Ross Douthat wants you to be very afraid of China:

The establishment of Chinese military pre-eminence in East Asia would be a unique geopolitical shock, with dire effects on the viability of America’s alliance systems, on the likelihood of regional wars and arms races and on our ability to maintain the global trading system that undergirds our prosperity at home.

All of this exaggerates what is at stake for the U.S., and it inflates the threat from China to U.S. interests. That makes it a very conventional hawkish argument, and like other conventional hawkish arguments it gets the most important things wrong. If Americans want to avert a “debacle in East Asia,” our government should reject hawkish recommendations on China policy.

China containment isn’t necessary, and a containment policy would commit the U.S. to decades of fruitless effort expending resources that could have been better used in other ways at home or elsewhere in the world. The quickest way to get “regional wars and arms races” is to pursue an intensifying, militarized rivalry with another major power. Peace in East Asia depends on a number of things, but one of them has been a relatively stable and cooperative U.S.-Chinese relationship. It will be much more difficult to keep the peace in East Asia if that earlier relationship is permanently replaced with a deeply hostile one.

Pursuing primacy in Asia is reckless and it will sooner or later lead to a destructive “debacle in East Asia.” As Van Jackson put at the start of this year, “Washington can support regional peace or pursue regional primacy, but it cannot do both.” China hawks want primacy, but pretend that it secures the peace, and they’re wrong. Great power conflict is one of the biggest threats to global trade and prosperity, and the pursuit of primacy makes such a conflict much more likely.

Read the rest of the article at Eunomia

Daniel Larison is a contributing editor for Antiwar.com and maintains his own site at Eunomia. He is former senior editor at The American Conservative. He has been published in the New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, World Politics Review, Politico Magazine, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter.