; Doyle and Rumley 2019, pp. 72–78; Yoshihara and Holmes 2018,
p. 165; Vine 2015, p. 19). More significantly, it signalled a shift in the strategic priorities of US foreign
policy-making towards containing China’s rise (Shambaugh 2013a, 2013b).
The Trump Administration maintained this approach militarily while launching a trade war against
China in 2018 introducing a broad range of tariffs on Chinese imports (OECD 2019, p. 26; see also Steff
and Tidwell 2020). The 2017 National Security Strategy alleges that China and Russia are ‘attempting to
erode American security and prosperity. They are determined to make economies less free and less fair,
to grow their militaries, and to control information and data to repress their societies and expand their
influence’ (White House 2017, p. 2). They are declared to be ‘strategic competitors’ with the US.
So far, the Biden Administration has maintained Obama’s pivot and Trump’s tariffs. The National Secur-
ity Strategy (NSS), released in October 2022, argues that ‘The US is on the brink of a “decisive decade”,
because “the post-Cold War era is definitely over and a competition is underway between the major powers
to shape what comes next”’ (The White House 2022, p. 6). China is identified as being ‘the only competitor
with both the intent to reshape the international order and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military,
and technological power to advance that objective’ (p. 8). It constitutes ‘America’s most consequential geo-
political challenge’ (p. 11). The bulk of the NSS is devoted to an outline of how the US will ‘out-compete’
and contain China. The strategy centrally involves three key prongs. First, building ‘the strongest possible
coalition of nations to enhance our collective influence’, composed of close democratic allies and partners,
non-democratic allies who support ‘a rules-based order’ (p.11), and supranational bodies that the US effec-
tively leads such as AUKUS, NATO, Five Eyes, the G7, the Indo-Pacific Quad, Indo-Pacific Economic
Framework, the Partnership for Global Investment and Infrastructure, the Americas Partnership for Econ-
omic Prosperity, World Bank, and IMF. The US will build ‘deeper bonds with Southeast Asian partners’
(p. 37), including Japan, South Korea, Thailand, Vietnam, and the Philippines.
The second prong is implementing a combination of domestic and trade policies aimed at reversing the
economic decline of the US relative to China. This is an investment in the ‘underlying sources and tools of
America influence’ (p. 11). These policies include ‘implementing a modern industrial and innovation strat-
egy’ with greater state support for ‘key areas where private industry, on its own, has not mobilized to protect
our core economic and national security interests’, such as ‘semiconductors and advanced computing’, bio-
technologies, and ‘clean energy technologies’ (pp. 14–15). Additionally, the US federal government is
‘enacting the largest investment in infrastructure in nearly a century’, strengthening its STEM-educated
workforce, and ‘countering intellectual property theft, forced technology transfer, and other attempts to
degrade our technological advantages by enhancing investment screening, export controls, and counterin-
telligence resources’ (p. 15). This means, in practice, substantially increasing the regulatory barriers to US
companies investing in, and exporting to, China. ‘The moves are in fact the US’s most aggressive yet as it
tries to stop China from developing technological capabilities it deems a threat’ (Kaur 2022, p. 1). It
amounts to an ‘economic war’ between the two countries (Bloomberg News 2022). Free-trade, especially
with China, is dead. Although the 2022 NSS rhetorically displays a commitment to the neoliberal ‘rules-
based order’ which ‘must remain the foundation for global peace and prosperity’, the truth is the opposite:
economically at least, Xi Jinping is much more strongly committed than Biden to maintaining the free-trade
arrangements associated with the cosmopolitan neoliberal ‘rules-based order’ that prevailed from 1982 to
2007. This is clear from Xi Jinping’s (2022) speech to the World Economic Forum,
474 B. S. ROPER

We should open up, not close off. We should seek integration, not decoupling. This is the way to build an open
world economy. We should guide reforms of the global governance system with the principle of fairness and
justice, and uphold the multilateral trading system with the World Trade Organization at its centre.

Marxist economists are sceptical that US federal government trade and industry policies will generate the
growth rate required to close the annual growth rate gap with China, because of the configuration of under-
lying factors that determine the average rate of profit in the US economy. Understood in Marxian terms, the
main cause of the US’s comparatively lower growth rate is a long-term decline in profitability, especially in
manufacturing (Carchedi and Roberts 2023; Brenner 2002; Harman 2010; Jones 2022; McNally 2011, 2020,
pp. 225–239; Moseley 1991, 2011; Riley and Brenner 2022; Roberts 2016; Shaikh 2016; Smith and Butovsky
2018.). Of course, there are all sorts of clarifications, elaborations, and qualifications that cannot be
discussed here given the need for brevity.
Third, the US military will be modernised and intelligence capabilities enhanced.
By modernising our military, pursuing advanced technologies, and investing in our defence workforce, we will
have strengthened deterrence in an era of increasing geopolitical confrontation, and positioned America to
defend our homeland, our allies, partners, and interests overseas, and our values across the globe. (The White
House 2022, p. 48)

Military power remains the bedrock of US hegemony. Interestingly, the NSS also announces what amounts
to a strategic withdrawal from the Middle East. ‘We have too often defaulted to military-centric policies
underpinned by an unrealistic faith in force and regime change to deliver sustainable outcomes,
while failing to adequately account for opportunity costs to competing global priorities or unintended
consequences’ (The White House 2022, p. 42). In other words, out-competing and containing China is
now the number one priority of US foreign policy and this rules out large-scale military interventions
and occupations of the kind seen in Afghanistan and Iraq under previous administrations. At the time
of writing (early 2024), it appears likely but is far from certain that that this broad strategic orientation
will persist during and beyond the period of US support for Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza.
The successive administrations of Obama, Trump, and Biden have become increasingly antagonistic
towards China. As Callinicos (2021a) aptly puts it, ‘Trump’s strategy was erratic and unpredictable. But
now we have a coherent policy of hostility to China’. By seeking to contain China’s rise with a broad
array of economic, diplomatic, and military measures, the US is fuelling tensions between the two countries.
Therefore international relations and the global political economy are likely to be propelled by the intensi-
fying geopolitical, economic, and military rivalry between China and the US.

The emergence of an asymmetric multipolar world order

These developments mean that
the unipolar world order based on the dominance of the US, which has been eroding for some time, has been
replaced by an asymmetric multipolar world order. The US remains the only superpower, and possesses by
far the largest military reach, but it faces a global rival in China and a host of lesser rivals like Russia. And
the competition between nation-states over the balance of geopolitical and economic power is intensifying.
(Smith 2017, pp. 43–44)

In a similar vein, but writing a decade earlier, Callinicos (2009, pp. 212–213) draws on Buzan’s three-tiered
scheme distinguishing between a globally hegemonic superpower which must ‘possess “broad-spectrum
capabilities right across the whole of the international system”’, great powers which ‘are responded to by
others on the basis of system-level calculations as well as regional ones’, and regional powers which can
exert substantial geopolitical and military influence over a regionally limited set of territories.
These insightful observations and helpful distinctions highlight major shifts in the configuration of the
global order since 1945: from the bipolar rivalry between two global superpowers during the Cold War, to
the ascendence of the US as the world’s sole globally hegemonic superpower from 1990 to 2008, followed by
the asymmetric multipolar order of the period from 2008 to 2020. In my view, the global order during the
decade from 2020 to 2030 will be configured around four-tiers: the US as the world’s globally hegemonic but
declining superpower; China as a superpower still weaker than the US but far more powerful than any of the
other great powers; great powers such as Britain, France, Germany, Japan, Russia; and regional powers such
 KOTUITUI: NEW ZEALAND JOURNAL OF SOCIAL SCIENCES ONLINE 475

as Australia, Israel, India, Saudi Arabia, Iran. If current trends continue with respect to the relative econ-
omic growth rates of China and the US, and China’s modernisation of its military, then post-2030 the global
order may return to a bipolar world order dominated by two globally influential superpowers – the US and
China. This is likely to occur even if China’s rate of economic growth slows since it can increase military
expenditure as a percentage of GDP more easily than the US.
To conclude, China constitutes a far greater threat to US imperialism than the Soviet Union which had
an economy that was never more than 60 percent of the size of the US economy (Callinicos et al. 1994,
p. 73). Although the US remains overwhelmingly dominant militarily, its advantage relative to China is
diminishing. If one factors in the high levels of spending on the militarisation of its police forces and the
highest incarceration rates in the world generating a comparatively large prison population, then the US
has one of the highest levels of government spending on weapons, police, and prisons relative to welfare
and public services of any advanced capitalist country (Wagner and Rabuy 2022). This has contributed
to major outbreaks of social and political unrest such as the Black Lives Matter movement (Johnson
2023; Taylor 2019). Little wonder that the Black Lives Matter movement calls for defunding the police in
order more adequately to fund welfare, health, and housing (Levin 2020).
Trump damaged US soft power, which ‘is more likely to have an impact on the general goals that a
country seeks’ than hard power, with irrational, provocative, and frequently racist tweets (Nye 2023,
p. 18, see also 71-73; The Soft Power 30 United states index score for 2015–2019).2 Declaring a trade war
with China in 2018, Trump allowed Xi Jinping to act as a defender of the cosmopolitan neoliberal order
and free trade. In addition, US soft power was further weakened by Trump’s woeful political misleadership
in response to the Covid 19 Pandemic. As Callinicos (2021b) insightfully argues, the US is potentially a weak
link in the chain of global imperialism. In view of its comparative economic decline, sustaining US military
hegemony requires high levels of per capita military expenditure. This, combined with decades of domestic
neoliberalism that has made the top one percent much better off while low – and middle-income Americans
struggle to afford health care, adequate housing, education, and to pay for the other essentials of life, means
that recurring outbreaks of social and political unrest are likely. In turn, this undermines the capacity of the
US to wage war against other countries in general and China in particular.

Implications for Aotearoa/New Zealand

The reconfiguration of the global order has interesting and important implications for NZ in view of the
configuration of its trade, security, military, and diplomatic relations. Limitations of space require a narrow
focus on these aspects even though it is important to recognise that NZ’s interconnections with the rest of
the world traverse economic, technological, social, migratory, cultural, intellectual, scientific, ideological,
geostrategic, military, and political dimensions, so competing influences from China and the US will be
diverse and multifaceted (Roper 2005b, pp. 29–30).
The intensifying rivalry between China and the US has been a central focus of the New Zealand foreign
policy literature (NZFPL), much of which draws upon the main theoretical perspectives within International
Relations (IR) (realism, idealism, and constructivism) and small state theory. The latter draws upon Waltz’s
(1979, pp. 129–193) conception of ‘relative material power’ which encompasses ‘population size, economic
and military strength’ (Steff and Dodd-Parr 2019, p. 92). Because of their size, ‘small states have different
needs, adopt different foreign policies, and have a harder time achieving favourable policy outcomes than
large states’ (Thorhallson and Steinson cited by Köllner 2021, p. 408). As Steff (2021, p. 4) observes, ‘a key
strategy for small states positioning between larger ones is hedging, involving efforts to “cultivate a middle
position that forestalls or avoids having to choose one side at the obvious expense of another”’ (Steff 2021,
p. 4). The consensus in the literature is that ‘New Zealand has adopted an asymmetric hedging strategy to
manage the fact its key security and economic needs have diverged, requiring positive relations with two com-
peting sets of actors – traditional partners for security and China for trade’ (Steff 2021, p. 4).
Marxists can agree with much of this, while pointing out that
national security always has a specific social substance at its core. It is the bulwark of particular social systems –
structures of domestic power, in class-divided societies, which embrace the entire way of life, institutions and
culture of the dominant and dominated classes, founded on specific economic orders. (Gowan 2002, p. 53)
476 B. S. ROPER

In other words, it isn’t simply a matter of the relative quantitative size of nation-states that determines the
extent of their power within the global order, but the qualitative nature and configuration of their econom-
ies, societies, and polities. Furthermore,
we cannot ignore the internal socio-political structures of states when studying their foreign policies. The
national strategies of states always operate to mediate domestic and external socio-economic and political drives,
and the stability of inter-state systems depends upon a fit between these internal and external arrangements of
the main states. (Gowan 2002, p. 55)

For example, in the literature on NZ foreign policy one often encounters brief references to domestic
political influences such as ‘insulation from public opinion’ (Buchanan 2010, p. 263), domestic ‘compli-
cations or constraints’ (Köllner 2021, p. 429), ‘domestic politics’ and ‘domestic criticism’ (Smith 2022,
pp. 315, 320), ‘argue to its public’ (Ayson 2023, p. 240), and ‘domestic public opinion could influence or
interfere with’ foreign policy (Steff and Dodd-Parr 2019, p. 104). Quite apart from the general criticism
of realism that it provides inadequate theoretical foundations for analysing domestic influences on the for-
mulation of foreign policy (Callinicos 2009, pp. 73–93), the NZFPL fails sufficiently to recognise the extent
to which the foreign policies of China, the US, and New Zealand are profoundly shaped by, among other
things, the specific forms of capitalism (including the mode of production, societal structuration, and result-
ing socio-political forces and patterns of interest group influence), systems of government, and neoliberal-
ism in these countries.
New Zealand has been ahead of most other Western countries in establishing a closer economic relation-
ship with China, being the first Western country to: ‘conclude a bilateral agreement with China on its acces-
sion to the World Trade Organisation (August 1997), recognise China’s status as a market economy (May
2004)’ (Steff and Dodd-Parr 2019, p. 96); establish a Free Trade Agreement (FTA) with China (April 2008);
‘the first western developed nation to join negotiations to set up the [Asia Infrastructure Investment] Bank’,
joining in 2015 (Rutherford 2015); and sign an MoU with China for its BRI in 2017.
There isn’t space to provide a detailed account of management of the bilateral relationship by successive
New Zealand governments, but it’s worth noting that relations were generally warm during the terms of the
fifth Labour and National governments from 1999 to 2008 and 2008 to 2017 respectively, with China being
described as ‘a key strategic partner’ by the latter, became rocky from 2017 to 2018 when Winston Peters
was Foreign Minister in the Sixth Labour-led Government, prompting PM Jacinda Ardern to take charge of
the China-NZ relationship with warm relations being re-established thereafter (Ayson 2020, pp. 461–468).
In response to the question ‘What would you do if China invaded Taiwan?’, posed in the first TVNZ leaders
debate prior to the 2023 election, Christopher Luxon endorsed Christopher Hipkins’ view that New Zealand
would do everything it could to prevent such a situation developing and stated ‘where there has been bi-
partisanship under successive governments, under successive parties, is our approach to foreign affairs
and to our relationships with our key partners which has actually been very consistent between govern-
ments’ (see also RNZ 2022).3 This suggests a continuation of the asymmetric hedging strategy but with
Winston Peters back in the Foreign Minister role, it will be interesting to observe how the Sixth
National-led government manages his propensity to antagonise Beijing given that previous National gov-
ernments have prioritised maintaining cordial bilateral relations with China (Miller 2023). As Defence Min-
ister, Judith Collins is unlikely to support a more hawkish stance in relation to China (Corlett and McClure
2021). National’s likely continuation of the hedging strategy maintained by previous governments is due, in
part, to the importance of the Chinese market for NZ farmers (especially dairy producers), horticultural and
wine producers, tourist operators, and New Zealand businesses that outsource their manufacturing to
China. Brady (2018) exaggerates the extent of covert Chinese influence over the National Party, and
New Zealand politics generally, but assembles sufficient evidence to suggest that it exists to some extent.
Young (2017, pp. 518–519) observes, as ‘an export-oriented, small trading nation’, ‘improving conditions
for New Zealand trade through relations with significant others is an essential aspect of New Zealand
foreign policy’. Related to the fact that New Zealand’s ‘strategic outlook is shaped by a very strong trade
imperative’, is the emphasis placed on maintaining an ‘independent foreign policy’ by successive govern-
ments (Köllner 2021, p. 410). Since the FTA with China was ratified in 2008, bi-lateral trade has grown
to the point that China is, by a substantial margin, NZ’s most important trading partner. In most years
since 2008, NZ has enjoyed large trading surpluses with China. For example, in 2021 total exports of
 KOTUITUI: NEW ZEALAND JOURNAL OF SOCIAL SCIENCES ONLINE 477

goods and services to China were valued at $21.45 billion, while total imports were $16.26 billion (MFAT
2022). This amounts to a trading surplus of $5.19 billion. It is no exaggeration to say that China helped to
keep the NZ economy afloat during the COVID pandemic, offsetting to some extent the loss of foreign
currency from international tourism due to border closures.
Turning to New Zealand’s relations with the US, which also crucially involves the relationship with its
only formal ally – Australia, there are several developments that even a very brief overview should mention.
The first of these is the Canberra Pact of 1944 which ‘focused on trans-Tasman defence for a post-war South
Pacific’, trilateral ANZUS Treaty of 1951 that provided for mutual defence if one of the parties were subject
to ‘an armed attack in the Pacific area’, and the joint statement on Closer Defence Relations between Aus-
tralia and New Zealand issued in 1991 that reiterated ‘New Zealand remains committed to responding
immediately should Australia be subject to an armed attack’ (Ayson 2023, pp. 238–239). When a prolonged
campaign for a nuclear free New Zealand culminated in the Fourth Labour Government banning nuclear
ship visits and the US responding by suspending its defence obligations in the ANZUS Treaty, New Zealand
ceased to be a formal military ally of the US. Thereafter, New Zealand had more room to manoeuvre with
respect to developing its ‘independent foreign policy’ which became a more pronounced theme of New
Zealand foreign policy-making. Although cool during the 1990s, bilateral relations with the US warmed
during the 2000s due to New Zealand providing military personnel for US military operations in Afghani-
stan and Iraq. US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice described New Zealand as an ‘ally’ during her 2008
visit (Steff and Dodd-Parr 2019, p. 95). In 2011 the NZ-US Wellington Declaration ‘signalled the beginning
of a renewed strategic partnership’ and this was followed in 2012 with the Washington Declaration which
provided for a stronger security and defence relationship (Steff and Dodd-Parr 2019, p. 95). More recently,
New Zealand displayed its commitment to its shared defence arrangements with Australia and the US by
purchasing four Boeing P-8A Poseidon maritime patrol aircraft for $2.34 billion that are interoperable with
Australian and US military forces.
As this indicates, during the same period that New Zealand has been drawing closer to China economi-
cally, it has also been building closer security relations with the US, even though it continues to maintain a
more distant relationship than Australia which is a close formal ally of the US. This greater distance is exem-
plified by widespread New Zealand criticism of the AUKUS trilateral security pact between Australia, the
UK, and the US which provides US and UK assistance to Australia in acquiring eight nuclear powered
attack submarines. (O’Connor et al. 2023) Pagani (2023) expressed a view held across much of
New Zealand’s political spectrum that AUKUS ‘is unnecessarily provocative to China, possibly foolhardy
in its nuclear proliferation. It is not clear what Australia achieves by positioning nuclear submarines in
the South China Sea, a long way from home’.4
As tensions between China and the US continue to intensify, NZ governments are likely to find
themselves in an increasingly difficult position. Much of the NZFPL focuses on the sustainability of
New Zealand’s hedging strategy as ‘strategic competition’ between China and the US intensifies. Although
Labour and National’s bi-partisanship in foreign policy-making reflects the shared influence on both parties
of liberal idealist views of international relations and US–China rivalry, Mearsheimer’s (2014a) offensive
realism has been a major influence on the academic literature. (Mearsheimer 2006, p. 160) argues,
among other things, that ‘if China continues its impressive economic growth over the next few decades,
the United States and China are likely to engage in an intense security competition with considerable poten-
tial for war’. Military conflict is likely because, on one side, ‘China is likely to try to dominate Asia the way
the United States dominates the Western Hemisphere’, while on the other
the United States can be expected to go to great lengths to contain China and ultimately weaken it to the point
where it is no longer capable of ruling the roost in Asia. In essence, America is likely to behave toward China
much the way it behaved toward the Soviet Union during the cold war. (2006, p. 162)

Liberal idealists and Marxists (Robinson 2007, 2017) who subscribe to a conception of global capitalism
being dominated by a transnational capitalist class and governed by transnational states reject this view,
emphasising the economic connections and inter-dependencies between China and the US, the mutually
beneficial nature of international trade from the perspective of political and economic elites in both
countries, the shared commitment of these elites to neoliberalism, and so forth. In contrast, most contem-
porary Marxist writers on imperialism and international relations agree with the view of offensive realists
478 B. S. ROPER

that military conflict between China and the US, directly or by involving proxies, is a realistic possibility in
the decades to come. But they strongly disagree with elements of offensive realist theory. As Gowan (2002,
p. 53) observes, ‘Mearsheimer’s whole edifice of realist theory appears to rest on an abstract postulate – that
great powers face an existential threat – for which there is scant historical evidence’. Even more concerning
are the foreign policy prescriptions often derived from offensive realist analyses of China’s rise. Indeed,
since it is commonly used to justify increased military expenditure and forward placement of military
forces, the offensive realist prediction of looming military conflict dangerously risks becoming a self-fulfill-
ing prophesy, as has been pointed out by defensive realists (Kirshner 2010), liberal idealists (White 2012),
and Marxists (Callinicos 2023, pp. 113–117).
Most of the New Zealand foreign policy literature is characterised by a strongly anti-China and pro-US
bias, unsurprisingly arguing for New Zealand to establish closer military, ‘strategic, security, and intelli-
gence ties with the AUKUS nations’ (Steff 2023, p. 1). The problem is not so much that the criticism of
China is inaccurate, although some of it is, but rather that it is applied in a one-sided manner. There is
no space to discuss this fully here, so two points will have to suffice. Firstly, legitimate criticism of China’s
authoritarian suppression of the pro-democracy movement in Hongkong, failure to grant independence to
Tibet, oppression of the Uygurs in Xinjiang (Amnesty International 2021; United Nations 2022), absence
throughout China of civil liberties including the right to form free trade unions (Chan et al. 2020), and
so forth, is not balanced with a similarly critical examination of the US which is assumed to be a benign
democratic superpower promoting peace, democracy, and freedom throughout the world. There is little
acknowledgement that China has zero military bases in close geographical proximity to the US while the
US maintains a large number of military bases in close geographic proximity to China (Vine 2015). Nor
is there mention of the enormous human costs of its interventions in the Middle East, Vietnam, Indonesia
(Cockburn 2021, 2023; Dower 2017; Fibiger 2023, pp. 46–65; Neale 2001; Vine 2020), its extensive use of
covert intervention throughout Central and Latin America (Podur and Emersberger 2021; Prashad
2020), the maintenance of an economic blockade of Cuba since the early 1960s (Lamrani 2013), its pro-
motion of the Eastward expansion of NATO which provoked the Russian invasion of Ukraine (Achcar
2023; Callinicos 2023; Mearsheimer 2014b), consistent support for Israel despite its blatant breaches of
international law including those committed during its most recent war in Gaza (Amnesty International
2023), the fact that the US maintains the death penalty in many states and has the highest incarceration
rate in world with around 2.8 million predominately black and Latino Americans in prisons (Taylor 2019).
Secondly, there is a pervasive failure to recognise that the US’s comprehensive efforts to curtail China’s
rise may eventually provoke a response. Much of the discussion proceeds on the assumption that China is
much more likely than the US to initiate conflict, for example, by invading Taiwan. As Noakes (2021, p. 12)
observes,
Placing so much emphasis on geostrategy as the motivator for China’s ascendance in the Pacific carries a range of
consequences. Most importantly, it runs a high risk of creating a tautological echo chamber in which the dangers
of China’s rise are taken to be self-evident by virtue of the rise itself. The pervasiveness of this view is only
encouraged when other approaches and explanations which could lend new perspective on that rise have not
been sufficiently examined. Since China’s presence in the region is determined by strategic competition, and
by definition competitions have winners and losers, wins for China means losses for others. Its rise is therefore
disruptive to the status quo, and further evidence is not required.

So, for example, in an article which discusses ‘New Zealand’s alliance obligations in a China-Australia
war’, Ayson (2023) fails to consider a situation in which the US starts a military confrontation while pre-
senting false information to the global public to justify it, as happened when the US invaded Iraq in 2003
(Callinicos 2003, 2010; Mooers 2006). It is an incontrovertible fact of history that since 1945 vastly larger
numbers of fatalities have resulted from US foreign military interventions than the much more limited
interventions by China, the largest of which being its 1979 incursion into Vietnam (Dower 2017; Smith
2023; Vine 2020). As we have seen, Mearsheimer (2014a, pp. 360–411) more accurately argues that the
two key potential geostrategic sources of future military conflict between China and the US are China’s
desire to become a regional hegemon in Asia and the US’s desire to stop it using all the means at its disposal.
In view of this, and for other reasons that can’t be fully articulated here, non-alignment is a preferable
foreign policy option for New Zealand than closer alignment to the US and its allies, who are at the very least
 KOTUITUI: NEW ZEALAND JOURNAL OF SOCIAL SCIENCES ONLINE 479

as likely as China to provoke armed conflict (Achcar 2023; Bacevich 2022; Bellamy-Foster et al. 2023. As
Smith (2022, p. 321) points out, ‘non-alignment might be attractive to New Zealand as avoiding being
sucked into the increasing zero-sum tension of the Sino-American relationship’. Khoo (2021) and Steff
(2023) reject non-alignment on unconvincing grounds that ultimately rest on a contestable realist assump-
tion that New Zealand could potentially face an existential threat from China in the absence of a close secur-
ity relationship with Australia and the United States. For example, Steff (2023) argues ‘If a US–China neo-
Cold War is underway, it might pay to bet on the most powerful and dynamic side – which is the US and
Australia’. As this article has shown, for several decades China’s economy and its military has been growing
at much faster rates than the US, so it’s hard to see how the US can be considered to be more dynamic than
China. Khoo (2021, p. 321) argues more carefully that although ‘non-alignment might be attractive to New
Zealand as avoiding being sucked into the increasing zero-sum tension of the Sino-American relationship’,
‘Wellington could end up in a situation where either (or both) Beijing and Washington equate nonalign-
ment with appeasement, opening the door to various levels of implicit or explicit coercive diplomacy
from these states’. It can be counter-argued that enduring diplomatic pressure from China and/or the
US is preferable to getting sucked into a war between China and the US with its allies, that the weight of
historical evidence suggests is more likely to be provoked and/or started by the US.
From a Marxist perspective the creation of a qualitatively more peaceful world will ultimately require
the collective democratic transcendence of capitalism, imperialism, neoliberalism, and the states which
maintain the existing global order (Roper 2013, pp. 274–275).

Conclusion
China’s rise has been a major factor in the reconfiguration of the global order. The US responded to China’s
rise with Obama’s ‘pivot towards Asia’ committing 60 percent of its naval forces to the Asia Pacific region.
The Trump Administration launched a trade war in 2018 – introducing a broad range of tariffs on Chinese
imports. So far, the Biden Administration has maintained Obama’s pivot and Trump’s tariffs while
intensifying US efforts to counter China’s rise. Increasing US hostility towards China, combined with Chi-
na’s increasing assertiveness in international affairs, has led to escalating tensions. The global order is likely
to be propelled, at least in part, by the intensifying geopolitical, economic, and military competition between
China and the US. The world order beyond 2030 will be dominated by two superpowers, a handful of great
powers, and a multiplicity of regional powers.
In this world-historical context, NZ governments will find it increasingly difficult to walk the tight rope
between China and the US, especially if there is a major escalation of Sino-US conflict. While those on the
right of the political spectrum are likely to be alarmed by China’s growing international influence and to
support military action taken by the US and/or its allies against China, those on the left are likely to oppose
military action against China led by the US, including proxy wars conducted by its regional allies with its
encouragement and support. But the left also needs to clearly recognise the authoritarian and oppressive
nature of the regime led by Xi Jinping, and support struggles for independence for Tibet, for an end to
the oppression of the Uyghur people in Xinjiang, and for democracy in Hong Kong and mainland
China, including the right of workers to form independent trade unions.
With respect to the New Zealand foreign policy literature focused on China’s rise and the US response,
there is an almost complete absence of heterodox perspectives (such as Marxism, neo-Gramscian IR theory,
and feminism). There needs to be more research of the kind exemplified by Noakes (2021) and hopefully
this article, to explore the important issues being raised by New Zealand’s economic, geopolitical, security,
military, and diplomatic relationships with China, Australia and the United States.

Notes
1. A map of US base locations around the world can be accessed at: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/9/10/
infographic-us-military-presence-around-the-world-interactive
2. https://softpower30.com/country/united-states/
3. https://www.tvnz.co.nz/shows/1news-your-vote-2023/episodes/s2023-e1
480 B. S. ROPER

4. https://www.stuff.co.nz/opinion/300837506/josie-pagani--the-fistpumping-of-aukus-doesnt-help-counter-the-
fistpumping-in-moscow

Acknowledgments
Part Two of this article has benefited greatly from the very helpful and much appreciated comments of two anonymous
referees. The referee who disagreed most strongly with the main arguments in this part of the article very generously
provided many helpful suggestions. The final version of the article is much stronger because of their input. Thanks very
much.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

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