In the spring 2025 issue of International Security, Professor Stephen M. Walt examines the question of a potential U.S.-China War and challenges prevailing assumptions about how the United States should respond to China’s rise. Asserting that the future depends largely on how leaders in both countries define and act upon their security needs, he argues that the defensive variant of realism offers a more restrained and strategic perspective in this context.
In his article titled “Hedging on Hegemony: The Realist Debate over How to Respond to China”, Professor Walt assesses China’s ambition to become a hegemonic power in Asia by challenging the US dominance in the region. Drawing on historical examples, he analyses the conditions under which a state can successfully establish a hegemonic position in a region and the conditions under which its attempts to become a regional hegemon are likely to fail.
Professor Walt situates his study against the background of China, under Xi Jinping, that abandoned its earlier commitment to a peaceful rise and seeks to be a powerful and influential global leader. He notes that U.S. leadership is convinced of China’s long-term intention to challenge the existing international order, as reflected in the 2022 National Defense Strategy, which identifies China as the “most comprehensive and serious challenge” to U.S. security. In response, the United States is reinforcing its security architecture in the Indo-Pacific and appears well-prepared to confront this emerging threat to its dominance.
Engaging with various realist perspectives on China’s potential rise, Walt argues that, as defensive realists assert, China is unlikely to succeed in its attempts to establish hegemony in Asia. He emphasises that regional hegemonic ambitions of emerging powers are generally identifiable and tend to provoke balancing responses from other great powers. Citing the historical examples of Napoleonic France, Nazi Germany, and Imperial Japan, he observes that all such attempts ended in catastrophic failure.
Analysing the historical pattern, Waltz asserts that the United States can detect and effectively counter China’s hegemonic ambitions in Asia. Given the present conditions, he argues that China is unlikely to pursue an all-out strategy of power maximization by challenging the United States to become a regional hegemon, as offensive realists predict. Such a move, he warns, would be highly likely to backfire and make China worse off than at present, as it would be contained by a powerful coalition or defeated by the United States itself. However, he cautions that the balancing efforts of the United States should not lead China to “conclude that its own security requires a risky bid for regional dominance”. To avoid such an escalation, Walt underscores the importance of establishing mutually accepted “rules of the road” to manage strategic competition between the two powers.
Professor Waltz concludes the article with a cautionary note: if either the United States or China—or both—embrace the offensive realist logic of power maximization and misread each other’s intentions, the risk of war will significantly increase.
