Thesis advisor: Robert Ross / The regional great power competition between the United States and China is escalating in various dimensions such as economic, political, and security realms. Who instigates such tension and how? To answer these questions, this paper inquires whether it is the declining power, the United States, or the rising power, China, that causes regional tension to heighten. Applying the theories on power transition and power transition war to the three case studies on South Korea, Taiwan, and the South China Sea dispute in Vietnam, how the United States is provoking China to adopt policies that increase tension will be examined. / Thesis (MA) — Boston College, 2022. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Political Science.

Which grand strategies do Great Powers adopt towards rising challengers? When do Great Powers conciliate their potential rivals, and when do they opt for strategies of containment? In this master’s report, I outline an argument to answer these and related questions. I add to the existing literatures on grand strategy and power transitions in several key respects. First, I model power shifts between Great Powers as contests over access to externally located benefits rather than as contests over power for its own sake. Second, I emphasize the weight of domestic politics in shaping states’ preferences over the apportionment of these benefits. Third, I highlight the role of diplomacy in determining whether established Great Powers choose to conciliate or else contain potential rivals. Empirically, I provide four vignettes of Great Power responses to rising states: the United States’ strategy towards Japan during the Cold War; Britain’s appeasement of the United States, 1890-1914; the United States’ containment of the Soviet Union under Ronald Reagan; and Britain’s containment of Wilhelmine Germany. / text

Yes / Are nuclear weapons still relevant to global security? Compared with the nuclear confrontation in the depths of the Cold War, nuclear weapons and deterrence appear to have lost their salience. Considering the conflicts in which the major powers engaged, the focus in strategic studies changed to counterinsurgency, counterterrorism, and subconventional conflict.2 Only recently, with the conflict in Ukraine and the increasingly confrontational relationship between the United States and China has this narrative come into question. The general perception on international security exhibits a strange paradox. On the one hand the US-led military interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq and other parts, the conflicts in the Middle East and Africa, the nuclearization of North Korea and the conflict between India and Pakistan among other regional security issues have given rise to a view that the modern world is less secure than ever, and we live in a world of chaos riven by unpredictable patterns of violence. By contrast, Steven Pinker has demonstrated the casualties from armed conflict are at their lowest point in human history, and interstate warfare has virtually ceased to exist as a phenomenon.3 The imminence of a global nuclear war in which at a minimum hundreds of millions of people would die appears to have dissipated. In some respects, it appears that war has become almost a phenomenon of the past. Most of the recent literature on nuclear weapons has focused on regional crises areas, such as South Asia (India and Pakistan) or the Korean peninsula.4 However, the modernization of arsenals by the nuclear powers, the integration of strategic conventional and nuclear weapons in strategic doctrines and the more confrontational dynamics in Great Power politics is cited as evidence that the risk of nuclear use is increasing. This paper contests the emerging narratives on an increased threat of nuclear conflict and considers the sources of insecurity in the contemporary period and in particular the risks of armed conflict between the United States, Russia, and China in order to assess the role of nuclear weapons in contemporary security.

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This dissertation seeks to conceptualise and operationalise the concept of soft balancing in international relations by articulating a “theory of tripartite strategic balancing” which is applicable to both international and regional unipolar systems. It has a twofold purpose: one theoretical and the other empirical. First, it seeks to develop a theory of tripartite strategic balancing which encompasses three forms of strategic balancing: internal, external, and soft balancing. The second part seeks to test the theory’s utility in explaining international political outcomes in the post-Cold War international system. In particular, it seeks to ascertain whether and how “second-tier great powers” have strategically balanced against the United States on a global level since the end of the Cold War. The analyses will focus largely on the foreign policies of Russia and France – the chief soft balancers. However, this dissertation also seeks to extend the concept of soft balancing into the regional level of analysis by examining whether and how minor-regional powers soft balance against regional unipolar leaders. For instance, it will examine whether and how the Russian Federation has been soft balanced against by states in the “European Near Abroad.” The analyses will focus primarily on the foreign policies of Poland – the chief soft balancer in the region. The dissertation will employ three in-depth case studies – the Kosovo Crisis (1999), the Iraqi wars (1991-2003), and the Georgia Crisis (2008) – to verify whether or not tripartite strategic balancing is actually occurring as the theory predicts. It will heavily rely on sources and interviews conducted during my time working at the United Nations Security Council and the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. These findings seek to contribute a more nuanced strand of thinking to the realist paradigm in international relations, and they offer practical implications for both US and Russian foreign policymaking.