 For those of you who don't know me, my name is Peter Dombrowski. Greetings to everyone, the participants, the speakers, my co-sponsors, Laura Cavallaro, who is the Will College administrative person who's taking care of me and keeping me on the right track. I want a special thanks to Dan and Alex, who at the end of the semester managed to carve out the time to do a talk. I will show this. Well, it doesn't do very well without backwards, but their book, Exit from Hegemony, we have the unraveling of the American global order. I think they're going to talk about some of their book and maybe address some of the issues that would be relevant for the presidential transition, and frankly, whatever they want to talk about within the broad topic, as I think we'd all like to hear what they have to say. Before we begin, I just have a small bit of housekeeping. This fall, I was awarded the Ruger Chair of National Security Economics at the Naval War College. This was held by Ambassador John Cloud previously, and I will have this for the next four or five years at a minimum. There's many activities that this chair will engage with, lectures online or hopefully at some point in person, are only part of the drill. I think there'll be four or five in the particular series next year, and anybody that wants to get on a mailing list, let us know. I can include you on the invitations. Of course, those of you that are joining us from the BU Group and around can also let Rizela and Kaya know. It is my great pleasure to co-host with Rizela and Kaya because they have provided a home away from home for me at BU in their political economy of security group. A lot of me to go up and join their seminars and present and talk with a lot of really interesting folks. It's great to be finally able to reciprocate with a little bit on my own. Rizela, did you want to say something before I have one final point? Thanks for all of you for joining us today. For those not familiar, we have a workshop for people presenting, workshopping, anything, policy papers through academic papers that look at the intersection of political economy and security. We are interdisciplinary. We have mostly political scientists. We have historians and hopefully some more historians coming in as well. I'll send around an email soon to everyone. We have seven or six presentations coming up in the winter spring workshops if anyone wants to join. If you want to present with us, we would love to have you. We love to encourage graduate students particularly and those emerging scholars to give them and amplify their work and their voices. Yeah, that's it. Happy to be here and looking forward to having this conversation. The last thing I want to say is a little bit about the approach today. I know most of you have done a million Zoom sessions over the last nine months, but just to sort of summarize how we're going to do it here. Alex and Dan will talk for 30 or 40 minutes. There will be 45 minutes. Give or take a few left for Q&As from anybody in the audience. I'll probably take the first question to get things rolling. Then those of you out there in the audience, please use the hand raising function and or put just a summary or some kind of indication of what kind of question you're asking and Kaia is going to sort of group questions and try to give us a little structure to the Q&A sessions. Roughly at 1.30 we will pack up because the Will College students have classes and thank you very much for taking the time out of your day. So over to Alex and Dan. All right. I'm going to start the presentation and as I do that I just want to thank everybody for coming. It's really not an imposition. You know, enough of us here are academics or academic adjacent to know that there's nothing that we like to do more than talk about our work in front of a semi-captive audience as it were. So now before I start, does this all look, do you don't see any weird floating windows do you? Anything like that? You see a full screen? Okay. All right. So thanks again for having us. We are here to talk about exit from hegemony and this title is actually from a different presentation, but it fits what we're going to talk about anyway, which is that what the implications for the incoming Biden administration are and essentially our bottom line is that it will make a lot of difference in foreign policy, but it won't alter the fundamental drivers of geopolitical change. Note that our book cover reflects when we wrote this book, which was, you know, which is about, you know, over a year to two years ago and it came out in April and the press really thought that this was the way to go. So we got a picture of Trump's rear side. Obviously that's, you know, that's a little bit itself has potentially exited and we're hoping that when we do the paperback edition, which we will have a lot more to say about, you know, kind of post-Trump environment that maybe they'll maybe they'll add Biden to the mix. But obviously that's the kind of change that now sort of structures some of our thinking and some of what we're going to say is the incoming Biden presidency and the kinds of arguments that are floating around about what it ought to be doing and how those intersect with the arguments we've been making for the last few years. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to begin with an over and Alex will take over at certain points. I'm going to begin with an overview of the main argument. I like to put some of the punchlines out front. We'll talk a little bit about conceptualizing international order because some of the vocabulary we use might be a little bit unfamiliar because we've sort of made it up in part. We'll talk about basic mechanisms of order contestation. We'll provide examples of the way that those mechanisms of order contestation have accelerated and become more consequential for the U.S. the U.S. system as we sometimes call it the United States international system and its hegemonic system. And then we'll talk about some implications for the Biden administration. Can you hear a bunch of noise in the background by the way? Hey Lira you can't have that on you have to move. She's got her headphones on. Okay great all right so thanks terrific all right. So all right all right so yeah okay all right. So if you've been following like the the the op-ed pages and the forum policy and foreign affairs style outlets for the last you know for a while but even particularly in the last month or so you've probably seen a lot of people making arguments about what a U.S. grand strategy should be in a post-trop environment. There are a lot of options on the table one of which is the restorationist position that says that you know fundamentally there's nothing about current trends that can't be reversed lays a lot of the blame for erosion of U.S. power and influence on Trump himself says this is more of a short term thing that you know the proper strategy can correct and we just ought to go back to kind of doing what we've been doing what we're doing under the Obama administration for example and that will kind of solve all of the problems of U.S. leadership. We have a position that says that we on the other side that says that we should adopt a grand strategy for strength that the whole pursuit of primacy or leadership as a sort of soft way of saying primacy that's all wrong and it's dangerous for the United States and that the lesson of the last four years is that we ought to really kind of I would say retrench but apparently that's not the right thing to say anymore we ought to engage in restraint. We have people who say that you know essentially it's not that we can restore but we got to kind of keep the status quo anti where it is kind of prevent further damage to the U.S. position and that's the way things ought to be. We have of course the great power conflict people the GPCRs which range everywhere from you know we're in a world of new realpolitik and Trump punctured the illusions of liberal internationalism all the way to we're in Cold War 2.0 and a full spectrum political conflict with China and Russia usually. We have the kind of reformers and these range the gamut from kind of center left to progressives to some conservative internationalists who say that you know we can't keep on doing things the way that things were being done but we but we still ought to kind of focus on a lot of the kinds of core goals and strengths of the United States but we ought to reform institutions reconstruct them create new institutions or new arrangements that might better suit the current period. Obviously we always have the offshore balancers hanging out telling us that that's what we should be doing because that's always the case and then there's the position we take which doesn't really fit very well on a bumper sticker that reflects a synthesis of some of the stuff which is that we need to adjust to a more contentious international order but this is not the same thing as the the GPC wager as we come to understand it that we should reform where we can but not necessarily try to reform with the eye towards creating making everything better and that in general we need to navigate a more competitive environment when we think about U.S. security foreign policy and national interests but that does not necessarily mean any of these kinds of positions as a kind of you know that that it's require a lot more pragmatism so to get there let's talk about the argument of the book our basic argument is the bottom line U.S. global hegemony is over with an emphasize on global the United States can still and has can still if it plays its cards right be the most powerful country or at least we the most powerful coalition of powers in the world for some time to come but that that any kind of pretence to restoring to where things were in the 2000s just forget about it that indeed the processes of hegemonic erosion are much further along than even some of the decline is think they are that we've been much witnessing them for well over a decade now and it's only that the sort of it's only sort of that we've sort of retroactively become aware of them but they've really been going on for much longer that they are rooted in the good old thing that everybody who studies hegemony knows about which are power transitions shifts in the relative distribution of power shifts primarily an economic output towards China and East Asia are driving a lot of these dynamics but that in that Trump when we understand him properly was an accelerant and a symptom but not a cause we talk about three exits because you know you got to have something like this apparently if you're going to do a quasi trade book so we have three exits we have great power challenges that's exit from above we have weaker state challenges those are from below and we have counter order movements that are challenges or exits from within the core of the contemporary order one of our kind of takeaways to although we're not going to emphasize that so much I'm sure it'll come up the Q&A is that we think that you can have the implosion of hegemonic orders without any kind of great power war and so while the debate over the Thucydides trap is interesting there's a way in which it probably distracts us from how hegemonic orders collapse which is usually before you even get to the war in the first place so let me talk a little order conversation and I'll start by talking a little bit about how we think about international order so international order is one of those terms that you know gets bandied around a lot right now they're really people don't usually tend to define it when they do they fall back on this kind of rules norms and arrangement of provision but in our view international order properly understood is just much larger than any single analytics so you want to choose a kind of heuristic or an analytic that's going to help you kind of tell the story that you think is the right story to tell and for us that means separating international order into two facets one of which is the what we call the architecture of international order and that's what I just talked about the rules and norms it's mostly what you hear about when you think you hear about liberal order you know notions of economic openness notions of you know norms of economic openness norms of sovereign equality you know you talk about conversation about international order in terms of things like debates about responsibility to protect and whether or not that's a that's a that's an impermissible alteration in basic rules of international order or it's it's a consistent with kind of commitments to liberalism but our argument is that there's also an infrastructure and that that infrastructure is a lot more important than it usually gets in terms of attention in most of the works about international order and that infrastructure is composed of the networks the routine practices the flows that are kind of the sinews of order they undergird order if you want to continue these metaphors in a hegemonic system they are hegemonic infrastructure and so for some of you a lot of what we're talking about the way you'll be most familiar with it are the kind of systems of joint exercises on the on the security side the way that United States engages in all these routine military exercises interoperability mechanisms even though we never really get interoperability routine you know yearly bilaterals with certain countries the multilateral arrangements were embedded in officer rotations and and particularly and also a exchange of training arrangements all those things in the security system are really fundamental components of that infrastructure and they're also parallels in the trade system parallels in the the sort of international cultural system diplomatic ties and diplomatic institutions provide a lot of the infrastructure of contemporary international order and that these are mutually implicating in the fact that they're mutually implicating at a theoretical level if you want to think about mutual constitution of agents and structures and layers of structure that's the kind of thing we have in mind on a more practical level what this means for us is that contestation over one of the aspects kind of implications for the other aspect even when the parties involved don't necessarily mean it so you can get contestation over architecture that can affect or reconfigure infrastructure and you get to get contestation over infrastructure that can or even contestation around infrastructure that isn't aimed at changing rules and norms but does have that effect and we'll some of the examples we work through will be examples of precisely this happening if you're on kind of the military security side what this means is you can have changes and norms that affect the ability of the US to maintain its hegemonic infrastructure and this can erode things we normally think about as hard power resources like American force projection capability through basing and access arrangements for example we use an ecology metaphor in the book I don't want to go too far deep into that but occasionally we'll use language that will smack of kind of ecosystems and ecology this is a mixing of metaphors but it's how we sort of conceive of all of these put together okay so logic to contestation well in our view there are kind of two primary categories that actually almost all contestation combines in one way or another the first of the and those are really kind of two things we borrow this from a lot of literature out there also some other work that we've done independently but wedging and brokerage so wedging that's the term that tim proffered uses in his work often you see this is divide and rule divide and conquer brokerage is about the connection of ties I'll walk through that in more detail in a second but there are some examples of the ways in which actors in order consultation combine wedging and brokering that I just want to flag to kind of orient to you so one of those are what we will call order inoculation strategies and these often involve wedging and brokerage at the civil society level designed to demobilize western NGOs and other kinds of civil society transmission mechanisms that can push liberal rights or or democracy on states that don't necessarily want it we have a encouraging counter order movements abroad so you know Russia has for a long time in Europe been supporting far right and far left groups also been astroturfing say green movements to affect some of these to demobilize certain policies like energy independence others to actually try to undermine NATO cohesion or EU cohesion this is a very kind of standard way of doing things international politics that's been around for centuries we also have wooing strategic partners are a way that you can find these two things you will show you a bunch of that in practice at the different levels but I want to go a little bit more now that hopefully that'll give you some sense of what we're talking about into the actually the way these work and sort of graphical terms so this is supposed to represent don't worry too much about keynote doesn't have a lot of countries in it so I grabbed two continents in the United States to kind of represent the you know white red and green but you can think about these as sort of states or you know international organizations or whatever let's talk about states so there you have ties between states and these ties can take the form of alliances dense diplomatic activity dense trade relationships the kinds of things that I mentioned as being a kind of crucial parts of the infrastructure of international orders and wedging is simply activity aimed to break that apart right to decrease the strength of those ties to decrease the density of those ties and ultimately in some cases actually destroy or end those ties themselves and there are multiple ways in which actors can engage in wedging strategies or divide and will divide and conquer strategies and they can any kind of carrot any kind of offer made to one side to try to get them to move away from the other side wooing strategic partners any kind of threat designed to try to break apart that relationship a coercive threat need for example to a state saying if they maintain an alliance a relationship that they'll suffer economic sanctions or military sanctions of various kinds and then usually what you see in practice are combinations of carrots and sticks often are targeted in fact at multiple at multiple levels of analysis and you know so you know targeted at domestic interest groups and targeted domestic parties and then targeted at interstate relations and diplomats often all of these things are a play in wedging strategies and it's important to note that these things can occur at any any kind of scale at they can be interstate domestic between international organizations and we're seeing a lot of that going on and one of the key arguments we make actually in the book is that power transition these are kind of things that happen all the time they're a normal part of the repertoire of power politics but the power transitions really exacerbate them and what power transitions do in essence is they give resources they create changes in the allocation of resources of states in the system primarily they give resources to rising powers who are not part of the coalition that has been maintaining order and those no resources are resources that can be used for wedging strategies they can be used as carrots and they can be used as sticks moreover power transitions we all know this is like you know 101 hegemonic stability 30 attend to produce revisionist sentiments and they do so in part because you get powers that have more ability to shape international order but didn't have as much of a say in how international order looked and so they often want to make changes of various sorts they also on the flip side can cause the incumbent powers to want to revise international order because you know this international order that they view as serving them really well is all of a sudden leading to powers or new rising powers who they don't necessarily want to be rising and so they themselves can see reasons to try to change aspects of international order at the domestic level oftentimes there are winners and losers a lot of citizens for example and declining states feel that loss of their status and status anxiety associated with it and they can then want to see changes in order maybe oftentimes they're the people within the more powerful states might be losing distributionally because of the same factors that are causing a rise in wealth elsewhere you also have distributional effects and rising powers that can affect revisionist sentiments and so that tends to increase that that tends to mean that power transitions both create kind of the means and also the will among a lot of actors to try to try to engage in order contestation and there are a bunch of things related to brokerage which is I'm going to now turn if wedging is breaking apart ties then brokerage is the opposite brokerage is the creating creation of new ties the linking up of previously unconnected social sites and this should just can be a little confusing because in in the contentious politics literature brokerage is the creation of new linkages but it also is a subject position or a network position that is being a broker and if you know if you've ever been in a situation in which you are in a brokerage relationship you are the only person connecting to other people or you are the go-between for example in a negotiation or you are in a social circle where you know you've ever been a social circle like a mean girl a style social circle you know that the way that the center maintains power the the top dog the top queen bee maintains powers by keeping a monopoly over those relationships and sort of being at the in a brokerage position and playing off the various players against one another and you know so there are a variety of advantages that come from brokerage most of which I've described but it also gives you asymmetric information because you have closer ties with other actors it also means that you know resources sometimes in some groups in these relations have to flow through the broker that can give them a lot of power what what the contagious politics people call the ability to opportunity horde for example but sometimes brokers brokerage doesn't just involve the creation of these kinds of disconnected bilateral relationships it also can involve closing triads or linking up the entire network and I think what's important for us or just thinking about these kinds of dynamics is that this is what multilateralism is right versus kind of bilateralism or even the more imperial strategies the difference between linking up the sites that have been initially brought into the hegemonic system or in keeping them separate this is the difference between say the us alliance policy in east asia during the cold war versus the us alliance policy in europe with nato uh now what's interesting about power transitions is not only they provide more states with more resources do this but one of the effects of the rise of new potential new new powers with resources with the ability to essentially act as patrons is it can shift the power relations towards weaker parties right so if you're a country that had been a client of the united states and now you've got china and other powers around who can offer you some of the same economic goods development assistance or security goods or or status goods that the united states previously was the only player in town that could or the us coalition the us and other western donors could that gives you the ability to act to be in a position of brokerage right that gives you the ability to play off the two sides against one another to go to a different actor and to actually then be put in a connect a connecting position that would not have been possibly forehand so power transitions create more possible patrons which leads to more leverage for potential clients and this leverage can be accomplished through exit so you know if the united states is demanding certain things on the security of the human rights the the economic openness side the anti-corruption side that really as a ruling elite you don't want to go in for or as ideologically you're unhappy with you can always leave the relationship which is something that if you did in the past you didn't have you basically cut off a lot of your a lot of the international goods you used to receive also a lot of states like portfolio diversification they don't like to be dependent on anyone so they just add donors or add security guarantees or add bases and that gives them more autonomy in those relationships even when they maintain those relationships and then actively you can leverage the threat of exit this is what happened all the time in the cold war and there's a lot of evidence that things like human rights conditionality didn't matter very much didn't have much effects during the cold war because the united states was afraid to trigger it lest it drove clients out of the u.s. system or it empowered it disempowered authoritarian regimes thus made things easier for communist insurgents but but but the same evidence suggests that in the 90s when the united states had a monopoly of patronage in the unipolar system that conditionality started to actually have effects and the reason was there were no exit options so what does this mean in practice and how has this been shaking out in the present period i'm going to turn over to to alex to talk a little bit about this starting with inoculation strategies which as i've said involve particular configurations of wedging and brokerage so alex yeah thanks very much dan it's a pleasure to be with you and thanks peter and rosella for the invitation so let's go through some just empirical examples of this playing out in more contemporary ordering dynamics i think you know one of the most wide spreading inoculation strategies has been the current really tidal wave of restrictions and bans on the activities of international ngos operating throughout the international system in the 1990s we had this literature on transnational networks we grew to believe that activists were nimble they could bounce around the sovereign in some ways that they were cleverer and that they would eventually push universalizing liberal norms whether it's respect for human rights gender equality the environment the campaign against landmines and pressure even states who didn't like to have their sovereignty you served on this but in fact and here russia is leading the way but it's not just russia according to some estimates depending on how you count them it's been more than 60 or more than 70 states since the year 2000 that have enacted ngo restrictions this is perhaps one of the most dramatic the foreign agents law of 2012 that required groups to self-designate as a foreign agent and in 2014 we just had the outright criminalization by the undesirable organization law so if we go to the next slide so i want to briefly take three of the pathways the exit to show this mix of brokerage and wedging going on we look at great power order contestation but we do it from the very specific viewpoint of looking at ordering fabrics and what china and russia are actually doing to alter the ecology of order in other words it's not a question of are they playing by the rules or not right that's not our focus it's rather what kinds of institutions are they setting up and here we're processing you know a kind of a multi-level set of features so the belton road as you probably had countless presentations we view belton road dynamics as having both brokering and wedging dynamics wedging because certain countries in the belton road have already started to go against traditional sort of foreign policy pathways so take the example of greece in 2017 vetoing the annual EU statement criticizing chinese human rights right after the pyrus parius port deal is done but we also have increasing use of regional organizations by china and russia in the book we actually map out and show that this wave of new kind of regional organizations in the security and the economic realm over the last 15 years is creating this networking amongst them right the shanghai cooperation organization and the cst o the eurasian economic union in other words we're not so much concerned of whether they are effective or not but rather how they are rewired um uh with each other and we particularly identify central asia and southeast asia as having the greatest density of these uh new organizations so we have the belton road we have new regional organizations that are very kind of different norms very different agendas than traditional regionalism but then we also have these dynamics boomeranging back into existing international organizations and for this is a map of a world map of the vote at the un human rights council on the shinjiang reeducation camps and in green are the countries that initially criticize china for the reeducation camps and these are the countries that belong traditionally we think of as part of the liberal order the us have withdrawn by then but we have we have canada we have australia we have west new europe we have the scandinavian countries we have japan we have new zealand and then a few weeks later china mobilizes a counter letter of over 50 countries uh in red that not only say the camps are totally fine but that uh law china for its respect and support of the human rights system in general right and here you see you know countries spanning uh different sort of continents um a lot of them uh uh uh belt and road uh clients right so we are you know redefining uh some of the instruments uh and their purpose of the existing liberal international order let's go next slide so that's from above equally interesting to us is from below weak states still don't get a lot of um attention when it comes to sort of i are um kind of order theorizing um and just to give you a couple examples of what dan was saying in practice pop quiz this gentleman on the left has put my back but kiev he was president of the kirgis republic in 2009 where he launched this audacious gambit in the presidential transition uh uh president obama where he uh appeared with president medvedev and he said that the u.s military base at menoss had become super unpopular it was the main facility through which troops equipment was staged in and out of afghanistan and he was going to close the base down and at the same press conference president medvedev announced that uh russia was providing the kirgis republic with a two billion dollar of investment in aid now but kiev in its kind of typical fashion waited for the first 300 million to come in from the russians and turned around did a new deal with uh the u.s upping the rent from 17 million to over 60 million and renaming it a transit center right and so this is an example of leveraging patrons for what you want but the phenomenon and in this case he can argue sort of you know but kiev was unsuccessful he was uh you know his his regime sort of collapsed a year later but you see this phenomenon also with leaders in countries that have been part traditionally of the u.s security system uh mr duderte who has openly courted uh russia and china who made it a point of canceling uh the vfa on the grounds of one of his advisors was denied a visa on human rights grounds banning u.s senators and then actually moved to suspend the cancellation of the vfa um this is part of in this chapter we call this growth in so-called multipolar populism a group of looters uh orban um urdogan who invoke the presence of china and russia as alternative patrons as a sign of autonomy um and domestic regime strength right that actually being locked into these traditional kind of western liberal ordering mechanisms is itself a sign of sort of weakness and in fact we are uh acting in the interest of the people because we actually have no problem um partnering with russia and china now what's really interesting about this for us is that sometimes it's actually the perception that you have a multipolar alternative as opposed to the reality that starts to drive local politics it's a fascinating survey uh undertaken by rf e uh rl uh from uh uh this time last year and the title as as you see there who gives the most aid to syria so we there was a polling of of syrups and 40 percent of them thought that china gives the most aid to syria right 40 percent uh and on the 15 percent thought russia gives the most aid to syria only 18 percent thought the european unit and by far by far the most aid actually is given by the european union like 90 percent and yet this perception lingered why because of the information space and environment because of local populist politicians who play up the importance of uh multipolarity um and this perception that actually uh russia and china offer significant public goods when they don't actually do so next slide oh yeah next prompt and in our view the ukraine conflict um can be read as actually kind of a battle of two sets of uh uh ordering and public goods mechanisms right sort of yana kovic uh uh uh looking at the eu than turning around feeling pressure from putin getting sort of more energy subsidies more bond uh relief and these sort of like two different zones of kind of ordering goods that ukraine uh found itself in the middle this sort of zone of contestation between the european union eastern partnership agreement um and russia that was pushing the eurasian economic union um let's go next you are voting you are voting for the only current leader in the free world who has got the guts to stand up and fight for the nation state to fight for patriotism to fight against globalism you'll be voting for the only leader in the western world with the real courage to stand up to the chinese communist party so then our final pathway is actually the internal one um and the internal wall within the so-called west where we're seeing increasing transnational contestation of what ordering system right western country should be a part of and we play the forage clip because what is so fascinating about trump although he wasn't the cause he has been an accelerant specifically because the executive branch in the white house in in particular is increasingly siding with illiberal western movements as opposed to those that are seek to preserve the liberal order you saw this in support for brexit you saw this in in in ukip but you also see this in appointing ambassadors with this kind of uh uh uh right wing populist affinity in places like the netherlands in germany in hungary that openly host and support um internal um right wing movements and in fact in this latest pew survey um of sort of popularity in the world where all you know uh us was terribly unpopular china wasn't that much more popular actually terribly unpopular what's interesting is that among european right wing um party supporters trump's popularity had skyrocketed over the last two years right so there is this kind of transnationalism happening at the moment uh next slide and here we see russia because we talk a lot about russia and it's sort of role in here both uh wedging and brokering wedging in the sense that they are actively supporting uh league of north uh politicians like mr salvini or the afd or marine lapen um in europe and it actually doesn't take a lot of money to do that um so this is kind of an attempt to sort of you know uh uh splinter these parties from the commitment to the trans Atlantic system but we see some brokering too this is mr orban prime minister orban delivering the keynote at the world congress of families now the world congress of families is an interesting it's almost like the the kind of antithesis of some of these liberal activist networks it was founded by two christian right movements in the 1990s then it has become funded by eurasian and oligarch capital and has had recent meetings in mosco in budapest um in verona most recently and the agenda there is very much uh so-called pro-family anti-lgbtq um focus on sort of reproductive rights anti-immigration um and this sort of joint mutual affinity against liberalism next one just ignore this because then it's the new slide so i just just very briefly so counter order that are focusing counter order movements is something that that is really i think fairly distinctive about our argument um and sometimes we get kind of people wondering why does this matter right and they're sort of at a meta level um it's seems sort of odd that we would say that contestation over liberal norms you know with a particular political valence uh can affect u.s hegemony but i think as you've probably understood by now part of our argument is that a lot of the sort of mechanisms of liberal normative ordering are actually uh mechanisms of u.s hegemony and u.s power and so to start to erode those or reverse those has implications for u.s influence globally it tends to redistribute influence away from the united states uh but there are some other reasons why shui should really care about court counter order movements all of the traditional uh or almost all the traditional like textbook revisionist states of hegemonic stability theory are we didn't become revisionist states sort of through some thing that absent domestic politics or through a change of heart of a leader they originated from subnational and transnational political movements like fascism which was not just a national movement it was a transnational uh collection of sometimes contentious but often mutually supportive and brokering uh far-right movements that was global in character in fact in the in the 20s um in which then came to power in states and came to power already uh with uh huge grievances against international order and then drove revisionist foreign policies similarly in my own uh past work um you can find uh that'll some examples of one of the archetypal examples that's supposed to be strategic overextension in the hegemonic cycle is in fact a case of transnational political contention causing overextension and causing hegemonic decline and that is transnational religious contention uh in the 16th and 17th century which is what got the spanish bog down uh in the netherlands which i think is really crucial to understanding uh why spain uh precipitously declined over the next over those two centuries went from a period of being a bid for hegemonic domination uh to one of uh much much weaker position and then finally one of the most consequential changes in international order the last 100 years uh the shift against formal empires and decolonization a lot of that story is the story about transnational uh anti-imperial agitation both the transnational spread of ideas and transnationalization of decolonization struggles which brought about you know a huge it was pretty important in helping to bring about a big shift uh in international ordering one that that greatly eroded um uh you know sort of actually to american allies so we want to just conclude with uh briefly running through some implications uh you know basically um i'll talk about the first ones our view is that biden's election does have implications for his global prospects depending on how you think about it what side you're on for good or for ill we think it matters that the white house is no longer aiding and abetting counter-order movements uh we think it's going to matter that biden has more interesting goods provision uh then then the trump administration overall did all of the trump administration did get in the game in some places and that uh the biden station will certainly pay more attention to trying to maintain political liberalism within incumbent institutions of the international order but that doesn't change any of the underlying pressures or the overall operation of mechanisms and as um alex will mention right now there are ways in which even the sort of uh some of the kind of the kind of uh reordering or reformism that that biden has in his national security team has signaled a very strong interest in it will will be itself very contentious uh and alex do you want to talk about this for a second yeah no we're over time but i think you know let's just take the example of one of the big bets in terms of sort of the norms and values the sort of biden teams as sort of espoused by jake selivan in that political interview the anti-corruption agenda right that's going to sort of you know come in strong and hard we've seen magnitsky adopted um you know over in europe we see this sort of comprehensive and set of anti-corruption members well now play this out if you start launching these anti-corruption campaigns sort of extraterritorially one of the leaders of these states um you actually create opportunities here for sort of backlash um for you know russia and china uh to take the side for the overall politicization uh or geopoliticalization and the sort of selective use of this enormously powerful extraterritorial anti-corruption tool like the fcpa and so uh uh i think that you know the main issue that the biden administration has to contend with is traditionally ambassadors um and presidents overseas especially within our allies you know we tried even though we had favorites and favored political parties we tried not to put our thumb in the scales and yet it might be unavoidable now that given this new contentious environment that members of uh an administration that seeks to preserve or expand the liberal order uh is going to have to explicitly support factions parties individuals and coalitions within these groups of traditional allies that seek to uphold the same and then that takes us in a very different world than we were before right because this institutionalizes this type of uh systemic cooperation non-cooperation at the transnational at the domestic level and then our final recommendation here is us is just going to have to learn to lose you can't outbid china all the time right you can't um go to every sort of place and try and deny an access to a facility um or to a regulatory standard or the adoption of a technology and so part of this is going to have to be um you know some countries that play with china are gonna have to learn about china's own kind of credibility and the way that they insert themselves into domestic politics and and that's okay letting others lose on their own i think rather than getting completely obsessed with kind of this kind of a global uh competition and sort of denial of ordering space for us um is a much more kind of prudent way to go excellent okay uh gentlemen um what i'm gonna do is take the moderator's prerogative and ask a single question and then folks that want to ask questions have issues raised if you can raise your hand in the participant list and also maybe give a brief uh summary of what your or a brief question in the chat function so we can sort of gather them we have about a half hour left uh and that will be wonderful so what i want to ask about um i love that you said you know we don't have to have a great power war and i like that you use the term contestation but in your conclusion and in the world i live in which is the naval war college you know the question is great power competition and i have such a problem with great power competition the following way what are we competing for how do we keep score i mean the american uh sort of sports analogy doesn't work very well there's no time frame there's no you know point system uh you know when do we know when we are out competing the chinese or the russians and then how does the ordering function play into that because in some ways the ordering function as you allude to in a bunch of ways in your in your book is about you know allocation of cost burden sharing sharing of and the idea that the hegemon itself at least in kind of classic hegemon theory provides certain goods even though it bears a disproportionate share of the cost so what about this idea of competition and is that something that's even useful for ir and policy specialists to think about thank you i mean i'll let alex handle the second half but on the question of great power competition i think that the what it does make sense in the context of us force structure to think about whether our key war fighting needs have to do with deterring great powers versus say engaging in various quote quote low intensity conflicts but anywhere broadly the the gpc approach um has a whole bunch of problems and one of which is is to begin with right that the question is what are you competing over competition is not an end in itself although the us has tends to make it one which is an interesting route to overextension in a fairly common one and also the idea that that if you're in a more competitive world the only tool available is to compete in fact one of the ways to deal with a more competitive world is to cooperate more right um you don't have to necessarily uh treat every uh every instance of contention and competition as an opportunity to have to uh you know you can diffuse things you can think about security dilemmas driving some relationships and that that competition is not the right answer for that um so to me the gpc paradigm and i have a piece hanging out right now awaiting uh editorial comments somewhere on this that i i think that it it just doesn't make a lot of sense to me i mean the whole idea that that there's some kind of model out there this world that we enter called great power competition and then there are useful time periods that provide lessons for how we deal with that doesn't make any sense right i mean great power competition is both something that always happens right it's they are even during periods of US hegemony and that um it is something that is not necessarily simply foisted on us by the structure of international politics or by the disposition simply of others right which is what a lot of these approaches to you know sort of deny the us any kind of agency