Globalization, deglobalization and

Great Power politics

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NORRIN M. RIPSMAN *

Commercial liberals argue that economic interdependence reduces the likelihood

of conflict between states because of the economic opportunity costs of using
force against a trading partner and the comparative efficiency of trade and invest-
ment, as compared to the use of force, as a means of extracting resources from
territory.1 This is largely an argument that applies to bilateral relationships, but
globalization and security theorists argue that, under the conditions of globaliza-
tion, economic interdependence can have a pacifying effect on the entire interna-
tional system. In other words, globalization should be a boon to global security
and should promote cooperation—or at least moderated competition—among
Great Powers, since their economic performance is integrally dependent on the
global economy, which would be hurt by intense competition, and globalization
provides additional non-military avenues to pursue Great Power competition.2
Furthermore, the argument implies, the recent phenomenon of deglobalization
has the potential to ignite greater competition among the Great Powers, since
it will weaken the economic disincentives to compete.3 This line of argument

* This article is part of the September 2021 special issue of International Affairs on ‘Deglobalization? The future of
the liberal international order’, guest-edited by T. V. Paul and Markus Kornprobst. For comments on earlier
drafts of this article the author thanks Steve Chan, Matt Hoffmann, Valerie Kindarji, Markus Kornprobst,
Kevin Luo, John Owen, T. V. Paul, Lou Pauly, and participants at a research seminar held on 2 Dec. 2020 at
the Department of Political Science, University of Toronto.
1
See Michael W. Doyle, Ways of war and peace: realism, liberalism, and socialism (New York: Norton, 1997), pp.
230–50; Robert O. Keohane, ‘International liberalism revisited’, in John Dunn, ed., The economic limits to
modern politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 186–7; Erik Gartzke, ‘The capitalist peace’,
American Journal of Political Science 51: 1, 2007, pp. 166–91. For an empirical critique of commercial liberalism,
see Norrin M. Ripsman and Jean-Marc F. Blanchard, ‘Commercial liberalism under fire: evidence from 1914
and 1936’, Security Studies 6: 2, Winter 1996–7, pp. 4–50.
2
Sean Kay, ‘Globalization, power, and security’, Security Dialogue 35: 1, 2004, pp. 9–25 at pp. 16–18; Stephen
G. Brooks, Producing security: multinational corporations, globalization, and the changing calculus of conflict (Prince-
ton: Princeton University Press, 2005). Indeed, this is one of the explanations that T. V. Paul provides for
the prevalence of soft balancing, rather than military competition, in the post-Cold War era: see T. V. Paul,
Restraining Great Powers: soft balancing from empires to the global era (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018),
pp. 15–16. For a signalling explanation linking globalization and reduced conflict, see Erik Gartzke and Quan
Li, ‘War, peace, and the invisible hand: positive political externalities of economic globalization’, International
Studies Quarterly 47: 4, 2003, pp. 561–86. For an overview of the globalization and security literature, see
Norrin M. Ripsman and T. V. Paul, Globalization and the national security state (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2010), pp. 20–29.
3
See e.g. Nouriel Roubini, ‘The specter of deglobalization and the Thucydides Trap’, Horizons: Journal of Inter-
national Relations and Sustainable Development, no. 15, 2020, pp. 130–39; Nargis Zehra, ‘The realist state and
deglobalization’, Policy Perspectives 8: 2, 2011, pp. 33–52.

International Affairs 97: 5 (2021) 1317–1333; doi: 10.1093/ia/iiab091

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 Norrin M. Ripsman
could explain the extensive Great Power cooperation that coincided with the rise
of globalization at the end of the twentieth century. Moreover, in the turmoil
of the current international environment, with COVID-19 ravaging the global
economy, closing international borders and reducing international travel to a
trickle, commercial liberals should expect a corresponding deterioration of Great
Power cooperation, especially given the recent assault on globalization by populists
in Europe, the United States and elsewhere.

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In this article, I investigate the economic and strategic trends of the past four
decades to evaluate whether the commercial liberal frame is a good fit to explain
these trends and offer useful forward projections. To this end, I address three
propositions, at least some of which would have to be true for a commercial liberal
argument linking globalization, deglobalization and international security to be
valid. In the first section, I examine whether economic globalization brought about
reduced Great Power competition.4 In the second, I explore whether, once Great
Power restraint was achieved, globalization helped maintain global security.5 The
third section investigates whether the resurgence of Great Power competition we
have been witnessing in recent years can be attributed to the process of deglobal-
ization that began in 2008 and has accelerated since 2015.6
I conclude that a surface-level commercial liberal reading of the post-Cold War
security environment is misleading. In reality, the relationship between global-
ization and Great Power relations is much more complex than such a reading
suggests. To begin with, the intense globalization of the 1990s and 2000s was
not responsible for moderating Great Power tensions; instead, globalization was
itself a product of the improved security situation resulting from the end of the
Cold War and emerging unipolarity. Furthermore, while globalization helped to
reinforce cooperation between the United States and emerging challengers, such
as China, which sought to harness the economic gains of globalization to accel-
erate their rise, it also created or intensified fault-lines that have led to increasing
tensions between the Great Powers. Finally, while we are currently witnessing
such increasing tension between the United States and both China and Russia,
4
Commercial liberals and globalization theorists have not directly made the claim that globalization brought
about security cooperation in the late 1980s and 1990s. Nonetheless, if the logic of their argument is correct
and their arguments have practical utility as a guide to contemporary international politics, then we should
see evidence of this and the following two propositions I discuss. If these theories cannot explain security
cooperation during the era of intensified globalization or intensified security competition as a result of deglo-
balization, their utility is called into doubt.
5
‘Restraint’ and ‘cooperation’ are not synonymous terms. Rather, I use the former as a subset of the latter,
denoting a minimal form of cooperation. Through mutual strategic restraint, Great Powers cooperate in that
they rein in the pursuit of their self-interest to a limited degree in order to avoid escalation and to achieve
mutual gains. This restraint may stop well short of large-scale cooperation, but still has a mutual bilateral
or multilateral aim. In this respect, my use of the term differs somewhat from the way it is employed in the
literature on American grand strategy as a unilateral strategy to conserve power resources. See e.g. Barry
Posen, Restraint: a new foundation for US grand strategy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015).
6
For commercial liberals, the dependent variable is the level of conflict. By implication, however, the economic
incentives and disincentives that commercial liberals describe could also foster reduced competition and even
cooperation. See the discussion in Norrin M. Ripsman, Peacemaking from above, peace from below: ending conflict
between regional rivals, Cornell Studies in Security (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016), pp. 22–3; Galia
Press-Barnathan, The political economy of transitions to peace: a comparative perspective (Pittsburgh: University of
Pittsburgh Press, 2009). Therefore, in this article I consider the possibility that globalization and deglobaliza-
tion affect any or all of conflict levels, competition and cooperation among Great Powers.
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 Globalization, deglobalization and Great Power politics
deglobalization does not appear to be the primary cause. Thus, commercial
liberalism does not offer a convincing explanation of the contemporary security
environment. Structural factors—particularly unipolarity and its erosion—and
populist/nationalist political pressures explain Great Power security dynamics
more effectively. Having said that, the geo-economic environment is far from
irrelevant to Great Power relations, although its influence is more nuanced than
commercial liberalism would suggest. To begin with, the geo-economic environ-

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ment—whether the international system is characterized by an open trading
regime, protectionism, globalization or deglobalization—is itself influenced by
Great Power politics. Furthermore, while it does not determine Great Power
politics, it serves as a medium for Great Power relations of both cooperation and
competition, which affects its style and intensity. I conclude with a brief discus-
sion of the implications of this finding for the future of Great Power relations.

Globalization did not cause Great Power cooperation

The first problem with a commercial liberal reading of the contemporary environ-
ment is that globalization is not responsible for Great Power restraint and coopera-
tion. If it were, we would need to see evidence that large-scale economic exchange
and global economic integration preceded the reduction in Great Power tensions
and increased Great Power cooperation in the 1990s and early 2000s. In fact, as
I will demonstrate in my analysis of the sequencing of globalization and Great
Power stability, the causal arrow points in the other direction: the Great Power
restraint and cooperation that emerged as a result of the end of the Cold War
preceded and may have led to the take-off of globalization.7

When did Great Power restraint begin?

In order to evaluate whether globalization is a primary cause of Great Power
restraint, it will first be necessary to determine when such restraint started. In
other words, while the superpowers during the Cold War always acted with some
restraint, which enabled them to avoid a hot war even during two Berlin crises,
the Cuban Missile Crisis and the 1973 nuclear alert, when did restraint overtake
competition as the primary mode of Great Power interaction?8 Two possibilities
suggest themselves: either the mid-1980s, after Soviet General Secretary Mikhail
S. Gorbachev began his dramatic reforms to Soviet domestic and foreign policy;
or the early 1990s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Prior to 1986, super-
power relations were actually quite tense. The 1970s ended with an abandonment
of detente—the reduction in US–Soviet tensions that prevailed during much of
the 1960s and 1970s—as evidenced by the escalation of conflict in Afghanistan, the
7
This is consistent with Barry Buzan, ‘Economic structure and international security: the limits of the liberal
case’, International Organization 38: 4, 1984, pp. 597–624.
8
For comparative purposes, the era of detente, which was characterized by a reduction in tensions during a
period of competition, would not qualify as representing a qualitative shift from competition to restraint as
the main mode of Great Power interaction.
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 Norrin M. Ripsman
failure of the second round of the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT II), and
the western refusal to attend the 1980 Moscow Olympic Games.9 In the early 1980s,
US President Ronald Reagan sought to escalate the Cold War by increasing US
defence spending and proposing a new space-based weapons system, the Strategic
Defense Initiative (SDI).10 In fact, Gorbachev was so agitated about SDI that the
1985 Geneva summit between the two leaders was a rancorous affair that ended in
failure.11 Until around the time of the Reykjavik summit of October 1986, then,

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Great Power competition was intensifying.
The first possible starting-point of extended Great Power restraint, then, is in
1986, when Gorbachev’s reforms began to de-escalate the Cold War. In addition to
his signature economic reforms (perestroika) and greater political openness (glas-
nost), Gorbachev initiated a programme of ‘new thinking’ in Soviet foreign policy,
designed to reduce the strain on the Soviet economy and diminish the risks of
nuclear war.12 A centrepiece of this new approach was his proposal to eliminate
nuclear weapons globally. At Reykjavik, Reagan became convinced that Gorbachev
was serious about changing course and, over the next three years, the superpowers
took steps to de-escalate and eventually end the Cold War.13 In December 1987,
the United States and Soviet Union concluded the Intermediate-Range Nuclear
Forces (INF) Treaty, an arms control agreement prohibiting the production, posses-
sion or deployment of ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles with ranges
of between 500 and 5,000 kilometres.14 By 1989, Gorbachev had abandoned the
Brezhnev Doctrine, which had allowed the Soviet Union to intervene militarily
in eastern bloc countries to defend socialism, and the Soviet east European empire
effectively ceased to exist. With the demolition of the Berlin Wall in November
1989, the conclusion of the Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty with President
George H. W. Bush in 1990, and an agreement to allow German reunification the
same year, the Cold War came to an end.15 The period from 1986 to 1990 does,
therefore, reflect a significant reduction in Great Power tensions.
The 1990s, however, represented a different level of Great Power restraint and
even cooperation. The 1991 Gulf War represented a dramatic break from Cold
War competition, as neither the Soviet Union nor China used its UN Security
Council veto to block the US-led coalition against Iraq. In fact, while China
9
Peter Wallensteen, ‘Focus on: American–Soviet detente: What went wrong?’, Journal of Peace Research 22: 1,
1985, pp. 1–8.
10
Frances Fitzgerald, Way out there in the blue: Reagan, Star Wars, and the end of the Cold War (New York: Simon
& Schuster, 2000); Mira Duric, The Strategic Defence Initiative: US policy and the Soviet Union (Abingdon: Rout-
ledge, 2017).
11
While the official sessions ended in mutual recriminations, the private sessions did succeed in building a
constructive relationship between Reagan and Gorbachev, which paved the way to further summit meetings.
See Jonathan Hunt and David Reynolds, ‘Geneva, Reykjavik, Washington, and Moscow, 1985–8’, in Kristina
Spohr and David Reynolds, eds, Transcending the Cold War: summits, statecraft, and the dissolution of bipolarity in
Europe, 1970–1990 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 151–79 at pp. 158–9.
12
Peter Zwick, ‘New thinking and new foreign policy under Gorbachev’, PS: Political Science and Politics 22: 2,
1989, pp. 215–24; Anthony d’Agostino, Gorbachev’s revolution, 1985–1991 (London: Macmillan, 1998).
13
Hunt and Reynolds, ‘Geneva, Reykjavik, Washington, and Moscow’, p. 165.
14
On the INF Treaty, see Christopher Kirkey, ‘The NATO alliance and the INF treaty’, Armed Forces and Society
16: 2, 1990, pp. 287–305.
15
Melvyn P. Leffler, For the soul of mankind: the United States, the Soviet Union and the Cold War (Basingstoke:
Macmillan, 2007), pp. 365–438.
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 Globalization, deglobalization and Great Power politics
officially abstained, the Soviet Union voted in support of the November 1990
UN resolution to authorize force against Iraq if its president, Saddam Hussein,
failed to withdraw from Kuwait, no doubt because Russia’s dire economic crisis
rendered it reliant on American assistance.16 During the 1990s, indeed, the United
States provided substantial economic assistance to the Soviet Union and its
successor states.17 The US–Russian relationship in the 1990s is often viewed as the
paradigm case of cooperation between a victorious Great Power and its defeated

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rival.18 Relations among other leading states were also fairly stable during the
1990s, representing a lull in international tensions after the prolonged Cold War.
Although the 1999 US-led intervention in support of Kosovo began to strain
relations between the United States and both Russia and China, after the terrorist
attacks of 11 September 2001, all the leading states of the world initially rallied to
the war against terrorism.19 From 1991 until somewhere between the 1999 Kosovo
intervention and the lead-up to the 2003 war against Iraq, then, Great Power
relations were fairly restrained and even somewhat cooperative.
Choosing between these two starting-points presents a methodological
problem. Selecting too early a starting point may underestimate the impact of
globalization, as any evidence of globalization subsequent to that date but prior
to the later date would be mistakenly dismissed as causally irrelevant. At the
same time, selecting too late a departure point may bias our conclusions in favour
of commercial liberalism, as it could attribute causal importance to economic
changes that occurred after the true moment of change. To avoid these pitfalls, I
will consider whether there is evidence that the world economy had substantially
globalized prior to each of these inflection points, 1986 and 1991.

How do we measure globalization?

Globalization refers to ‘the expansion of socio-economic and socio-political
activities beyond the state on an international and transnational scale’.20 While, as
Kornprobst and Paul observe, globalization is difficult to define, and scholars have
16
Lawrence Freedman, ‘The Gulf War and the new world order’, Survival 33: 3, 1991, pp. 195–209 at pp. 199–201.
17
The US provided over US$25 billion to the states of the former Soviet Union between 1992 and 2005. See
Curt Tarnoff, US assistance to the former Soviet Union, Congressional Research Service Report to Congress
(Washington DC, 14 April 2005), https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metacrs6698/m1/1/high_res_d/
RL32866_2005Apr14.pdf. (Unless otherwise noted at point of citation, all URLs cited in this article were
accessible on 23 May 2021.)
18
See e.g. Philip Zelikow and Condoleezza Rice, Germany united and Europe transformed (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1995); Andrew Kydd, ‘Trust, reassurance, and cooperation’, International Organiza-
tion 52: 2, 2000, pp. 325–57; G. John Ikenberry, After victory: institutions, strategic restraint, and the rebuilding of
power after major wars (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), ch. 7. For a contrary perspective, see Joshua
R. Itzkowitz Shifrinson, Rising titans, falling giants: how Great Powers exploit power shifts (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 2018), chs 4–5.
19
On Russian and Chinese concerns about the Kosovo intervention, see Vicktor Gobarev, ‘Russia–NATO rela-
tions after the Kosovo crisis: strategic implications’, Journal of Slavic Military Studies 12: 3, 1999, pp. 1–17; David
P. Calleo, ‘The United States and the Great Powers’, World Policy Journal 16: 3, 1999, pp. 11–19 at p. 16; Yong
Deng, ‘Hegemon on the offensive: Chinese perspectives on US. global strategy’, Political Science Quarterly 116:
3, 2001, pp. 343–65 at p. 350. On their embrace of the US-led ‘war on terror’, see Giandomenico Picco, ‘New
entente after September 11? The United States, Russia, China, and India’, Global Governance 9: 1, 2003, pp.
15–21.
20
Ripsman and Paul, Globalization and the national security state, p. 9.
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 Norrin M. Ripsman
identified political, social and cultural elements of the phenomenon, this article
is principally focused on the most salient forms of economic globalization.21
Since economic globalization implies, at a minimum, that national economies
are increasingly embedded in a global market, indicators of globalization would
include higher levels of global trade, higher percentages of international trade as a
percentage of GDP, and higher levels of global foreign direct investment (FDI).22
Globalization was the by-product of the Washington Consensus and institu-

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tions—such as the IMF and the GATT, among others—created by the West in the
early Cold War period.23 Nonetheless, trade indicators suggest that it was only in
the 1990s, after the Cold War ended, that globalization really took off. According
to World Bank statistics, for example, global merchandise exports remained flat
between 1980 and 1985, dropping slightly from around US$1.98 trillion in 1980
to just under US$1.9 trillion in 1985.24 These figures provide little support for
the claim that globalization brought about the reduction in Great Power tensions
beginning in 1986. As the Cold War began to de-escalate, however, global trade
began to climb, almost doubling to US$3.47 trillion by 1990. From the end of
the Cold War until the 2008 global financial crisis, world merchandise exports
grew every year except two (1998 and 2001, the year of the Al-Qaeda terrorist
attacks on the United States) to over US$16 trillion, a rise of 470 per cent.25 There
is, therefore, only weak support for globalization as a cause of greater coopera-
tion after the second possible inflection point of 1991. While global trade was just
beginning to climb at that time, it was happening simultaneously with improved
Great Power relations, rather than preceding it. Moreover, the step-level jump to
a globalized economy did not take place until afterwards.
When we consider trade as a percentage of global GDP—a measure of how
much of global wealth was dependent on international trade—the picture is
even clearer. Between 1983 and 1994, global trade as a percentage of world GDP
remained locked in a range between just under 28 per cent (in 1987) and just over
30 per cent (1984). From 1994 onwards, however, this figure surged annually
(again, except in 1998 and 2001) to almost 51.5 per cent in 2008.26 This provides
strong evidence against the commercial liberal claim, since even the second period
of reduced tensions preceded the shift to global trade as the predominant source
of national wealth.
Global FDI actually began to increase earlier than global trade, but still not until
global tensions began to dissipate in the mid-1980s as a result of the Gorbachev
revolution, which de-escalated the Cold War. Statistics from the UN Confer-
ence on Trade and Development show global FDI inflows to have been relatively

21
Markus Kornprobst and T. V. Paul, ‘Globalization, deglobalization and the liberal international order’, Inter-
national Affairs 97: 5, 2021, pp. 1305–16.
22
Jagdish Bhagwati, In defense of globalization (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 3.
23
Joseph Stiglitz, Globalization and its discontents (New York: Norton, 2002), ch. 1.
24
World Bank, Merchandise exports (current US$), World Bank Open Data (Washington DC, n.d.), https://data.
worldbank.org/indicator/TX.VAL.MRCH.CD.WT?most_recent_value_desc=true.
25
World Bank, Merchandise exports (current US$).
26
World Bank, Merchandise trade (% of GDP), World Bank Open Data (Washington DC, n.d.), https://data.
worldbank.org/indicator/TG.VAL.TOTL.GD.ZS?most_recent_value_desc=true.
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 Globalization, deglobalization and Great Power politics
flat between 1980 and 1985, starting at US$54.4 billion and ending at US$55.8
billion, with a high for the period in 1981 (US$69.6 billion) and a low in 1983
(US$50.4 billion). These inflows then increased annually to US$205 billion in 1990
(a jump of nearly 400 per cent), before dropping to US$154 billion in 1991 and
US$162 billion in 1992. The real take-off of FDI inflows, however, occurred from
1993 to 2007, when the total shot up from US$220 billion to US$1.9 trillion, an
almost ninefold increase.27 Once again, this provides no support for the idea that

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economic globalization preceded and promoted the Gorbachev-led reduction in
tensions, and only weak support for the claim that it preceded the 1990s coopera-
tion, as the step-level jump occurred only after it had begun. We can conclude,
therefore, that the beginning of the dramatic increase in globalization of national
economies occurred in the 1990s, after the Cold War had ended and Great Power
security cooperation had already begun.
Global trade and investment make up only part of the picture, though. If
globalization preceded and caused Great Power cooperation, we would need to
see evidence that the leading powers and their alliances had globalized economies
prior to the reduction in Great Power tensions. To this end, we need to consider
whether both the eastern bloc (Warsaw Pact states) and the western bloc (NATO
states) were comparably dependent on international trade and investment, given
the relative sizes of their economies, prior to 1986 and 1991. A look at World Bank
trade data indicates that the two blocs had different exposures to globalization
during this period. Between 1975 and 1989, members of the NATO alliance as a
whole consistently received 55–60 per cent of their imports from other NATO
countries (with a low of 54.3 per cent in 1981 and a high of 59.5 per cent in
1989). Given that NATO included some of the world’s largest economies (such as
the United States, West Germany and the United Kingdom) and accounted for
the majority of global production, this is not surprising.28 These trading patterns
remained fairly stable, so that in the 1990s NATO countries continued to import
roughly the same amounts from within the alliance, with a high of 60.2 per cent
in 1992 and a low of 56.4 per cent in 1999.29 They were also consistent with the
alliance’s share of the global economy, in terms of members’ combined percentage
of gross world production.30 This suggests that the large western freer trade area
governed by the GATT was already substantially ‘globalized’ by this point within
the western trading system.

27
UN Conference on Trade and Development, Foreign direct investment: inward and outward flows and stocks,
annual, bilateral FDI statistics (Geneva, n.d.), https://unctadstat.unctad.org/wds/TableViewer/tableView.
aspx?ReportId=96740.
28
World Bank, GDP (constant 2010 US$), World Bank Open Data (Washington DC, n.d.). https://data.world-
bank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.KD?view=chart. I thank Jeff Kirshenbaum for calculating alliance totals
from these data.
29
Exports for the alliance similarly remained rather steady in the range 58–65% between 1975 and 1999.
30
For example, in 1980 NATO member countries produced a total of US$6.78 trillion or almost 60% of the total
gross world production of US$11.2 trillion. See World Bank, GDP (current US$)—world, Belgium, Canada,
Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Turkey,
United Kingdom, United States, World Bank Open Data (Washington DC, n.d.), https://data.worldbank.org/
indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD?name_desc=false&locations=1W-BE-CA-DK-FR-DE-GR-IS-IT-LU-NL-
NO-PT-ES-TR-GB-US.
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 Norrin M. Ripsman
In contrast, there is evidence that the eastern bloc globalized its economies only
in the 1990s, after the Cold War ended. Indeed, Warsaw Pact countries traded with
themselves to a greatly disproportionate degree. While the figures fluctuated consid-
erably over the years, from 1985 onwards Warsaw Pact countries imported between
42 per cent and 49 per cent of their goods from members of their own alliance and
exported between 44 per cent and 50 per cent of their goods within the alliance.
This is a surprising amount, given that the Warsaw Pact countries accounted for less

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than 20 per cent of gross world production. Since NATO countries accounted for
roughly 60 per cent of the global economy, it is natural that they traded within the
alliance for roughly 60 per cent of their goods; if they were comparably globalized,
trade among Warsaw Pact countries should have been expected to account for
under 20 per cent of their goods. Yet they actually traded for more than double that,
which indicates that they were comparatively shut out of globalization. Only in the
1990s did intra-alliance trade drop (imports from under 23 per cent in 1990 to just
above 14 per cent in 1999, and exports from over 23 per cent in 1990 to over 12 per
cent in 1999) to a degree commensurate with the size of the members’ economies.
Their access to the global market, therefore, was not significant until after the Cold
War ended and the superpower confrontation had abated.
Since there is little evidence that globalization preceded Great Power cooper-
ation, it is implausible that it could have played a causal role. Instead, a more
convincing explanation would be that the end of the Cold War and, consequently,
American preponderance in a unipolar international system brought about both
substantial Great Power cooperation and the acceleration of globalization itself.31
In other words, rather than causing Great Power cooperation, globalization was
largely an effect of strategic stability in the post-Cold War world. Prior to the
end of the Cold War, superpower competition ensured that the eastern and
western blocs limited trade and investment with their rivals, especially in areas
that were strategically significant, including dual-use technologies. Under the
export controls of the Coordinating Committee on Multilateral Export Controls
(COCOM), in place from 1950 until 1994, western countries were prohibited from
selling over 100 different categories of goods to the Soviet Union and its allies.32
These export controls were reinforced by currency convertibility problems that
made economic exchange between the blocs difficult.33 Only once the Soviet
Union was no longer a threat could America and other western states begin to
trade more freely with the former communist states and integrate them within an
emerging global economy. Consequently, economic exchange could only truly
globalize once the Cold War security competition had ended.

31
Ripsman and Paul, Globalization and the national security state; William Wohlforth, ‘The stability of a unipolar
world’, International Security 24: 1, 1999, pp. 5–41. For a more sceptical treatment of unipolarity as a pacifier of
Great Power relations, see Jeffrey W. Taliaferro, ‘Peaceful change: the post-Cold War evolution’, in T. V. Paul,
Deborah Larson, Harold Trinkunas, Anders Wivel and Raif Emmers, eds, Oxford handbook of peaceful change in
international relations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2021).
32
Michael Mastanduno, Economic containment: CoCom and the politics of East–West trade (Ithaca, NY Cornell
University Press, 1992).
33
See e.g. David A. Baldwin and Helen V. Milner, eds, East–West trade and the Atlantic alliance (Basingstoke:
Macmillan, 1990).
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 Globalization, deglobalization and Great Power politics

The complex relationship between globalization and stability

This does not mean that globalization has had no impact on Great Power relations.
Its effect, however, has been somewhat contradictory. In some respects, global-
ization created incentives to maintain the liberal order—especially relatively free
trade, liberal economic institutions such as the WTO, and international institu-
tions such as the UN to regulate Great Power competition—in order to secure

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the economic gains it promised. Great Power politics are conditioned by relative
power, which makes economic growth rates of paramount importance.34 Under
globalization, especially with the primacy of a liberal United States intent on
preserving the liberal order, rising states needed to adapt their polities, economies
and societies to capitalize on economic openness.35 This was, in fact, the self-
conscious intention of the Clinton administration’s enlargement strategy, which
sought to expand the zone of both democracy and liberal economic exchange to
foster a more stable strategic environment.36 And it initially paid dividends, even
with greater powers, such as China and Russia.
China’s accession to the WTO is instructive in this regard. The collapse of the
Soviet Union left China as the Great Power challenger-in-waiting, and tensions
between the United States and China appeared to be on the rise in the 1990s. Areas
of conflict included US support for Taiwan, US demands that Beijing respect
Chinese citizens’ human rights, especially after the Tiananmen Square massacre
of 1989, and western intervention in Kosovo, which China considered an intru-
sion into a state’s internal affairs and a potential precedent for Tibet. Non-trivial
threats of military escalation between China and the United States arose on several
occasions, such as the third Taiwan Straits crisis in 1996, the accidental US bombing
of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade during the 1999 Kosovo intervention, and the
2001 Hainan Island incident, in which a Chinese fighter plane and a US reconnais-
sance plane collided.37 Yet despite these tensions, Beijing negotiated entry into the
WTO in order to enable it to sustain double-digit growth rates that would support
its rise to near-peer status with the United States.38 As part of this process, China
liberalized its service sector to some extent and permitted foreign investment. In
particular, Beijing allowed foreigners to invest in the banking, financial services,
insurance and telecommunications sectors, which had previously been closed to

34
The quintessential statement of this principle is Robert Gilpin, War and change in international politics (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1981).
35
For related arguments, see John M. Owen IV, ‘Transnational liberalism and US primacy’, International Security
26: 3, 2001–02, pp. 117–52; Ikenberry, After victory, pp. 61–79.
36
On Clinton’s enlargement strategy, see the speech by Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs
Anthony Lake, ‘From containment to enlargement’, Johns Hopkins University, Washington DC, 21 Sept.
1993, https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/lakedoc.html.
37
On the challenges in the Sino-American relationship in the 1990s, see John W. Garver, Face off: China, the
United States, and Taiwan’s democratization (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997), pp. 35–47; James
Mann, About face: a history of America’s curious relationship with China from Nixon to Clinton (New York: Vintage,
2000), pp. 226–368; David M. Lampton, Same bed, different dreams: managing US–China relations, 1989–2000
(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001).
38
See Samuel S. Kim, ‘China’s path to Great Power status in the globalization era’, Asian Perspective 27: 1, 2003,
pp. 35–75. Kim quotes Chinese leaders as saying: ‘The rise in a country’s economic status will bring about a
corresponding rise in its political status’ (p. 66).
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 Norrin M. Ripsman
outside participants.39 The Chinese regime also allowed even greater economic
freedom to its special economic zones (SEZs), border cities and inland provincial
capitals, and, as part of the ‘one country, two systems’ handover agreement with
Great Britain, accorded greater political rights to Hong Kong than other areas of
China enjoyed.40 That Beijing felt powerful incentives to maintain the US-led
international economy was illustrated after the 2008 global financial crisis, when,
rather than seeking to accelerate Washington’s difficulties, China purchased large

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amounts of US Treasury securities in order to enable US consumers to continue
buying Chinese goods.41 Clearly, the gains of globalization persuaded China to
buy into the liberal order to a limited extent.
Russia also faced powerful incentives to cooperate with the United States in a
globalized world. While the Soviet Union’s collapse left Russia as something less
than a peer competitor to the US, it still possessed a nuclear arsenal and significant
conventional armed forces. The path back to Great Power status depended on
an economic resurgence, and that required cooperation with the West to ensure
not only foreign aid but also badly needed capital investment. The United States
tendered several billion dollars’ worth of economic assistance to Russia in the
1990s—in the form of foreign aid, subsidized loans and deferred debt—with a
view to liberalizing its economy and democratizing its polity.42 US businesses
also invested heavily in Russia, especially its badly undercapitalized oil industry.43
Moreover, as long as post-Cold War Russia was seen as a stable partner, western
countries encouraged investment in the Russian oil and gas sector in order to wean
the global economy from dependence on the politically volatile Middle East.44 To
keep this aid and investment flowing, Moscow had, at least nominally, to develop
its democratic and liberal credentials, and refrain from major challenges to US
global policy, while seeking to maximize its interests within the former Soviet
space.45 In this context, Russian leaders—even President Vladimir Putin—all
embraced the principle of democratization and initially sought to avoid actions
that might upset the economic applecart. Under the direction of Prime Minister
Yegor Gaydar and Anatoly Chubais (chairman of the State Property Committee
and later first deputy premier), Russia embarked on an ambitious privatization and
39
Lee Bransetter and Nicholas Lardy, ‘China’s embrace of globalization’, in Loren Brandt and G. Thomas
Rawski, eds, China’s great transformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 633–82; see esp.
pp. 655–9.
40
On the SEZs, see Dilip K. Das, ‘Liberalization efforts in China and accession to the World Trade Organiza-
tion’, Journal of World Investment and Trade 2: 4, 2001, pp. 761–89. On Hong Kong, see Richard C. Bush, Hong
Kong in the shadow of China: living with the Leviathan (Washington DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2016), chs 1
and 2.
41
Geoffrey Garrett, ‘G2 in G20: China, the United States and the world after the global financial crisis’, Global
Policy 1: 1, 2010, pp. 29–39.
42
James M. Goldgeier and Michael McFaul, Power and purpose: US foreign policy toward Russia after the Cold War
(Washington DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2003), pp. 92–5.
43
Oksan Bayulgen, Foreign investments and political regimes: the oil sector in Azerbaijan, Russia, and Norway (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 122–4.
44
Indeed, it was precisely the fear of instability owing to an incomplete or stalled transition to a fully liberal
polity that kept investment levels lower than Russian leaders wanted. See Bayulgen, Foreign investments and
political regimes, p. 124.
45
Allen C. Lynch, ‘The evolution of Russian foreign policy in the 1990s’, Journal of Communist Studies and Transi-
tion Politics 18: 1, 2002, pp. 161–82.
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 Globalization, deglobalization and Great Power politics
economic reform programme, consistent with western demands.46 Although it
later fell apart, Russia’s willingness to guarantee the territorial integrity of Ukraine
and refrain from military or economic coercion against it under the provisions of
the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, in which Kiev committed to denuclearization,
is a case in point.47 Russia’s rather muted opposition to NATO’s admission of
former eastern bloc countries in the 1990s and its eventual grumbling acquiescence
in NATO’s war aims in Kosovo in 1999 are also emblematic of Russia’s willingness

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to sacrifice even higher-level strategic objectives to the need for good relations
with the West and the economic benefits that resulted from them.48
Despite these stabilizing effects of globalization, there were also unintended
consequences, as its losers sought to challenge the liberal order.49 A significant
by-product of globalization has been increasing economic inequality, which has
stoked discontent both domestically and internationally.50 Within the United
States, workers in the moribund manufacturing sector, particularly in the so-called
‘rust belt’, were eager to stem the tide of globalization, which had been closing
plants and eliminating jobs. They were, therefore, receptive to candidate Donald
Trump’s 2016 campaign promises to get tough with China, renegotiate or withdraw
from trade pacts, and restore US manufacturing primacy.51 In the United King-
dom, disaffection with political globalization, which opponents believed under-
mined British economic and political autonomy, contributed to the popularity of
the Brexit movement to withdraw from the EU.52 Elsewhere in Europe, after the
2008 global economic crisis, vulnerable European economies—particularly Portu-
gal, Italy, Greece and Spain—faced considerable public pressure to resist the global
austerity programme required by world economic leaders and institutions, which
led to numerous governmental collapses and a frenzy of EU near-exit crises.53
These pressures were not confined to individual countries. Rather, globaliza-
tion as a transnational movement spawned transnational coalitions to overthrow
it. Throughout the world, those who believed globalization was exacerbating
inequality and eroding labour standards, environmental conditions, local indus-
tries or traditional values began to mobilize to rein in the unruly beast. Most

46
See Robert W. Campbell, ‘Evaluating Russian economic reform: a review essay’, Post-Soviet Affairs 12: 2, 1996,
pp. 181–93.
47
William H. Kincade and Cynthia M. Nolan, ‘Troubled triangle: Russia, Ukraine, and the United States’,
Journal of Strategic Studies 24: 1, 2001, pp. 104–42.
48
Erik Yesson, ‘NATO and Russia in Kosovo’, RUSI Journal 144: 4, 1999, pp. 20–26 at pp. 23–4.
49
See e.g. Dani Rodrik, ‘Populism and the economics of globalization’, Journal of International Business Policy
1: 1, June 2018, pp. 1–22; Ron Martin, Peter Tyler, Michael Storper, Emil Evenhuis and Amy Glasmeiere,
‘Globalization at a critical juncture?’, Cambridge Journal of Regions 11: 1, 2018, pp. 3–16 at p. 12.
50
Doug Stokes, ‘Trump, American hegemony, and the future of the liberal international order’, International
Affairs 94: 1, 2018, pp. 133–50.
51
Jeffry Friedan, ‘The political economy of the globalization backlash: sources and implications’, in Luis A. V.
Catao and Maurice Obstfeld, eds, Meeting globalization’s challenges: policies to make trade work for all (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2019), ch. 12.
52
Jonathan Hearn, ‘Vox populi: nationalism, globalization, and the balance of power in the making of Brexit’,
in William Outhwaite, ed., Brexit: sociological responses (New York: Anthem, 2017), pp. 19–30.
53
Marco Ancelovici, ‘Crisis and contention in Europe: a political process account of anti-austerity protests’,
in Hans-Jörg Trenz, Carlo Ruzza and Virginie Guiraudon, eds, Europe’s prolonged crisis (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2015), ch. 9. On the particularly salient Grexit crisis, see Nicos Christodoulakis, Greek endgame:
from austerity to growth or Grexit (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015).
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 Norrin M. Ripsman
strikingly, the massive protest against the 1999 WTO ministerial conference in
Seattle included a broad-based coalition of environmentalists, labour unions,
student groups, religious groups, consumer advocates and others from around
the world. These disparate actors, with their widely diverging demands, were
all united by one common grievance: their opposition to globalization.54 Subse-
quently, protests targeted G8 and G20 annual meetings, as well as meetings of the
World Economic Forum—a gathering of businesspeople, government officials,

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economists and others—in Davos, Switzerland. Other manifestations of discon-
tent with globalization included the Occupy Wall Street protests, which charged
globalization and neo-liberal economics with enriching 1 per cent of the world’s
population at the expense of the remaining 99 per cent.55
Another consequence of American-led globalization was that the western-
oriented nature of the project made the other Great Powers uneasy. Under
globalization, China and Russia came under increasing pressure to adopt western
political and economic practices and institutions in order to benefit from the global
market. Over time, both these potential challengers grew increasingly suspicious
that the liberal order was designed to exploit them and maintain US dominance,
prompting them to seek alternatives to it.56
Thus globalization had contradictory tendencies, which both encouraged
stability and cooperation, yet simultaneously tugged at the strings holding the
liberal order together.

Deglobalization is not the primary cause of increased security competition

The third problem with the commercial liberal explanation of the contemporary
security environment is that deglobalization is not the primary cause of increased
Great Power security competition. Even prior to deglobalization, Great Power
cooperation began to erode owing to a variety of factors, including objections to
US foreign policy adventurism and a declining US appetite to bear the costs of
maintaining the system.
First, a word is in order about the nature of ‘deglobalization’ and its origins. If
globalization is an expansion of economic, political and social activity beyond the
scale of the nation-state, deglobalization entails a reduction of global exchange
and a reassertion of national control over commerce, politics and social affairs.
Deglobalization began as a call to wrest back national control over economic and
political affairs from neo-liberal institutions such as the G7, the World Bank,
the IMF and the WTO.57 While its ideational origins may trace back to the late

54
Margaret Levi and Gillian H. Murphy, ‘Coalitions of contention: the case of the WTO protests in Seattle’,
Political Studies 54: 4, 2006, pp. 651–70.
55
Cristina Flesher Fominaya, Social movements and globalization: how protests, occupations and uprisings are changing the
world (London: Red Globe, 2014).
56
Peter Ferdinand, ‘Russia and China: converging responses to globalization’, International Affairs 83: 4, 2007, pp.
655–80.
57
See Yann Breault and Michèle Rioux, ‘The globalization/deglobalization dialectic: a fragmented world order
on the road to globalization 2.0?’, in J. L. Black, Michael Johns and Alanda D. Theriault, eds, The new world
disorder: challenges and threats in an uncertain world (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2019), pp. 207–27 at pp. 208–09;
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 Globalization, deglobalization and Great Power politics
1990s—notably the movements leading to the 1999 Seattle protests—they did not
gain traction in the policies of leading states until after the Great Recession of
2008 and especially the mid-2010s. Its most powerful manifestations were, within
the EU, the Greek debt crisis, the uproar over the movement of refugees across
the Schengen Area’s open borders and the Brexit phenomenon, and in the United
States, Trump’s ‘America First’ foreign policy. In each of these episodes, national
governments in one or more states acted on constituent demands to break with

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international agreements, institutions, alliances and the global economy to protect
distinctly national interests and agendas. Collectively, these developments have
called the project of globalization in doubt, as leading global players begin to look
inward and question the value of continued international cooperation. COVID-
19, which has ravaged economies around the world, decreasing international travel,
trade, investment and demand, has only intensified the assault on globalization.58
Long before the project of globalization was under assault, however, Russia
and China began to have serious objections to the direction of American foreign
policy. One of the first flashpoints was the US-led bombing campaign against
Serbia in 1999 in support of Kosovo. Russian and Chinese leaders judged this to
be an unwarranted intervention in the affairs of a sovereign state, and feared the
precedent it would create for their own secessionist territories, such as Chechnya
and Tibet.59 Moscow and Beijing also worried about the US drive to pursue and
expand missile defence systems despite their objections. Consequently, Russia
and China, though avoiding an outright alliance, increasingly began to cooperate
with each other in response to what they perceived as US high-handedness.60 The
unilateralism the United States exhibited in its 2003 war against Iraq, waged in
the face of opposition within both the UN and NATO, further convinced China,
Russia and others that unchecked American hegemony was detrimental to their
interests.61 From Russia’s point of view, US-led efforts to extend NATO into the
Russian sphere of influence—particularly Ukraine and Georgia—reinforced the
conclusion that it was dangerous to work with Washington.62 Thus Russia and
China began their shift from cooperation to soft balancing to harder balancing
even before the retrenchment of globalization.63

Kornprobst and Paul, ‘Globalization, deglobalization and the liberal international order’. For a more strictly
economic definition of deglobalization as reduced global trade, see Peter A. G. van Bergeijk, Deglobalization
2.0 (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2020).
58
‘Has covid-19 killed globalization?’, The Economist, 16 May 2020, https://www.economist.com/lead-
ers/2020/05/14/has-covid-19-killed-globalisation.
59
See e.g. Yuri Tsyganov, ‘The Kosovo war: a new impetus for Sino-Russian alliance?’, Russian and Eurasian
Bulletin 8: 5, 1999, pp. 1–14; Tracey German, ‘A legacy of conflict: Kosovo, Russia, and the West’, Compara-
tive Strategy 38: 5, 2019, pp. 426–38; Denny Roy, ‘China’s reaction to American predominance’, Survival 45: 3,
2003, pp. 57–78 at pp. 66–8.
60
See Alexander Korolev and Vladimir Portyakov, ‘Reluctant allies: system–unit dynamics and China–Russia
relations’, International Relations 33: 1, 2019, pp. 40–66; Roy, ‘China’s reaction to American predominance’.
61
Ekaterina Stepanova, ‘The unilateral and multilateral use of force by the United States’, in David M. Malone
and Yuen Foong Khong, eds, Unilateralism and US foreign policy: international perspectives (Boulder, CO: Lynne
Rienner, 2003), pp. 181–200 at pp. 194–8; Susan Turner, ‘Russia, China, and a multipolar world order: the
danger in the undefined’, Asian Perspective 33: 1, 2009, pp. 159–84, esp. p. 164.
62
William J. Burns, The back channel: a memoir of American diplomacy and the case for its renewal (New York: Random
House, 2019), pp. 200–243.
63
On variations in Great Power balancing strategies, see Paul, Restraining Great Powers, chs 1–2.
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 Norrin M. Ripsman
A second factor that contributed to the deterioration in strategic cooperation
was the waning of both American power and the perception of US invincibility in
the twenty-first century. The attacks of September 2001 by Al-Qaeda against the
United States, in which a rag-tag band of foreign terrorists carried out a massive
assault against the World Trade Center—the symbol of American economic
primacy—and the Pentagon—the symbol of US military primacy—brought the
limits of US power into sharp focus. In the aftermath, although the US-led coali-

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tions won quick wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, over the ensuing years they failed to
bring order to those countries. The fact that US forces suffered extensive casual-
ties on an almost daily basis in both countries to poorly armed insurgencies using
low-tech weapons and improvised explosive devices only deepened the sense of
eroding American power. The financial crisis of 2008, which eventually resulted in
a significant dip in US defence spending, was additional confirmation of a United
States that, if not yet a weary titan, was no longer seemingly omnipotent, as it
had been since the end of the Cold War.64 Consequently, although Washington
continued to spend far more on defence than the other leading states combined, and
still possessed the world’s most powerful military and most dynamic economy, the
sheen of unipolarity had begun to fade.65 Great Power antagonism and posturing,
therefore, may simply be a by-product of emerging multipolarity.
A third factor in increasing global strategic competition—and one partly
related to Washington’s economic difficulties—has been a declining US interest in
paying the costs of maintaining the system. As the United States faced economic
headwinds, domestic pressure mounted to prioritize health care for its own
citizens and mitigate the impact of the economic crisis.66 Moreover, growing
demands for protectionism and opposition to free trade pacts such as the proposed
Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the North American Free Trade Agreement
(NAFTA), which allow foreign producers to compete on comparable terms with
the dwindling US manufacturing sector, created incentives for the US govern-
ment to look inward rather than prioritizing its global role. Under these circum-
stances, a growing segment of the American electorate favoured presidential
candidates such as Barack Obama, who promised to withdraw US troops from
Iraq and Afghanistan and avoid foreign wars, or Donald Trump, who committed
his administration to withdrawing from the TPP and renegotiating NAFTA.

64
Because defence allocations are locked in years in advance, it takes time to reduce the defence budget. See
Ethan B. Kapstein, The political economy of national security (PENS) (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1992), ch. 2. In
2008, US defence spending totalled US$766 billion. It rose to a high of US$850 billion in 2010, before drop-
ping each year thereafter until 2017, when it hit US$663 billion (all figures in constant 2018 US$). See Stock-
holm International Peace Research Institute, Military expenditure by country (Stockholm: SIPRI, 2020), https://
www.sipri.org/sites/default/files/Data%20for%20all%20countries%20from%201988%E2%80%932019%20
in%20constant%20%282018%29%20USD.pdf, pp. 10, 17.
65
Adam Tooze, Crashed: how a decade of financial crises changed the world (New York: Viking, 2018). In 2019, the US
spent US$731.8 billion on defence, which was greater than the combined spending of China, India, Russia,
Saudi Arabia, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Japan, South Korea and Brazil: SIPRI, Military expendi-
ture by country, pp. 17–21.
66
Stephen G. Brooks and William C. Wohlforth, America abroad: why the sole superpower should not pull back from the
world (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), p. 7.

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 Globalization, deglobalization and Great Power politics
This new-found insularity was manifest during the Obama administration in
the president’s well-known reluctance to commit US forces overseas, his failure
to respond forcefully when Syria crossed his red line of chemical weapons use,
and his preference to ‘lead from behind’ in Libya.67 President Trump took US
withdrawal from the world stage even further by demanding that allies contribute
a greater share of alliance costs, questioning the utility of bedrock alliances such
as NATO, withdrawing from the TPP and imposing tariffs on alliance partners.68

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The very public reluctance of the greatest power for over a decade to play an active
role as global hegemon encouraged revisionist China and Russia to challenge the
US-led security order in Asia, Europe and the Middle East. The increasing Chinese
assertiveness in the South China Sea and Hong Kong has been facilitated by the
expectation that Washington is unwilling to project its power across the globe.69
Similarly, Russia’s invasion of Crimea and its defiance of US interests in Syria
would have been much less likely to occur had the US been acting as the global
leader it was in the 1990s.
An additional drag on Great Power cooperation has been the emergence in key
countries of populist and/or nationalist leaders who prioritize national objectives
and denigrate the global liberal order. In Russia, Vladimir Putin has been a staunch
critic of the liberal order, and has sought to challenge it by force, if necessary, as
he has in Ukraine and Georgia. In China, Xi Jinping has consistently pursued a
more aggressive line than his predecessors, seeking to challenge the western-led
international order through initiatives such as the Belt and Road Initiative and
China’s authoritarian alternative to the liberal model; and he has been willing to
risk open breaks with the West over Hong Kong and the South China Sea. In the
United States, Trump’s presidency was an extended assault on the institutions
and alliances of the global liberal order. Under leaders who, for domestic political
reasons, prioritize national objectives over interstate cooperation, Great Power
relations have become more strained.
Deglobalization may certainly accelerate the unravelling of the security order.
As transnational commerce and investment dry up, whether as a result of protec-
tionism or of pandemic, rising states will have fewer economic incentives to
restrain themselves. After all, while economic interdependence and globalization
do not drive security policy, they are not completely irrelevant to it. Moreover, if
the global economy continues to stall, that stagnation might create political incen-
tives for leaders such as Putin and Xi to pursue increasingly belligerent foreign
policies as a means of justifying their leadership and silencing domestic discontent,
as expected by the diversionary theory of war.70 An accelerated economic collapse
may also further erode Washington’s economic capacity to maintain the global
67
Colin Dueck, The Obama Doctrine: American grand strategy today (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).
68
Hal Brands, ‘The unexceptional superpower: grand strategy in the age of Trump’, Survival 59: 6, 2017, pp.
7–40.
69
Michal Kolmas and Sárka Kolmasová, ‘A “pivot” that never existed: America’s Asian strategy under Obama
and Trump’, Cambridge Review of International Affairs 32: 1, 2019, pp. 61–79.
70
Jack S. Levy, ‘The diversionary theory of war’, in Manus I. Midlarsky, ed., The handbook of war studies (Boston:
Unwin Hyman, 1989).

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 Norrin M. Ripsman
order and contain challengers. In other words, deglobalization may pour fuel on
the fire of global security competition. Nonetheless, since Great Power discord
preceded the retreat of globalization, for primarily geostrategic reasons, it would
be incorrect to attribute increasing Great Power competition to deglobalization.

Rethinking the relationship between the geo-economic environment and

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Great Power relations
If the economic environment did not drive Great Power relations, but was not
entirely irrelevant to them either, how can we properly characterize the relation-
ship between the two? Perhaps it is more appropriate to understand the interna-
tional economic system as the geo-economic environment within which Great
Power competition occurs. It can affect the character of Great Power compe-
tition, and can either amplify or dampen competition and cooperation, but it
is not a principal driver of Great Power relations. Thinking along these lines,
we can more properly view both globalization and deglobalization as arenas of
competition.71 Great Powers compete differently because of globalization. Under
conditions of globalization, when the geostrategic environment promotes rivalry
Great Powers are unlikely to eschew competition, but are likely to select instru-
ments of soft balancing where possible.72 Under conditions of deglobalization, by
contrast, there are no restraints on harder power competition, using more tradi-
tional instruments.
Of course, if the geostrategic environment promotes greater restraint—as
for example under conditions of unipolarity, active hegemonic engagement and
hegemonic restraint—that would dampen (but not eliminate) competition even
in a deglobalized world; but it would do so even more strongly under condi-
tions of globalization, with the extra incentives to cooperate then prevailing. This
explains why, during the early post-Cold War era, when the United States had
clear dominance of the system but acted with greater multilateralism and restraint,
Great Power competition was greatly reduced and muted. Yet once the United
States began to act more unilaterally and in a less restrained manner, in the late
1990s and in the new millennium, and especially after US relative power began to
weaken somewhat, Great Power competition intensified.

Conclusion
With the relative stability of the post-Cold War world having dissipated, we are
heading for more uncertain and dangerous times. The erosion of US primacy and
its replacement with a more multipolar framework will lead to a more turbulent
international system. The United States, as an overextended power, may increas-
ingly withdraw from its leadership role owing to the costs of maintaining the
military capacity to project power globally, which are necessary to preserve the
71
I thank Matt Hoffmann and Kevin Luo for suggesting this conceptualization to me.
72
Paul, Restraining Great Powers.
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 Globalization, deglobalization and Great Power politics
system. Meanwhile, China, Russia and other potential Great Power rivals will
continue to take advantage of US weakness to advance their regional interests and
accelerate its hegemonic decline. In this context, it is questionable whether even
a new government in Washington that seeks to restore American alliances and the
core institutional fabric of the liberal order will be able to put Humpty Dumpty
back together again.
As I have demonstrated in this article, however, these changes were not brought

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about by the collapse of globalization. The liberal economic order that has existed
in the West since the 1940s and globally since the 1990s appears to be a casualty,
rather than a catalyst, of broader political and geostrategic changes such as waning
US hegemony, nationalist demands for protection and the emergence of populist
leaders less committed to the liberal agenda. Nonetheless, economic relations do
affect the character and methods of Great Power competition. Consequently,
if deglobalization persists, we can expect it to alter and intensify Great Power
competition, and to see that competition shift increasingly from soft balancing to
the use of harder power-political tools.

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