The Reality of 21st Century International Relations

2022 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
International Relations ◽  
21St Century ◽  
International System ◽  
World Order ◽  
The United States ◽  
Nation States ◽  
To Come

This chapter will highlight contemporary issues plaguing the international system and the actors (nation-states) involved. The chapter begins by detailing the rising nationalism that fomented into insurrection on January 6, 2021 at the United States Capitol building. The chapter will take a deeper look into the 21st century world order and provide foresight into the chapters to come.

scholarly journals THE DECLINING HEGEMONY OF THE UNITED STATES AND THE GROWING INFLUENCE OF CHINA: A CRITICAL PERSPECTIVE ON POWER TRANSITION THEORY IN THE 21ST CENTURY

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (18) ◽  
Author(s):  
Nasa'i Muhammad Gwadabe
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
International Relations ◽  
21St Century ◽  
International System ◽  
The United States ◽  
Transition Theory ◽  
Power Transition ◽  
Power Transition Theory ◽  
Rise Of China ◽  
The Rise Of China

The apparent eroding in the hegemonic power of the United States and the sustained growth of China has triggered debate as to whether the rise of China will be peaceful or conflictual. Structural realism posits that the world is characterised by the anarchic ordering principle in which there is no central authority sitting above the states. Therefore, the absence of a “leviathan” on the international system automatically makes every state equal on the system which created an atmosphere of competition for the maximisation of power for survival. On a similar line of reasoning, the Power Transition theory as a variant theory within realism postulates that when the international system is structured based on the principle of hierarchy, peace will reign. It means that when international relations are regulated and influenced by a dominant power, the international system becomes stable. But the emergence of a dissatisfied powerful nation to challenge the hegemon usually ends up in war. Based on this assumption, Power Transition theorists argued that the rise of China to rival the dominance of the United States could not be peaceful. The Power Transition theory has influenced many academics to have the belief that the two nations will end up in “Thucydides’ Trap”. This belief has aggravated the matter beyond the reasonable level and has instilled panic in the mind of foreign policymakers which could jeopardise world peace and international cooperation. Hence, this paper aims to critically evaluate the deficiency of the Power Transition theory in the 21st century in explaining the current United States-China relations and the prospect of peace or war between the two nations using process tracing. Accordingly, in this paper, it is argued that in the 21st century, an armed confrontation between the United States and China is highly unlikely. Because in today’s world, nations (including the United States and China) are intertwined by the forces of globalisation which created inexorable economic interdependence. Additionally, there is rapid advancement in military technology and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction which came with the concept of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). Consequently, there is a need to revisit the Power Transition theory to accommodate contemporary factors. The inclusion of the current variables into the Theory will make it applicable and adequately fit in the discourse of international relations and global politics of the 21st-century international system.

COMPETITION FOR EAST ASIA – BALANCING STRATEGIES OF THE USA AGAINST CHINA

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Attila Mezei
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
International Relations ◽  
East Asia ◽  
United States Of America ◽  
Domestic Politics ◽  
International System ◽  
World Order ◽  
The United States ◽  
Smart Power ◽  
The Usa

China has been a rising power in East Asia for decades. The end of the Cold War and the increasing effects of globalization brought the country in the forefront of attention on the international scene. The economic importance of the East Asian giant cannot be denied. Its economic power has been translating into a powerful tool to upset the balance of power tremendously. China has been expanding its influence around the globe and challenging the status quo more than ever before. The United States, the strongest state in the current international system has to pay attention to the increasingly assertive China. The USA uses several strategies to mitigate the threat China poses to the world order that the USA built. The structural forces of the international system, the Covid-19 pandemic, and American domestic politics make the threat of rising China more challenging. In my paper, I try to identify the balancing strategies of the United States in the 21st century against China. In my opinion, the application of neoclassical realist school of international relations can foreshadow the possible paths of the conflict. The United States of America has to use a wide variety of balancing strategies in order to counter the threat. A heavier reliance on allies is inevitable for the United States if it wants to contain the increasing influence of China around the globe. The USA should increase its hard-, soft-, and asymmetrical balancing methods mixed with smart power strategies to remain on the top of the international system. In my opinion, the showdown between China and the United States of America will be inevitable in the medium term. If the USA uses its position right, the peaceful containment of Chinese ambitions is possible. The successes of the above-mentioned strategies will decide how the competition of these two countries shape the international relations in the coming decades.

The World of Uncertainty: Is America Losing Its Leverage Towards a Looming New China–Russia Alliance?

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (04) ◽  
pp. 92-106
Author(s):  
Vitaly KOZYREV
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
21St Century ◽  
World Order ◽  
The United States ◽  
Great Power ◽  
Window Of Opportunity ◽  
The Us ◽  
The World ◽  
Alliance Building

The recent deterioration of US–China and US–Russia relations has stumbled the formation of a better world order in the 21st century. Washington’s concerns of the “great power realignment”, as well as its Manichean battle against China’s and Russia’s “illiberal regimes” have resulted in the activated alliance-building efforts between Beijing and Moscow, prompting the Biden administration to consider some wedging strategies. Despite their coordinated preparation to deter the US power, the Chinese and Russian leaderships seek to avert a conflict with Washington by diplomatic means, and the characteristic of their partnership is still leaving a “window of opportunity” for the United States to lever against the establishment of a formal Sino–Russian alliance.

scholarly journals Sources: Oil: A Cultural and Geographic Encyclopedia of Black Gold

2015 ◽  
Vol 54 (4) ◽  
pp. 83
Author(s):  
Paul MacLennan
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
International Relations ◽  
The United States ◽  
Monetary Value ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
To Come ◽  
The Individual ◽  
As Effects

In the winter of 2015, as this review is being written, the price of gasoline is plummeting in the United States and what this will mean for the individual, community, and country for the immediate future but also in years to come is unknown. There are a wide range of implications in politics, economics, and international relations as well as effects on what the individual pays for everyday groceries. It is therefore important that libraries provide their communities with the resources that include information and discussion on how energy and its monetary value interact with society.

scholarly journals United States and China: One evidence of the changing global geopolitical environment

2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (5) ◽  
pp. 6-16
Author(s):  
Ruth Ortiz ◽  
Eusebio Ortiz Zarco ◽  
Gerardo Suárez Barrera
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Empirical Analysis ◽  
21St Century ◽  
International System ◽  
The United States ◽  
Research Paper ◽  
Economic Indicators ◽  
The World

This research paper examines the commercial and monetary interdependence that has been built during the period 1990 - 2018 between two main economies of the world; this is an empirical analysis, based on a statistical scrutiny of economic indicators and Granger causalty tests. The result is a contribution to the understanding of the 21st century bundled international system, characterized by a changing global geopolitical environment, where the United States and China are the main actors.  

The New World Order

2019 ◽  
pp. 137-148
Author(s):  
Martin S. Flaherty
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
New World ◽  
Separation Of Powers ◽  
World Order ◽  
The United States ◽  
New World Order ◽  
The Bahamas ◽  
Global Networks ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Nation States

This chapter looks to the real “New World Order.” Conventionally, international relations as well as international law concentrated on the interactions of nation-states. On this model, the United States, China, Russia, the United Kingdom, Kenya, Mexico, and the Bahamas, for example, are principally the irreducible units. Recent thinking emphasizes that instead, international relations more and more consists of executive, legislative, and judicial officials directly reaching out to their foreign counterparts to share information, forge ongoing networks, coordinate cooperation, and construct new frameworks. The traditional nation-state has today become “disaggregated,” dealing with its peers less as monolithic sovereign states than through these more specialized “global networks.” Notably, the counterparts that officials of one state seek out in others tracks the divisions of separation of powers: executives to executives, judges to judges, legislators to legislators. How such transnational, interdepartmental networking affects each branch of government within a given state is another matter.

Rethinking United States–Caribbean relations: towards a new mode of trans-territorial governance

2000 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-82 ◽  
Author(s):  
ANTHONY PAYNE
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
International Relations ◽  
International System ◽  
The United States ◽  
The North ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Different Order

United States–Caribbean relations over the period of the last thirty or forty years have rarely—if ever—been analysed in a thoroughly satisfying way. It is a strange omission in the international relations literature given the proximity of the United States to the Caribbean, and vice versa. But the fact is that most accounts of the relationship have fallen prey to a powerful, but ultimately misleading, mythology by which small, poor, weak, dependent entities in the Caribbean have either created trouble for, or alternatively been confronted by, the ‘colossus to the north’ that is the United States in whose ‘backyard’ they unfortunately have to reside. Virtually all analysts of the US–Caribbean relationship have thus drawn a picture marked at heart by the notion of an inherently unequal struggle between forces of a different order and scale. Within this broad metaphor the only major difference of interpretation has reflected the competing theories of power in the international system developed by the realist and structuralist schools.

scholarly journals GEOPOLITICS AND EMPIRE: VISIONS OF REGIONAL WORLD ORDER IN THE 1940S

2014 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 353-381 ◽  
Author(s):  
OR ROSENBOIM
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
International Relations ◽  
World Order ◽  
The United States ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Policy Implications ◽  
Political Space ◽  
World War ◽  
Second World

This essay examines the influence of geopolitical and imperial thought on theories of international relations in the United States. The paper assesses the thought of Owen Lattimore, a leading American sinologist and political adviser to F. D. Roosevelt and Chiang Kai-shek, and Nicholas John Spykman, an influential international-relations scholar at Yale. In the framework of the Second World War and the “air age”, they envisaged a tripolar world order that entailed a new conception of political space and international relations. Lattimore's global geopolitical order sought to replace imperialism with democracy, while Spykman employed geopolitical concepts to envisage a tripolar order of “balanced powers” which built upon—rather than rejected—existing imperial structures. This paper examines their international theories and the policy implications of their thought to claim that 1940s theoretical interdisciplinarity made an important contribution to the development of the discipline of international relations in the United States.

scholarly journals The Gulf War (1990–1991) and new foreign political concept of George Herbert Walker Bush

2021 ◽  
Vol 26 (4) ◽  
pp. 65-69
Author(s):  
Dmitrii N. Khristenko
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
International Relations ◽  
New World ◽  
World Order ◽  
The United States ◽  
Gulf War ◽  
George Herbert ◽  
New World Order ◽  
The World

The article examines the foreign policy concept of the «new world order» of George Herbert Walker Bush, which he put forward during the Gulf War (1990-1991). Despite its short duration, the Middle East conflict has become a symbol of the transformation of international relations initiated by the crisis of the bipolar system and arising of the United States as the main military and political world power. Consequently, Washington sought to rethink its role in the world arena. This task was intended to solve by the concept of a «new world order». The main sources for this article were the memoirs of the former American president and James Addison Baker III (U.S. Secretary of State), documents of White House’ administration, as well as publications of «Foreign Affairs» – the most influential journal on international relations in the United States. The research methodology includes the space-time analysis of Fernand Paul Achille Braudel, historical-descriptive and historical-genetic methods. It is noted that the foreign policy concept of a «new world order» was in the centre of public attention and caused a heated discussion in the United States, as a result of which was rejected its main element – reliance on allies and the rule of international law. The attempts of Russian diplomacy to propose a corrected interpretation of the concept of a «new world order» did not meet the understanding overseas. Washington took a course towards sole leadership in the world that triggered the deterioration of the state of affairs in the world arena in the long term.

scholarly journals Towards the Rise of Eurasia. Competing Geopolitical Narratives and Responses

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Central And Eastern Europe ◽  
The United States ◽  
Great Powers ◽  
Regional Studies ◽  
Wide Audience ◽  
Comprehensive Picture

At the beginning of the 21st century, the unity of Europe and Asia took on a new meaning, leading to an appreciation of Eurasian thinking - which has a long tradition in geopolitics -, allowing different narratives to be born in different countries. The aim of this volume is to present in detail the interconnected geopolitical narratives that are emerging in various countries. As a similar book that examines the image of Eurasia through narratives has not yet been published in the region, this publication can be seen as a ground-breaking step. This work contains studies by experts in geopolitics - both foreign and domestic specialists - that undoubtedly contribute to the development of geopolitical research in Central and Eastern Europe. With their help, the reader can get a comprehensive picture of how the great powers and smaller countries on the supercontinent (as well as in the United States) interpret Eurasia, what the main features are of each narrative, and which factors and processes are helping and hindering their implementation. The publisher of the volume, the lnstitute of lnternational, Political and Regional Studies at Corvinus University, is strongly committed to exploring current developments in geopolitics, thereby contributing to their better understanding. The latest volume in the series 'Corvinus Geographia, Geopolitica, Geooeconomia' may be of interest to a wide audience. As well as being relevant to those interested in geopolitics, it will appeal to those who seek to understand the changing landscape of international relations of the 21st century.

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