Democratic enlargement… meet the PRC

2 May 2006, 0400 EDT

Peter Howard writes an interesting composite post on the nexus of energy politics, China’s rise, and US policy objectives.

The core of the issue: when we move out, China moves in. Scratch the negative diplomatic externalities for regimes intent on brutalizing their populations.

Solutions? Liberal hegemony types would argue China needs to be better socialized into the international system. Realists say “Good luck” and “I told you so.” Such developments, from my perspective, demonstrate how “exit options” for small states enhance their leverage against particular great–and even militarily hegemonic–powers.

Filed as: China and liberal internationalism

Dan Nexon

Daniel H. Nexon is a Professor at Georgetown University, with a joint appointment in the Department of Government and the School of Foreign Service. His academic work focuses on international-relations theory, power politics, empires and hegemony, and international order. He has also written on the relationship between popular culture and world politics.

He has held fellowships at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation and at the Ohio State University's Mershon Center for International Studies. During 2009-2010 he worked in the U.S. Department of Defense as a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow. He was the lead editor of International Studies Quarterly from 2014-2018.

He is the author of The Struggle for Power in Early Modern Europe: Religious Conflict, Dynastic Empires, and International Change (Princeton University Press, 2009), which won the International Security Studies Section (ISSS) Best Book Award for 2010, and co-author of Exit from Hegemony: The Unraveling of the American Global Order (Oxford University Press, 2020). His articles have appeared in a lot of places. He is the founder of the The Duck of Minerva, and also blogs at Lawyers, Guns and Money.