Level III: Power Transition
This week treats power transition as a systemic problem and then turns it on a single case: US–China. The main line is uneven growth under anarchy, when a rising state’s capabilities outpace the rules a declining hegemon built, the system falls out of equilibrium and must somehow be readjusted, by accommodation or by war. Each reading offers a different mechanism for that readjustment: Gilpin’s cost–benefit cycle, Mearsheimer’s structural compulsion to maximize power, Friedberg’s competing paradigmatic forecasts, Goddard’s legitimation contests, and Shifrinson’s account of how rising states choose to prey on or prop up the declining giant.
Reading list
- Gilpin. 1981. War and Change in World Politics, Ch. 5.
- Mearsheimer. 1991. The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, Ch. 1 (Introduction).
- Friedberg. 2005. “The Future of U.S.–China Relations: Is Conflict Inevitable?” International Security.
- Goddard. 2018. When Right Makes Might: Rising Powers and World Order, Ch. 2.
- Shifrinson. 2018. Rising Titans, Falling Giants, Ch. 1.
- Application: “Forum: What Does America Want from China?” 2024. Foreign Affairs.
Gilpin (1981): War and Change in World Politics
Ch. 5 · disequilibrium, hegemonic decline, and the cycle of hegemonic war
His premise is that if disequilibrium is not resolved, the system will be changed and a new equilibrium reflecting the redistribution of power will be established. In practical terms: when power shifts but the rules and order do not, the system is “out of balance.” If that imbalance is not fixed by policy adjustment, the system itself is reordered, often by major war, so that the new distribution of power is finally reflected in new rules, territory, hierarchy, and division of labor. Gilpin makes this concrete from each actor’s standpoint: for the dominant power the costs of maintaining the status quo have risen, while for rising powers the perceived costs of changing the system have fallen. If adjustment fails, the disequilibrium “will be resolved by war,” and the post-war settlement reorders the system’s basic components to match the new power balance. A hegemon is the state whose power underwrites and governs the international order, its rules, hierarchy of prestige, territorial settlement, and division of labor; post-war settlements install new rules aligned with the victor’s power. Decline is when the hegemon’s costs of maintaining the system rise relative to its capacity, often producing fiscal crisis. A rising challenger is a state whose relative costs of changing the system fall as its power grows; “in accordance with the law of demand,” it will seek change once perceived benefits exceed costs. But I see a circularity problem: “decline” is essentially defined as “costs rising relative to capacity,” yet Gilpin never really analyzes why capacity falls relatively, he just calls it “differential growth.” He gestures at innovation and efficiency (imperial China’s long survival credited to high innovation, Rome to stagnation), but that is descriptive, not explanatory: it does not tell us why some states keep innovating and others cannot. Decline and fiscal crisis are treated as mutually reinforcing, while the deeper cause of differential growth stays underexplored. This links straight to Organski/Kugler power-transition theory and the Thucydidean problem of fear plus shifting capabilities; power-transition theory leans on quantified relative-power comparison, whereas Gilpin foregrounds cost–benefit calculation and the governance of the system, but the core mechanism is the same: relative power changes, the rising state challenges the status quo, and war becomes possible. The first is to increase the resources devoted to maintaining commitments. Concrete methods: raise taxes or extract tribute (the French crown’s taxation, Athenian tribute), fast but politically costly, inviting resistance and revolt and dragging the economy; finance indirectly through inflation or manipulating the terms of trade, at the price of long-run hardship and resistance; or improve efficiency through innovation and institutional “rejuvenation” of economic, military, and political institutions, the ideal solution because it expands disposable resources, but slow and hard in aging societies with vested interests and rigidities. The bottom line: raising revenue is fast but costly, while innovation is best but slow and institutionally difficult. The second strategy is to reduce existing commitments without ultimately jeopardizing the hegemon’s position, retrenchment. Gilpin’s set of tools has three moves: (1) unilateral withdrawals and abandoning exposed positions (Venice’s deliberate advance–retreat, Byzantine consolidation, the modern Nixon Doctrine), aligning scale with means, but signaling weakness if mishandled; (2) alliances and rapprochement with less-threatening powers, sharing benefits for shared costs (Romans–Goths, British ententes, U.S.–China), at the risk of overpaying, ally defection (Riker’s coalition logic), and entrapment in an ally’s disputes; and (3) appeasement of the rising power, unpopular after Munich but sometimes successful (Britain toward the U.S. before WWI), with the main risk being prestige erosion and snowballing demands, and the benefit being that it can avert war under the right conditions. His model of successful retrenchment is Britain in the 1890s–1907, settling with the U.S., Japan, France, and Russia to concentrate on Germany.
Retrenchment is the deliberate reduction of political, territorial, and economic commitments to bring costs back into line with resources. Gilpin’s reasons for calling it dangerous: it signals waning power, invites ally hedging and rival pressure, and, if forced rather than chosen, can cause prestige to collapse; yet failing to retrench voluntarily can be worse. My own take is that retrenchment is dangerous mainly when it is poorly timed or poorly communicated, but useful when it is sequenced with a credible concentration of power, exactly what Britain achieved with its pre-1914 settlements. Gilpin gives three defining features: a direct contest between the dominant power(s) and the rising challenger(s), with system-wide participation in bipolar camps; a stake that is the governance and legitimacy of the system itself, fought on political, economic, and ideological grounds and often followed by the transformation of the defeated society; and unlimited means with global scope, whose intensity, scope, and duration make them “world” wars. It changes the system because victory and defeat reorder all the basic components, hierarchy of prestige, territory, rules, division of labor, to reflect the new distribution of power, producing a new order. I do find the distinction analytically useful: hegemonic wars are system-making (they reset who governs), whereas limited wars are state-to-state adjustments within the system. The Peloponnesian War qualifies because Sparta and Athens spiral into war over hegemony in Hellas (the Melian Dialogue shows the Athenian logic of raw power), and it meets all three criteria, direct hegemon-vs-challenger contest, system-governance stakes, and unlimited means; Gilpin cites Pericles’ point that seemingly “small” demands were really about hegemony, not trifles. Gilpin’s general claim is that peaceful change is easier within a system (adjusting rules and benefits) but much harder when it requires changing who leads the system, because dominant powers rarely cede leadership willingly and risers rarely forgo their advantage. Yet he cites appeasement that worked, Britain accommodating the rising United States before WWI, which laid the “special relationship.” My view is that the transition stayed peaceful because of deep value, common-law, and cultural affinity (Carr’s “tolerant and unoppressive” Anglo-powers), because security externalities aligned (Germany as the focal threat), and because Britain could retrench globally while preserving its core interests. He closes the chapter on the cycle, one hegemonic war begins another round of growth, expansion, and eventual decline, but not as an iron law: he explicitly entertains peaceful change and notes that long-cycle theories lack a clear mechanism, conceding that “uncertainty rules the world.” My take is that the cycle is a strong tendency under anarchy plus uneven growth, but institutional innovation, deep integration, and nuclear deterrence can lengthen cycles or channel adjustment away from total war (echoing Carr’s “peaceful change” dilemma). And we should care even when open hegemonic war is constrained by nuclear weapons and interdependence, because Gilpin’s real pay-off is diagnostic: watch for a rising mismatch between the leader’s commitments and resources, falling costs for challengers to revise the rules, and the preconditions of “closing in” opportunities and dominant-power time anxiety. When power shifts outpace rule adaptation, the risk of crisis and hard tests of order rises.
Mearsheimer (1991): The Tragedy of Great Power Politics
Ch. 1 · offensive realism and the structural tragedy
Great powers are determined largely by their relative military capability: to qualify, a state must be able to put up a serious fight in an all-out conventional war against the most powerful state, and in the nuclear age must also have a survivable nuclear deterrent alongside formidable conventional forces. His empirical scope runs from the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars to the end of the 20th century, chiefly the European great powers, plus Imperial Japan, China in the 1990s, and the United States. Applying his criteria today, the clearest cases are the United States, China, and Russia; India is often discussed as emerging but it is debated whether it meets the strict “serious fight versus the most powerful state” threshold, though its survivable nuclear force and growing conventional capacity place it near the category, and the EU is not a state. The concept is analytically useful in his framework because he focuses on great powers precisely as the actors with the largest impact on international politics, the fortunes of all states are shaped mainly by those with the greatest capability (the world wars, the US–USSR rivalry), and the definition imposes observable thresholds. Its downside is that borderline cases like India create gray zones and the category can underplay influential middle powers and coalitions; still, for theories of war, balancing, and polarity it is precise and operational. His claim is that there are no status quo powers in the international system, save the occasional hegemon that wants to keep its dominating position; great powers are rarely content with the current distribution of power and almost always have revisionist intentions. The reason is structural: the system forces states that seek only security nonetheless to act aggressively, because of three features, anarchy (no higher authority), the fact that states always have some offensive capability, and the fact that states can never be certain about others’ intentions. These combine to make states fear one another, so that even states that only want to be secure “have little choice but to pursue power and to seek to dominate”, a situation no one designed and that is therefore genuinely tragic. I find the logic internally coherent and a good match for many historical patterns. The usual objections target the inference from fear to offensive maximization (the defensive-realist contrast below) and whether institutions or ideas can durably mitigate uncertainty. I’d add that episodes of apparent status-quo behavior often reflect temporary constraint or satisfaction under particular cost–benefit conditions; liberal and domestic-politics accounts say some states sometimes accept constraints for institutional, ideological, or audience-cost reasons, but Mearsheimer would treat those as contingent, not structural. He predicted that engagement is doomed to fail: if China becomes an economic powerhouse it will almost certainly translate economic might into military might and make a run at dominating Northeast Asia, and whether it is democratic and enmeshed or autocratic and autarkic will have “little effect” on its behavior; he anticipated balancing coalitions and intense security competition. On (a), his criterion of failure is not trade volumes but the security relationship, growth → military power → bids for regional dominance → balancing → rivalry, and on those terms we do observe deepened strategic rivalry and balancing in Asia (alliances, arms racing). On (b), he argues regime type and interdependence matter little and structure dominates, which is consistent with subsequent rivalry; alternative accounts stress domestic politics, ideology, and specific policy choices, but they do not negate the structural mechanism he foregrounds. My pushback is sharper. The key tension is that if the problem is the United States refusing to accept Chinese regional primacy, then that is an American choice, not a structural necessity, and historically East Asia’s hierarchical order was relatively stable when no external great power intervened. There is a paradox in America’s security perimeter: the “island chains” strategy itself manufactures the perception of threat, and extending the U.S. security boundary up to China’s periphery is itself an offensive act. From Washington’s center it looks like China is the threat; from Beijing’s view it is America’s forward deployment that threatens. This exposes a perspectival bias in the theory, which struggles to explain why the United States must maintain global hegemony rather than only Western-hemisphere dominance, and how a regional hegemon (as China historically was) is supposed to coexist with a distant hegemon like the United States.
The logic chains together: anarchy plus uncertainty means a state can never be sure it is “safe enough,” so maximizing relative power is the optimal strategy, and hegemony is the ultimate goal; great powers look for opportunities to gain power, and multipolarity is more war-prone, especially when there is a potential hegemon. Against Waltz’s defensive realism the key difference is how much power states want: defensive realism sees structure pushing states to maintain the balance, a status-quo bias where balancing and the offense–defense balance discourage aggression, while offensive realism sees structure providing powerful incentives to maximize relative power, so status quo powers are rarely found. Against classical (human-nature) realism the difference is the root of aggression: Morgenthau roots it in an innate lust for power, whereas offensive realism roots it in systemic structure, anarchy, uncertainty, and offensive capability, so that survival itself mandates aggression. Both portray great powers as relentlessly seeking power, but one locates the engine in human nature and the other in the system. He argues realism is not a popular school in the West and that Americans have an especially intense antipathy toward balance-of-power thinking, citing Wilson, FDR, and Clinton denigrating “power politics”; he attributes this to deep-seated optimism and moralism in American culture, which prefers moral-crusade narratives over balance-of-power calculation, so that U.S. foreign-policy discourse often sounds like a “Liberalism 101 lecture.” In the 1990s liberal triumphalism (the “end of history” mood) was strong, and the rhetoric gap he describes, liberal language masking realist practice, remains visible. But there has been a real shift: Trump-era “America First” is explicitly realist language; the Biden era kept values rhetoric but framed China policy essentially as power competition; in the academy offensive realism has gained influence in explaining US–China relations; and the policy world now talks openly about “great-power competition.” As for which is closer to reality, I think offensive realism best explains the direction of US–China relations under power transition (rivalry, balancing, arms racing), while defensive realism better captures the variance, the periods when costs and risks, efficient balancing, or defense-dominant technologies restrain aggression and keep competition below the threshold of war (the offense–defense logic of Jervis, Snyder, and Van Evera). As a baseline, offensive realism captures the gravitational pull toward competition; defensive realism explains why that pull often results in cautious positional play rather than constant bids for hegemony. The observable US–China implications follow from his logic, China converts wealth to military power, seeks regional dominance, neighbors and the U.S. balance, competition intensifies, and war risk persists (Taiwan). Broadly the evidence fits: Chinese military modernization and U.S./regional counter-balancing (alliances, force posture, technology denial). What is softer than his stark prediction is the persistence of deep economic interdependence and dense institutionalized interaction alongside rivalry, features defensive realists and liberals regard as consequential even though they do not eliminate the underlying competition. Most real-world patterns look like offensive-realist tendencies moderated by defensive-realist constraints.
Friedberg (2005): The Future of U.S.–China Relations
International Security · paradigm contest and analytical eclecticism
Useful as a map, fraught as a forecast. It is useful because Friedberg argues we need to catalogue multiple causal forces, liberal, realist, constructivist, and then ask how they combine, endorsing “analytical eclecticism” and invoking Katzenstein and Okawara’s critique of paradigmatic clashes; all the arguments are in some sense correct. It is fraught because he also concedes prediction is “unknowable,” since outcomes result from converging or offsetting forces rather than a single mechanism, and he warns that no single camp may be “right”, multiple mechanisms may work at once, captured in his “simple physical metaphor” of forces pushing in different directions. Friedberg states that “in foreign affairs, most Americans are liberals,” and treats this as a general observation, not China-specific, tethered to faith in interdependence, institutions, and democratization. The ideological impulse (democracy, human rights) still shapes U.S. policy rhetoric, e.g., support for Taiwan’s democracy, but on instruments the U.S. since 2018 has moved toward restrictions (tariffs, tech controls) more consistent with realist/mercantilist caution than pure liberal optimism, the 2024 Section 301 hikes (EVs to 100%) and broadened chip export controls in 2023–24, even as trade ties remain large but cooled and securitized since their 2022 peak. So his cultural-ideological point retains force while the policy toolbox has shifted toward guarded competition. As for temperament: liberals tend to optimism because they expect commerce, institutions, and democratization to pacify relations, assuming human reason, the possibility of progress, and useful institutions, for them history is a smoothly ascending curve. Realists tend to pessimism because they see power transitions and an intense security dilemma making competition likely, assuming anarchy, power politics, and structure-bound state behavior, for them history is a vicious circle. Friedberg’s own contrast: where liberals see progressive forces leading the world to ever-higher prosperity and peace, realists see inescapable laws of nature compelling a recurrent struggle for power and survival. Liberal optimism centers on two features: soaring trade and investment creating pro-peace constituencies, and institutions plus eventual democratization stabilizing ties (“China too must become democratic”). Realist pessimism stresses PRC power growth, potentially expanding aims, and a high-salience security dilemma over Taiwan. To me Taiwan’s deterrence/assurance spiral is structurally central, capabilities, commitments, domestic audiences, and empirically remains the flashpoint (the 2024 DPP win, sharper PRC rhetoric and exercises). The two camps capture different things and miss others: liberal optimism captures economic ties, institutional interaction, and domestic politics but misses power structure, geopolitics, and cultural identity; realist pessimism captures the distribution of power, geostrategy, and military balance but misses domestic politics, ideational change, and non-traditional security; constructivism captures ideas, identity, and discourse but misses material foundations and institutional constraints. Importantly, optimism/pessimism is a separate dimension from the paradigms: Friedberg builds the typology so each paradigm has optimist and pessimist variants. The realist-optimist case holds that China’s aims are constrained, its rise manageable, and the security dilemma muted, a “conservative power” with limited objectives, making stable competition and coexistence feasible. The liberal-pessimist case holds that the regime is authoritarian and insecure, the perils of transition are real, and an ideational spiral of mutual suspicion (hawks on both sides) aggravates rivalry. Both are coherent; I find the liberal-pessimist dynamics, regime type, audience costs, ideology, especially helpful in explaining the post-2018 securitization of trade and tech despite deep interdependence.
Constructivism adds attention to identities, norms, strategic culture, and how repeated interaction can reshape preferences. Optimistic constructivists believe institutions can “soften” norms and identities over time through sustained contact. Pessimistic constructivists believe shocks and crises harden hostile images, they point to identity-freezing moments like the 1999 embassy bombing and the 2001 EP-3 incident. Which way it tilts is mixed: periods of contact (the 2023 resumption of military-to-military talks) push identities one way, while punctuated shocks (Taiwan, tech controls) push them the other. None wins outright; Friedberg’s own synthesis, analytical eclecticism and a steady state of “bounded competition”, travels best to 2023–25: trading and talking continue, yet mistrust and hedging persist. The evidence: cooperation channels reopen (the 2023 Biden–Xi meeting restarted mil-to-mil comms and launched AI talks, classic softening); rivalry hardens in geo-economics and tech (2024–25 tariff hikes and expanded chip controls show sustained strategic decoupling); security competition spikes (Taiwan politics in 2024, deepened allied defense cooperation, AUKUS Pillars I and II); and interdependence endures but is politically reframed (trade volumes remain very large, just more managed and concentrated in sensitive sectors). The hybrid, bounded-competition outcome is closest to observed reality, exactly his medium-term expectation. What the typology misses is substantial: geo-economic statecraft beyond tariffs and WTO logic (outbound investment screening, extraterritorial chip and tool controls, FDPR extensions) that merge realist security with institutional-legal channels; green-tech industrial-policy politics (EV and solar supply chains) where climate and security logics intersect, the 100% EV tariff being securitized industrial policy; allied capability pooling (AUKUS Pillar II on AI, autonomy, quantum) as institutionalized balancing not centered in 2005; crisis-driven perception shocks in the infosphere (disinformation, cyber operations) and technology identity (the AI race) amplifying the constructivist shock-hardening pathway; and domestic polarization in the U.S. alongside centralization in China, which reweights audience costs and elite constraints and complicates “most Americans are liberals” as a predictor, since bipartisan support for tariffs and controls suggests a broader securitized center. More broadly, the underweighted factors are technological change (cyber competition, the strategic stakes of AI, contests over technical standards), global-governance issues (climate cooperation, pandemics and other transnational challenges, the role of third parties like the EU), the non-linear effects of domestic politics (internal factional struggle in China, U.S. polarization, populism), the autonomy of regional order (ASEAN’s mediating role, East Asian regionalism, middle-power strategies), and new forms of economic interdependence (deep supply-chain integration, financial interpenetration, the connectivity of the digital economy).
Goddard (2018): When Right Makes Might
Ch. 2 · the politics of legitimacy and rising-power legitimation
We saw Goddard earlier in “Uncommon Ground: Indivisible Territory and the Politics of Legitimacy” (IO, 2006), where legitimation contests help decide whose territorial claims are treated as rightful. In this 2018 chapter she defines legitimation as a state’s attempt to justify its demands by appealing to recognized norms and rules so others will accept or support them: “A state legitimates its actions when it appeals to recognized norms and rules to justify its demands to its audience,” and “states justify their actions to get other nations to accept, if not support, them.” Legitimacy matters because great powers use such reasons to read whether a rising state’s intentions are limited or revolutionary, which then shapes accommodation versus confrontation, and, as she notes, scholars across constructivist, realist, and liberal traditions all argue that legitimacy is core to power politics. A rising power legitimates to manage how its audience understands its actions and, in the process, to shape whether they mobilize against or allow its revisionist behavior. The three benefits/mechanisms are: signaling restraint or constraint, so great powers do not feel compelled to mobilize; rhetorical coercion, which shifts the burden of proof and silences hawks; and identity effects, which soothe the audience’s self-understanding and lower the sense of existential threat, together making accommodation more likely. Empirically, a rising power is using legitimation when its leaders publicly appeal to prevailing rules and norms to justify revisionist acts, and do so consistently toward the relevant audience. Goddard stresses multivocal legitimation, combining status-quo principles with revolutionary language to resonate across diverse audiences, and traces it through speeches, diplomatic documents, and the press (to count, the rhetoric had to occur consistently). Her examples: the Monroe administration arguing that U.S. incursions into Spanish Florida were consistent with treaty and international law, and Bismarck arguing that Prussia’s 1864 invasion of Denmark upheld rather than undermined Concert treaties, combining Concert norms with nationalism to fend off balancing. The relevant audience is the great power(s) whose mobilization the rising state hopes to forestall, reached publicly and consistently through speeches, diplomatic documents, and the press. Not all rising powers care equally: it varies with (a) the rising power’s capacity for multivocality, its ties to multiple coalitions and ability to speak credibly in several idioms, and (b) the great-power audience’s institutional vulnerability, how fragile the favored order appears. When a rising power cannot be multivocal, it is pushed toward revolutionary rhetoric to satisfy domestic and revisionist constituencies; when great powers are institutionally vulnerable, they are more receptive to legitimation, or more alarmed by illegitimate talk. Legitimation links to collective mobilization through the same three mechanisms: signaling restraint reduces the need to mobilize, rhetorical coercion raises the political and hypocrisy costs of mobilizing, and identity appeals raise the existential costs of mobilizing. I’d also flag a transmission problem traditional constructivism leaves underspecified: how do ideas and identity at the individual level translate into state behavior at the macro level? Candidate channels, elite consensus, a public discourse field where some claims become “unsayable,” institutionalization of identity in organizational routines and law, each face objections (elite disagreement, who polices the sayable, institutions also change). My worry is over-reliance on elite psychology with no systematic analysis of mass publics, media, or interest groups, an exaggeration of discourse’s binding force, and a lack of counterfactual testing: if you can always find an “identity” explanation, the theory is unfalsifiable. A more credible mechanism may be that legitimation discourse alters the available “toolbox” of arguments in elite debate, making some policies easier or harder to defend publicly, and so changing the political cost–benefit of policy and, at the margin, the final decision, without needing an ontology of “state anxiety.”
They are most effective when both conditions hold: high multivocality in the rising power and high institutional vulnerability in the great-power audience. In that quadrant rhetoric strongly resonates, the great power sees restraint, opposition is silenced, the rising power is seen as a partner, and accommodation is preferred. Walking the 2×2: high multivocality + low vulnerability = weak resonance (the rising state can speak in many voices but the great power thinks the order is secure, “you talk beautifully, but I’m not sure which voice to believe,” which can cause policy paralysis and endless elite debate); high multivocality + high vulnerability = strong resonance, her favored mechanism (the great power, needing allies to preserve the order, listens selectively and hears what it wants to hear); low multivocality + high vulnerability = strong dissonance, the other key mechanism (the rising state speaks only revolutionary language and even a low real threat is read as existential); and low multivocality + low vulnerability = weak dissonance (revolutionary talk, but the great power feels secure and stays wary without overreacting). I find the logic theoretically coherent: it links audience receptivity (vulnerability) with speaker capacity (multivocality) and clarifies why talk “is not cheap” when it governs mobilization pathways, improving on costly-signaling models by showing how resonance, not material cost, gives signals their bite. The open questions are measurement (how to code multivocality and vulnerability) and endogeneity (rhetoric may be chosen because of expected responses); she addresses operationalization later (“no social science concept lends itself to easy operationalization”) by specifying sources and coding principles. Her periodization (Table 2) marks U.S. hedging toward China from 2012, neither pure accommodation nor pure confrontation. Mapping onto Table 1, today the U.S. appears institutionally vulnerable (domestic contestation over the liberal order, allied debates on trade and tech) while China’s rhetoric is often multivocal (invoking both WTO-liberal language and post-colonial/sovereignty frames). That combination points toward high multivocality / high vulnerability and strong resonance for some audiences and episodes, creating accommodation tendencies in parts of the system; but because vulnerability and multivocality vary by issue domain (trade, tech standards, security), we also see policy paralysis and hedging features akin to high multivocality / low vulnerability (weak resonance, under-balancing). So the dyad oscillates between strong-resonance accommodation pressures in economics and weak-resonance under-balancing or hard balancing in security and tech, which is what her “hedging” label captures. My pushback: even if China keeps a low profile, would the U.S. really not contain it? Her framework implies that if China is multivocal the U.S. keeps accommodating, but it overlooks that a post-2015 American elite consensus, “China will inevitably challenge hegemony”, has formed independently of Chinese rhetoric. A second issue is the primacy of domestic politics: China’s rhetorical turn may be driven mainly by internal factors (Xi’s power consolidation needing nationalism, the economic slowdown needing an external scapegoat, social control needing a “Western threat” narrative), and U.S. hawkishness likewise by internal ones (manufacturing-decline voter anxiety, elite anxiety about relative decline, both parties needing an external threat to unite the country), so both sides’ rhetoric may be a by-product of domestic politics rather than a result of strategic interaction. A third is structural lock-in: on Taiwan the U.S. has commitments whatever China says, in the South China Sea it has allies however China legitimates, and in tech the structural competition is unavoidable regardless of rhetoric, the framework’s blind spot is over-emphasizing agency and neglecting structural constraint. It can generalize the dynamics of the rhetorical contest, the intensification of identity politics, and why dialogue gets harder; it cannot generalize the structural drivers of material competition, the primacy of domestic politics, or the non-negotiability of specific issues (Taiwan, chips, the South China Sea). On case selection, she picks seminal rising-power episodes (U.S. 1817–23; Prussia 1863–71; Germany 1933–38 and after; Japan 1931–45) built around turning-point crises, hard tests where rhetoric should matter despite costly signals, with variation in outcomes and in the two conditions, using process tracing across diplomatic archives, speeches, and newspapers. It is a strong qualitative design, but I have concerns: the quadrants are unevenly populated (the weak-dissonance cell rests on Japan 1905–17, which barely counts as “low multivocality”; strong resonance has four cases, strong dissonance three, the weak-effect cells one each); process tracing risks circularity (a politician citing a rising state’s rhetoric, or claiming to feel “locked in” by it, or voicing identity anxiety, could be genuine motive or after-the-fact rationalization, Chamberlain may have believed Hitler or may have used the rhetoric to justify appeasement forced by British military weakness, and her method cannot distinguish these); counterfactuals are missing (would Britain have conceded if Hitler used the same words but did not rearm?); and within-case variation is questionable (the German case treats Hitler’s autumn-1938 “rhetorical shift” as causal, yet historians note he never changed his goals, only his tactics, so was it discourse change → British shift, or behavior change → British shift → post-hoc attribution to discourse?). The cases may actually support a weaker but more credible theory: legitimation discourse changes the “available arguments” in great-power elite debate, makes some policies easier or harder to defend publicly, and raises or lowers their political (not existential) cost, which can be decisive when other factors are close, a mechanism compatible with rational choice and possibly stronger.
Shifrinson (2018): Rising Titans, Falling Giants
Ch. 1 · predation theory and the strategies of rising states
By “great power” he means a state with the resources to make a good showing in a fight with the strongest state in the system, operationalized more finely as holding at least 10% of total regional capabilities and at least 25% of the strongest state’s capabilities. “Decline” is a sustained loss of capabilities relative to one or more other great powers, with special emphasis on relative economic capabilities because they underwrite military power; importantly, decline is about the narrowing or widening of power gaps, not ordinal rank crossings, a country’s power “can be diminished by the mere fact of new forces accumulating around it,” so you can decline without being overtaken. That last point is a real theoretical contribution. Compared with Mearsheimer, who defines great powers as able to “put up a serious fight in an all-out conventional war against the most powerful state” (plus a survivable nuclear deterrent in the nuclear age), Shifrinson’s “make a good showing in a fight with the strongest state” is substantively the same military-capacity-against-the-leader criterion, but his is more precise and operationalized, and he folds in the economic base as especially important for evaluating decline. He operationalizes decline by first identifying great powers via GDP-share thresholds and National Material Capabilities, then coding decline when a great power loses at least 5 percentage points of its share of capabilities among great powers within a 10-year period, sustained for at least five consecutive years, until the state either resumes growth or leaves the great-power ranks. Indicators include GDP shares (Maddison), NMC indices, and finer-grained metrics such as technology, the health of economic foundations, and power-projection capabilities. What to watch for today: relative GDP-share trends against peer great powers over a decade (down 5+ points, sustained 5+ years); slowing growth versus peers, or peers growing faster even if you grow in absolute terms; erosion in the technological edge and in military power-projection; and mounting costs from foreign adventures or domestic priorities that sap resources. Shifrinson is careful not to declare “today’s” decliners in this chapter, he supplies the template, and applying it requires current data; this is consistent with Kennedy-style relative-power tracking and with Gilpin’s focus on long-run economic underpinnings. Shifrinson is explicitly agnostic about sources, listing absolute losses, slower growth, others’ faster growth, and costly foreign adventures or domestic initiatives, often occurring at once (the USSR’s economic difficulty plus Afghanistan and reform costs). He argues that, for explaining the rising state’s behavior, the type of decline “should not matter much,” since what matters is that relative power is shifting and states assess threats in relative terms. In practice the usual causes are long-term productivity slowdown, technological diffusion to rivals, debt and financial crises, imperial overstretch, demography, and wars of choice, consistent with Gilpin’s hegemonic-decline logic and Kennedy’s burden-of-empire argument. Should we be agnostic? For predicting the rising state’s strategy, agnosticism is defensible because his mechanisms turn on the decliner’s strategic value and military posture, not on why it is declining. But for policy analysis the source matters indirectly: a decline driven by overextension may correlate with a weaker posture (pushing risers toward Relegation or Strengthening depending on the decliner’s value), whereas a decline from civil–military reforms might improve posture even amid economic slippage, nudging risers toward Weakening or Bolstering rather than the intense options. That keeps faith with his framework while recognizing how causes can shape posture.
Rising-state strategy varies along two dimensions. Goals are either predatory (weaken the decliner, ideally pushing it out of the great-power ranks) or supportive (slow or prevent further losses and sustain the decliner as a great power). Means are the “assertiveness” Kevin Narizny describes: intense (costly, risk-accepting, designed to cause rapid, fundamental change) or limited (gradual, low-cost, sensitive to third-party reactions). Crossing them yields four ideal types: Relegation (predatory + intense), Weakening (predatory + limited), Bolstering (supportive + limited), and Strengthening (supportive + intense), each with historical examples. My assessment: the Goals dimension is conceptually crisp, with clear indicators in Table 1.2 (do leaders emphasize the benefits of growing stronger at the decliner’s expense, or worry about letting it fall farther?) and observable behavioral differences, and it can be coded from elite rhetoric and policy choices, fairly tractable. The Means dimension is conceptually fuzzier: “assertiveness” relies on several subjective judgments, large- versus small-scale, “significant trade-offs,” rapid versus gradual, and Table 1.4’s military-posture indicators are descriptive, lacking quantitative standards (“robust” versus “weak” is subjective, and it is unclear how to aggregate across land, sea, air, and nuclear domains). The deeper problem is the binary simplification: assertiveness is really a continuous variable forced into a dichotomy, with no clear threshold (how intense is intense?), and interaction effects are underexplored (strategic value and posture may not be independent, high value may itself encourage maintaining a robust posture). Possible fixes, make Means continuous (e.g., % of resources committed), add a “Moderate” middle category, use quantitative indicators (military budgets, aid amounts), and specify the time horizon (short- versus long-term), but a 2×2 may be the defensible “second-best”: historical cases rarely yield precise continuous data. The matrix is easier to communicate and remember, the dichotomy is enough to separate actual cases, and IR theory favors parsimonious typologies. The quadrant expectations themselves are clear, spelled out with policy lists and historical illustrations around the figure. In brief: rising states prey upon or support decliners with varying assertiveness depending on (1) the decliner’s utility as a partner and (2) its military tools. The two drivers are strategic value (can the decliner help weaken other great powers?, judged by other threats, geography, latent potential, and political availability) and military posture (the quality, deployment, and readiness of extant forces in the relevant theater, robust versus weak, not just numbers). Together they predict goal and means and map onto the 2×2: Relegation (low value + weak posture), Weakening (low value + robust posture), Bolstering (high value + robust posture), Strengthening (high value + weak posture). Posture matters because, with a robust posture, predation risks preventive war or entrapment if you support too much, whereas with a weak posture the risks of intense action fall and time pressure to act rises (to preempt others or to secure a valuable partner); so posture shapes assertiveness conditional on the goal set by strategic value. How it differs: classic power-transition theory (Organski/Kugler) and preventive-war stories emphasize relative-power change rates and the danger as a challenger nears parity, predicting a single modal outcome; Shifrinson instead focuses on how the rising state treats the decliner, conditional on the decliner’s usefulness against other threats and its current posture, producing four distinct strategy types rather than inevitable conflict. Compared with offensive realism, which expects expansion whenever feasible, predation theory partitions the conditions: support is often optimal if the decliner is valuable against others, and assertiveness is attenuated by the decliner’s posture even when the riser wants to prey. My evaluation: it is parsimonious, process-oriented, and testable, with distinctive predictions versus ideational, interdependence, or pure-polarity accounts. Shifrinson himself gives a contemporary clue: China’s efforts to expand its reach in the South and East China Seas while slowly building its military exemplify limited means that do not immediately upset the balance but force the United States to work harder to maintain the status quo, gradual, salami-tactics-style predation. That maps to Weakening (predatory goal + limited means) vis-à-vis a United States that, in this quasi-bipolar competition, has low strategic value to China (it is the principal competitor, so not a partner to support) and a robust posture. So toward the U.S., China ≈ Weakening: incremental military buildup, gray-zone operations, selective economic coercion and tech industrial policy, and probing alliances, all to shift the distribution of power slowly without triggering a major war, exactly the quadrant expectation (low-value decliner + robust posture ⇒ Weakening). Toward other actors, a weakening but strategically useful Russia, China at times displays Bolstering or Strengthening behavior, but the U.S.–China dyad is Weakening. Predation theory thus disaggregates the rising state’s choice into goal and means, explained by the U.S.’s strategic value to China and U.S. posture, and predicts competitive, cumulative pressure below the threshold of general war: salami tactics at sea, arms racing, prestige and legitimacy contests, targeting secondary interests, and selective economic statecraft that raise U.S. costs and gradually shift the regional balance without inviting catastrophic preventive conflict. It also warns that a shift in either variable can move the case across quadrants: if U.S. posture weakened markedly, China’s incentives could shift toward Relegation (more intense predation); if the U.S. became strategically valuable to Beijing against a third rival, you’d expect Bolstering or Strengthening instead.
Application · Theory in current events
“Forum: What Does America Want from China?” 2024. Foreign Affairs. (Reacting to Pottinger & Gallagher 2024.)
This forum reacts to Pottinger and Gallagher (2024), who argue that U.S. competition with China must not simply be “managed” but “won.” In policy terms, “winning” rather than managing means pressing for decisive advantage rather than stable coexistence. It means sustained pressure, tighter technology denial, firmer deterrence, and a refusal to settle into coexistence. This sits at the realist-pessimist pole of Friedberg’s typology, the “win it” rather than “ride it out” stance. The forum is useful because it stages, in real time, the same paradigm contest Friedberg mapped. Contributors split between those who read the rivalry as a structural power transition demanding primacy (close to Mearsheimer’s offensive realism and Gilpin’s hegemonic logic) and those who stress the costs, the limits of decoupling, and the interdependence and domestic constraints that a “win it” posture underrates. Reading the writers through Friedberg’s grid, the Pottinger–Gallagher camp are realist pessimists who treat Chinese intentions as revolutionary and accommodation as appeasement, while their critics range from realist optimists (China’s aims are bounded; managed competition and coexistence are feasible) to liberal pessimists (the danger is real but driven by regime type, audience costs, and a mutual-suspicion spiral that a maximalist U.S. posture would worsen). The theories and testable assumptions worth extracting are familiar from the week: the offensive-realist claim that a rising China will convert wealth into bids for regional dominance regardless of regime type; Gilpin’s claim that hegemons facing rising challengers must choose between costly resource mobilization, retrenchment, or war; Goddard’s claim that legitimation and audience perception, not just capabilities, shape whether mobilization to “win” is sustainable; and Shifrinson’s claim that the rising state’s strategy is conditioned by the decliner’s strategic value and posture. One could test these by tracking whether “winning” rhetoric actually shifts allied behavior and Chinese signaling, or whether it triggers exactly the counter-balancing and rhetorical-coercion dynamics Goddard predicts. My own reading stays close to Friedberg’s synthesis: the durable expectation is bounded competition. A doctrine that insists on “winning” rather than managing risks overreaching. It underrates both the interdependence that keeps the contest below the threshold of open hegemonic war and the domestic drivers on each side that make either capital’s posture less a product of strategic interaction than of internal politics.
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