The American securitization of China and Russia: U.S. geopolitical culture and declining unipolarity

ABSTRACT

Policymakers define threats through the development and presentation of threat narratives, which seek to shape, promote, and limit policy agendas and debate through public discourse. Since 2015, American officials engaged in a securitization process which depicts great power competition, in the form of a rising and aggressive Eurasian alignment of China and Russia, as an existential threat to both America’s geopolitical position in the international system and the liberal-democratic world order. This led to the articulation of an international threat environment under threat from revisionist powers and a revival of Cold War-era rhetoric about both a democracy-autocracy binary and spheres of influence. Utilizing an original dataset which codes the content and evolution of these threat narratives, it seeks to answer the following questions: How is this securitization process reflective of American geopolitical culture? How does the U.S. believe that this challenge arose? How does Washington see its role in this process? It finds that the perceived intentions of these countries, fueled by their respective political cultures, were the crucial factors for precipitating this process, rather than their growing capabilities.  It also identifies four ways in which this process reflects underlying fears found in American geopolitical culture under declining unipolarity.

KEYWORDS:

• Threat narratives
• securitization
• practical geopolitics
• United States
• Russia
• China
• great power competition

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. Which, admittedly, cannot always be assumed.

2. Obviously, neither is going to invade the United States. Though, with their nuclear arsenals, both states could potentially constitute an existential threat to the physical survival of the United States.

3. In fact, an analysis of this shifting narrative provides for a better understanding of American geopolitical culture than the securitization processes which followed 9/11. Not only was the global balance of power more strongly in America’s favor immediately following 9/11, but terrorism, even though it was framed as an existential threat, could not really undermine American primacy and global status, let alone the very structure of the international system.

4. Two examples include Broomfield (2003) and Chen (2014).

5. A particular committee may not have held a hearing of this type each year.

6. There were two reports excluded. First, officials from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Homeland Security were excluded since this article focused on two international threats. Their reports tended to emphasize domestic threats originating from domestic sources or international terrorism, the latter only tangentially connected to Russia and China. Second, testimony from CIA Director James Woolsey in 1995 and Lieutenant General Patrick Hughes in 1999 were excluded because their format and structure departed rather significantly from others as being quite general and failing to account for specific threats in detail.

7. Because each year did not contain the name number of reports, annual percentages of references are presented, rather than raw numbers. The data file and the coded hearings can be found at the lead author’s website: http: https://www.ndsu.edu/faculty/ambrosio/china_russia_threat/.

8. One exception is China’s actions or intentions toward Taiwan were always considered to have an identity component: Beijing has consistently (and vocally) presented Taiwan part of its national territory and exempting this would not have fully reflected the importance of reunifying the island with the mainland as a core component of China’s official national identity and (geo)political culture.

9. Figure 1 takes into account the seven coding possibilities in terms of the three sources of threat – each source exclusively and four additional combinations (e.g. capabilities+identity, capabilities+intentions, etc.). In order to present the overall scope of these three sources, any reference which included a particular source, either by itself or in combination with another source, is counted as exhibiting that source. Thus, the 53% of references cited here as capabilities represents references in which capabilities were cited exclusively or in combination with another source.

10. 1992 was an anomaly, with most of that year’s testimony about China’s violation of arms control agreements and therefore were coded as intentions (rule-breaking).

11. In fact, a full third of all references to Chinese great power ambitions included an explicit Identity element – which is notable, given that only explicit statements to this effect are coded as such.

12. 2012 appears to be an odd year, with little discussion of Russian actions. Rather, the focus of that testimony was on Moscow’s conventional weapons, which constituted nearly a third of total references.

13. Mentions of capabilities during this time came overwhelmingly from Russia’s residual nuclear weapons.

14. But, as seen in Figure 4, Russian capabilities eventually became a growing concern as well.

15. Though, these were described as having “greater demonstrative impact than operational military significance.”

16. For example, NATO expansion, color revolutions, missile defense, and encroachment into the former Soviet space.

17. The exceptionally high number in 1994 reflected how Russian instability may spill over into the rest of the regions, though. Much of the rest focused on Russia’s desire for regional dominance.

18. This was already well-established by the end of Putin’s first term (Ambrosio 2005).

19. By contrast, the oft-called rogue states had no capacity to act in a truly global manner.

20. See S.Hrg.115-278 (2018, 15), Coats (2019, 4, 37).

21. A recent, and highly prominent, example is Kagan (2019).