Rising titans, falling giants: how Great Powers exploit power shifts

Abstract

Over the last several decades, the rise of China and fears about the relative decline of the United States have generated two parallel literatures. On the one hand, the end of the uni-polar moment has seen a resurgence of new theoretical and empirical work on the politics of great power rise and decline. The 1980s, of course, gave us a broad literature on power transitions, suggesting that (1) power shifts resulted in part from unproductive investments and strategic overreach on the part of those powers in decline (Organski and Kugler 1980; Gilpin 1981; Kennedy 1987; Calleo 1987); (2) rising states and declining states were apt to come into conflict with one another as power changed hands; (3) there was at least some possibility that international institutions might cushion the transition and sustain some degree of cooperation even "after hegemony" (Keohane 1984; Webb and Krasner 1989). China's rise has motivated a new wave of work that challenges and extends this older literature. It examines, among other things, the sources of rise and decline (e.g., Beckley 2018); the strategies of rising and declining states (e.g., Murray 2018; Ward 2017; Edel-stein 2017; Paul 2016); and the consequences of these strategies both for the states themselves and "international order" more generally (e.g.