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US economic statecraft and great power competition

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 October 2022

James Lee Open the ORCID record for James Lee [Opens in a new window]  and
Richard Maher
James Lee*
Affiliation:
Institute of European and American Studies, Academia Sinica; 128, Section 2, Academia Road, Nankang, Taipei 115, Taiwan; UC Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation
Richard Maher
Affiliation:
Independent scholar, Daphne, AL, USA
*
*Corresponding author: James Lee, Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

This article develops a conceptual framework for explaining variation in the United States’ economic statecraft in the Cold War and the present day, focusing on how US officials perceived the type of geoeconomic capability that its rivals possessed and the type of national security challenge that they posed. This framework specifies four ideal-type strategies on the part of the United States: economic containment, national economic competition, technological containment, and national technological competition. Analyses of U.S. strategy toward the Soviet Union, China, and Japan support the theory. These ideal types explain why, in the rivalry with Japan in the 1980s, the United States openly engaged in competition but did not adopt containment, relying on Voluntary Export Restraints, currency devaluation agreements, and bilateral semiconductor agreements rather than placing Japan on something historically analogous to the Commerce Department's contemporary Entity List or targeting Japan with comprehensive export controls through an institution like CoCom. These ideal types (and the theory behind them) also explain why the United States has implemented containment measures against specific Chinese companies but has not pursued a systematic “decoupling” of the US and Chinese economies.

Keywords

geoeconomicsUS–China relationsgreat power competitionCold Wareconomic statecraft
Type
Research Article
Information
Business and Politics , Volume 24 , Special Issue 4: U.S.-China Trade War , December 2022 , pp. 332 - 347
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of V.K. Aggarwal

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