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This assessment of realist foreign policy proposals suggests that additional policy measures are required for developing a stable international order, to avoid proxy wars where possible and to contain and resolve them when they do emerge, in addition to further global challenges. Realists are not opposed to the use of diplomacy to avoid and manage conflict. To the contrary, they encourage it, but in encouraging the use of diplomacy it is crucial to recognize that diplomacy also requires the support of international institutions and established diplomatic networks. Diplomatic breakthroughs are difficult to achieve, requiring years of skillful and patient negotiations. Diplomacy, moreover, is an inconstant and limited tool without the support of broader international institutions that provide mechanisms of delay, ongoing networks of collaborative great power pressure on belligerent parties, and collaboratively developed processes and agreed terms of dispute resolution, negotiation, and mediation.

Realist critics of liberal hegemony often suggest policy-fuzzy gestures toward diplomacy and accommodation. Porter for instance argues that the United States should abandon liberal hegemony in favor of détente-style collaboration with illiberal powers in the making of global order (Porter 2020, 170–99). The key strategic proposal Porter advances is to

But in truth, the United States is not foundering. The stark narrative of decline ignores deeper world-historical influences and circumstances that will continue to make the United States the dominant presence and organizer of world politics in the twenty-first century. To be sure, no one knows the future, and no one owns it. The coming world order will be shaped by complex, shifting, and difficult-to-grasp political forces and by choices made by people living in all parts of the world. Nonetheless, the deep sources of American power and influence in the world persist. Indeed, with the rise of the brazen illiberalism of China and Russia, these distinctive traits and capacities have come more clearly into view.

The mistake made by prophets of American decline is to see the United States and its liberal order as just another empire on the wane. The wheel of history turns, empires come and go—and now, they suggest, it is time for the United States to fade into senescence. Yes, the United States has at times resembled an old-style empire. But its role in the world rests on much more than its past imperial behavior; U.S. power draws not only on brute strength but also on ideas, institutions, and values that are complexly woven into the fabric of modernity. The global order the United States has built since the end of World War II is best seen not as an empire but as a world system, a sprawling multifaceted political formation, rich in vicissitudes, that creates opportunity for people across the planet.

The story of world politics is often told as a game of thrones in which a rotating cast of great powers battles for top-dog status. According to researchers led by Graham Allison at Harvard, there have been sixteen cases in the past five hundred years when a rising power challenged a ruling power. 3 Twelve of these cases ended in carnage. One can quibble with Allison’s case selection, but the basic pattern is clear: hegemonic rivalry has sparked a catastrophic war every forty years on average for the past half millennium.

The emergence of unipolarity in 1991 has put this cycle of hegemonic competition on hold. Obviously wars and security competition still occur in today’s unipolar world—in fact, as I explain later, unipolarity has made certain types of asymmetric conflict more likely—but none of these conflicts have the global scope or generational length of a hegemonic rivalry.

Successful green policies in China share common elements, the book argues. They eschew rigid targets and top-down solutions that “cut everything with the same knife”, to borrow the Chinese phrase for one-size-fits-all prescriptions. Success stories also typically involve the state working with volunteer groups and seeking input from civil society. The book cites a reforestation scheme in the late 1990s in the Loess Plateau of north-western China. Designers spent two years consulting local farmers and scientists, tailoring their plans to local conditions. Orchards of walnuts and dates, shielded by desert willows and traditional landscaping techniques, slowly returned life to barren lands. Later, when impatient officials tried to scale up the scheme with the mass-planting of a few types of fast-growing, water-hungry tree, they failed.

As well as showing the limits of central planning, the book argues that China’s rulers use greenery to cloak their long-standing authoritarian ambitions. Nomads in Inner Mongolia or Tibet were once stripped of their herds and forcibly moved to drab housing blocks in the name of modernity. Now they are subjected to “ecological migration”, ostensibly to save grasslands from their grazing animals. Vast hydroelectric dams are still built over the objections of locals and environmentalists, but now in the name of fighting climate change. Abroad, China stresses the green credentials of its global infrastructure scheme, the Belt and Road Initiative. It delivers cheap technologies to developing countries. But its leaders’ green conscience is selective. In pursuit of national interests they send fishing fleets to pillage far-off seas. They sign opaque contracts with foreign governments to build coal-fired power stations, polluting mines and habitat-wrecking dams. They often rely on authoritarian allies to quell local protests.

Nearly every week, the international news media reports on the Chinese government’s troubling use of technology to spy on its own citizens and those of other countries. China’s tech giants, Foreign Policy reported late last year, work hand in glove with the country’s spy agencies. The Guardian suggested in December that a Chinese state-owned phone operator spies on American users.

Surveillance is a fact of life for Chinese citizens and, increasingly, for those who live in countries that have adopted Chinese surveillance technology, from Ecuador to Kyrgyzstan. Even more worrisome, this ecosystem of Chinese-based technologies carries with it a set of values that undergirds the Chinese state—a form of twenty-first-century authoritarianism that marries social control and efficiency.

Ever since then-U.S. President Richard Nixon went to China in 1972, U.S. policymakers have sought above all to talk with their counterparts in Beijing, believing dialogue would lead to substantive cooperation on issues ranging from nuclear weapons to trade to climate policy. Yet today, as Chinese leaders stonewall their U.S. counterparts and the two countries’ militaries dance around each other in Asia, it might seem quixotic to ask: What future relationship does the United States even want with China?

This question will become even more important as the United States heads into its 2024 presidential election. As the Biden administration’s National Security Strategy has made clear, the 2020s are the decisive decade for setting the terms of U.S.-Chinese geopolitical competition.

Northwest of Beijing’s Forbidden City, outside the Third Ring Road, the Chinese Academy of Sciences has spent seven decades building a campus of national laboratories. Near its center is the Institute of Automation, a sleek silvery-blue building surrounded by camera-studded poles. The institute is a basic research facility. Its computer scientists inquire into artificial intelligence’s fundamental mysteries. Their more practical innovations—iris recognition, cloud-based speech synthesis—are spun off to Chinese tech giants, AI start-ups, and, in some cases, the People’s Liberation Army.

I visited the institute on a rainy morning in the summer of 2019. China’s best and brightest were still shuffling in post-commute, dressed casually in basketball shorts or yoga pants, AirPods nestled in their ears. In my pocket, I had a burner phone; in my backpack, a computer wiped free of data—standard precautions for Western journalists in China. To visit China on sensitive business is to risk being barraged with cyberattacks and malware. In 2019, Belgian officials on a trade mission noticed that their mobile data were being intercepted by pop-up antennae outside their Beijing hotel.

One of the dire outcomes of the emergence of COVID-19 has been the glaring racial and ethnic disparities that have defined the course of the spread of the virus. This has been true for all communities of color across the global system, including in China, where the Han majority has systematically targeted the Black community as being super-spreaders of COVID-19. As a recent migrant-minority community in China, the Black experience has been defined by vulgar racism, exploitation, and stigmatization. This is not surprising, as anti-black racism in China is embedded in Han-minzu racialist ideologies, which perceive Blackness as occupying the bottom of the racial totem pole (Dikötter, 1992; 1997). In the context of COVID-19, the Black community in China was again a target of multiple racial projects (Omi & Winant, 1994) that sought to label their bodies as diseased and physical presence as a threat to the viability and safety of the Han majority. The resulting actions led to wholescale banning of Black individuals from entering restaurants, engaging in business transactions, seeking medical attention in hospitals, renting apartments, and were forced into government-sanctioned quarantines (Marsh, 2020).

One response to this discrimination manifested on the social media platform, Twitter, which was used by the victims of the targeted attacks and activists alike to expose how the Chinese government is systematically facilitating discriminatory policies against Black migrants in China. The online mobilization has generated a tremendous outcry across Africa and the global community to hold China accountable. These online Twitter posts have not only framed the racialized experiences of Black migrants to the world but also produced simultaneous global responses to their lived reality in China under COVID-19. What overall themes can we derive from these public conversations on Twitter regarding anti-Black racism in China? How have the grievances of the Black community been framed in response to heightened Han racism in the context of COVID-19? In the present paper, we attempt to answer these questions by exploring how global Twitter mobilized awareness regarding anti-Black racism in China. We first discuss the history of African migration to China and then discuss the Han racial ideologies that are driving the anti-Black racism. We then discuss the topics that emerge as a result of our analysis of tweets using the natural language processing (NLP) technique of latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) to extract the underlying topics of the analyzed tweets. Finally, we conclude with a brief discussion on anti-Black racism, COVID-19, and the future of the Black community in China.

The international order is in deep trouble, and not only since the onslaught of the COVID-19 pandemic. This is not how things were supposed to turn out. The collapse of the “evil empire,” the end of the Cold War and the integration of Central and Eastern Europe into the EU were supposed to bring about a new era of stability and prosperity, the latter epitomized most prominently by China’s embrace of the market.

Liberalism was supposed to reign supreme. In the grand battle of ideas, Marx had lost out, Hegel had won — or so his American acolyte, Francis Fukuyama, claimed. Fukuyama proclaimed that the “end of history” was at hand, and the cognoscenti and would-be cognoscenti on both sides of the Atlantic enthusiastically applauded.

The Biden administration is trying to reduce tensions with China and “put a floor” under the relationship. Although China’s leaders profess to want the same end, their actions tell a different story. This gap between what China says and does is widening, presenting a vexing problem for the United States.

The Biden team is busily engaging with Chinese government officials in pursuit of a follow-up meeting between President Biden and Chinese leader Xi Jinping after their summit in Bali, Indonesia, in November. The goal, as national security adviser Jake Sullivan said on CNN on Sunday, is “to manage the competition responsibly, to ensure that competition does not become conflict.” But there are mounting signs that China’s leaders are uninterested in improving U.S.-China relations at the moment — and might see benefits in ramping up tensions.

Leader of the world’s most populous state, Chinese President Xi Jinping, is fond of speaking about how our world is undergoing once-in-a-century major changes. To a world exhausted by the pandemic and the ensuing economic dislocation, his 2022 Davos address offered a soothing vision of “the right way forward for humanity,” in which the global community will prosper by “choosing dialogue over confrontation, inclusiveness over exclusion and standing against all forms of unilateralism, protectionism, hegemony or power politics.” Similarly for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)—as it embarks on its second century and moves closer to the center of the world stage—its ostensible pledge is to “promote the shared human values of peace, development, fairness, justice, democracy and freedom” in cooperation with “all progressive forces around the world.” And yet for each of these claims made to a global audience, the activities of the Communist Party inside China tell a different story.

Over the past decade, China has become less democratic and free; it is now more, rather than less, authoritarian. The CCP has dismissed the idea of universal values and freedoms as a Western effort to dominate the world. It has constitutionally subordinated all institutions of the state to the Party’s will. The very idea of the rule of law, so fundamental in open societies, has been contorted to suit “Chinese conditions” (yifa zhiguo) in order to fortify and legitimize the Party’s leadership over the media, the justice system, and even the basic right to privacy.

Pro-democracy protests have rocked Hong Kong for more than a year. Now, China has imposed a draconian national security law that will undermine the territory’s autonomy and, by extension, its identity. The new law is a profound tragedy for the people of Hong Kong, but unfortunately, there is little the international community can do to halt its implementation. The administration of U.S. President Donald Trump has suggested that it will dial up pressure on Hong Kong’s government. But doing so risks hurting Hong Kong’s economy more than Beijing’s and accelerating the territory’s absorption into southern China. Some analysts have therefore counseled U.S. restraint, arguing that a softer touch could encourage Beijing to moderate its implementation of the law and avoid making the situation worse. But there are larger issues at stake. U.S. policymakers must consider more than Hong Kong when formulating their response. A tepid U.S. reaction could leave Beijing with the impression that it can proceed with relative impunity on other contentious issues in Asia. The shadow of Taiwan looms large in this context. Unless the United States demonstrates the resolve and ability to resist Chinese coercion and aggression, China’s leaders may eventually conclude that the risks and the costs of future military action against Taiwan are low—or at least tolerable. There isn’t a straight line from Hong Kong to Taiwan, of course. A Chinese assault on the island is neither imminent nor inevitable. But Beijing’s recent actions in Hong Kong—and elsewhere in Asia—raise worrying questions about its evolving objectives and increasing willingness to use coercive tactics to achieve them. In short, the United States must be careful not to play a narrow game on Hong Kong when Beijing is positioning itself for a broader competition for the future of Asia. WIDENING THE ASIA APERTURE Under President Xi Jinping, China has become much more tolerant of friction in international affairs than it once was and much bolder about using coercion to advance Chinese interests—often at the expense of the United States and other powers, such as Japan and India. In recent months, China has increased its military and paramilitary pressure on neighboring countries with which it has territorial disputes, including India, Japan, Vietnam, Malaysia, and Indonesia. Whether these aggressive maneuvers were intended to remind the world of China’s resolve or to capitalize on the distraction caused by the coronavirus pandemic, they offer a stark reminder of Xi’s appetite for risk, tolerance for conflict, and desire to assert territorial claims. Recent history reveals that the international system is vulnerable to this kind of creeping irredentism. When Russian President Vladimir Putin decided to invade Ukraine and annex Crimea in 2014, he was drawing on lessons from his 2008 invasion of Georgia. The latter created a permissive environment for the former: the Georgia invasion cost Russia little and drew only weak international condemnation. Taiwan and Ukraine occupy very different geopolitical contexts, but just as Putin factored the U.S. response to Russian actions in Georgia into his decision to invade Ukraine, China’s leaders will factor the U.S. response to the Hong Kong security law into their decisions about future aggression in Asia. Given how little Beijing’s crackdown in Hong Kong has cost it to date, we are concerned that Beijing will draw the wrong conclusions about the costs of future coercion against Taiwan. Hong Kong and Taiwan have more in common than many analysts appreciate, both in the view of Beijing and in the sentiments of their citizens. The protests that have raged in Hong Kong for the last year resonated deeply with the people and the leadership in Taiwan. Taiwanese citizens sent protective gear to the protesters in Hong Kong, and Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen won reelection in January in part because she voiced support for Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement. In a rare bipartisan move, her ruling Democratic Progressive Party, the opposition Kuomintang, and other parties jointly expressed “regret and severe condemnation” of Beijing’s national security law. Taiwanese officials have also pledged to provide refuge to Hong Kong residents fleeing Chinese repression, and some Hong Kongers appear to have taken them up on the offer. According to news reports, the number of Hong Kong residents who moved to Taiwan in the first four months of 2020 was up 150 percent from the same period last year. The democracy movement that has so united the citizens of Hong Kong and Taiwan has allies in other parts of Asia as well. A social media movement known as the Milk Tea Alliance—a reference to the sweet milk tea popular in East Asia—has brought together activists in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Thailand who are critical of Chinese nationalist netizens and who oppose Beijing’s new national security law. Recently, the Milk Tea Alliance spread to the Philippines, where some citizens have joined the online movement to voice concerns about Chinese aggression in the South China Sea. But what many in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and other Asian countries see as online mobilization in support of universal democratic norms, Beijing sees as a dangerous movement of “splittists” who seek to undermine China’s sovereignty, keep China permanently divided, spread Western values, and contain China in Asia. Indeed, Chinese authorities regularly blame “external hostile forces” for the protests in Hong Kong—and for the movement’s resonance in Taiwan and elsewhere. TAIWAN AND CHINESE ANXIETY China’s leaders have always maintained that they are prepared to use force over Taiwan—either to prevent the island’s de jure independence or to compel its unification with the mainland. But Xi has taken a progressively harder line on Taiwan, in word as well as deed. At the 19th Party Congress in 2017, he declared that reunification was linked to his “China Dream” of national rejuvenation. Since then, he has twice stated that the separation of mainland China and Taiwan “should not be passed down generation after generation.” And in his most recent speech focused solely on Taiwan, in January 2019, he said that “our country must be reunified, and will surely be reunified.” Even more ominous, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang omitted the term “peaceful” in front of “unification”—previously standard in official communications about Taiwan—in his annual opening speech to the National People’s Congress in May. A few days later, State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi did the same in his speech to the congress. As a former head of the State Council’s Taiwan Affairs Office, Wang was well aware of the significance of this rhetorical change. By the end of the NPC’s two-week session, “peaceful reunification” was back in the final version of Li’s work report approved by the congress—along with unconvincing explanations for its initial absence having to do with poor bureaucratic coordination. In addition to hardening its rhetoric against Taiwan, China has sought to isolate the island diplomatically. In the last five years, Beijing has poached seven of Taipei’s formal allies, leaving only 15 countries that recognize Taiwan as an independent country. At the height of the coronavirus pandemic in May, China even excluded Taiwan from the annual meeting of the World Health Assembly in Geneva, despite the island’s global leadership in containing and mitigating COVID-19. At the same time, China has ramped up military pressure on Taiwan. Its air force and navy have conducted more than ten transits and military exercises near the island since mid-January, including an increasing number of deliberate incursions into Taiwan’s airspace, according to research by Bonnie S. Glaser and Matthew P. Funaiole of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. In March 2019, China’s air force sent two advanced fighter jets over the centerline of the Taiwan Strait for the first time in 20 years. Since then, it has sent an increasing number of aircraft across the centerline. China’s strategic bombers have also circumnavigated the island multiple times in recent months, while other Chinese aircraft have crossed the Miyako Strait between Taiwan and Japan. All of these maneuvers were intended to intimidate Taiwan by demonstrating Beijing’s readiness to use force at a moment’s notice. There is little Tsai can do to convince China to dial back the diplomatic and military pressure short of accepting its unilateral definition of “one China” and its “one country, two systems” model, both of which are now wholly discredited by what has happened in Hong Kong. In the worldview of China’s leaders, Tsai’s commitment to Taiwanese independence, her perceived efforts at “de-Sinification” on the island, and the growing connections between Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the democratic world more broadly all legitimize China’s saber rattling—and perhaps, eventually, its use of force. Xi appears to have made up his mind about Tsai—wrongly but perhaps conclusively. He and other Chinese leaders are still weighing the costs and benefits of a harder line on Taiwan as they take the measure of U.S. and international willpower—which is why the U.S. response to the Hong Kong law matters so much. (edited) CHANGING BEIJING’S CALCULUS To deter Beijing from further aggression, the United States must make clear that there will be consequences for the national security law, particularly if Beijing uses it to justify the arrest or rendition of journalists, peaceful activists, or political candidates in Hong Kong. The U.S. Congress has passed bipartisan legislation authorizing the Trump administration to deny visas and impose other targeted sanctions against those directly involved in the crackdown on Hong Kong, and the Trump administration has indicated a readiness to implement these measures. Targeted sanctions won’t be cost-free for U.S.-Chinese relations or for the people of Hong Kong, but the United States can limit the collateral damage by implementing them incrementally, proportionately, and in concert with other powers. The Trump administration will need to start by improving its coordination with European and Asian allies. It has issued symbolically important joint statements on Hong Kong, first with Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom and then with the G-7. But much more diplomacy is needed to broaden that coalition and coordinate pressure on Beijing. That so few Asian governments have criticized China’s new law is deeply worrisome, as is the European Union’s initial pledge that it will merely “follow developments closely.” But before Washington can rally its European and Asian allies behind a unified message on Hong Kong, it will have to stop kicking them. Trump’s unilateral withdrawal of troops from NATO, his extreme demands for payment from Tokyo and Seoul, his threats to pull troops out of South Korea, and his disinterest in the G-7 and other groupings have pushed these allies away at a time when they would ordinarily be open to U.S. leadership. These actions have also telegraphed vulnerability, disunity, and lack of resolve among Western allies to Beijing. But China is creating more favorable conditions for U.S.-led diplomacy on Hong Kong. Beijing’s so-called wolf warrior diplomacy, aimed at intimidating countries critical of its handling of the pandemic, combined with its recent aggression on territorial issues has alienated much of the world. The United States should seize this opportunity to make Hong Kong a diplomatic priority. In the lead-up to the Legislative Council elections in Hong Kong in September, Washington should lead the G-7, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, the European Union, and the so-called Quad of the United States, Japan, Australia, and India in joint statements and actions warning Beijing against arresting political candidates it dislikes. The United States and its European and Asian allies should also consider offering Hong Kong citizens residency and a path to citizenship, just as the United Kingdom has done. And if the situation in Hong Kong deteriorates—owing to arrests of candidates in the September elections, for instance—the United States should consider sanctioning the Chinese officials responsible. Such measures won’t restore Hong Kong’s autonomy in the near term, but they could discourage overt acts of repression and help shape Beijing’s thinking about Taiwan. Staving off Chinese aggression, whether in Taiwan or elsewhere in Asia, however, will also require the United States to get serious about military deterrence in the western Pacific. Over the last two decades, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has made advances that seriously eroded U.S. military power in the western Pacific, especially around Taiwan. Recent operations by two U.S. carrier battle groups in the South China Sea were important demonstrations of willpower, but capacity matters, too. As former Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Work has written, the U.S. military now faces the prospect of losing a fight with China in defense of Taiwan. The Pentagon has focused on building large platforms, such as aircraft carriers and big-deck amphibious ships, but such facilities don’t effectively deter China’s anti-access/area-denial capabilities. The United States needs to rethink its forward-basing posture, increase its cooperation and interoperability with allies such as Japan, and improve its ability to fight in highly contested environments, including through greater use of unmanned systems. The House and Senate Armed Services Committees have proposed a Pacific Deterrence Initiative that would go a long way toward restoring the United States’ competitive edge in these areas. The U.S. Congress should fund the initiative and hold the Pentagon accountable for its timely implementation.

China’s growing global influence poses a serious threat to international human rights, according to a new report, which suggests that the United Nations Human Rights Council — the body established to safeguard such international protections — is failing to counter the risks.

The UNHRC is an inter-governmental body made up of 47 U.N. member states, which are elected on a three-year rotational basis with the stated aim of strengthening the “promotion and protection of human rights” globally.

In 2009, when I began to more frequently describe China as “authoritarian” as a broadcast correspondent for Al Jazeera English, some editors pushed back, believing it was too much editorializing. We have since become more comfortable with regularly using the designation, in media coverage and beyond. But as journalists and athletes head to Beijing for the Winter Olympics, it may be time to reassess and consider calling the Chinese state what it is fast becoming: a fascist one.

When the facts change, it’s time to change our minds — and our language. Ahead of the 2008 Summer Games in Beijing, international media knew China was authoritarian and described it as such when necessary, but entire articles concerning China’s political system were written without mentioning it. The government had issued regulations allowing the foreign press corps to travel freely around the country, a departure from years of tight control. And the people we met on these trips, many working as labor campaigners or rights lawyers, pointed the way to a new, transformative Chinese generation.

In July 2017, Gulzira Auelkhan’s father fell ill. So she made the short hop from her village in the windswept Kazakhstan countryside into her native China to care for him. Upon arrival in the western province of Xinjiang, however, she was arrested, for no given reason. No charges were ever brought, but she spent the next 15 months being ferried between five different prison camps with barbed wire and watchtowers, during which she was interrogated 19 times and tortured with electric batons. Her interrogators had no clear explanation for her detention. “Once they asked me, ‘Do you have a TV in Kazakhstan?’” says Auelkhan, 42. “‘In which case your ideology has been corrupted.’”

Auelkhan, an ethnic Kazakh Muslim who grew up speaking a Turkic dialect, was forced to learn Mandarin Chinese, salute the Chinese flag and sing songs exulting the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) beneath photos of President Xi Jinping. “We all had to eat pork, and I was forced to burn a Koran and a prayer mat,” she says. “There was to be no more praying.” Afterward, she was sent to a labor camp for two months, where she sewed gloves until she says her neck ached and her eyes turned bloodshot.

Still, the risks are considerable. As Western democracies enact safeguards to protect citizens from the rampant harvesting of data by government and corporations, China is exporting its AI-powered surveillance technology to authoritarian governments around the world. Chinese firms are providing high-tech surveillance tools to at least 18 nations from Venezuela to Zimbabwe, according to a 2018 report by Freedom House. China is a battleground where the modern surveillance state has reached a nadir, prompting censure from governments and institutions around the globe, but it is also where rebellion against its overreach is being most ferociously fought.

“Today’s economic business models all encourage people to share data,” says Lokman Tsui, a privacy expert at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. In China, he adds, we are seeing “what happens when the state goes after that data to exploit and weaponize it.”

The centrality of the U.S. dollar in world affairs is mainly determined by economic factors, but geopolitical forces are threatening to weaken its top spot in the currency hierarchy. U.S. sanctions in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have pushed some countries to further reduce their reliance on the dollar. The geopolitical tug of war between allies and foes, liberal and illiberal states carries high stakes. “Great powers have great currencies,” quipped the Nobel laureate Robert Mundell. If the currency system were to become multipolar, U.S. monetary perks would recede, as would the United States’ global economic influence and its ability to use dollars as an alternative to military force when policing international order

A more fragmented global economy in which security partnerships determine economic relations is coming into view. But an end to the dollar’s dominance is still unlikely. Countries participating in the sanctions against Russia or benefiting from U.S. currency coercion aimed at upholding the liberal international order’s core principle of nonaggression have no incentives to diversify away from the dollar. Even countries opposing Western sanctions are likely to stick with the dollar to preserve their own security and U.S. security guarantees in a hardening geopolitical climate.

Consistency with influential relevant theories lends credence to the expectation that US security commitments actually can shape the strategic environment as deep engagement presupposes. But it is far from conclusive. Not all analysts endorse the theories we discussed in chapter 5. These theories make strong assumptions that states generally act rationally and focus primarily on security. Allowing misperceptions, emotions, domestic politics, desire for status, or concern for honor into the picture might alter the verdict on the strategy’s net expected effects. And to model the strategy’s expected effects we had to simplify things by selecting two mechanisms— assurance and deterrence— and examining their effects independently, thus missing potentially powerful positive interactions between them.

This chapter moves beyond theory to examine patterns of evidence. If the theoretical arguments about the security effects of deep engagement are right, what sort of evidence should we see? Two major bodies of evidence are most important: general empirical findings concerning the strategy’s key mechanisms and regionally focused research.

Systemic Dimensions: The Varying Prevalence of Competitive Intervention

The framework articulated above not only provides a comprehensive account of the duration effects of competitive intervention on civil wars—it also highlights a candidate explanation for the recent decline in the prevalence of intrastate conflict. Insofar as state decisions to aid combatants are consistent with competitive state policy-making, temporal variation in geopolitical competition between states should affect trends in the prevalence of competitive intervention. Variation in the prevalence of competitive intervention should in turn affect temporal trends in the prevalence of internal conflict through the duration effects described above.

Since the end of the Cold War, democracy has made many gains. But the fate of freedom is now hanging in the balance globally. With astonishing courage and resolve over the last several months, ordinary citizens in Algeria, Sudan, Venezuela, and Hong Kong—in numbers and creativity that nearly defy comprehension—have shown that aspirations for democracy did not die with the implosion of the Arab Spring in 2013 or the relentless, bullying rise of a neototalitarian China.

In the face of sometimes brutal and even deadly state repression, the courageous mobilization of ordinary citizens, advocating standing up for their rights, should inspire all of those who live in established, liberal democracies. At the same time, the ill winds of strongman populism, intolerance of minorities, and readiness to eclipse constitutional norms—which have already eviscerated democracy in countries such as Hungary, Turkey, and Bangladesh—now cast a shadow over the future of democracy in the Philippines, Poland, and India, particularly with the recently reelected Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s dismissal of the state government in Kashmir.