知己知彼，百戰不殆。
"Know yourself, know your enemy, and in a hundred battles, you will never know defeat.

The truth is Mearsheimer is rationalizing US projection of power in the far east for its own perceived power projection goals, which are destabilizing, and entirely unrealistic in light of US relative decline, the hollowing out of its industrial base and overcommitment worldwide.

The US has just not adjusted to the new reality. Mearsheimer can argue the US is still number one all day long, but China's industrial capacity is at least two times greater than the US, its shipbuilding capability many times greater than the US, etc. What's the US solution? Reshoring? Not really, it's to move US military logistics, maintenance and production and other "defense" burdens onto our allies in the Eastern hemisphere, South Korea, Japan and Australia, because our military industrial sector is unable to produce anything inexpensively. What happens in this instance? The production, maintenance and logistics train of the US military becomes more rather than less vulnerable as its bases and infrastructure are expanded onto China's doorstep. Those Asian states on the Chinese periphery that don't accept installation of US military infrastructure or at least US military products and the relationship with the US that accompanies it, must be undermined by one means or another.

Please wake up from the US is number one, delusions of world domination. That era is over; Washington just refuses to recognize reality. The US elites believe that it is not personally profitable for them to do so, so they won't. I wouldn't accuse Mearsheimer of venality, he is just biased and committed to his mechanistic theory that states are rational in their actions. There is nothing rational about US actions. On the other hand, he refers to anarchy, and the law of the jungle. This is a legacy of the social Darwinist intellectual trend that underlay western imperialism and later European fascism. These are emotional, cultural, and materialist drives that result in poor judgement and irrational decision making. The structural imbalance caused by the undue commitment of political and economic power to the miliary sector, and the empire abroad, drive policies that are often incompatible, if not entirely self destructive, and definitely not in the national interest. National policies emerge from competing ambitions and policy priorities among several constituencies at home and abroad institutionally, and factions within the policy apparatus itself, to increase their own power and access to national resources. Inside the Pentagon, SACEUR, CENTCOM, and INDOPACCOM all compete for resources to enable the next military effort. These resources are dwindling. Yet defense allocations are increasing at wartime levels.

The US cannot maintain 800 bases worldwide and at the same time produce a competitive conventional military capability to defeat China or Russia, and perhaps even less powerful states such as Iran, without resorting to nuclear war. In the case of Asian wars since WWII, that option has repeatedly raised its ugly head when the conventional force prospects didn't look promising. In his book, The Doomsday Machine, Daniel Ellsberg, lists 25 separate instances beginning with Hiroshima and Nagasaki, when the United States threatened to use nuclear weapons to respond to international situations that it felt it might not be able to otherwise manage. More than half of these were in Asia. Many observers have consistently observed that there is nothing rational about threats or risks of nuclear war being entertained as actual measures in particular conflicts when the conventional armed forces are deemed inadequate. Theories about nuclear first strike options are floated often. In fact, such use is often entertained in a game theory context, rather than the inevitable actual aftermath of nuclear conflict which can be reasonably anticipated.

Something that has accelerated US decline in addition to American arrogance concerning the efficacy of military solutions, has been the almost interminable pursuit of elective wars over decades. These unnecessary and costly wars, based largely on pretextual grounds, accelerated the waste of national power and resources. Additionally, they were strategic blunders. Sunk costs in unnecessary military campaigns are not recoverable. There is no going back and changing the lost opportunities or recovering resources forever lost, caused by poor strategic judgements. The Vietnam war veterans I knew and worked with for a time, called that war a DUMPEX. What was the war's purpose? What horrible damage occurred to the US national interest when we withdrew? The damage to US interests was entirely self inflicted. It doesn't matter where the bombs are dropped, how many aircraft are lost, just make your quota. The outcome was really immaterial to the method. Now a declining and poorly led nation cannot even meet a quota, and has to inveigle allies to deplete their limited inventories of weapons to meet US instigated military campaign needs.

Mearsheimer's regional hegemon theory as proposed is essentially no different than the old domino theory. He should know better. His projection of US imperial goals onto China is distorting his vision. At the same time the US is following the "magic bullet" syndrome that plagued it in the Vietnam conflict. This is the idea that some sort of technical development like the high ground Space Force or digital full spectrum dominance (C4ISR) is going to give us the upper hand in China's backyard. Perhaps deploying long range US missiles to the Philippines and other archipelagoes will do the trick. Each buzzword, theory or acronym that is floated as a "strategy" is actually just another constituency for defense dollars and campaign contributions. The US which couldn't achieve victory in Korea, or Vietnam, or Afghanistan, now is failing in Ukraine and flailing over Yemen. These instances around the world since WWII indicate that it's time to drop this delusion of world domination. The alternative recourse to "boots on the ground" has been to surreptitiously divide and conquer, via propaganda, sedition, regime change, and proxy wars. This, the old formula of empire. Biden called for smart wars, aka proxy wars; in other words, let others die as proxies for the US. That has played itself out in Ukraine. Obsequious and corrupt elites in the Philippines and Taiwan have yet to figure it out, while some South Koreans and Japanese are beginning to see the light. Now it is said we have to "strangle China." "We can impose costs," Admiral Paparo says; and "We still maintain the nuclear first strike option." Is this rational policy?

Mearsheimer is not a China expert. On at least one occasion he said he is well received in China. This is primarily because of Sun Tzu's dictum:

If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.

This is the reason that Mearsheimer's views are studied there.

China understands the US, much better than we understand China. China relies primarily on soft power and restraint, while preparing for the next US provocation. Contrary to Mearsheimer's theory, China's perspective is that the one who has to go to war to achieve goals has lost already. Sometimes paraphrased as China wants to do business, while the west wants to do war. The Chinese arms buildup is primarily due to US threats and the arms buildup the US has encouraged in the region. The US needs greater insight into itself as well, but that is perhaps expecting too much.

Game of Bluff: Renowned scholar confronts Western 'neutrality' on the South China Sea CGTN

Anthony Carty discusses the results of seven years of painstaking research on western policy in the South China Sea and how the US cultivated this international issue to serve its own interests. If you have never heard this presentation, or don't have time for it, make a note to look at it, sometime in the future, because the South China Sea dispute and the US role in it cannot be understood without this history.

I wonder if Mearsheimer ever addressed Anthony Carty's analysis based upon diplomatic records from the 19th and 20th Centuries of the US, France and UK archives. The thrust of those documents is that the Philippines never had a valid claim to any of the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea. The Chinese claim to South China Sea islands (the Paracel and Spratly Islands) and the other features in the Chinese claimed EEZ in the South China Sea; this "territorial claim" preexisted the Philippine and Vietnamese claims. The west insists that the claim has no historical or legal foundation which is simply untrue. The UN Convention on the Law of the Sea doesn't apply to the disputed territorial claims that preexisted its adoption; UNCLOS doesn't apply to territorial disputes at all such as those concerning Taiping Island, or Thitu Island in the Spratlys. Yet the UNCLOS 2016 decision, decided in favor of the Philippines and against China was ex parte, that is China did not even participate in the decision. Nor was the 2016 Permanent Court of Arbitration decision valid but rather it was void ab initio for lack of jurisdiction. When I hear so called experts from Taiwan and the Philippines (on recent Taiwan English language broadcasts) discuss the SCS dispute they are merely repeating western and Japanese talking points without critically examining the complete lack of a legal basis for the so called "compulsory arbitration." Freedom of navigation is a red herring as a contended US policy objective in the region. According to Carty, the US deliberately left territorial issues after Japanese withdrawal after WWII and claims by China in particular, unresolved in the 1951 Treaty of San Francisco, because it had no intention of yielding territory back to China, regardless of the historical record, or legal validity of Chinese claims. This is the cause of instability in the region.

Here is a much shorter video (3 min) with Carty which is a teaser for the much longer interview above.