Asia & the Pacific

Stephen Walt writes that those who favor foreign policy restraint believe the United States should trade and invest in other countries, encourage other states to do the same, and be open to managed immigration instead of building walls in a fit of xenophobia.

Joseph Nye considers lessons from his own work on preventing the spread of nuclear technology in the 1970s.

In this deeply personal book, Joseph Nye shares his own journey living through the American century.

Joseph Nye argues that while former US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping each played important roles in ending Sino-American engagement, the death of the policy started with the 2008 global financial crisis. That is when Chinese elites concluded that America was in decline, and that China need no longer bide its time.

Americans have long seen their country as morally exceptional, but their exceptionalism actually comprises three distinct views. Whichever prevails in next year's presidential election will have significant implications for ongoing conflicts in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East.

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. 

This year's G7 summit in Hiroshima sees nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation sitting high on the agenda, amid rising tensions between the nuclear states and an increasingly divided international order.  Six contributors offer their analyses, including the Belfer Center's Mayumi Fukushima.

Stephen Walt argues that prudent states should not assume that a norm against conquest will suffice to protect them; adequate hard power, shrewd diplomacy, and reliable allies are better—if still imperfect—guarantees.

Stephen Walt argues that in a multipolar world, the United States will be in an ideal situation to play the other major powers off against each other, and it can let its partners in Eurasia bear more of the burden of their own security. 

David C. Logan and Robert C. Watts IV respond to Isaac B. Kardon and Wendy Leutert's spring 2022 article, "Pier Competitor: China's Power Position in Global Ports."