Grand strategies can be thought of as overall survival strategies of all states. Great powers seek survival against other great powers seeking to undermine their power and position, determining prestige-seeking behavior as psychotic and destructive. Weak states suffer from systemic vulnerabilities and trade whatever political power they have to a great power for economic assistance. If enough weak states support a particular great power, then that great power will become more powerful relative to competitors. This forms an international system fashioned by these transactions.

This book introduces ten key terms for analysing grand strategy and shows how the world’s great powers – the United States, China, Russia and the European Union (EU) – shape their strategic decisions today and shows how the choices made will determine the course of world politics in the first half of the 21st century.

This book explains the development of the international system’s present-day balance of power by exploring three central questions: (1) Under what conditions has the international system order evolved from a unipolar system to the current multipolar system? (2) What are its major states? (3) How do weak powers affect great power competition? It puts forward the following hypotheses: (1) if China and Russia are expanding their military, political, and economic influence into weaker states globally, then the unipolar American order is unraveling; and (2) if the international system is multipolar, then great power balancing may enhance international security. However, balancing may be made difficult because of weak state aid-seeking behavior. When weak states engage competing great powers, they become spheres of competition. This book delves into these states. Whether in Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, Central Asia, East Asia, or Eastern Europe, great powers hope to establish some control over weaker units for security, economic, and at times, prestige purposes. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of political science and IR, security studies, and IPE, as well as members of the think tank community and policy analysts.

This book seeks to explain why weak states exist within the international system. Using the cases of Armenia, St. Kitts and Nevis, Lebanon, and Cambodia, the author argues that, if a state is weak and vulnerable, then it can practice an unexpected degree of relative autonomy unfettered by great powers.

For more than a century, no US adversary or coalition of adversaries - not Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, or the Soviet Union - has ever reached sixty percent of US GDP. China is the sole exception, and it is fast emerging into a global superpower that could rival, if not eclipse, the United States. What does China want, does it have a grand strategy to achieve it, and what should the United States do about it? In The Long Game, Rush Doshi draws from a rich base of Chinese primary sources, including decades worth of party documents, leaked materials, memoirs by party leaders, and a careful analysis of China's conduct to provide a history of China's grand strategy since the end of the Cold War. Taking readers behind the Party's closed doors, he uncovers Beijing's long, methodical game to displace America from its hegemonic position in both the East Asia regional and global orders through three sequential "strategies of displacement." Beginning in the 1980s, China focused for two decades on "hiding capabilities and biding time." After the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, it became more assertive regionally, following a policy of "actively accomplishing something." Finally, in the aftermath populist elections of 2016, China shifted to an even more aggressive strategy for undermining US hegemony, adopting the phrase "great changes unseen in century." After charting how China's long game has evolved, Doshi offers a comprehensive yet asymmetric plan for an effective US response. Ironically, his proposed approach takes a page from Beijing's own strategic playbook to undermine China's ambitions and strengthen American order without competing dollar-for-dollar, ship-for-ship, or loan-for-loan.

A clearly articulated, well-defined, and relatively stable grand strategy is supposed to allow the ship of state to steer a steady course through the roiling seas of global politics. However, the obstacles to formulating and implementing grand strategy are, by all accounts, imposing. The Oxford Handbook of Grand Strategy addresses the conceptual and historical foundations, production, evolution, and future of grand strategy from a wide range of standpoints. The seven constituent sections present and critically examine the history of grand strategy, including beyond the West; six distinct theoretical approaches to the subject; the sources of grand strategy, ranging from geography and technology to domestic politics to individual psychology and culture; the instruments of grand strategy's implementation, from military to economic to covert action; political actors', including non-state actors', grand strategic choices; the debatable merits of grand strategy, relative to alternatives; and the future of grand strategy, in light of challenges ranging from political polarization to technological change to aging populations. The result is a field-defining, interdisciplinary, and comparative text that will be a key resource for years to come.

Post- Cold War Predictions examines how the international order evolved after the collapse of the Soviet Union (and before the attacks on 9/11) by focusing on the ways we study and understand major powers’ security behavior within the evolving multipolar order. Beginning with an overview of Post-Cold War literature, Kassab summarizes and evaluates influential Post-Cold War texts to better understand scholarship’s need to predict. First, he discusses the central importance of power in international relations and drives home the central focus of international structures, linking findings to the broader structure-agent problem. He then reinterprets the purpose of theory, preferring explanatory theories to those that aim to predict outcomes. To understand the context by which political ideas were developed and followed as if they were political ideologies, Hanna Samir Kassab makes explicit the links between historicism and historiography, forwarding a new methodology for studying political science: Politicist analysis. Using simple jargon and defining terms where necessary, this succinct and enlightening text is required reading for all those interested in international politics.

To explore what extended competition between the United States and China might entail out to 2050, the authors of this report identified and characterized China’s grand strategy, analyzed its component national strategies (diplomacy, economics, science and technology, and military affairs), and assessed how successful China might be at implementing these over the next three decades.

This book studies systemic vulnerabilities and their impact on states and individual survival. The author theorizes that the structure of the international system is a product of the distribution of capabilities and vulnerabilities across states. States function or behave in terms of these systemic threats. The author examines a number of specific case-studies focusing on military, economic, environmental, political and cyber vulnerabilities, and how different states are impacted by them. Arguing that current attempts to securitize these vulnerabilities through defensive foreign policies are largely failing, the books makes the case for prioritizing economic development and human security.

The essential introduction to the comparative analysis of national grand strategies.