Shifrinson Publishes Journal Article on China’s Rise
Joshua Shifrinson, Assistant Professor of International Relations at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, published a journal article exploring whether the United States should fear the rise of China.
Shifrinson’s article, entitled “Should the United States Fear China’s Rise?” was published in the Winter 2019 issue of The Washington Quarterly.
From the text of the article:
Whether pundits and policymakers admit it or not, the United States is a great power in relative decline. It is not like the former Soviet Union and soon to fall into the dustbin of history; nor is it akin to ancient Rome with the Goths at the gates. Nevertheless, with policymakers and analysts alike embracing the idea that a new era of great power competition is at hand, they simultaneously acknowledge that the United States’ “unipolar era” is over. Relative to rising great powers such as India or (more dramatically) China, the United States is declining.
Shaping American grand strategy to suit this new environment will require a host of diplomatic, economic, and military adjustments that strategists are only slowly coming to recognize. Indeed, the fact that proponents of “restraint” and “offshore balancing” are pitted against advocates of “deep engagement” and “liberal hegemony” in a vibrant debate highlights that the course corrections to manage the U.S. transition away from unipolar dominance remain up in the air. Any number of domestic and international factors will affect the precise nature of the strategy chosen. However, because the changing distribution of power and rise of new great powers largely drive the U.S. grand strategy debate, addressing U.S. strategic needs requires anticipating the likely future behavior of other great powers and the role of U.S. policy therein. We therefore need to know: what strategies are rising states themselves likely to adopt in response to U.S. decline and, relatedly, how might the different strategic options under discussion for the United States reinforce or reduce problematic aspects of rising state behavior?
Joshua R. Itzkowitz Shifrinson’s teaching and research interests focus on the intersection of international security and diplomatic history, particularly the rise and fall of great powers and the origins of grand strategy. He has special expertise in great power politics since 1945 and U.S. engagement in Europe and Asia. Shifrinson’s first book, Rising Titans, Falling Giants: How Great Powers Exploit Power Shifts (Cornell University Press, 2018) builds on extensive archival research focused on U.S. and Soviet foreign policy after 1945 to explain why some rising states challenge and prey upon declining great powers, while others seek to support and cooperate with declining states.