The Great Delusion: How America Misread China

Lao Tzu says, “Governing a great nation is like cooking a small fish - too much handling will spoil it."

Misunderstandings and ill-conceived calculations can push even great powers into situations they never intended to enter.

John Bolton—who served as U.S. national security advisor during President Trump’s first term—recently said in a talk at the Harvard Kennedy School that “the United States misunderstood China.”

His comment brought to mind John Mearsheimer’s The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities (2018).

Mearsheimer had underscored the following points:

“Think about the United States looking at a rising China today, or Britain looking at a rising Germany in the decades before World War I. American leaders cannot know China’s future intentions with high certainty, just as British policymakers could not be sure of Germany’s intentions before 1914.”

Mearsheimer also argued that the United States assumed integrating China into the liberal order would make it a “responsible stakeholder.”

This assumption now lies in pieces. For years, Washington has clung to the claim that as China’s middle class grows, the country will move toward democracy.

In contrast, Beijing fused state capitalism with technology and steadily expanded its global heft.

On this point, Bolton agrees with Mearsheimer, but he cannot resist an addition. For Bolton, the real danger is China developing a nuclear strike capability close to—or on par with— that of Russia and the United States. He described this as the most serious threat to world peace in the 21st century.

In the discipline of international relations, the liberal narrative that has long stood just behind the realist frame rested on a claim that “mutual interdependence produces peace.”

However, when interdependence is asymmetric, it can generate pressure and tension rather than peace. As in the China case, the sheer scale of its market and its weight in global supply chains have taken on a tension-amplifying role.

It is no surprise that U.S.–China great-power rivalry was sparked through “trade wars.”

However, what we are witnessing today is not merely China’s ordinary rise. China now wants to write the rules. It is controlling data flows and pulling sensitive domains—from rare earths to semiconductors—onto political and contested terrain.

Simultaneously, by forging a hazy axis with Russia, Iran, and North Korea, it seeks to reduce its political costs. Imbalances in the nuclear realm, hypersonics, space-based early warning, and command-and-control ambiguitiesall dramatically heighten the risks of misperception and miscalculation.

It is useful to assess Bolton’s claim that “the U.S. misunderstood China” from this vantage point.

One can argue that the liberal narrative was mistaken and that the United States was late to enter this competition. Still, I believe that the U.S. retains an advantage in a rivalry in which it leads in military capacity and alliance networks. However, China’s rise in other domains is unmistakable.

What deserves attention here is that the United States is unable to intervene in the counter-hegemonic space emerging from its great-power competition with China.

This assertive counter-hegemonic sphere—manifest in the deepening of China–Russia ties, Iran’s regional capacity, and North Korea’s military parades—multiplies and accelerates the risk that great-power rivalry could tip into a general war.

There is no total war at present, but we are living through a tense interregnum in which war could at any moment become a “costly possibility.”

The year 2030 appears to be decisive for great-power competition. As China continues to rapidly modernize its military, it also takes care to draw historical bearings.

Some analyses suggest that by 2030, China could bring its nuclear capacity to a more proportional level with that of the United States and Russia. This would stand out as a game-changing move for strategic balance.

Therefore, Bolton’s confession—“we misunderstood”—also looks like a picture of the collapse of the liberal narrative in the American mind.

The United has long treated China’s rise as a story that it could one day bring under control. However, China took that story and turned it into its own dream. With hybrid notions such as the “socialist market economy,” it has reconfigured itself.

While the U.S. busies itself tallying its missteps, China has already quickened its pace toward its dreams. On the ruins of a liberal delusion, the story of a hybrid narrative is emerging.