A Foreign Affairs Best Book of 2016 Today, nations increasingly carry out geopolitical combat through economic means. Policies governing everything from trade and investment to energy and exchange rates are wielded as tools to win diplomatic allies, punish adversaries, and coerce those in between. Not so in the United States, however. America still too often reaches for the gun over the purse to advance its interests abroad. The result is a playing field sharply tilting against the United States. “Geoeconomics, the use of economic instruments to advance foreign policy goals, has long been a staple of great-power politics. In this impressive policy manifesto, Blackwill and Harris argue that in recent decades, the United States has tended to neglect this form of statecraft, while China, Russia, and other illiberal states have increasingly employed it to Washington’s disadvantage.” —G. John Ikenberry, Foreign Affairs “A readable and lucid primer...The book defines the extensive topic and opens readers’ eyes to its prevalence throughout history...[Presidential] candidates who care more about protecting American interests would be wise to heed the advice of War by Other Means and take our geoeconomic toolkit more seriously. —Jordan Schneider, Weekly Standard

The Asia-Pacific has become the Indo-Pacific region as the US, Japan, Australia and India have decided to join forces and scale-up their political, economic and security cooperation. The message coming from Washington, Tokyo, Canberra and New Delhi is clear: China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is no longer the only game in town and Beijing’s policymakers better get ready for fierce competition. Japan’s ongoing and future “quality infrastructure” policies and investments in the Indo-Pacific in particular make it very clear that Tokyo wants a (much) bigger slice of the pie of infrastructure investments in the region. China’s territorial expansionism in the South China Sea and its increasing interests and presence in countries in South Asia have done their share to help the four aforesaid countries expand their security and defence ties. Beijing, of course, smells containment in all of this and it probably has a point. Who will have the upper hand in shaping and defining Asian security and providing developing South and Southeast Asia with badly-needed infrastructure: the US and Japan together with its allies or the increasingly assertive and uncompromising China and its Belt and Road Initiative?

What is Soviet-American competition all about? Is the Soviet Union a security problem that the United States must solve? Or is it an insecurity condition with which the U.S. must learn to live—and if so, on what terms? What kind of a player is the United States in the great game of power politics? In The Geopolitics of Super Power, one of our most respected strategic theorists answers these and other questions. In geopolitical terms, Colin Gray sees the Soviet-American antagonism as an enduring contest between a continental empire and a maritime coalition, each with its distinctive character and purposes. Gray explores the roots of the American style in foreign policy and strategy, and how that style relates to defense options. He identifies four broad alternatives for U.S. national security policy: passive and active means of containment, disengagement from foreign security commitments, and the "rollback" of the Soviet empire. Gray argues vigorously for active containment, for the systematic deemphasis of nuclear weapons, and for the intelligent use, for deterrence and defense purposes, of the West's great competitive strengths in the political, economic, and technological spheres.

This clear and concise introductory textbook guides students through their first engagement with geopolitics. It offers a clear framework for understanding contemporary conflicts by showing how geography provides opportunities and limits upon the actions of countries, national groups, and terrorist organizations. This second edition is fundamentally restructured to emphasize geopolitical agency, and non-state actors. The text is fully revised, containing a brand new chapter on environmental geopolitics, which includes discussion of climate change and resource conflicts. The text contains updated case studies, such as the Korean conflict, Israel-Palestine and Chechnya and Kashmir, to emphasize the multi-faceted nature of conflict. These, along with guided exercises, help explain contemporary global power struggles, environmental geopolitics, the global military actions of the United States, the persistence of nationalist conflicts, the changing role of borders, and the new geopolitics of terrorism, and peace movements. Throughout, the readers are introduced to different theoretical perspectives, including feminist contributions, as both the practice and representation of geopolitics are discussed. Introduction to Geopolitics is an ideal introductory text which provides a deeper and critical understanding of current affairs, geopolitical structures and agents. The text is extensively illustrated with diagrams, maps, photographs and end of chapter further reading. Both students and general readers alike will find this book an essential stepping-stone to understanding contemporary conflicts.

Under the ambitious leadership of President Xi Jinping, China is zealously transforming its wealth and economic power into potent tools of global political influence. But China's foreign policy initiatives, even the vaunted "Belt and Road," will be shaped and redefined as they confront theground realities of local and regional politics outside China. In China's Western Horizon, Daniel S. Markey, a scholar of international relations and former member of the U.S. State Department's policy planning staff, previews how China's efforts are likely to play out in its own "backyard:" theswath of Eurasia that includes South Asia, Central Asia, and the Middle East. Drawing from his extensive interviews, travels, and historical research, Markey describes how perceptions of China vary widely within states like Pakistan, Kazakhstan, and Iran.The region's powerful and privileged groups often expect to profit from their connections to China, while others fear commercial and political losses. Similarly, statesmen across Eurasia are scrambling to harness China's energy purchases, arms sales, and infrastructure investments as a means tooutdo their strategic competitors, like India and Saudi Arabia, while negotiating relations with Russia and America. On balance, Markey anticipates that China's deepening involvement will play to the advantage of regional strongmen and exacerbate the political tensions within and among Eurasianstates. To make the most of America's limited influence in China's backyard (and elsewhere), he argues that U.S. policymakers should pursue a selective and localized strategy to serve America's aims in Eurasia and to better compete with China over the long run.

Framing constitutes 'strategic action' that integrates 'discursive, political and sociological sub-processes' in order 'to achieve political potency' to be translated into strategic pay-offs. Media constructs frames that guide individuals, groups or collectives (state, society, social movements or other) to serve, if not willingly then at least unconsciously, the interests and purposes of potentially adversarial actors; thus inadvertently succumbing to their will. A make-believe world, so to speak, that creates a virtual reality in which individuals, groups or collectivities, are acted upon as mere objects, rather than being allowed to act as determining subjects. Potency is achieved when through foreign or adversarial media and mediatized outlets, people in societies do not define their own situation but in fact have the situation defined and interpreted for them. Then their own actions and their consequences become in reality produced and controlled by actors other than themselves. This methodology of framing and identity reconstruction contributes to identifying “the action system of the collective actor and the ways the different components of its action are kept together and translated in visible mobilization.” Frames thus entrap, causing psychological and strategic dislocation which springs from the sense of being trapped. They involve social engineering, indirectly implemented, in the service of hegemony and control. Clusters of concepts or a language, that carry “family resemblance” such as, media, mediatization, soft power, simulation, feigning, social movements, virtuality, indirect approach, propaganda, among others, contribute to the sense of being trapped. As framing devices they merge soft and hard power, aiming at instilling a sense of being defeated, or of being inevitably so in an adversary’s mental and psychological structure, reducing the need for direct, high intensity warfare to a minimum. Together with the cluster of family concepts, they combine into being instruments of high politics and actual vehicles of war, even if in an indirect way and as an indirect approach. For “the profoundest truth of war,” as Liddell Hart had put it, “is that the issue of battle is usually decided in the minds of the opposing commanders, not in the bodies of their men.” In this sense, if war is politics by other means, as Carl von Clausewitz had argued, media has increasingly become war by other means.

In Geopolitics in Health, Eduardo J. Gómez takes a critical look at how the emerging BRICS economies dealt with the obesity, AIDS, and tuberculosis epidemics. Despite the countries having similar international political and economic ambitions, Gómez finds that domestic policy responses were driven mainly by international, as opposed to domestic, pressures and interests. Using a theoretical framework called geopolitical positioning, Gómez explores how nations respond to international pressures and policy criticisms, as well as offers of financial and technical assistance; countries then utilize domestic policy innovations and ultimately engage in global health diplomacy in order to bolster their international reputation. --Publisher description.