John Mearsheimer

Not so much good guys versus bad guys.

Okay, so you're hypothesizing a world where they dominate Asia.

And we dominate the Western Hemisphere.

Yeah.

I believe there would be a great deal of security competition, intense security competition between those two superpowers.

Well, conflict, let's use the word war.

So I distinguish between security competition and war.

And what I'm telling you is you'll have an intense security competition where there's no shooting.

Where if there's shooting, it's mainly proxies that are doing the fighting.

Much like the Vietnam War, right?

Or you could have a case where one of those superpowers

was involved in a war against a proxy of the other superpower.

Korean War, think the Korean War.

The United States fought the Chinese who were allied with the Soviets at the time.

But a war between the United States and China, just like a war between the United States

and the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

That's what you really want to avoid.

So I think you'd have an intense security competition, right?

You'd have wars involving proxies of each of those two superpowers, and you would probably have some wars where one of the superpowers was involved in a proxy

with one of the other superpowers' proxies.