American Grand Strategy towards China
Michiel Foulon
2018 - 2022
This book project addresses the following question: Why did the US pursue, from structural realism’s perspective, an underactive grand strategy towards China from 1991-2011, but a more optimal strategy from 2011-2018? Over the past thirty years, the US’s approach to dealing with China’s rise has not turned out as many scholars and foreign policy elites expected. This book will advance a theory that expounds the conditions under which decision-makers’ perceptions and resource constraints interfere with states’ grand strategy, with the US’s China strategy as its case study. It will be argued that, in a very permissive strategic environment, when the threat from a rising power is distant and small, the space for decision-makers’ misperceptions and resource constraints to interfere expands, and decision-makers worry less about potential security losses from trade. However, in a less permissive strategic environment, the space for such interference contracts, and decision-makers worry more about security losses from trade.
The US’s grand strategy towards China is caught up in this matrix of variables. The US’s China strategy from 1991–2018 is then decoded as a blended product of systemic conditions and domestic characteristics that produced an underactive China strategy. Contrary to explanations offered by structural realism, (systemic and holistic) social constructivism, individual and decision-making FPA, domestic politics and sectoral interests approaches, and two-level game explanations, the explanation advanced in this book thus expounds the conditions under which intervening variables interfere more and when they interfere less with state behavior. In doing so, it seeks to contribute not only to the literatures on US-China relations and the trade-security nexus but also to that of neoclassical realism and IR theory more generally.
Related publications
Foulon, Michiel; Meibauer, Gustav (2020), external pageRealist avenues to global International Relationscall_made, European Journal of International Relations.
Michiel Foulon (2018), external pageTrade and Security in US Grand Strategy to Chinacall_made, in Salvador Santino F. Regilme Jr. and James Parisot, eds., Global Cooperation and Conflict? Emerging Powers and the Future of American Hegemony, New York: Routledge, pp. 43-59.
Michiel Foulon (2018), external pageNeoclassical Realist Analysis of Foreign Policycall_made, in Patrick Haney et al., eds., Oxford Encyclopedia of Foreign Policy Analysis, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Michiel Foulon (2015), external pageNeoclassical Realism: Challengers and Bridging Identitiescall_made, International Studies Review, 17:4, pp. 635-661.