What follows is my general philosophy on China issues, by way of answering the hardest of hard defense framing questions regarding China. After my most recent piece in Foreign Affairs, I got a note from a semi-prominent friend in Washington's foreign policy...
Over the past six months or so, I've gotten a lot of pings about NATO and the "Big 3" (UK, France, and Germany) taking on a role in Asia — and specifically a bigger military presence in the region....
Every self-respecting foreign policy expert who fancies themselves part of a realpolitik tradition talks as if the balance of power were everything. Now, I don't necessarily think of myself as a...
About a year ago I introduced an ocasional series called "Quarter-Baked Ideas." The idea was to blog about semi-formed thoughts related to international affairs. The whole notion turned about to be...
Statue Outside the Guingtou Battle Museum(Photo: Dan Nexon)Note: this is the second post stemming from my June trip to Taiwan. The first is available here.Seven years ago Bill Petti wrote a piece at the Duck called "US, Taiwan, and the Myth of an Obligation to Defend." Bill eviscerated the claim that the US was legally obligated to defend the island against an attack from the mainland, but concluded by noting that:Many US policymakers have come to see our position on Taiwan as a barometer by which enemies and allies judge US resolve. Over the last 50 years we have coupled our stance on...
Japan-Korea treaty killed by Seoul at last minute about a week ago.Jennifer Lind provides a quick explanation:East Asia, where states don't even need to practice wedge politics to bring about division.....
Robert drove a great deal of traffic to the Duck with his provocative posts on retrenchment and US alliances. His efforts to "grade" allies by strategic importance has led to some interesting results and fascinating discussions. But I think he's working with an overly narrow view of what alliances are good for. Here I agree with Steve Walt in general, although I have a somewhat different spin. Robert's analysis treats alliances as if they are basically cooperative security arrangements, produce little in the way of externalities, and amount to a net negative investment only offset by the...
Go Luxemburg!According to Michael Beckley, the United States should be deeply concerned about the power-political position of Luxemburg, Denmark, Switzerland, and others. Okay, not really. But that's the implication of Beckley's top-line response to Erik Voeten's dissection of his recent article in International Security.Normally economic growth rates dovetail with changes in wealth gaps. But these measures often diverge when comparing a rich country like the United States to a poor one like China. Since 1991, China’s per capita income rose 11 percent annually while America’s rose 3.5...
Tobias Harris over at Observing Japan, weighs in on the discussion regarding Japanese balancing (or lack thereof). Harris' post is an excellent addition to the discussion and includes some excellent points that require me to clarify my original post. And away we go...1) Tobias is correct that given the current and likely current state of the DPRK they are not exactly a Gilpin-esque revisionist power. However, I don't think that a state must have asperations and likely capabilities to match to be considered a revisionist state in general. A state that clearly is unhappy with the current...
Peter brings up an interesting question and one that we don’t yet have a final answer on: Under what circumstances will states balance against another? If shifts in the balance of power are not enough to provoke balancing, what does? I think the notion that Japan could be provoked into balancing by the DPRK rather than China certainly has merit. A few initial thoughts as to why this may be the case:1) Increased Economic Dependence: China’s military modernization has been and will continue to be fueled by its growing economy. Japan has become arguably China’s most important economic partner...
I was listening to a CFR podcast of a special conference call on North Korea's nuclear weapons test yesterday during my much longer than usual commute. One key part of the discussion centered around Japan's response to the nuclear test and missile launches. Japan, it seems, is taking steps to improve its military capabilities in response to North Korea's actions. Even the most extreme option--Japan going nuclear--seems to be lurking near the table. The conference call participants saw China as a key to the North Korean situation, with greater action possible this time in part because China...
I already pimped it, but my review essay, "The Balance of Power in the Balance," just came out in World Politics (abstract). Unlike a number of other journals, World Politics subjects review essays to peer review and insists that they include original argumentation.Two of my conclusions:Balance of power theory, at least in its stronger variants, cannot survive the combined weight of arguments and evidence presented in these four volumes. while a case exists for preserving a weak balance of power theory, such a theory ultimately works by decoupling the mechanisms specified by Waltz from his...