“Permanent Normal Trading Relations”

2021 ◽  
pp. 134-156
Author(s):  
Rush Doshi
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
The United States ◽  
Grand Strategy ◽  
Economic Power ◽  
Most Favored Nation ◽  
American Power ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
China’S Economy

Chapter 6 considers the economic components of China’s grand strategy to blunt American power. It demonstrates that the “traumatic trifecta” at the end of the Cold War laid bare China’s dependence on US markets, capital, and technology. Beijing had previously been relatively unconcerned about the annual US congressional votes that granted China “most-favored nation” (MFN) trade status, but that changed overnight. Washington’s post-Tiananmen sanctions and its threats to revoke MFN trade status—which could have seriously damaged China’s economy—deeply concerned China’s leaders. Beijing sought not to decouple from the United States but instead to bind the discretionary use of American economic power, and it worked hard to remove MFN from congressional review through “permanent normal trading relations,” leveraging negotiations in APEC and the WTO to obtain it.

US grand strategy after the Cold War: Can realism explain it? Should realism guide it?

2018 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-22 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen M Walt
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Cold War ◽  
World Order ◽  
The United States ◽  
Grand Strategy ◽  
Structural Constraints ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Policy Elites

This article uses realism to explain past US grand strategy and prescribe what it should be today. Throughout its history, the United States has generally acted as realism depicts. The end of the Cold War reduced the structural constraints that states normally face in anarchy, and a bipartisan coalition of foreign policy elites attempted to use this favorable position to expand the US-led ‘liberal world order’. Their efforts mostly failed, however, and the United States should now return to a more realistic strategy – offshore balancing – that served it well in the past. Washington should rely on local allies to uphold the balance of power in Europe and the Middle East and focus on leading a balancing coalition in Asia. Unfortunately, President Donald Trump lacks the knowledge, competence, and character to pursue this sensible course, and his cavalier approach to foreign policy is likely to damage America’s international position significantly.

“New Cold Wars Have Begun”

2021 ◽  
pp. 47-67
Author(s):  
Rush Doshi
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
The United States ◽  
Gulf War ◽  
Grand Strategy ◽  
American Power ◽  
Tiananmen Square ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Balance Of Forces ◽  
The Cold War

Chapter 3 uses Party texts to explore China’s changing view of the United States at the end of the Cold War and the ends, ways, and means of its subsequent grand strategy to blunt American power. It demonstrates how China went from seeing the United States as a quasi-ally against the Soviet Union to seeing it as China’s greatest threat and “main adversary” in the wake of three events: the traumatic trifecta of the Tiananmen Square Massacre, the Gulf War, and the Soviet collapse. It traces how Beijing launched its blunting strategy under the Party guideline of “hiding capabilities and biding time,” which it tied to perceptions of US power captured in phrases like the “international balance of forces” and “multipolarity.” The chapter also introduces China’s effort to asymmetrically weaken American power in Asia across military, economic, and political instruments, which are discussed in greater detail in subsequent chapters.

The Unbearable Whiteness of Grand Strategy

2021 ◽  
pp. 329-345
Author(s):  
Adriane Lentz-Smith
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
The United States ◽  
Grand Strategy ◽  
National Interests ◽  
History Of ◽  
American Foreign Relations ◽  
The Third World ◽  
The Cold War

This chapter explores grand strategy as an intellectual and cultural project by considering its willful unseeing of race as a political project. To ignore race is to misapprehend how power works in the United States and how domestic formulations of subjectivity, difference, and racialized power imbue American foreign relations. The chapter focuses on African Americans in the era of Cold War civil rights. For Carl Rowan and Sam Greenlee, the two African American veterans who provide concrete cases for thinking about the United States and the world, their blackness and ambitions for their people would color how they interpreted America's role in political and military struggles in the Third World and beyond. As with other people of color, their encounters with white supremacy shaped their understandings of liberation, violence, and the United States security project. Their perspectives challenge scholars’ conceptions of the Cold War as a period of “defined clear national interests” and “public consensus.” Centering the stories of Rowan and Greenlee highlights not simply ongoing contestation over the myth and history of the Cold War, but, more fundamentally, the unthinking whiteness of grand strategy itself.

“Demonstrate Benign Intentions”

2021 ◽  
pp. 101-133
Author(s):  
Rush Doshi
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Grand Strategy ◽  
The Political ◽  
Regional Organizations ◽  
American Power ◽  
Regional Institutions ◽  
Institutional Rules ◽  
Regional Order ◽  
The Cold War

Chapter 5 considers the political and multilateral components of China’s grand strategy to blunt American power in Asia. It demonstrates that the “traumatic trifecta” at the end of the Cold War led China to reverse its previous opposition to joining regional institutions. Beijing feared Asian regional forums might be used by Washington to build liberal regional order or even an Asian NATO, so China joined them to blunt American power. It stalled institutionalization in regional organizations that included the United States; wielded institutional rules to constrain US freedom of maneuver; and hoped its own participation would reassure wary neighbors otherwise tempted to join a US-led balancing coalition. China also worked with Russia to erect regional institutions in Central Asia to guard against US influence within the region.

The Long Game

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rush Doshi
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Global Financial Crisis ◽  
Careful Analysis ◽  
The United States ◽  
Grand Strategy ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Imperial Japan ◽  
The Cold War

For more than a century, no US adversary or coalition of adversaries—not Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, or even the Soviet Union—has ever reached 60 percent of US GDP. China is the sole exception, and it is fast emerging into a global superpower that could rival, if not eclipse, the United States. What does China want, does it have a grand strategy to achieve it, and what should the United States do about it? The Long Game draws from a rich base of Chinese primary sources, including decades’ worth of party documents, leaked materials, memoirs by party leaders, as well as careful analysis of China's conduct, to provide a history of China’s grand strategy since the end of the Cold War. Taking readers behind the Party’s closed doors, this book uncovers Beijing’s long, methodical game to displace America from the regional and global order through three sequential “strategies of displacement.” The book shows how China’s strategy is profoundly shaped by key events that change its perception of American power—the end of the Cold War, the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, the populist elections of 2016, and the coronavirus pandemic of 2020. Finally, the book offers a comprehensive yet “asymmetric” plan for an effective US response to the China challenge. Ironically, the proposed approach takes a page from Beijing’s own strategic playbook to undermine China’s ambitions and strengthen American order without competing dollar-for-dollar, ship-for-ship, or loan-for-loan.

American Grand Strategy

2021 ◽  
pp. 447-458
Author(s):  
Fredrik Logevall
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
The United States ◽  
Foreign Affairs ◽  
Grand Strategy ◽  
Great Power Politics ◽  
Grand Strategies ◽  
Containment Policy ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
American Grand Strategy

This chapter assesses how grand American grand strategy has been. If the containment followed by the United States in the Cold War is the most successful, or at least most celebrated, grand strategy the United States has ever pursued, it is worthy of a closer look. This chapter considers two foundational writings from the early Cold War: George Kennan's “X” Article, published in Foreign Affairs in 1947 (under the pseudonym “X”), which laid out the containment policy—that is to say, the containment of Soviet power—and National Security Council Memorandum 68 (NSC-68) of April 1950. Both of these documents are held to have played major roles in shaping the grand strategy that helped the United States deal successfully with the Soviet threat and ultimately win the Cold War. Each has indeed been referred to as the “blueprint” for US policy in the struggle. The chapter then addresses a second question: How much does grand strategy matter in the context of American history? History suggests that grand strategies do not alter the trajectory of great-power politics all that much. In the case of the United States, even radically imperfect strategies have not fundamentally affected its rise and fall.

Why China Matters

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arthur R. Kroeber
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
China’S Economy ◽  
Global Economics

Why should I care about China’s economy? In 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed and the Cold War ended. Until then, the single biggest force affecting global economics and geopolitics had been the rivalry between the United States and the USSR. Since then, a period spanning...

6. Hyperpower and its discontents

2019 ◽  
pp. 114-124
Author(s):  
Andrew Preston
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Roman Empire ◽  
Cold War ◽  
World Order ◽  
The United States ◽  
Individual Rights ◽  
American Power ◽  
The Cold War

With the Cold War over, the United States found itself in a position of supremacy unmatched since the days of the Roman Empire. American power was supposed to stimulate the spread of liberalism, democracy, and capitalism, creating a world order embedded in the sanctity of individual rights. History didn’t quite turn out that way. ‘Hyperpower and its discontents’ describes how the end of the Cold War also revived a set of dormant tensions fuelled by race, religion, ethnicity, nation, and tribe. Globalization, long suppressed by Cold War tensions, reemerged with even greater force, creating a foundation for US dominance, but also new opportunities for America’s enemies to resist that dominance.

Getting Grand Strategy Right

2021 ◽  
pp. 558-574
Author(s):  
Hal Brands ◽  
Peter Feaver
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Cold War ◽  
The United States ◽  
Grand Strategy ◽  
American Power ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
State Action ◽  
Public Debates ◽  
American Grand Strategy

Grand strategy is essential to effective foreign policy. Yet even as the study of grand strategy has flourished within the academy, many academics have remained skeptical of grand strategy as a concept or been harshly critical of grand strategy as practiced by the United States. This essay defines the concept of grand strategy, emphasizing that it is best understood as the logic undergirding state action. The essay also explains why common academic critiques are mistaken; they set fire to straw-person visions that either reduce grand strategy to impractically detailed and rigid plans rather than recognizing the logic that guides purposeful state action, however imperfectly implemented, or to impossibly grandiose visions of American power in the post-Cold War era that ignores the genuine achievements of the last thirty years. Finally, the essay discusses how academics can usefully contribute to public debates on American grand strategy.

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