Asymmetric Interdependence and Statecraft: Building Knowledge to Explicate Great Power Coercion Dilemmas at the Security-Economy Nexus
Abstract
Research Problem: Why are threats, sanctions, or limited use of force against weaker great power rivals often self-defeating across the spectrum of high intensity to grey zone conflict? Do economic structures and deep/complex commercial ties between states and firms affect the frequency, intensity, and effectiveness of deterrence/compellence/escalation strategies? Do great powers share assessments of national trajectories, interests, interdependence, competitive advantages, and trade-offs across security and economic domains in respective coercive bouts? These questions are timely as Washington faces a resurgent Russia and rising China. Economic interdependence and power asymmetries with these states create distinctive coercion dilemmas at the security-economic nexus for the U.S. Yet, the canonical literature on coercion separates economic and strategic analyses, draws from a narrow empirical base, and advances mono-causal arguments, while newer literature addresses shifting power balances, the relevance of non-traditional tools across domains, and the rise of non-state actors. As coercion/escalation processes yield mixed outcomes, predictive models require empirically rich/dynamic explication of variables that shape national preferences and strategies across security and economic domains; the focus of this project.Proposed Methods: The project will disaggregate, induce, and validate basic knowledge concerning the conditions and processes of great power coercion. We will systematically explore and test-- meshing datasets, and employing multilingual big data analytics, interactive visualizations, and qualitative methods-- both extant and emergent patterns, preferences, stakeholders, dispositions, causal pathways, and operative conditions that characterize Russia and China~s approaches. Analyses across kinetic domains will be augmented by structural, firm-level, and cross-sectoral dimensions to economic interdependence in order to compare/contrast/integrate respective drivers and capacity of hybrid coercive strategies. Validated hypotheses will inform development of meta-models of cross-domain strategic interaction, with basic insights tested in critical U.S.-Russia and U.S-China cases of coercive diplomacy. To probe the generalizability and policy trade-offs, we will develop/visualize scenarios for future U.S. competitive strategies that will be critiqued in dialogues with international defense and security experts.Anticipated Outcome: Inductive and deductive analyses will systematically disaggregate and validate trends in preferences and causal impact of various stakeholders of Russian and Chinese foreign economic and security policies. These will constitute the micro-foundations for developing new models of strategic interaction among asymmetrically interdependent state rivals across different regional, geopolitical, and economic contexts.Potential Impact on DoD Capabilities & Broader Implications for Defense: This project will offer novel, empirically-grounded, and systematic diagnoses of current and prospective Russian and Chinese strategic thinking and behavior across multiple domains to uncover discrete preferences and capacity for complex strategic competition. By integrating these findings into meta-models of strategic interaction, it also will generate/refine analytical frameworks to assess the modalities, trade-offs, and outcomes of deep and asymmetric interdependence for cross-domain coercion and escalation management. Theoretically generated scenarios, supported by big data/visual analytics, will highlight plausible signals to inform (and stress-test) counter- strategies and hybrid defense postures aimed at widening the space for U.S. advantage in gray-zone competition with resurgent but asymmetrically interdependent great power rivals.
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- Aug 15, 2019
- Source ID
- N000141912474
Entities
People
- Adam Stulberg
Organizations
- Georgia Tech Research Corporation
- Office of Naval Research
- United States Navy