Shifrinson Writes in The National Interest on the China Threat
According to Joshua Shifrinson, Assistant Professor of International Relations at the Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, “China is not the threat claimed, and inflators’ prescriptions are a recipe for overstretching and needless risk.” Importantly, he also believes that, “not is not too late for the U.S. to soberly address China’s rise.”
In a new OpEd, titled “How Donald Trump Should Handle China’s Growing Power,” published in The National Interest on march 8, 2020, Shifrinson looks at great power behavior and concludes that, “limiting the U.S. response rather than preventively reacting to trumped-up charges of a China threat is the United States’ best play.”
An excerpt:
“Though pundits portray American goals as defensive and China as the challenger, actual evidence of Chinese aggression is questionable, based largely on China’s assertiveness in pursuing its territorial claims in the South and East China Seas. The claims are suspect but are also long-standing features of PRC policy. Ironically, it is thus possible that China sees itself as acting defensively. And while the tactics adopted to assert these claims over the last decade—constructing military bases on the contested territories, sending ships and aircraft to the area, and so on—are novel, equating these with a threat is off-base. Rather, the exercise appears an attempt to make pre-existing claims more credible; to paraphrase from Middle Eastern discussions, China is creating facts on the sea.”
Read the full OpEd here.
Joshua R. Itzkowitz Shifrinson is an Assistant Professor at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, where his 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 is author of Rising Titans, Falling Giants: How Great Powers Exploit Power Shifts (Cornell University Press, 2018) and his work has appeared with International Security, the Journal of Strategic Studies, Foreign Affairs, and other venues. Read more here.