Will China make a bid for regional hegemony in East Asia, and can it succeed? In the modern era, only the United States has achieved regional hegemony—all other attempts have met catastrophic failure. China should not pursue hegemony, and the United States should adopt a measured approach to China’s rise, facilitating balancing behavior by the United States’ Asian partners while working with China to create a more stable regional order.
Guests: Stephen M. Walt is the Robert and Renée Belfer Professor of International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School.
International Security Article: Stephen M. Walt, “Hedging on Hegemony: The Realist Debate over How to Respond to China,” International Security, Vol. 49, No. 4 (Spring 25), pp. 37–70, https://doi.org/10.1162/isec_a_00508.
Originally released on June 24, 2025
Jeff Friedman: Hello and welcome to the International Security Podcast. We are produced by International Security, a quarterly journal edited at Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and published by MIT press. Each episode of the podcast highlights a piece of research from the journal, drawing out its implications for understanding the theory and practice of international politics.
I'm Jeff Friedman from Dartmouth College. Today our guest is Stephen Walt. Steve is the Belfer Professor of International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School. His recent International Security article is titled “Hedging on Hegemony: The Realist Debate over How to Respond to China.” The article argues that the theory of offensive realism exaggerates the degree to which states such as China have incentives to pursue regional hegemony. It draws on the theory of defensive realism to explain why the United States and China are not destined for war and can instead preserve a peaceful balance of power in East Asia. Steve, good to see you.
Stephen M. Walt: Nice to be here.
Jeff Friedman: Okay, so, just to start, you focus on assessing the feasibility of a Chinese bid for hegemony in East Asia. Can you start by explaining why that question is so important for shaping the region's politics and US policy towards it?
Stephen M. Walt: Yeah, I'll do my best. So the concern that China might establish itself as a regional hegemon, I think, has underlain much of America's concern about China's rise. I mean, there are a variety of reasons why the United States is worried about China's rising power and some of its ambitions, but that's often viewed through the lens of whether or not China will become a hegemonic power in Asia. And the United States for at least a century has had as a central principle of its grand strategy or foreign policy preventing any other country from establishing a dominant position in its region similar to the dominant position that the United States enjoys in the Western Hemisphere.
And the logic behind that was essentially a realist one, that if any state, you know, Nazi Germany, Wilhelmine Germany, Imperial Japan, the Soviet Union, truly dominated its region, it would be secure from local challenges and therefore be in a position to project power readily around the world, including possibly into the Western Hemisphere.
And American leaders of many different types decided that American security would be maximized if other great powers had to worry a lot about conditions in their immediate neighborhood and therefore couldn't focus fully on the United States. So that underlay American entry into World War I, World War II, it lay behind our strategy in the Cold War.
And it's now why the United States is both focused on China, but explicitly trying to prevent China from dominating Asia. And the article tries to assess how likely it is that China will try to do that, and if it did try, how likely it is that it would succeed.
Jeff Friedman: Yeah, so let's start there. You begin the article by reviewing the history of states’ attempts to secure regional hegemony. How has that tended to go for them?
Stephen M. Walt: Not well. And this is again one of the points where I part company from my offensive realist friends. So the argument that you get out of offensive realism is that if a state is in a position to establish itself or make a bid for hegemony, it should try. Because if it succeeds, of course, then it will have maximized its own security.
The problem is if you look historically at the various countries who have tried this, almost all of them fail. You know, France failed under Louis XIV. Germany failed not once, but twice. Napoleon Bonaparte ultimately failed and ends up dying, you know, in exile in the South Atlantic. Imperial Japan makes a bid for Asian hegemony in the 1930s. It fails.
And what's interesting about these cases is they aren't just failures, they're catastrophic failures. Napoleonic France loses a million soldiers and ends up with the Bourbon restoration. Germany loses both world wars, ends up divided at the end of the Second World War for 40 years, and of course suffers massive damage. Imperial Japan loses several million people and has two atomic bombs dropped on it. So again, these aren't just setbacks. These are catastrophic failures. And that suggests that maybe there's a reason why bidding for hegemony is not such a great idea even if the conditions might appear to be favorable at one point or another.
Jeff Friedman: What are those reasons? So these bids for regional hegemony, they failed. They failed catastrophically. Why? Why is that? These are pretty powerful states. Surely they thought they had some plausible chance of securing their objectives. What tends to go wrong for them?
Stephen M. Walt: Well, there are two things that go wrong. One of them is obviously the operation of the balance of power. And this is sort of the key insight that comes out of defensive realism, is that when states are powerful, but also when they appear to be especially threatening, i.e., when they are manifesting hegemonic ambitions, other states, whatever their other differences might be, get together to try and stop them. That yes, there are collective action problems. Yes, it's sometimes tough to organize a balancing coalition. But if you look at all of the failures, Napoleon, Wilhelmine Germany, Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, et cetera, they're all ultimately defeated at the hands of a vastly stronger balancing coalition and that coalition is conjured up or provoked into being by the aggressive attempt to establish hegemony in a particular region.
A second reason, which I think reinforces that, is the emergence and development of modern nationalism around the world, which both strengthens the balancing tendency, but it also makes it harder to benefit from conquest. You may conquer another great power and occupy its territory, but you're likely to face resistance. And that resistance makes the benefits of owning more territory substantially greater. You even have to worry that if you appear to have established a hegemonic position eventually some of those countries might revolt against you and turn out to be more of a liability than an asset. Again, if you look at the previous hegemonic bids many of those powers actually faced really significant occupation costs. So a combination of balancing dynamics and modern nationalism, I think, makes it extremely difficult to establish a hegemonic position anywhere.
Jeff Friedman: Steve, whatever happened to the stopping power of water? If I think back to my IR general exams, I thought that was supposed to be the main thing that blocked these bids for regional hegemony. I noticed you did not mention that just now. Why is that?
Stephen M. Walt: Well, to be clear, I mean, stopping power of water is an idea that emerges in John Mearsheimer’s famous book, Tragedy of Great Power Politics, and he argues that's why you can't be a global hegemon. He doesn't argue that prevents regional hegemony, that is the limiting factor, that it's just too difficult to project military power across vast distances and against a hostile shore.
And so you can't be a global hegemon, but you can aspire to dominate a particular region. And I do discuss it in the article and point out that the stopping power of water first of all, you know, isn't an absolute barrier. The United States was able to project an enormous amount of military power across the Pacific during the Second World War, and eventually across the Atlantic, staging in Great Britain and then conducting the Normandy invasion.
So, you could also point to some of the places the United States has intervened since then. So water is a barrier, but it's not an absolute barrier. But more importantly, I argued that the stopping power of water didn't, isn't the main reason that past hegemons failed. It was primarily the operation of a balance of power.
Jeff Friedman: You just mentioned that the United States is an exception to this pattern that bids for regional hegemony tend to fail. Why is it that the United States is the exception to that? Both in North America and with the Monroe Doctrine, that does seem to be a place where a power was able to consolidate control relatively peacefully, or at least in the absence of warfare with other great powers.
Why was that?
Stephen M. Walt: So the United States is in fact the great exception and the reasons for that exceptional status, the fact that the United States did establish a hegemonic position in the Western Hemisphere, is really a fascinating tale, and I think there are several reasons.
I mean, one of them is a geographic distance. That other major powers, especially Great Britain, but to some degree France and to some degree Spain, were worried about the 13 colonies and the power potential that they had if they continued to grow and expand in Europe. But there were always other problems that worried them more. So, you know, the United States foolishly attacks Canada and Great Britain in the war of 1812, and the British respond by occupying Washington, DC, and burning the White House, suggesting that they are in fact far stronger. But of course this is 1812. It's the middle of the Napoleonic Wars and Britain quite sensibly decides that it has to concentrate on defeating France, and then focusing on the peace negotiations at the Congress of Vienna. So the United States gets off easy, in part because it's a long way away from the other major powers.
A second reason was, the United States does face substantial opposition from the indigenous Native American population. And as I learned in part from sources that you told me about some years ago, you know, Colin Callaway and others, the indigenous tribes did have working systems of diplomacy, were sometimes able to coordinate activities and inflict defeats upon the United States, but you had a situation where they faced enormous collective action problems. These are relatively small tribes, mutually antagonistic in many cases, had norms of consensus decision-making, et cetera. And very importantly, were vulnerable to diseases that the Europeans had brought to them from Europe. So in a sense, this was an unfair fight. You couldn't get the kind of coordinated opposition sustained over many years.
A third factor was the fact that the United States rose to great power rather slowly. It's again, we start out as these 13 rather weak colonies clinging to the Atlantic seaboard, and we grow to be a great power, but we do it over a century or more. So in a sense, the United States establishes itself but so slowly that people, they notice, but they don't feel they have to respond immediately.
And finally, the United States never has to fight another great power in that entire period after the war of 1812. We fight an expansionist war with Mexico, but Mexico is not a great power and has no great power allies.
So if you look at the United States as a whole, the situation was nearly perfect for establishing a hegemonic position. We simply didn't face the kind of concerted opposition because again, the other major powers who might've stopped us were generally busy worrying about each other and not worrying about us. And local opposition could not organize effectively against us. There's other things going on there, but that's the main story I tell.
Jeff Friedman: Yeah, I mean, that makes a lot of sense, the United States is just this unique case historically for many reasons that wouldn't necessarily apply to China. I want to take the analogies a bit further though…
Stephen M. Walt: Can I…
Jeff Friedman: Oh, yeah, go.
Stephen M. Walt: One final point, and this is I think an important point. The United States also went to some lengths in the 19th century to try and reassure others about its intentions. That, you know, it was originally regarded somewhat askance by the European great powers. We're a revolutionary state. We have these crazy ideas about democracy, we're anti-monarchical, et cetera. And in the early 19th century presidents like John Adams began to work very hard at convincing Europeans that in fact, we were not trying to overturn the entire global order, that we recognize the system of states needed to exist, et cetera.
And over time we were able to persuade many other countries that our intentions were relatively benign. Not our intentions towards the indigenous population—there we were quite horrible—but towards the other major powers the United States behaved itself to some degree, and that made them even less likely to, you know, view us as a dangerous threat that had to be contained.
Jeff Friedman: Yeah, that makes sense. Taking this back to East Asia for a moment, I mean, all the cases you've described so far of states bidding for regional hegemony, like the world wars, Napoleonic Wars, the United States conquering indigenous peoples, these involve overt military assaults and invasions. And I could certainly see the argument that if China were to attempt, you know, Barbarossa 2.0 today, they'd be running major risks. But what about the idea that they could accomplish these objectives through salami-slicing, you know, sort of pressure a state here, build an artificial island in the South China Sea over there, and before you know it, they've secured regional hegemony without the kind of mass confrontation that seems to have brought other bids down in the past.
Stephen M. Walt: Right. Well, if I were advising Xi Jinping on how to proceed, that's exactly what I'd tell him to do. It's something sort of more akin to the strategy of peaceful rise that's associated with, you know, with Deng Xiaoping and some of his successors, the idea that you hide your power, concentrate on building good relations with everyone, and don't, you know, throw a lot of sharp elbows early on.
That's not, of course, what China has done in recent years, but I would certainly tell them to sort of imitate the United States. Do it slowly. Do it gradually. Don't throw your weight around until you're really in a position that others can't stand up to you.
Even there, I'm not sure it's going to work. I mean, first of all, you know, nationalism exists in China and this requires a great deal of self-restraint. But also others are noticing China's increasing power. You know, we live in a world now where information is ubiquitous, where Chinese military capabilities can be monitored. Their exercises can be observed, their speeches, their territorial claims, all are things that people can watch. So yes, they can try to proceed in a gradual, you know, so as you say, salami-slicing tactic. But I think other states are already noticing what China is doing and responding to it by increasing their own military capabilities, forging various security ties with each other. And that leaves aside some of the other options that would be available if a Chinese bid for hegemony began to emerge, such as the acquisition of nuclear weapons and other things like that.
Jeff Friedman: Let's talk about the prospect for balancing in East Asia because that's such a key part of your article, that consistent with defensive realism, states balance in reaction to threat. But I could see some reasons to think that East Asia is tough for this. There's no other state there that can remotely match China's military power. A number of these states are spread out pretty wide with oceans among them. You know, I could see this as a circumstance where Beijing could buck historical trends by sort of picking off states one by one without stimulating a balancing coalition. I just wonder if you look at the last decade or so, do you see that working or is the balancing coalition holding together? What's the trajectory that the region seems to be on with respect to that part of your argument?
Stephen M. Walt: Your points about the potential obstacles to an effective balancing coalition in Asia are right on the money. The fact that there are big distances involved, you know, makes it possible for states to think they can sit one out, you know, if a conflict occurs. The fact that some Asian countries have bad histories, South Korea and Japan is a good example of that, is one obstacle as well. But I think there's several things too that are more reassuring. I mean, first of all, there is another great power involved in Asia. The United States has a very large and well-established military presence in Asia, and there's no sign that it's going anywhere.
The last four presidents have all talked about doing more in Asia and have begun to move American military assets there. So, so far the American commitment to Asia hasn't diminished. Moreover, the United States has worked rather effectively to try and smooth relations between a number of Asian countries, most notably in the agreement that the Biden administration was able to broker between South Korea and Japan.
So I think that is suggestive. And then finally, just, do you look at what different countries are already doing? As I said before you know, they are sharply increasing their own military capabilities. Organizations, you know, informal associations like the Quad of India, Australia, Japan, and the United States, are forming and continue to operate. The United States has improved its relations with countries like Vietnam, motivated almost entirely, I think, by security concerns as well. So, thus far there's no indication that states in Asia are unwilling to balance, because they recognize that keeping China in check, at least in military and security terms, is highly desirable if they want to maintain their own autonomy.
Jeff Friedman: Steve, what do you think accounts for the seeming convergence among Democrats and Republicans on this? It just seems like conventional wisdom at this point, that the two parties can't agree on anything internationally. And yet, as you point out, the Trump and Biden administrations were relatively continuous with each other on supporting a balancing coalition in East Asia.
Is that an accident? Is that something that we can expect to continue? What role do you see US domestic politics playing here?
Stephen M. Walt: So it's two parts of it. I mean, certainly this is one of the few issues where you get a real bipartisan consensus. And I think that just reflects the structural reality that Americans finally woke up to the fact that they did in fact have a peer competitor emerging in Asia, that China was not converging towards liberal democracy, it was not embracing the various institutions or all of the institutions that the United States favored, it had its own interests, it was going to pursue them. And it didn't take very long for both Democrats and Republicans to then agree that the United States should respond.
Whether we responded as well as we could have is a separate question. And that sort of brings us to the domestic politics. You know, I think the Trump administration understands that China is a long-term rival. Certainly people in the Pentagon see that very clearly. The, some of the developments that you're seeing the United States pursuing in trying to slow Chinese technological advances are all consistent with that as well.
The problem is that there are also some fundamental contradictions in the way Trump has approached this both in his first term and his second term. It was a strategic mistake, in my view, to tear up or leave the Transpacific Partnership, which he did back in 2017. And I think it's also a mistake to simultaneously want to balance China in Asia in strategic terms and at the same time have trade wars with most of our trading partners in that part of the world. What you want to do is unite those countries in a united front vis-a-vis China, rather than picking fights with the same countries you're trying to be allied with.
And I hope that the administration can resolve that contradiction, because it is one of the things that could ultimately, you know, undermine our ability to balance China and therefore, you know, among other things make this article look silly in 30 years.
Jeff Friedman: Steve, how crucial is Taiwan to this equation in your view? The, you know, the standard way the US commitment to Taiwan is portrayed is that it's the fulcrum for credibility in the region; if the United States doesn't back Taiwan, then the balancing coalition will fall apart. In hearing you describe the history of great power bids for hegemony, though I'm, yeah, I'm reminded of the fact that even a canonical case of appeasement like Munich didn't prevent the Allies from catastrophically crushing Germany's bid for regional hegemony in the end.
So, I mean, I guess a question for you is whether the US commitment to Taiwan is as important as people think. Does it seem to hold the pivot point for the balancing coalition in Asia, or is that something that might be less important than the conventional wisdom suggests?
Stephen M. Walt: Yeah, this is a hotly debated topic and you know, readers of International Security undoubtedly know that there are a variety of views here. People, you know, Caitlin Talmadge of MIT for example arguing that Taiwan is really quite critical to our security position in Asia; people like Charlie Glaser, now also associated at MIT, with a much more sanguine view.
My view is that China is a useful partner and the United States should be committed to its defense, but how critical it ultimately is depends a certain to a certain degree on the scenario you have in mind. So the United States is formally on record saying that if Taiwan wants to voluntarily reunify with China and they can work that out, we have no objection. In that scenario, American credibility isn't called into question at all. We've said that, you know, the Taiwanese want to rejoin China, that's okay with us.
Similarly, a situation where Taiwan provoked the Chinese, for example, by unilaterally declaring independence, doesn't call American credibility into question very much, because that’s a position we've asked the Taiwanese not to pursue. So it depends a little bit on the scenarios.
And finally, worst case, you know, there is a direct military challenge and the United States either declines to respond, says, well, sorry, we're not going to do anything, or tries to respond and fails. That would be obviously, I think, you know, a setback for the United States and would undermine our position to some degree, but it would also be an enormous wake up call. That, it doesn't eradicate the American security position in Asia. We would still have lots of assets there and we'd still have lots of countries who now, in my view, would be even more interested in having close security ties with the United States.
So I think, you know, if you are imagining that if Taiwan were to fall, suddenly everyone throws up the white flag and says, well, we are, you know, we're sending delegations to Beijing to work out the new tributary relationship. I think that's far too pessimistic.
Jeff Friedman: Steve your article has very clear policy implications for China. You know, don't push for regional hegemony, or this is liable to go badly for you. So let me keep asking you about implications for the United States and its allies. I think even if I accept the idea that the prospect of China bidding for regional hegemony is lower than I might otherwise have thought, does that change the way I should think about this?
I mean, national security is full of low probability, high consequence risks. The chances that China might do something that's not in its interests due to nationalism or anything else could still be high enough to worry about, so how does the realization that this balancing coalition is likely to be more stable than the conventional wisdom believes, how does that shape the way the United States should respond to this circumstance? Does this mean that Washington can shift its policy in a more dovish direction, or that it should just keep doing what it's already doing to shore up its position in the region?
Stephen M. Walt: That's a great question and I think the sort of overall implication of this article is that the United States ought to approach this problem as calmly as possible. And it is, at the risk of, you know, a pun, it is a balancing act here. The United States cannot ignore China's rising power and the ambitions that are going along with that, but it also shouldn't panic.
It should, you know, monitor its capabilities and try to make sure that we can continue to operate effectively in the event of a significant Chinese military challenge in Asia. We should be working actively with our allies there and coordinating with them. And that always faces the usual intra-alliance bargaining challenges where, you know, our allies would sort of like the United States to do all the heavy lifting, and we would like them to do a lot more. And that just requires a lot of diplomatic interchange, you know, mutually respectful conversations where we don't need to panic but we do need to keep pushing them to do more.
But finally, we also have an interest in not creating the circumstances where bids for hegemony often arise. And those bids for hegemony partly arise from opportunity. States that see, ah, there seems to be a window open at the moment, but who also are worried about their long-term future, and in particular become convinced that sort of the world is out to get them, and if they don't act now, they're going to be in real trouble down the road.
So the United States, while it wants to bolster its defense capabilities and alignments in Asia, it also should be doing whatever it can to try and lower the temperature with Beijing. Suggesting, as some American officials have done in the past, that our goal should be to end the rule of the Chinese Communist Party, is a bad idea because if the Chinese became convinced that we really were trying to do that and we might have a shot at doing it, that's the kind of scenario that might push them into essentially a preventive war. And so the United States, it has to do this odd little balancing act of simultaneously keeping its powder dry and working with other allies in Asia to maintain that coalition while at the same time not acting in ways that suggest our aims towards China are unlimited.
And, you know, I closed the article by reiterating some points that Dani Rodrik and I made in a series of papers a couple of years ago, which is that what the United States really should be doing is trying to organize its relations with China into three boxes: things we agree not to do to each other; things where we agree to negotiate and bargain, and trade is a good example of that; and then areas where we will act independently to protect our interests, for example, supporting allies. But we will do that only as necessary to protect our interests, not as a way of trying to weaken China, not as a way of trying to harm the other side. We try to persuade the Chinese, that's how we should group our relations and we work within that framework.
This does not, it’s not a recipe for permanent peace. It's not a recipe for utopia. I view it as a rather realistic way of trying to manage competition that is likely to last for a long time because, and this is really important, the United States and China aren't going anywhere. These are countries with hundreds of millions of people, robust economies, powerful militaries. We are thousands of miles away from each other. They're not going to take us over. We're not going to take them over. Coexistence is inevitable. It's not just desirable, it's inevitable. And therefore, the approach that one hopes both sides take is not to look for an ultimate victory or permanent supremacy, but rather of what Kevin Rudd, the former prime minister of Australia and China scholar, has called a managed strategic competition.
And that's basically what I call for at the end.
Jeff Friedman: Steve, last question: We like to ask people on this program, who else is writing interesting things on the subject? When you were working on this piece, who did you think had interesting and novel things to say about the balance of power in the region?
Stephen M. Walt: So there's an enormous literature on this; you can spend the next year trying to master it. I've already mentioned the piece by Green and Talmage on Taiwan, which I think is very useful. Taylor Fravel of MIT and a couple of co-authors had a really terrific piece in IS on this nuclear dimension of China's buildup and how that should be seen through the lens of a security dilemma.
I've long liked the work of Michael Beckley, who has done some, I think, very interesting work on how you measure Chinese power. I don't agree with it in every particular, but I think it's often quite good. When I was writing this piece, you know, I went back to this old study of the balance of power in world history by your colleague Bill Wohlforth, Stuart Kaufman, and Richard Little, which is quite fascinating. Again, I don't agree with every argument they make, but I found it was very useful in thinking about ways of understanding hegemony historically.
And then finally, just, I have to put in a plug for Pekka Hämäläinen’s book Indigenous Continent, which is about, again, the American long conquest of North America and the resistance, the quite persistent resistance movement by indigenous Americans. Again one of those books that I might have things I'd quibble about, but it's a really fascinating read, and I found it useful as I was working on this paper.
Jeff Friedman: Thank you so much Steve, and thanks to everyone for listening to the International Security Podcast, produced by International Security, a quarterly journal at Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and published by MIT Press. If you like the conversation, please take a moment to rate and review us or share us on social media, which helps other people find the show. I'm Jeff Friedman, the executive editor of International Security is Jacqueline L. Hazelton. Our producer is Monica Achen. Our associate producer and technical director is Benn Craig. Our guest today has been Steve Walt. See you next time.