Great Powers Initiative

Archives: Great Powers Initiative Policy Papers

Whither Command of the Commons?

  • By
  • Sameer Lalwani,
  • New America Foundation
  • and Joshua Shifrinson, International Security Program Research Fellow, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School
September 13, 2011

Introduction: Command of the Commons and U.S. Primacy

In 1805, British Admiral Horatio Nelson defeated a combined Franco-Spanish fleet off the coast of Spain that threatened to deny Britain command of the sea around Western Europe. Nelson’s success ensured that the United Kingdom retained what analysts would today refer to as “command of the commons”—the ability to project military power and engage in trade at times and places of its choosing while denying the same privileges to others.

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Russia’s Revised Strategic Plan

  • By Paul J. Saunders, Executive Director, Center for the National Interest
July 15, 2011

Most nations lack the power and the self-confidence to seek to change the global order and—whether satisfied with it or not—must accept the existing order and seek to adapt to it. Russia is not one of those nations.

Russia’s twenty-first century foreign policy strategy—to the extent that it exists in a coherent form—is not a plan to cope with what may come, but an effort to encourage global trends that officials in Moscow believe will advance their country’s interests.

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Grand Strategy and Power Transitions: What We Can Learn from Great Britain

  • By Charles A. Kupchan, Georgetown University and Council on Foreign Relations
July 12, 2011

This essay draws lessons for great-power grand strategy from the history of Great Britain and its effort to manage the hegemonic power transitions that spawned World War I and World War II. It focuses on two main issues. The first is the diplomacy of managing power transitions. At the turn of the twentieth century, Britain faced a rapidly changing strategic landscape. London had to deal with the simultaneous rise of three major powers – the United States, Germany, and Japan.

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Adapting to a Copernican World: Paradigmatic Leap and Policy Challenges

  • By Bruce W. Jentleson, Duke University
July 12, 2011

During the Cold War, the U.S. position in the world was a lot like the ancient philosopher-astronomer Ptolemy’s theory of the universe. For Ptolemy the Earth was at the center with the other planets, indeed all the other celestial bodies, revolving around it. So too, the United States was at the center of the Cold War world. We were the wielder of power, the economic engine, and the bastion of free world ideology.

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America’s Challenge: The Rise of China and the Future of Liberal International Order

  • By G. John Ikenberry, Princeton University
July 12, 2011

The Master said: “To worship gods that are not yours, that is toadyism. Not to act when justice commands, that is cowardice.” The Analects of Confucius, 2:24

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U.S.-Russian Relations and the Rise of China

  • By
  • Anatol Lieven,
  • New America Foundation
July 11, 2011

Since the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, U.S. policies towards Russia have been characterized by a level of hostility which is not justified by Russian threats to U.S. interests. These U.S. attitudes towards Russia have both encouraged and been encouraged by a strategy of the expansion of U.S.

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Strategic Turn: New U.S. and Russian Views on Nuclear Weapons

  • By Joseph Cirincione, President, Ploughshares Fund
June 29, 2011

The United States and Russia possess 95 percent of the world’s nuclear weapons. How these two nuclear superpowers configure and view their nuclear forces has a profound impact on how the other nuclear-armed states perceive the value of their weapons and how seriously other nations consider acquiring or not acquiring their own nuclear arsenals.1 This paper briefly summarizes the development of US and Russian views on nuclear weapons over the past 30 years and offers practical policy recommendations for how both nations can achieve their stated goal of reducing the role of nuclear weapons in national security strategies.

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China’s Energy Rise and the Future of U.S.-China Energy Relations

  • By Mikkal Herberg, Research Director, Energy Security Program The National Bureau of Asian Research
June 21, 2011

China is gradually emerging as a new superpower in global energy markets and energy geopolitics.  This reflects the enormous scale of China’s current and future energy and oil consumption, Beijing’s growing energy investments abroad and expanding energy diplomacy, its rising carbon emissions, and China’s emergence as a global leader in clean energy technology development. The scale of China’s energy expansion is quite breathtaking.

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American Policy Toward China: Getting Beyond the Friend-or-Foe Fallacy

  • By Ely Ratner, RAND Corporation and Steven Weber, University of California, Berkeley
June 15, 2011

“You can't manage what you can't measure” is a widely accepted truism among business and government organizations. It is not widely accepted among psychologists and sociologists, most of whom would recoil at the idea that the condition of a relationship should be ‘marked to market’ every day, or that any meaningful relationship can be boiled down to a single index that quantifies where it is at any moment and whether it is “better’’ or “worse” than a week or a month ago. 

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Chronicle of a Debt Foretold

  • By Michele Wucker
May 2, 2011

Today’s debt crises among European sovereigns and US underwater mortgage holders both have much in common with a similar chronicle of debt foretold a decade ago.

In March 2001, not even a year before Argentina devalued its currency and stopped paying its foreign obligations, it was clear that the country was headed for disaster. Despite an IMF bailout package only months earlier, its benchmark bonds were trading at well under 80 cents on the dollar and yielding more than 900 basis points over US Treasury bonds, reflecting investors’ lack of confidence in the country’s finances.

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