China at large

Chinese President Xi Jinping and Indonesia’s President Joko Widodo in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, China, March 2015. Photo: Alamy

In the Dragon’s Shadow: Southeast Asia in the Chinese Century
Sebastian Strangio
Yale University Press: 2020
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The Deer and the Dragon: Southeast Asia and China in the 21st Century
Donald K. Emmerson (Ed)
Stanford: 2020
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Rivers of Iron: Railroads and Chinese Power in Southeast Asia
David M. Lampton, Selina Ho and Cheng-Chwee Kuikh
University of California Press: 2020
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The study of international politics revolves around two questions: which actors matter and what explains their behaviour? One school of thought, realism, offers the simplest answer: only states matter, and they are bound to compete and pursue whatever is in their self-interest. Other theoretical frameworks champion the role of trade, democracy and multilateral institutions or the importance of ideas and non-state actors, but realism is deceptively straightforward and enduring.

Realism dominated international relations as it emerged as a distinct field of political science in the second half of the twentieth century, championed by theorist Hans J. Morgenthau inside the academy and by his protégé Henry Kissinger in the halls of power. During the Cold War, the international system closely resembled how realists saw the world: as a cut-throat battle for supremacy. They embraced the perverse logic of mutually assured destruction (the idea that two countries capable of destroying each other with nuclear weapons would not go to war, as satirised by Stanley Kubrick in Dr Strangelove) and took a grim pleasure in the stability the superpower stand-off created.

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