Articles

During foreign policy disputes involving China and some of its most important commercial partners, why do local leaders punish or protect foreign commercial actors? The decision comes down to the political incentives facing each local leader. Understanding this variation is important because how local leaders treat foreign businesses can influence the overall effectiveness of the Chinese government’s economic coercion against foreign states. 

Power transitions affect a state’s ability to exercise economic statecraft. As a dominating and a rising power approach parity, they face structural incentives to decouple their economies. This decoupling affects business-state relations: high-value businesses within the dominant power tend to oppose their state’s economic statecraft because of its costs to them, whereas low-value businesses within the rising power tend to cooperate because they gain from it. 

U.S. power extends beyond the military and economic spheres to include policing. The United States has used its global policing power to capture terrorists, warlords, and drug kingpins. But extradition is not simply a bureaucratic tool. States’ geopolitical interests shape their willingness to cooperate with others in extraditing fugitives. 

Economic interdependence has long been considered important to international peace. Questions about harmful effects of the free flow of capital, however, are arising. China and Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development countries are increasingly involving their business firms in security and intelligence work, causing a security dilemma dynamic that increases economic competition.

When the U.S. military trains other states’ forces, it tries to impart liberal norms such as respect for human rights. But when liberal norms clash, these soldiers prioritize loyalty to their unit, the military, and shared goals.

White Southerners opposed to Reconstruction used violence to undermine Black political power and force uncommitted white Southerners to their side. Although structural factors made it harder for the U.S. government to suppress this violence, a series of policy failures prompted Reconstruction’s failure and generations of injustice.

Tongfi Kim and Andrew Taffer respond to Ketian Zhang’s summer 2019 article, “Cautious Bully: Reputation, Resolve, and Beijing's Use of Coercion in the South China Sea.”

SWJ interview with Nathaniel L. Moir, Ph.D., an Ernest May Postdoctoral Fellow in History and Policy at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School. Dr. Moir is completing a book manuscript on Bernard Fall for publication.

Contrary to the conventional wisdom, China is a cautious bully that seeks to balance between the need to establish resolve and the economic cost of coercion, seen through its territorial disputes in the South China Sea.

Liberal market-oriented states are in a natural alliance to preserve and protect a global order that is systematically buttressing states’ embrace of market-oriented norms and values.