The Biden administration’s jarring revisionism on economic policy toward China (and by extension the world) is reviving discussions (most acute during the Trump and George W. Bush years) about whether it’s right to label the United States a...
The Biden administration’s jarring revisionism on economic policy toward China (and by extension the world) is reviving discussions (most acute during the Trump and George W. Bush years) about whether it’s right to label the United States a...
The global distribution of material power changes from time to time. It’s something that happens, not something we should spend any amount of time pursuing or avoiding. I say this as someone who...
“Kuzushi” is the concept of off-balancing. It refers to a tactic of getting your opponent out of a fixed position where he’ll be vulnerable, maybe getting his weight tilted too much to one side or making him overcommit to a move. With kuzushi, you aren’t achieving anything; you’re opening up a window of opportunity. Window ajar, you have a split second to advance your position. A sweep or submission attempt that would’ve been impossible under normal conditions suddenly works against an unbalanced opponent.
I was an enlisted Airman studying Korean at the Defense Language Institute (DLI) in Monterey, California on September 11, 2001. When the first two planes struck, none of us had any idea whether it...
The following is a guest post by Dr. Daniel Nicholls. Daniel Nicholls is an adjunct professor of IR at ESADE and the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona. His research looks at the interplay between relational structures, roles and hierarchy.  In an interesting piece on the Japan-South Korea spat in Foreign Affairs, Bonnie S. Glaser and Oriana Skylar Mastro argue that by failing to mediate the dispute between the keystones of its Asian alliance system, the US risks losing regional influence to a fast-moving and wily China. In short, if Washington doesn’t jump in as a relationship counselor,...
This World Politics in a Time of Populist Nationalism (WPTPN) guest post is written by Ahsan Butt, an Assistant Professor at the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University. His book, Secession and Security: Explaining State Strategy against Separatists, will be published next year by Cornell University Press. The future of a U.S.-led liberal order in Europe and East Asia has attracted considerable attention in the wake of Donald Trump’s election, given his distaste for internationalism signaled by heavy criticism of NATO and the TPP. Much of the post-election conjecture...
This World Politics in a Time of Populist Nationalism (WPTPN) guest post is written by Daniel Braaten, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Texas Lutheran University. His main research interests are in the areas of global governance, human rights, and U.S. foreign policy. His research has been published in the Review of International Studies, Journal of Peace Research, Journal of Human Rights, and Human Rights Review. What effect will a Donald Trump presidency have on American hegemonic legitimacy? My purpose here is not to wade into debates about whether U.S. hegemony is benign,...
The following is a re-up of a piece I wrote for the Diplomat last month as part of an informal back-and-forth series with the National Interest this summer on the US pivot to Asia and AirSea Battle. (Here and here are some of the other entries.) That pic, which has got to be the grossest river in all China, is from here. In brief, I increasingly think that ASB is a mistake, because it’s almost impossible to read it as anything other than hugely provocative from the Chinese point of view, no matter what we say to them about our peaceful intentions. (Read this, and tell me reasonable Chinese...
About a year ago I introduced an ocasional series called "Quarter-Baked Ideas." The idea was to blog about semi-formed thoughts related to international affairs. The whole notion turned about to be quarter-baked: I haven't done another one until now. Do rising powers have an intrinsic advantage in "flexibility" when compared to dominant ones? The answer to this question matters a great deal, I submit, to debates over the persistence and decline of hegemonic orders. As I've alluded to before, there's a curious blindspot in mainstream hegemonic-order theory. On the one hand, hegemonic-order...
This is of interest only to international-relations theorists and fellow travelers. A long-standing claims about hegemonic orders is that they are normative ones: that a dominant power uses a wide variety of power resources to create a set of international rules and regimes conducive to its ideological and material interests. After World War II the United States worked actively to promote norms and institutions consistent with a broadly "liberal internationalist" environment, albeit ones refracted through the prism of Cold War competition. After the Cold War the United States enlarged the...
As part of a now lengthy chain (one, two, three, four) on US allies and the likelihood of US retrenchment, I argued that American hegemony, despite America’s huge debt and deficit, is more financially stable than almost anyone expected. Because foreigners’ appetite for dollars seems unquenchable and because we print the global reserve currency, borrow in it, and face no serious reserve challengers (the euro and RMB maybe, see below), US can exploit this ‘exorbitant privilege’ far worse than anyone ever thought. For example, I think almost everyone expected the bond-market to turn against the...
Two of my posts this week (one, two) on hypothetical retrenchment under Ron Paul got a lot of traffic and comments. (H/t to Stephen Walt and Andrew Sullivan.) So here is some follow-up.The OP was intended as an emergency exercise if the US were to face a truly significant crisis that forced retrenchment. The purpose was to ask who are the most important US allies and commitments if we were forced to choose. Right now, the US is not choosing. We are all over the place; if anything, we are taking on more commitments (Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, the Asian pivot). As I tried to say in...