11.Introduction, The National Security Strategy of the United States of America, September 2002.
12.Meeting between Helmut Kohl and Lech Walesa, November 9, 1989, CWIHP.
13.John J. Mearsheimer, “Back to the Future: Instability in Europe after the Cold War,” International Security, Summer 1990, 5–56.
14.See Michael Mandelbaum, The Case for Goliath: How America Acts as the World’s Government in the 21st Century (New York: PublicAffairs, 2005); Stephen G. Brooks and William C. Wohlforth, America Abroad: The United States’ Global Role in the 21st Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).
15.John J. Mearsheimer, “Why Is Europe Peaceful Today?,” European Political Science, September 2010, 387–97.
16.World Bank, “GDP (constant 2010 US$)”; and Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, Military Expenditure Database, “Data for all countries from 1988–2019 in constant (2018) USD.”
17.A point made in Jonathan Holslag, World Politics since 1989 (London: Polity, 2021), 283.
18.Michael McFaul, Russia’s Unfinished Revolution: Political Change from Gorbachev to Putin (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015); Friedberg, Getting China Wrong.
19.The phrase comes from Draft of FY 94–99 Defense Planning Guidance.
20.FCO Cable, “Russian Foreign Policy,” May 12, 1997, PREM-49-149-3, TNA. See also Mary Sarotte, Not One Inch: America, Russia, and the Making of Post-Cold War Stalemate (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021).
21.Holslag, World Politics since 1989, 120. On the crisis, see also James Mann, About Face: A History of America’s Curious Relationship with China, from Nixon to Clinton (New York: Vintage, 2000), 335–37.
22.Chua Chin Leng, “The Politics of Non Interference—A New World Order,” China Daily, January 25, 2016.
23.Kimberly Marten, “Reconsidering NATO Expansion: A Counterfactual Analysis of Russia and the West in the 1990s,” European Journal of International Security, November 2017, 135–61.
24.The alliance with the United States was traditionally viewed in Beijing as a “bottle cork.” Adam Liff, “China and the U.S. Alliance System,” China Quarterly, March 2018, 139.
25.Memorandum of Conversation—President Boris Yeltsin of Russia, November 19, 1999, William J. Clinton Presidential Library.
26.Samuel Kim, “Human Rights in China’s International Relations,” in Edward Friedman and Barrett McCormick, eds., What If China Doesn’t Democratize? Implications for War and Peace (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 2000), 130–31; Wang Jisi and Kenneth Lieberthal, Addressing U.S.–China Strategic Distrust, Brookings Institution, March 2012, esp. 11–12.
27.Darya Korsunskaya, “Putin Says Russia Must Prevent ‘Color Revolution,’ ” Reuters, November 20, 2014. See also Michael McFaul, From Cold War to Hot Peace: An American Ambassador in Putin’s Russia (New York: Mariner, 2019), 57–75.
28.Michael O’Hanlon, “Is U.S. Defense Spending Too High, Too Low, or Just Right?,” Policy 2020, Brookings Institution, October 15, 2019.
29.Barack Obama, “Remarks by the President on the Way Forward in Afghanistan,” White House, June 22, 2011.
30.Kent Calder, Super Continent: The Logic of Eurasian Integration (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2019), 100.
31.Toshi Yoshihara and Jack Bianchi, Seizing on Weakness: Allied Strategy for Competing with China’s Globalizing Military (Washington, DC: Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, 2021); Andrew J. Nathan and Andrew Scobell, China’s Search for Security (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012).
32.Howard French, Everything under the Heavens: How the Past Helps Shape China’s Push for Global Power (New York: Knopf, 2017); Michael Schuman, Superpower Interrupted: The Chinese History of the World (New York: PublicAffairs, 2020).
33.Elizabeth Economy, The Third Revolution: Xi Jinping and the New Chinese State (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018).
