"Security without Exclusivity: Hybrid Alignment under U.S.-China Competition" by CWP alum Isaac Kardon
This article explores an emerging dynamic in the international system: Countries across the world are engaged in simultaneous security cooperation with both China and the United States. China and the United States, however, do not provide the same types of security goods. The United States primarily offers regional security—assistance that improves partners’ capabilities to deter or deny external threats to their territory. China primarily offers regime security—assistance that builds partners’ capabilities to control their territory and populations, and often, to prevent threats to a regime's hold on power. Many countries benefit from both types of assistance, and neither China nor the United States is in a strong position to demand exclusivity from third countries. As a result, a growing number of countries are developing nonexclusive, differentiated security relationships with both great powers. We call this phenomenon “security hybridization” and demonstrate that it is theoretically and empirically distinct from traditional balancing and omnibalancing. We illustrate this dynamic with two case studies—Vietnam and the United Arab Emirates. Each country engages in defense cooperation with the United States and, simultaneously, pursues increasingly robust internal security cooperation with China. Security hybridization distinguishes today's great power competition from Cold War rivalry and will likely shape patterns of domestic and global security in the years ahead.
February 01 2025 - "Security without Exclusivity: Hybrid Alignment under U.S.-China Competition"
Sheena Chestnut Greitens, Isaac B. Kardon -- International Security (2025) 49 (3): 122–163. https://doi.org/10.1162/isec_a_00504
Isaac B. Kardon, Ph.D., (孔适海博士) is a senior fellow for China studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He is concurrently adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins SAIS, and was formerly assistant professor at the U.S. Naval War College (NWC), where he served as a research faculty member in the China Maritime Studies Institute.
Isaac’s research centers on the People’s Republic of China’s maritime power, with specialization in maritime disputes and the international law of the sea, Chinese global port development, China-Pakistan relations, and the People’s Liberation Army’s overseas basing. His writing appears in International Security, Security Studies, Foreign Affairs, the New York Times, the Naval War College Review, as well as other scholarly and policy publications. Isaac’s book, China’s Law of the Sea: The New Rules of Maritime Order (Yale, 2023) analyzes whether and how China is “making the rules” of regional and global order.
At Carnegie, Isaac is building on his foundation of research on China in the maritime domain to explore China’s role in the wider global commons. High seas, deep seabed, polar regions, and orbital space are among the “strategic frontier issues” prioritized by China’s leadership—and thus key sites to observe China’s interests in and influence on vital global rules, norms, and standards. China’s interest in leading the nascent regime for deep sea mining is a particular area of research focus. He is also continuing “past the pier” on his existing stream of research on PRC ports to further study China’s development of transport and communications infrastructure networks with dual civilian and military functions.
Isaac earned a Ph.D. in government from Cornell University, an M.Phil in modern Chinese studies from Oxford University, and a B.A. in history from Dartmouth College. He was a China & the World post-doctoral fellow at Princeton University, and has held visiting appointments at NYU School of Law, Academia Sinica, and the PRC National Institute for South China Sea Studies. He studied Chinese (Mandarin) at Peking University, Tsinghua University, Hainan University, and National Taiwan Normal University.
Photo Credit: https://pixabay.com/users/peggy_marco-1553824/
