Toliy offered some thoughts in comments on the US-China post below. I started with a reply to his comments, but decided to make this a longer post. In short, I think he is correct to note that a country's political strategy and economic strategy may point in different directions. Specifically, China may "gain politically" from greater prestige relative to the U.S. (say, from a weakening dollar), even if it may "lose economically" by doing so. And I agree with his first paragraph in his comments. If I follow correctly, he also then asks whether China's "political strategy" might be to look for a decline in the dollar.
My expectation would simply be that economic logic would trump political "point winning" for China in this regard. I too would argue as Toliy has: that China wants a long-term move away from the dollar as reserve currency, but surely wants no collapse of the dollar in the short-term. (For what it's worth, I can think of no-one who would want a collapse of the dollar in the short-term. Except maybe this guy. That is, Mr. July 2004. And no, for those keeping score, not even Mr. June 2005 would want a collapse of the dollar -- no way.) As for the question of "winning political points", or what I called "bragging rights", my expectation is that China would subordinate these to its economic objectives, trying to manage a long-term, slow weakening of the dollar with no sudden movements.
Perhaps this expectation that China would not seek "political points" from hurting the dollar's prestige comes from my belief (and one is free to call it a "perspective", "bias", or other term) that IPE probably has fewer "zero-sum games" than security studies. You will have to ask yourself if you agree.
Think of the Cold War. The US and USSR opposed one another militarily, and any relative increase in US power was seen to be a comparable decrease in Soviet power, and vice versa. This is a zero-sum game, just like football, baseball, or (of course) ice hockey: one side scores points at the expense of the other side. Notice in the Cold War case that the US and USSR also did not trade with one another. That is, each side denied the economic benefits of exchange (from basic comparative advantage, etc.) to its rival.
Contrast that with most cases in IPE between countries that maintain economic relations with one another. The U.S. and China today being the biggest example, but take the U.S. and the EU, for a moment (or the EU and China). Of course, each side is going to maximize the advantage it can get in negotiations and in trade with other parties, but there is very little sense that the EU would benefit from American economic weakness, or that America wants an economically weak Europe. Economics simply isn't that zero-sum between trading partners. Again, each will try to get the best deal for itself, and will try to maximize its own power, and other caveats exist (domestic politics may intervene in many ways, and the question of rapid growth's effects on the environment may shape peoples' preferences), but you will not find many arguing that we want an economically weak EU or a less vibrant world economy. A decrepit China would also mean a less vibrant world economy, and China probably competes less than Europe with the U.S. when it comes to directly competitive goods. (That is, we buy European stuff that Americans also make - like cars and airplanes - but buy relatively few Chinese items that are also Made in the U.S.A.)
When it comes to the positive-sum international relations we find in the global economy, consider also the Marshall Plan, in which the U.S. was part of the reconstruction of Europe after WWII. The logic was that - apart from humanitarian reasons - the U.S. smartly recognized the need for a vibrant international economy in the long run and thus invested in building up Europe as a powerful integrated economy. (Incidentally, administering the Marshall Plan was the origin of the institution Prof. Smitka referenced yesterday - the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, or the World Bank.)
Returning to China now, the same principle of interdependence seems operative. In short, as David Razum noted in referencing a recent book, and as The Economist notes in its current issue, and as Niall Ferguson noted in coining the term "Chimerica", we have a partial "fusion" of the two major economies. The notion of interdependence suggests to me that if China has the U.S. by the throat, the U.S. has China by the [insert graphic image here]. Either one squeezes and both are going to get hurt. So neither wants to squeeze.
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