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Fateful Transitions
As China emerges as a global force in the twenty-first century, questions of how existing great powers will navigate the geopolitical transition loom large. In Fateful Transitions, Daniel M. Kliman revisits historic power shifts to shed light on enduring patterns in international relations, demonstrating that the regime type of ascendant powers greatly influences global interactions.Since the late nineteenth century, the world's major democracies have tended to accommodate or conciliate ascendant democratic states. Certain attributes of democracy, such as a free press and domestic checks and balances, encourage trust during power shifts, whereas closed and autocratic regimes on the ascent tend to produce a cycle of suspicion, competition, and confrontation. Drawing on democratic peace theory and power transition theory, Kliman compares Great Britain's embrace of U.S. ascendancy in the early twentieth century to its confrontational stance toward autocratic Germany and later U.S. mistrust of the Soviet Union. Within this geopolitical context, he evaluates the interactions between China and current great powers, the United States and Japan. Building on this analysis, Kliman offers new insights into the dynamics of power shifts and explores their implications for how today's established and emerging powers can successfully navigate fateful transitions.
eBook
Pax Britannica Eclipsed
As the United States, Europe, and much of Asia navigate the rise of new powers, the British experience at the turn of the twentieth century is instructive. Although the Pax Britannica ended on the battlefields of the First World War, the eclipse of British power occurred earlier. Between 1870 and 1914, Great Britain steadily lost ground to two emerging giants: post-Civil War America and a unified Germany. This was the product of differential economic growth rates and the military capabilities such superior economic performance afforded. Once the United States and Germany surpassed Great Britain economically, its days as the world’s
Book Chapter
Power Shifts and Strategy
This chapter connects power transitions, regime type, and the choices that democratic leaders make as they navigate the rise of other nations. The argument is that democracy in an ascendant state reassures while autocratic rule creates a climate of uncertainty and mistrust. Democracies can rise without sowing alarm because their domestic institutions clarify intentions and allow outsiders to shape their strategic behavior. Conversely, rising autocracies provoke anxiety because centralized control and pervasive secrecy obscure their ambitions and reduce opportunities to influence their trajectory. What this means is that democratic powers pursue different strategies as democracies and autocracies rise. They appease
Book Chapter
Emerging Superpower
Napoleon Bonaparte reputedly warned: “Let China sleep, for when she wakes, she will shake the world.”¹ Two centuries later, China’s long slumber has ended. Roused by capitalist reforms enacted under Communist Party rule, China is emerging as a superpower second only to the United States. China’s rise and the American response will to a significant extent define the international landscape of the twenty-first century. Before looking forward and considering how this fateful transition may evolve, it is important to understand the contours of the present and recent past. Uncertainty and mistrust have accompanied China’s ascendance because one-party rule endures in
Book Chapter
Neighboring Titan
The United States is not the only democratic nation experiencing a fateful transition as China rises. America’s ally and China’s neighbor, Japan, confronts a much sharper power shift. Once Asia’s largest economy and leading voice, Japan has in recent years fallen behind China, its fading dynamism accelerating the relative decline brought about by China’s rapidly expanding economy and growing military prowess. Japan’s response to the rise of China parallels that of the United States. Since China’s ascendance became apparent in the late 1990s, the Japanese government has opted to integrate and hedge. What induced Washington to embrace this approach has
Book Chapter
Red Star Rising
The destruction wrought by the Second World War precipitated the rise of the Soviet Union. Powerful states on the USSR periphery were either shattered by defeat or exhausted in victory. At the same time, the Red Army advanced to the heart of Europe, placing vast new territories and large foreign populations under Soviet control. Although the United States remained the world’s preeminent power, its position was no longer unassailable, particularly if the USSR could gain dominance over the industrial and natural resource concentrations located just beyond its expanded frontiers. The end of the most cataclysmic war in history had ushered
Book Chapter
Germany Resurgent
Great Britain’s strategy toward the resurgence of Germany during the 1930s is traditionally synonymous with appeasement. Recklessly credulous, British leaders offered Adolf Hitler a series of unilateral concessions culminating with the Munich Agreement, which transferred Czechoslovakian territory to Germany. Only too late, when Germany violated the Munich Agreement and occupied the heartland of the Czech state, did the British government realize the folly of its course. This appeasement narrative evolved immediately after the Second World War and poses a dilemma for the book’s focus on regime type.¹ Within a year of taking power, Hitler transformed the Weimar Republic into a
Book Chapter
Implications for the Twenty-First Century
Regime type is key to understanding the dynamics of fateful transitions. Autocracies sow mistrust as they gain in power while democracies can rise and reassure. In power shifts ranging from the British response to the emergence of the United States and Germany in the late nineteenth century to China’s recent arrival on the international stage and the American and Japanese reactions, this dynamic holds true. Across time and geopolitical traditions, regime type sets the boundaries for the way democratic leaders manage a new power’s rise.
This book set out to demonstrate that a state’s domestic institutions shape the external reaction
Book Chapter
Fateful Transitions
An age-old question—how to manage the rise of new powers—looms large for the United States, Europe, and much of Asia. Although the nature of the emerging international order remains unclear, the geopolitics of the twenty-first century has earlier parallels. Since the late 1800s, the world’s major democracies have repeatedly navigated the ascendance of other nations. The choices made by democratic leaders during these fateful transitions have profoundly shaped the course of history. On the positive side, these decisions paved the way for the Anglo-American rapprochement; on the negative side, the path taken culminated in World War I, World
Book Chapter