Against Optimism

2021 ◽  
pp. 44-72
Author(s):  
Sebastian Rosato
Keyword(s):  
Great Powers ◽  
Great Power ◽  
The Future

This chapter evaluates intentions optimism, the view that great powers can, under certain conditions, obtain the kind of information that would allow them to estimate the intentions of their peers with confidence. The first argument holds that there are some situations in which states can access firsthand information about each other’s intentions. The next three arguments contend that secondhand information about state’s intentions—evidence of their declarations, interests, and actions—can, on occasion, be a reliable guide to how they intend to behave. The fifth argument maintains that even if single clues are only marginally informative, multiple clues can, in combination, be a dependable indicator of a state’s intentions. The final argument deals with the future and contends that knowledge of how a great power intends to behave today can serve as reliable secondhand information about how it will intend to behave in the future. An evaluation of these arguments reveals that they are logically and empirically flawed. Intentions optimists have greatly exaggerated the odds that states can access firsthand information or acquire reliable secondhand information about each other’s current and future intentions. Hence, it is almost impossible for great powers to trust each other.

The Future of the Great Powers in Africa: Towards a Political Economy of Intervention

1983 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 555-586 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy M. Shaw
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Great Powers ◽  
Great Power ◽  
The Future

Great-Power rivalry in Africa is among the legacies left by European statesmen who, a century ago in Berlin, carved up the continent and whole nations within it into tidy colonial compartments, several with frontiers still in dispute. Russians and Americans attended that inglorious conference but stayed out of the scramble for territories that followed. It is one of history's ironies that Moscow and Washington emerged, with proxies to help them, as leading contestants in the contemporary struggle for position, presence and power in Africa.

Intentions Pessimism

2021 ◽  
pp. 21-43
Author(s):  
Sebastian Rosato
Keyword(s):  
Great Powers ◽  
The Other ◽  
Great Power ◽  
Power Politics ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Future ◽  
Great Power Politics ◽  
The One

This chapter outlines a theory called intentions pessimism. It begins by describing the information problems that confront states seeking to divine each other’s intentions. The first problem is that it is particularly difficult for a great power to access firsthand information about another state’s current intentions, that state’s actual ideas about how it intends to behave. The second problem is that although great powers can acquire information about each other’s declarations, interests, and actions, all of which are related to its intentions, this secondhand information is unreliable, which is to say that it is consistent with both benign and malign intent. The third problem is that states cannot access firsthand information about each other’s future intentions, while secondhand information on the matter is especially unreliable. The chapter then argues that given the inextricable link between information, on the one hand, and certainty and uncertainty on the other, these problems of access, reliability, and the future virtually preclude great powers from being confident that their peers have benign intentions, or more simply, from trusting them. Indeed, they typically cause states to be acutely uncertain about each other’s intentions. The chapter concludes by exploring the effects of uncertainty on great power politics.

Leadership Succession, Great Power Ambitions, and the Future of Central Asia

2016 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 209-225 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric McGlinchey
Keyword(s):  
Central Asia ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Great Powers ◽  
Great Power ◽  
Leadership Succession ◽  
Leadership Change ◽  
Quarter Century ◽  
Central Asian ◽  
The Future ◽  
State Governance

Two uncertainties will reshape inter- and intra-state governance in Eurasia over the next five to twenty years. First, the stabilizing anchors of Central Asia, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, will see their first leadership change since independence. Second, it is unclear if and how the region’s two great powers, Russia and China, will accommodate one another’s expanding interests. This paper explores these two uncertainties, their potential to reshape Central Asian politics, and scenarios that may emerge should the current, now quarter century status quo be disrupted.

scholarly journals Future of US-China Relations: Conflict, Competition or Cooperation?

2020 ◽  
Vol 16 (7) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Syed Muhammad Saad Zaidi ◽  
Adam Saud
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
International Relations ◽  
The United States ◽  
Great Powers ◽  
Political Agenda ◽  
Eastern Hemisphere ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Future ◽  
Rise Of China ◽  
The Rise Of China

In contemporary times, the geo-political agenda and geo-economic strategy of the world is being dominated by the ongoing US-China hegemonic competition. Where the United States is trying to prolong the ‘unipolar moment’ and deter the rise of China; China is trying to establish itself as the hegemon in the Eastern hemisphere, an alternate to the US. The entirely opposite interests of the two Great Powers have initiated a hostile confrontational competition for domination. This paper seeks to determine the future nature of the US-China relations; will history repeat itself and a bloody war be fought to determine the leader of the pack? or another prolonged Cold War will be fought, which will end when one side significantly weakens and collapses? Both dominant paradigms of International Relations, Realism and Liberalism, are used to analyze the future nature of the US-China relations.

Immoderate greatness: Is great power restraint a practical grand strategy?

2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 111-132 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tudor Onea
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Use Of Force ◽  
Great Powers ◽  
Great Power ◽  
Grand Strategy ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
Victorian Britain ◽  
Scaling Down ◽  
Splendid Isolation ◽  
Self Defence

AbstractThe article examines when and how often great powers are likely to follow a grand strategy of restraint and whether there is any evidence that they have ever done so. The question has considerable implications for the ongoing US grand strategy debate. Restraint refers to the practice of self-discipline in the use of force for self-defence or for addressing massive power imbalances; and in extending security commitments to foreign political actors. The first part of the article examines statistics in the last two hundred years on great power involvement in wars and disputes as well as on their commitments to alliances and dependencies. The second part considers whether two seeming cases of the dominant power scaling down its international involvement – Ming China withdrawal from naval mastery in the fifteenth century and Victorian Britain splendid isolation – represent instances of genuine restraint.

An analysis of stagnation in multilateral law-making – and why the law of the sea has transcended the stagnation trend

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Andreas Motzfeldt Kravik
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Current Trend ◽  
The United States ◽  
Legal Framework ◽  
Great Powers ◽  
Great Power ◽  
Law Of The Sea ◽  
The Law ◽  
Law Making ◽  
Multilateral Treaties

Abstract The article explores the current stagnation in multilateral law-making based on an analysis of recent treaty attempts across various subfields of international law. It further examines why the law of the sea has continued to evolve despite this trend. The article demonstrates that states still regularly seek multilateral treaties to address new challenges. While there is some evidence of general treaty saturation, it is the current inability of traditional great powers to negotiate new binding norms which is the most constraining factor on multilateral law-making. This in turn is related to deeper geopolitical shifts by which traditional great powers, notably the United States and its allies, have seen their relative influence decline. Until the current great power competition ends or settles into a new mode of international co-operation, new multilateral treaties with actual regulatory effect will rarely emerge. The law of the sea has avoided the current trend of stagnation for primarily three reasons (i) a global commitment to the basic tenets of the law of the sea; (ii) a legal framework that affords rights and obligations somewhat evenly disbursed, allowing less powerful states to use their collective leverage to advance multilateral negotiations, despite intermittent great power opposition; and (iii) the avoidance of entrenched multilateral forums where decisions are reached by consensus only.

Watching the Soviet Union Decline

2018 ◽  
pp. 99-118
Author(s):  
Joshua R. Itzkowitz Shifrinson
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Relative Position ◽  
State Policy ◽  
The United States ◽  
Great Powers ◽  
Great Power ◽  
Archival Research ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Union Decline

Chapters 2 and 3 helped confirm that rising states support declining great powers when decliners can help rising states against other great power threats. In contrast, Chapters 4 and 5 assess the logic of rising state predation by examining the United States’ response to the Soviet Union’s decline in the 1980s and early 1990s. Chapter 4 first provides an overview of the Soviet Union’s waning relative position and discusses U.S. efforts to monitor the trend. Next, it reviews existing research on the course of U.S. strategy and relates this work to alternative accounts of rising state policy. The bulk of the chapter then uses extensive archival research to evaluate the factors central to predation theory and predict U.S. strategy given the argument. These predictions are analyzed in Chapter 5.

The Resurgence of Interwar Germany

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
David M. Edelstein
Keyword(s):  
Great Britain ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Interwar Period ◽  
Great Powers ◽  
Great Power ◽  
Short Term ◽  
Time Horizons ◽  
The Soviet Union

While Hitler’s Germany in the 1930’s has received abundant attention, this chapter begins earlier in the interwar period. Throughout the 1920’s, Europe’s great powers debated how to manage a defeated Germany that had the latent power potential to again become a great power. This chapter traces how Great Britain, France, and the Soviet Union addressed this challenge. It argues that all three of these European powers preferred to cooperate with Germany in the short-term rather than paying the high cost of competing with Germany when it had uncertain long-term intentions. This explanation based on time horizons is superior to alternative explanations based on either buckpassing or engagement.

Soothing Wounded Vanity

2020 ◽  
pp. 108-137
Author(s):  
Joslyn Barnhart
Keyword(s):  
Essential Role ◽  
Great Powers ◽  
Competitive Dynamics ◽  
Third Party ◽  
Great Power ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
Land Grab ◽  
Security Concerns ◽  
International Events

This chapter focuses on national humiliation and the triggering in the 1880s of the Scramble for Africa, an unprecedented land grab by European great powers. It demonstrates that individual-level support for aggressive policies, both vengeful in nature and directed at third-party states, increased within states that are confronted with potentially humiliating international events. The chapter reviews two international events that played an essential role in generating the competitive dynamics of the Scramble for Africa during the 1880s. The first event involved an instance of unexpected national failure, while the second event involved the denial of great power privileges by a higher status state. It also describes the acts of territorial conquest in Africa by France and Germany that generated status and security concerns within Italy and Britain, which led both states to adopt expansionary policies they likely would not have pursued otherwise.

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