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Ideology in China is itself malleable, rather than a rigid cage that determines policy and has been continually tweaked to justify the maintenance of one-party rule through decades of great change. Under Mao, for instance, capitalists were persecuted as “counterrevolutionaries.” But under President Jiang Zemin the Chinese Communist Party abandoned a core Marxist belief in 2001 by accepting private entrepreneurs as party members. China’s economy today is more capitalist than Marxist and highly dependent on access to world markets. Assessments of China based on cherry-picked phrases from party propaganda overlook the frequent gap between rhetoric and reality. In 2018, for example, China cracked down on Marxist student groups and labor organizers, possibly because — as the labor scholar and sociologist Eli Friedman has noted — the young activists embodied “the Marxist principles the C.C.P. has long since abandoned in practice.” Likewise, Beijing has for years emphasized the sanctity of national sovereignty and noninterference in a country’s domestic affairs, yet has provided diplomatic cover for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Leading Chinese intellectuals openly acknowledge the difficulty of reconciling what China says with what it does. “Even we don’t believe much of what we say,” the Chinese economist Yao Yang, who is known for his pragmatic views, has said. “Our goal is not to defeat liberalism, but instead to say that what we have can be as good as what you have.” Jiang Shigong, a legal scholar and apologist for Mr. Xi’s political philosophy, has written that “‘socialism’ is not ossified dogma, but instead an open concept awaiting exploration and definition.” China’s long-term ambitions are difficult to know with certainty, and they can change. But it is far from clear that it can — or even seeks to — replace the United States as the world’s dominant power. Mr. Xi and the C.C.P. apparently see the United States as trying to keep China perpetually subordinate and vulnerable, opposing whatever China does or advocates in an international system that Beijing believes favors the United States and developed democracies. But at a minimum, China seems more intent on modifying aspects of a system under which it has prospered — making it safer for autocracy — rather than replacing it. Mr. Xi often couches this effort in his political slogans like the “China dream” and a “shared future for humankind.” But there is continuing debate in China over what these visions really mean and what costs and risks China should accept in seeking global leadership. China’s overseas development largess, for example, is limited by the imperative of addressing its own persistent development needs at home, research by the scholar Min Ye has shown. Same for other key Chinese strategies for widening its influence: Its efforts to internationalize the renminbi and reduce dollar dominance are constrained by the tight grip it keeps on the currency’s value, as well as other capital controls. These policies help stabilize its economy and prevent capital flight, but they limit the renminbi’s global appeal. Editors’ Picks Help! I Signed Up for a $4,800 Bird-Watching Trip but the Company Shut Down. Why My Father Called Me Son, Daughter, He, She and It Gretchen Whitmer Would Like You to Meet ‘Governor Barbie’ U.S. concerns often center on the legitimate fear that China could attack Taiwan. But despite menacing Chinese military exercises meant to deter the self-ruled island from moving closer to formal independence, many experts believe that Beijing still prefers to achieve its longstanding objective of “peaceful reunification” through measures short of war. China could lose in a war and face international sanctions and supply chain disruptions. These would be economically and politically devastating, jeopardizing Mr. Xi’s prime objectives of regime security, domestic stability and national rejuvenation. Doubts are growing that China, facing economic headwinds and a shrinking population, can achieve its goal of surpassing the United States as the world’s largest economy, let alone other metrics of global leadership. There is broad recognition in China that it remains militarily, economically and technologically weaker than the United States and that further modernization depends upon continued access to international technology, capital and markets within a stable economic order. “It is impossible for America to contain the rise of China,” the influential Chinese scholar Huang Renwei has noted, “and it is equally impossible for China to quickly surpass America.” Chinese rhetoric about global governance reform has resonated in many developing countries that also see international institutions as tilted against them. But there is little reason to believe that the C.C.P.’s self-serving, nationalist ideology will captivate the world, especially as Mr. Xi feeds mistrust with his authoritarian ways, coercive tactics against foreign businesses and trading partners, and policies that increasingly smack of paranoia. China tends to be viewed more favorably in parts of the developing world. But that owes more to economics than to ideas, and its overseas investments have often been criticized for lacking transparency, saddling poor countries with debt, as well as environmental and other concerns. The United States must continue to discourage and hedge against more threatening Chinese behavior, including bolstering Taiwan’s capacity to resist coercion. But Washington should resist being guided solely by fear, which threatens the openness and dynamism responsible for American technological and scientific leadership. Policymakers should pair deterrent threats with more robust efforts to seek a constructive relationship with China, while also protecting the core values and interests of an inclusive international order and calling on Beijing to offer more credible reassurances of its intentions. There is no doubt that China — whatever its trajectory — poses a huge and complex policy challenge for America. But exaggerating fears of an “existential struggle” increases the likelihood of conflict, crowds out efforts to tackle shared challenges like climate change and creates a with-us-or-against-us framing that could alienate the United States from allies and much of the world. Worse, reflexively maneuvering to outcompete or thwart China only validates hard-liners in Beijing who believe that America is implacably hostile and that the only response lies in undermining the United States. By continuing on that road, the world’s two most powerful countries may end up turning each other into the enemies that they fear.

Why Regional Hegemony Is (Nearly) Impossible to Achieve Regional hegemony may be desirable in theory, but history suggests that it is an elusive goal. As Jonathan Kirshner points out, several different great powers have launched bids for regional dominance in the modern era and all but one of these attempts ended in disaster. France failed under Louis XIV and Napoleon Bonaparte, Germany was beaten decisively in both world wars, and Japan’s attempt to establish a hegemonic order in Asia ended in total defeat as well. Only the United States managed to pull off becoming the sole great power in its region. In the modern world, in short, the success rate is less than 20 percent. Furthermore, the failures were not just minor setbacks: They were unmitigated disasters for the countries that made the attempt. Perhaps a million Frenchmen lost their lives in the Napoleonic Wars, and Bonaparte died in exile on a remote island in the South Atlantic. Germany suffered mightily in both world wars and ended up divided into separate states for more than 40 years. Japan was firebombed in World War II, had two cities destroyed by atomic bombs, and its political order was remade by a foreign occupier. Being a regional hegemon might be desirable, but trying to become one almost always makes a state less, rather than more, secure. Bids for hegemony fail for two main reasons. First, as defensive realists have long emphasized, there is a powerful tendency for major powers to balance against threats. When a powerful state is nearby, when its military forces seem tailored to project power against others, and when it seems to have revisionist ambitions, nearby powers typically band together to deter or defeat them. If a would-be hegemon reveals its aims by starting a war, balancing behavior becomes even more pronounced and effective. The second barrier to regional hegemony is nationalism. As Napoleon discovered when he invaded Spain, as the Soviet Union and United States both learned in Afghanistan, and as Moscow is now being reminded in Ukraine, local populations will make enormous sacrifices to repel invaders. Even nations that have been temporarily vanquished often remain restive and eager to throw off an aspiring hegemon’s yoke. The dissolution of the European colonial empires during the 20th century further illustrates how the spread of nationalist doctrines has strengthened resistance to foreign dominance. The United States is the one exception to this recurring tendency: It is the only regional hegemon in the modern era. Other would-be hegemons faced coordinated opposition from formidable and well-organized nation-states, but the United States was an ocean away from the other great powers and able to expand across North America without having to fight another major power or overcome a balancing coalition. The Indigenous population tried to resist, but it was weakened by its susceptibility to European diseases and divided into many loosely organized tribes and nations. Although Indigenous opposition to American expansion persisted until the late 19th century, the native tribes faced insurmountable collective-action problems and a dwindling population and were eventually swamped by an irresistible demographic tide. To put it plainly, the United States got lucky. Could China Become a Regional Hegemon Today? The conditions that allowed the United States to dominate the Western Hemisphere and exclude other major powers do not exist in Asia today. China may be stronger than any of its neighbors, but several of them are major industrial powers with considerable potential to check Chinese power, and the world’s other major power—the United States—remains committed to helping defend them. India’s population is now larger and significantly younger than China’s and its economy is growing more rapidly. Many of China’s neighbors are already balancing more energetically: Defense budgets are rising sharply, and Australia, India, and Japan are coordinating with each other and with the United States. The greater their fear of Chinese hegemony, the more vigorous such responses will be. In addition, India already has a nuclear arsenal and Japan or South Korea could acquire a nuclear deterrent if the need arose. Officials in Tokyo and Seoul have previously made it clear that they see this as a viable option should circumstances require, and possessing their own deterrent would further limit China’s ability to intimidate them. If China does not want more of its neighbors to acquire nuclear weapons, therefore, it should limit its ambitions and make such a step unnecessary. Nor are Asian powers likely to be swayed by Chinese President Xi Jinping’s suggestion that “it is for the people of Asia to run the affairs of Asia, solve the problems of Asia, and uphold the security of Asia.” Such statements are obviously intended to make the U.S. role in Asia seem less legitimate, but the belief that a shared “Asian” identity will override each individual state’s self-interest ignores the power of modern nationalism, which did not exist when the pre-modern, Sino-centric tributary system was in place. Nationalism is a powerful force in China, of course, but also in India, South Korea, Japan, Australia, and Vietnam. It is hard to imagine any of these states preferring subordination to Beijing to national autonomy. Lastly, modern surveillance and communications technology makes it much easier for states to identify threatening powers and coordinate defensive responses. A Chinese bid for hegemony in Asia would be impossible to disguise, and states threatened by this attempt could share concerns, pool resources, and formulate a collective response quickly. As the rapid and vigorous Western response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine illustrates, countries facing a common danger can act with surprising swiftness when necessary. If Regional Hegemony Is Not an Option, What Then? If China’s prospects for regional hegemony are limited, then what do the United States and China have to fight about? Each is a vast country populated by hundreds of millions of patriotic citizens. They have large and sophisticated economies that no outside power could successfully strangle, powerful conventional military forces, and second-strike nuclear capabilities. An enormous ocean separates them, and neither side could possibly mount a successful invasion of the other. Coexistence is not merely desirable; it is unavoidable. Yet China’s leaders could still decide to choose the same risky path that other would-be hegemons have followed. If they believed the regional balance of power heavily tilted in their favor, that nearby states could be bullied into neutrality, that one or two triumphs would render subsequent resistance impossible, and that other states in Asia would eventually regard Chinese primacy as legitimate, then the risks of a hegemonic bid (however ill-advised) would rise. In the worst case, Chinese leaders could convince themselves that conditions temporarily favored a bid for regional hegemony while at the same time fearing that the balance of power could turn against them decisively if the opportunity was not seized. This combination of wishful thinking and paranoia is that textbook condition for preventive war; precisely the logic that convinced German and Japanese leaders to launch unsuccessful bids for hegemony during the first half of the 20th century. The implications for the United States and its Asian partners are clear. On the one hand, they should work to mitigate the various factors that can impede effective balancing and could lead Beijing to erroneously conclude that a bid for hegemony might succeed. At the same time, however, the United States and its allies need to make it crystal clear that they not trying to threaten China’s independence or territorial integrity, undermine the authority of the Chinese Communist Party, or crash the Chinese economy. Reassurance is needed so that China’s leaders do not conclude that they have no choice but to pursue hegemony even if the odds of success are small. Consistent messaging will be essential. Although recent speeches by National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen were clearly intended to reassure Beijing about the scope and purpose of U.S. export controls and other economic measures, efforts to give NATO a strategic role in Asia and the more confrontational closing statement issued after the G-7 summit meeting earlier this month send a different signal, one that cannot help but heighten tensions On several occasions over the past three centuries, a great power concluded that its security required it to establish a dominant position over its neighbors. All but one of these attempts failed catastrophically. China would be unwise to make the attempt, but the United States and its allies would be equally unwise if their own actions unwittingly convinced Beijing that a risky bid for hegemony was still its best option.

In a traditional sense, China cannot be a revisionist power if it centers core bodies and principles of the existing order in their vision of the future. This complicates general arguments that China seeks to upend the existing system. However, China is not a status quo power either. Despite centering key international bodies like the U.N. and associated institutions, the promotion of multipolarity and particularistic universalism indicates that Chinese officials seek to erode what they view as American hegemony and the centrality of the Western liberal values the U.S. promotes as universal.

China’s foreign policy discourse does not necessarily represent an inherent threat to international order per se. After all, the international order has never been static and has always had competing interpretations, including by officials in Washington. However, these global initiatives do challenge the current dominant interpretation of the international order promoted by the United States. which is espoused in its “rules-based order” discourse. Consequently, to the extent that the current order must be unipolar and defined by universalist Western liberal values, China clearly represents a challenge.

The United States has to objectively assess the situation to determine whether China is an existential threat to its survival and act accordingly. Few researchers and scholars now believe that China doesn’t pose an existential threat to either the existence of the United States or the security of the international system. In an article published in Foreign Policy, Micheal D. Swaine argues that China does not pose an existential threat to the United States (Swaine, 2021). Politicians, military officers, and pundits take turns to highlight this issue but according to Swaine, the threat perception is not based on empirical data. Wong and Myers (2020), under the title “Officials Push US-China Relations toward Point of No Return” asserted that US government officials use rhetoric and criticism against China to get support in domestic elections, according to the other it was President Trump Policies that started a fundamental strategic and ideological confrontation between the two major powers. According to Li (2021), a famous Chinese western educated scholar, China is the only country in history which gained such huge amount of power without firing a single bullet or invading another country, so he doesn’t see China’s rise as an existential threat to the US (Shah, 2023). While the majority of research is concerned with the causes of confrontation and the possibility of conflict, no organized piece of work has been done on the process of Securitization, the process through which threats are being created through discourse so that extraordinary measures against that threat can be justified. As China being an existential threat to the US and international order cannot be justified by empirical evidence, actors like government officials, politicians, and pundits try to frame it as such to divert resources, attention, and focus toward that specified threat. The Securitization theory doesn’t rule out the possibility of conflict or cooperation, rather it presumes that both scenarios are possible. Further Securitization of the issue like seeing economic, political, technological, and cultural relations through the prism of security may exacerbate the already tense situation (Song, 2015). The American perception of China as an existential threat is not only based on China’s rise but also on a long history of animosity and distrust against Asians. In his book “Has China Won” Mahbubani (2020) argues that the animosity against the Asian nation is rooted in ‘Yellow Peril’ a racist metaphor that regards East Asians as an existential threat to Western world. In “The Myth of American Exceptionalism” Hodgson (2009) argues Securitization of US-CHINA Relations… that Americans believe that their political, economic, and moral values are superior to all other nations; therefore, they should be considered universal and admired by all. This sense of exceptionalism is wrong and is a barrier to understanding issues through reason. In a nutshell, looking at the relationship through a zero-sum game and a cold war mentality will further worsen the situation; therefore, a process of de-securitization is required in areas where there is a possibility of cooperation like trade, climate change, terrorism, and nuclear nonproliferation.

Even if diversion as a tactic is rare—and perhaps unlikely in the future—domestic unrest in China can create incentives to use force for other reasons. Chinese analysts often refer to the idea of “internal troubles, external aggression” (neiyou waihuan) to describe the “century of national humiliation,” a period that began in the mid-nineteenth century when the Qing dynasty’s decline and internal turmoil allowed foreign powers to seize land through “unequal treaties” and establish spheres of influence in the country. Later Chinese leaders have often feared that other countries would similarly seek to profit from China’s weakness, so the government has become sensitive to perceived external challenges or threats in periods of domestic duress. Historically, Chinese leaders have used force in such moments as a way to signal resolve to China’s adversaries, not to divert the public’s attention or increase social cohesion.

In October 1962, for example, China attacked India during the calamity of the Great Leap Forward after India had increased its military presence along the contested border, including in areas across from Tibet where the Chinese government had just suppressed a revolt. According to a senior Chinese general at the time, India strengthened its presence on the border because it saw China as “weak and easily bullied” amid famine, revolt, and tensions with the United States and the Soviet Union. Mao’s goal was not to divert the public’s attention but to stabilize the border by destroying the new Indian positions and correct any perception that China was weak.

Despite Axelrod’s assertions that the long-term adaptiveness of reactive aggression is poor, certain ecological contexts have been found to encourage hostile attributions and reactive aggression in response to ambiguous provocations. For example, rhesus macaque mothers who hold high dominance ranks socialize their 9-mo-old infants to display a pattern of high vigilance to threatening faces, probably as a short-term adaptive strategy to enable the offspring to maintain high rank (2). In the US South, a unique “culture of honor” promotes vigilance toward provocateurs, perceptual readiness to attribute hostile intent to others, and retaliatory aggression in response to being dishonored (3). Qualitative accounts of urban violence among minority males also point toward the importance of retaliating against being “dissed,” as in disrespected (4). Recent “Stand Your Ground” laws in the United States excuse retaliation against a perceived provocateur.

A pattern of hypervigilance to threat, hostile attribution of intent, and reactive aggression in response to provocation often comes at a cost to an individual within a society and to that society’s long-term health and well-being. A large body of psychological research in the United States indicates that, when an individual attributes hostile intent to a peer provocateur, the individual is likely to become anxious and escalate reactive aggression, leading in turn to chronic aggressive behavior problems (5). Children who consistently make hostile attributions about others have been shown to escalate aggression in response to provocation, to become chronically anxious, and to increase their aggressive behavior problems over time and grow into violent adults (6).

In Elizabethan theater, “alarums and excursions” was a stage direction calling for actors to rush about the stage in a chaotic clamor suggestive of battle. In American politics, threat inflation has a similarly theatrical role: it tries to confuse and excite an audience to win its support for some policy, often military excursions of some sort. This chapter explains why U.S. defense politics is especially prone to such behavior—why, that is, U.S. leaders serially exaggerate the nation’s vulnerability to national security threats. The explanation, in a nutshell, is that power gives the United States the opportunity to adopt expansive foreign policy goals. “Expansive” here refers not necessarily to attempts at expansion in the sense of territorial acquisition but to a militarily active and interventionist grand strategy. To heighten support for those goals, U.S. leaders exaggerate their contribution to domestic security. Over time, expansive foreign policy also generates societal interests tied to its survival. Those interests, most prominently national security organizations, inflate threats to protect their prerogatives. Educated amid that cacophony of threat inflation, new political leaders learn to echo it, either because doing so seems politically safe or because they believe it. Assertions of insecurity become a cultural habit of American elites. The chapter begins by defining threat inflation and describing how U.S. leaders use it. It then reviews political science and economics concepts showing how special interest groups dominate debates about risk. The second section shows how the growth of U.S. power distributes the costs of expansive foreign policies, thus undermining the formation of interest groups opposed to such policies. The next shows how power concentrates the benefits of those policies, forming interests that promote themselves with threat inflation. The last section discusses conditions that make for more balanced debate about threats and how to foster them. In explaining U.S. threat inflation, the chapter sheds light on which security threats are especially prone to exaggeration; on why reactions to new threats are often slow; on why fears tend to outlast the dangers that brought them; and, more generally, how debate fails to purge myth—how the democratic marketplace of ideas fails. Threat inflation is speech that gives an exaggerated sense of danger. It need not involve lying. U.S. leaders, for example, often threat‐​inflate by abusing worst‐​case scenarios—highlighting a dangerous possibility and omitting its probability. Shorn of context, the possibility implies more danger than reality merits. If you tell someone skiing bunny slopes in New Hampshire to beware of avalanches and illustrate the danger with tales of heliskiers buried by snow in the Canadian Rockies, you are not lying. But you have failed to point out that the danger of an avalanche in the White Mountains is remote. You are inflating skiing’s danger. Of course, in national security politics, exaggeration is rarely so blatant. It can be difficult to separate the prudent warning from threat inflation, especially when the speaker’s job is to warn. In the Semi‐​Sovereign People, E. E. Schattschneider imagines democratic politics as a street fight watched by a crowd. The fight’s outcome, he tells us, depends on the extent of the crowd’s involvement. So the brawlers may try to involve the crowd, depending on its disposition and on how the fight is going. In politics, he argues, beneficiaries of the policy status quo will seek to keep conflict narrow, whereas those seeking change will often try to broaden it. Activists frustrated by local politics might try to involve state government, and statewide combatants may look to the federal government. The full Congress can reverse its committees’ actions. The secretary of defense might reevaluate an army decision, and the president, driven by public opinion, might overrule him. In U.S. politics, threat inflation is often a shout of “danger!” meant to socialize conflict, an effort to energize public opinion. The U.S. system, according to Theodore Lowi, is especially prone to such appeals. Compared with dictatorships or even parliamentary governments, power in the United States is diffuse: spread among branches of government, committees, agencies, and private interest groups. Those entities are potential points of resistance to policy change. They create a powerful bias toward the status quo. Crises and wars unify public goals, overcoming the typical stasis. Invocations of insecurity attempt to create a similarly unifying sense of crisis that removes parochial barriers to collective action. Because policymakers always struggle to implement their proposals, alarmism is a regular feature of U.S. policy debate. It rarely works. But as with most shouts for help, the absence of initial success is likely to produce louder shouting, not quiet. Threat inflators are searching for arguments that win with the public. Another species of threat inflation defends the status quo. Advocates of security organizations and policies naturally defend them by references to the dangers that they confront. Such defenses shade easily into exaggeration, especially as the relevant threat lessens. The considerable academic literature dealing with how states misunderstand and mismanage danger generally focuses on errors of perception—psychological bias, ignorance, intelligence mistakes, and other communication and comprehension problems that prevent the state from correctly interpreting information. So the Nazi threat mounted without a proper response because nations slept, blind to its menace. The 9/11 attacks resulted from a “failure of imagination.” The United States invaded Iraq because it overestimated Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction arsenal. The solution to misperception is to see more clearly—correct for predictable biases, collect better intelligence, improve analysis of it, share information faster, and use better theory about enemy thinking.

Contemporary social theory might point to Michel Foucault, and the argument drawn from his writings that politics is the extension of war rather than the other way round. Given the interest in biopolitics and geogovernance within the discipline these matters are obviously relevant but the connection to peace needs to be thought carefully beyond formulations that simply assume it as the opposite of wars (Morrissey 2011). This is especially the case given the changing modes of contemporary warfare and the advocacy of violence as an appropriate policy in present circumstances. The modes of warfare at the heart of liberalism suggest that the security of what Reid and Dillon (2009) call the biohuman, the liberal consuming subject, involves a violent series of practices designed to pacify the world by the elimination of political alternatives. The tension here suggests an imperial peace, a forceful imposition of a state of non-war. In George W. Bush’s terms justifying the war on terror, a long struggle to eliminate tyranny (Dalby 2009a). Peace is, in this geopolitical understanding, what comes after the elimination of opposition. In late 2011 such formulations dominated discussions of the death of Colonel Gadaffi in Libya.¶ The dramatic transformation of human affairs in the last couple of generations do require that would-be peaceful geographers look both to the importance of non-violence and simultaneously to how global transformations are changing the landscape of violence and social change, all of it still under the threat of nuclear devastation should major inter-state war occur once again. The re-emergence of non-violence as an explicit political strategy, and in particular the use of Gene Sharp’s (1973) ideas of non-violent direct action in recent events pose these questions very pointedly. Geographers have much to offer in such re-thinking that may yet play their part in a more global understanding of how interconnected our fates are becoming and how inappropriate national state boundaries are as the premise for political action in a rapidly changing biosphere.¶ But to do so some hard thinking is needed on geopolitics, and on how it works as well as how peace-full scholarship might foster that which it desires. Linking the practical actions of non-violence from Tahrir Square to those of the Occupy Wall Street actions, underway as the first draft of this paper was keyboarded, requires that we think very carefully about the practices that now are designated in terms of globalization. Not all this is novel, but the geopolitical scene is shifting in ways that need to be incorporated into the new thinking within geography about war, peace, violence and what the discipline might have to say about, and contribute to, non-violence as well as to contestations of contemporary lawfare (Gregory 2006).¶ Whether the delegitimization of violence as a mode of rule will be extended further in coming decades is one of the big questions facing peace researchers. The American reaction to 9/11 set things back dramatically, an opportunity to respond in terms of response to a crime and diplomacy was squandered, but the wider social refusal to accept repression and violence as appropriate modes of rule has interesting potential to constrain the use of military force. The professionalization of many high technology militaries also reduces their inclination to involve themselves in repressing social movements, although here Mikhail Gorbachev’s refusal to use the Red Army against dissidents in Eastern Europe in the late 1980s remains emblematic of the changes norms of acceptable rule that have been extended in the last few generations.¶ A geography discipline seriously interested in peace needs to link the social processes on the relatively small scale such as the non-violent protests Megoran (2011) highlights, and the peaceful accompaniment actions that Koopman (2011) documents, to the larger geopolitical transformations of our times, to make the eminently geographical point that peace activities vary widely from place to place, but now are an important part of larger contemporary geopolitical transformations. ¶ Geopolitics has mostly been about rivalries between great powers and their contestations of power on the large scale. These specifications of the political world focus on states and the perpetuation of threats mapped as external dangers to supposedly pacific polities. Much geopolitical discourse specifies the world as a dangerous place, hence precisely because of these mappings, one supposedly necessitating violence in what passes for a realist interpretation of great powers as the prime movers of history (Mearsheimer 2001). Geopolitical thinking is about order and order is in part a cartographic notion. Juliet Fall (2010) once again emphasizes the importance of taken for granted boundaries as the ontological given of contemporary politics. Politics is about the cartographic control of territories, as Megoran (2011) too ponders regarding the first half of the twentieth century, but it also about much more than this, despite the fascination that so many commentators have with the ideal form of the supposedly national territorial state. Part of what geographers bring to the discussion of peace is a more nuanced geographical imagination than that found in so much of international studies (Dalby 2011a).¶ On the other hand much of the discussion of peace sees war as the problem, peace as the solution. Implied in that is geopolitics as the problem, mapping dangers turns out to be a dangerous enterprise insofar as it facilitates the perpetuation of violence by representing other places as threats to which our place is susceptible. But this only matters if this is related to the realist assumptions of the inevitability of rivalry, the eternal search for power as key to humanity’s self-organisation and the assumption that organized violence is the ultimate arbiter (Dalby 2010). Critical geopolitics is about challenging such contextualizations, and as such its relationships to peace would seem to be obvious, albeit as Megoran (2011) notes mostly by way of a focus on what Galtung (1969, 1971) calls negative peace. Given the repeated reinvention of colonial tropes in contemporary Western political discourse such critique remains an essential part of a political geography that grants peoples “the courtesy of political geography” (Mitchell and Smith 1991). Undercutting the moral logics of violence, so frequently relying on simplistic invocations of geographical inevitability, to structure their apologetics, remains a crucial contribution.¶ Both the practical matters of recent history and the scholarly contributions by geographers do not allow simple binary distinctions of peace and war to be used as the premise of either scholarship or political practice. History and scholarship suggest rather that peace is what comes after war; the relationship is temporal, stages in matters of violence, geography and reorganizing facts on the ground. Historically in the era of European warfare, coincident with the rise of modernity, that many people hope is now near its end, peace was that which was imposed by the victors, who in turn were the most powerful in whatever contest was followed by a “peace”. Much recent geographical scholarship suggests that post conflict re-construction is a mode of peace building literally (Kirsch and Flint 2011). But those of us who would challenge war as a human institution, or think about non-violence as a strategy for a better world, will not be satisfied with a geography that is concerned only to pick up the pieces and reconfigure them after they have been shattered by the latest round of organized violence.¶ The key points are that reconstruction is a violent transformation of society, a world where frequently neo-liberal globalization is seen as the imposition of social forms that will not resist its logics. Hence peace is what victors impose, an imperial peace that may eventually be quite welcome to those who benefit from the new arrangements. Is peace then post-war? Perhaps it can be understood in these terms. But the corollary is the equally important point that peace is also frequently what comes before the next war. The normal human situation these days is a matter of non-war, but it is far from clear where security is enforced that this is more than a limited form of negative peace. Without large-scale de-militarization then peace is just what happens between wars. But given this then one additional key point that geographers interested in war need to pay attention to is the matter of how peace fails, how conflict escalates and how geography matters in these processes (Flint et al 2009). Peacekeeping is frequently about geographical separation as the Orwellian names for contemporary walls in terms of lines of peace have it. But there is much more geographical thinking to be done about these matters and the scales of interactions across supposedly peaceful borders, not least where what matters most is state security and its ordering principles rather than local interactions across frontiers. This is so not least because of the marked current trend to build fences around states as the supposed solution to numerous security challenges (Jones 2011).¶ Putting matters into historical context also suggests that war is not what it used to be, at least not after the events of the 1940s. Negative peace is about preventing conflict; non-violence is about political strategies to delegitimise violence, to challenge the human norms of behavior that allow cultures of violence. It is important to link this to the issues of what are now called lawfare (Morrissey 2011), the use of law as power and coercion to set the rules of social and political life too. This has been a key part of the US strategy for a long time; shaping institutions to the benefit of the US economy has been what much of international relations has been about, but the larger benefits of constraining conflict are part of the larger process that international law struggles to legitimize. Rules of conduct matter in the international system and the wide-scale repudiation of the American invasion of Iraq in 2003 demonstrated this point clearly

We consider an instance when leader preferences might not take the commonly assumed form. Social psychologists, economists, and behavioral biologists have long explored how fairness motivates behavior, but scholars of IR generally neglect this mechanism. We examine how the prospects of unfair negotiated settlements can produce risk-loving behavior in leaders and how fairness concerns provide leaders with incentive not to pursue ever larger shares of a disputed good. We also expand on the literature on “voice,” in particular, to show that leaders have less incentive to accept settlements that appear imposed upon them. Thus, while aggressive public rhetoric can be used to signal credibility (Fearon 1994; Tomz 2007; Trager and Vavreck 2011) and mobilize support (for example, Baum 2002), such public rhetoric also makes it more difficult for the state’s adversaries to compromise and avoid war.3 We investigate the influence of fairness heuristics on approval and thus on leader incentives. Scholars cannot easily study these dynamics with observational data, however, owing to strategic selection effects (Lewis and Schultz 2003; Signorino 1999). Therefore, we use a randomized survey experiment administered on a large, nation-wide sample of the US adult population. The experiment involves a real-world—and still developing—dispute in which the United States and Russia have competing claims over a resource-rich territory in the Arctic. We independently and randomly vary three factors that influence public evaluations of presidential performance in international crises: (i) the aggressiveness of the foreign leader’s rhetoric, (ii) whether a negotiated settlement was reached or war occurred, and (iii) how much of the resource-rich territory each country ultimately obtained. After respondents read about the dispute and outcome, they were asked whether they approved or disapproved of how the president handled the situation. The results provide three central contributions to the understanding of international crisis dynamics. First, nonsatiated (monotonically increasing) utility functions do not always represent the preferences of leaders who seek to maximize voter approval. Contrary to commonly made assumptions, we find that negotiating for shares of the disputed good above 50 percent actually decreases presidential approval. In international contexts like the one analyzed below, democratic leaders lack a direct political incentive to strive for a highly favorable division of the good in question.

Four of the Court’s copyright cases addressed procedural issues. 28 The Court agreed with OSG’s recommended outcome and generally agreed with OSG’s analysis in all four. Most understandable was the Court’s deference to the government’s views in three cases calling for close interpretations of registration-related provisions of the 1976 Act. 29 The Copyright Office has substantial expertise on these issues because registering copyright claims is the Office’s principal responsibility.30 In a fourth copyright procedure case, OSG persuaded the Court that the equitable doctrine of laches should not be a complete defense to infringement claims, as this would undermine the ability of rightholders to recover some compensation for infringements that happened during the statutory limitations period. 31

OSG also persuaded the Court to defer to Congressional judgments about granting a twenty- year extension to the terms of existing copyrights and “restorations” of copyrights in foreign- authored works that had previously been in the public domain in the U.S. for failure to comply with U.S. formalities.32 OSG’s briefs emphasized the historical precedents for extending copyright terms and granting rights in intellectual creations previously thought to be in the public domain and argued that Congress had acted rationally in amending copyright law to achieve its legitimate objectives.33

In two high-profile twenty-first-century cases involving disruptive digital technologies, the Court’s analysis of technology developer liability for copyright infringement was significantly different than OSG’s, even though the Court ultimately agreed with OSG that the petitioners should prevail. One was Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Inc. v. Grokster, Ltd., 205 which considered whether developers of peer-to-peer (p2p) file-sharing technologies could be held indirectly liable for its users’ file-sharing copyright infringements. The second was American Broadcasting Corp. v. Aereo, Inc., 206 which considered a direct infringement claim against the maker of a technology enabling subscribers to watch broadcast television programs on their computers or mobile devices.

Had the Court adopted the petitioners’ and OSG’s arguments, developers of innovative technologies enabling users to access and enjoy digital content would have faced increased litigation risks. In both cases, amicus curiae briefs filed by major technology companies and public interest organizations warned the Court not to adopt the petitioners’ (and OSG’s) views about liability rules when copyright owners sue technology companies for direct or indirect infringement.207 In both cases, the Court heeded those warnings and issued narrower rulings than the petitioners sought and OSG recommended.

Of the sixteen copyright cases in which OSG has participated as amicus since 1978, the Court has disagreed with OSG in ten (64%) (with one case still pending). 366 This contrasts with the findings of empirical studies of OSG’s influence in the 2010s which found that OSG’s views prevailed in roughly three-quarters of the cases in which it filed as amicus. 367 These data are consistent with empirical findings about OSG’s amicus success over several decades. 368

Another indicator of OSG’s influence has been the frequency with which the Court cites its briefs or arguments. Empirical studies have shown that OSG’s briefs are “significantly more likely to be cited” by the Court than amicus briefs filed by other entities.378 One study covering a fifty-year period in the mid- to late-twentieth century reported that OSG briefs were cited in just over 40% of the Court’s cases in which OSG filed.379

Citations to OSG’s briefs or arguments in the Court’s copyright cases are in keeping with this indicator of its influence. Of the Court’s seventeen copyright rulings in which OSG participated, OSG’s briefs or arguments were mentioned in nine (53%).380 But only in Eldred did the Court cite OSG’s briefs repeatedly and in a positive manner.381

The Office of the Solicitor General (OSG) has historically been very influential with the Supreme Court, especially as an amicus curiae in private litigant cases (75% win rate overall, and more than 90% in patent cases). This Article is the first to consider OSG’s record of success in the Court’s copyright cases. Over the past forty-five years (starting with the effective date of the Copyright Act of 1976), OSG has had a perfect record of success in the Court’s copyright procedure and constitutional challenge cases, but a more mixed record of success in cases calling for substantive interpretations of copyright law and in copyright remedies cases. In some of these cases, the Court agreed with OSG about which litigant should prevail, but not with OSG’s analysis of the issues, ultimately issuing much narrower decisions than OSG recommended. In others, the Court disagreed with OSG about which litigant should prevail, as well as with its analysis of the substantive law issues. OSG has typically argued, seemingly due to the influence of the U.S. Copyright Office, for higher protectionist positions in the substantive analysis cases than the Court adopted. The Court has generally taken a broader view of the potential implications of its rulings for the public and for affected industry sectors than OSG espoused, often heeding concerns expressed in lower protectionist amicus briefs. The Court has also relied more heavily than OSG on its past copyright decisions. To better serve the constitutional goals of copyright law, the Article suggests that OSG should limit its amicus filings in copyright cases to those in which the government has a direct and meaningful interest.

These disparities in outcomes raise the question of: why? Why is the SG more than twice as successful at persuading the Court when it is an amicus in a patent case as compared to when it is a party? For starters, the roles are inherently different. When the SG is an amicus, it adopts the role of a “mediator” or “advisor” to the Supreme Court and is expected to take the “long view,”188 even sometimes presenting arguments that contravene the practices of the federal government. For instance, in Ass’n for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics, Inc., 189 the SG’s position—which the Supreme Court ultimately adopted—was that isolated DNA is not patent-eligible subject matter because it is a “natural phenomenon” but that artificially created DNA sequences (socalled cDNA) are sufficiently man-made to be patent eligible.190 In its brief, the SG explained that, though the Patent Office had been issuing patents on isolated DNA for several years, the litigation had “prompted the United States to reevaluate whether such patents are consistent with the settled principle that patent protection does not extend to products of nature” and that, “[b]ased on that review, the United States concluded that . . . isolated DNA is not patent eligible subject matter.”191 Notably, officials from the Patent Office were not listed on the cover of the SG’s brief, as is customary in patent cases192 and other cases in which a federal agency is involved.193

In patent law, the SG acts as the government's fire dispatcher, situated at the intersection between the PTO, the President, and other executive branch principals and agencies. In this role, the SG decides which alarms are genuine, which fires can be extinguished, and when and where firefighters should be allocated. When private litigants allege that a PTO regulation diverges from the President's preferences or the Supreme Court's precedents, the SG decides whether these allegations are true and whether the issue is worthy of the Court's review." ' If the SG decides that review is warranted, the SG selects the United States' position, given the relevant legal and policy (and political) considerations. In selecting this position, the SG canvasses the government, notifying the President and other non-PTO actors that the matter is significant and, if necessary, asserting its litigating authority to override the PTO's established policies.

Myriad, analyzed in Parts II and III, exemplifies this pattern. Opposition to the PTO's guidelines strengthened over time. Public interest litigants challenged Myriad's patents on the BRCAi and BRCA2 genes in Europe and then the United States."' The SG's control of the Myriad litigation brought the PTO's guidelines to the attention of the SG's principals and other agencies and ensured that the United States' position integrated their perspectives. Moreover, the Myriad litigation provided these parties with an opportunity to contract the scope of patent-eligibility without directing the PTO change its rules. By requesting the Federal Circuit (and later Supreme Court) to invalidate Myriad's patents, the SG shifted the costs of upsetting reliance interests to the courts and avoiding unconstitutional takings issues."1 2

On rare occasions, the Court will solicit the perspective of the SG’s Office on the certworthiness of a petition through a call for the views of the Solicitor General (CVSG). Extant research suggests that the CVSG is another information-gathering tool that the Court uses to take advantage of the SG’s independence and objectivity (Days (1994), and unmatched expertise in federal policy and complex regulatory matters. For example, Thompson and Wachtell (2009) find that 91% of the CVSG cases reviewed between 1997 and 2004 involved complex regulatory and statutory schemes, while only 7% involved significant issues of constitutional law. This statistical breakdown is consistent with the Justices’ competence in dealing with questions of constitutionality, their relative unfamiliarity with regulatory systems, and the SG’s obvious comparative advantage in advising the Court on issues related to federal regulation. The authors also observe that, although the SG’s response to a CVSG is almost always accompanied with a suggestion for how the Court should rule on the case (assuming the petition is accepted), the Court’s ultimate decision on the merits is uncorrelated with the SG’s recommendations. Finally, Thompson and Wachtell point to a plethora of anecdotal evidence that decouples the CSVG from any political motivations, further supporting our treatment of the CSVG indicator as exogenous to the final votes in our case-outcomes model. 27

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday denied the federal government’s request to argue in an upcoming case, something the court has done just three times in the past two decades and twice in under a year.

While the sample size is pretty small— the two most recent “token denials” could be “the beginning of a subtle message from the Court for the SG to engage in more self-regulation” when asking for precious argument time, said University of Texas law professor Stephen I. Vladeck.

The SG is highly successful. During the Rehnquist Court era, the SG won over 62 percent of all cases in which the United States was a direct party and over 66 percent of cases in which she participated as amicus curiae (Epstein, Segal, Spaeth, and Walker 2007). Numerous additional studies provide systematic confirmation of the SG’s success (e.g., Deen, Ignagni, and Meernik 2003; Segal 1990; Segal and Reedy 1988). Whether trying to persuade the Court to hear (or not hear) a case at the agenda-setting stage or winning a case at the merits stage, the SG usually gets what she wants.

Still, scholars present various assorted theories on why she so commonly succeeds. The longest-standing view argued that much like a “Tenth Justice,” the SG serves as an agent of the Court (Caplan 1988). She plays a special role for the Court, screening cases and advocating positions that advance the goals of the Court as an institution (Salokar 1992). As one former clerk told us, the SG is expected to “play as an honest broker of the facts” when communicating with the Court. Perry’s (1991, 132) seminal text likewise is replete with comments from justices who assert that the SG aids the Court:

The solicitor general is considered the No. 2 member of the Justice Department, serving right under the attorney general. The person filling that role argues the federal government’s case before the Supreme Court.

The defendant in the case is Robert Bonta, the state’s attorney general who took over from the original defendant, Xavier Becerra. Becerra is now secretary of Health and Human Services.