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.
