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US grand strategy towards China, 1991-2015: A neoclassical realist analysis
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Foulon, Michiel (2019) US grand strategy towards China, 1991-2015: A neoclassical realist analysis. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.
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Official URL: http://webcat.warwick.ac.uk/record=b3475185~S15
Abstract
This study demonstrates how a neoclassical realist approach can contribute to explanations of the grand strategies of states, by examining the case study of the United States’ (US) grand strategy towards China. Thereby, it aims to contribute to theories of international relations, studies of grand strategy adjustments and the empirical analysis of the US’s grand strategy towards China during 1991-2015.
Grand strategy is expected, from the purview of structural realism, to focus on checking rising great powers; that is, structural realism anticipates a strong trend that established great powers go to great lengths to respond to rising powers and to redress trade deficits with them. However, as the US’s sub-optimal strategy towards China from 1991–2015 illustrates, this is not always the case. Since the alternative explanations offered by scholarly literature on US-China relations are frequently grounded in Innenpolitik, constructivist and two-level game approaches, they cannot easily explain continuous sub-optimal strategies. To offer a more satisfactory explanation to grand strategy that a sparser structural realist approach cannot, scholars have increasingly adopted neoclassical realism.
This thesis examines neoclassical realism and alternative explanations to construct a theoretical model that can more satisfactorily explain sub-optimal strategies and uses the US’s China strategy as its case study. The thesis’s theoretical model explores the conditions under which decision-makers’ perceptions and resource constraints interfered more with the US’s grand strategy towards China and when they interfered less. It argues 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– 2015 is then conceptualised as a blended product of systemic conditions and domestic characteristics that produced an underactive China strategy.
This proposed theoretical model is examined in a comparative case study with a before-after design on the US’s grand strategy towards China. Congruence and process-tracing methods reveal the within-case causal mechanism at play and demonstrate the causal primacy of systemic factors in producing the US’s China strategy.
Item Type: | Thesis (PhD) | ||||
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Subjects: | J Political Science > JZ International relations | ||||
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH): | United States -- Foreign relations -- China, Political realism, International relations | ||||
Official Date: | April 2019 | ||||
Dates: |
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Institution: | University of Warwick | ||||
Theses Department: | Department of Politics and International Studies | ||||
Thesis Type: | PhD | ||||
Publication Status: | Unpublished | ||||
Format of File: | |||||
Extent: | 317 leaves : illustrations | ||||
Language: | eng |
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