USA-CHINA-RUSSIA: the return of power politics in 21st century international relations

The project aims to reconstruct the change of register used by American administrations in describing the rise of China and in defining the American strategic approach towards the latter. Consequently, the project includes a dual objective and, therefore, two parallel research activities:

– O1: Study the evolution of America's assessment of the opportunities and risks presented by China's political, economic, and military rise.

– O2: study the change in the approach promoted by the American presidencies towards the emerging power China.

In relation to the first objective, textual analysis will be conducted to discern in what proportion the opportunities and risks of China's rise have been appreciated in the strategic documents released by American executives. In particular, this phase of the research will have both a qualitative and quantitative aspect. As regards the first dimension, the analysis will evaluate how preponderant the rise of China is in Washington's perception of the international strategic context, that is, it will evaluate the "WEIGHT" variable of China in the American international political vision. Regarding the second dimension, consistently with what is postulated by the "balance of threat" theory advanced by Stephen Walt (1987), the research will estimate what the American perception of the "THREAT" variable is for the rise of China.
With reference to the second objective, the project will adopt the theoretical prism suggested by Randall Schweller (1999) on the ways in which the dominant power reacts to the rise of a new power. Therefore, each American document will be interpreted in light of the following typology of sponsored behavior towards China: (1) preventive war, (2) balancing, (3) bandwagoning, (4) binding, (5) engagement, and (6) distancing/buckpassing. Each of the reaction options responds to a different imperative: (1) eliminate the emerging power, (2) contain it, (3) take advantage of its rise, (4) constrain it, (5) transform it or (6) ignore it. Obviously, it is theoretically and practically impossible for one of these ideal types of behavior to occur perfectly but rather each administration is expected to have developed its own combination of objectives and, therefore, policies to react to China's rise. 
Of all the options, obviously, preventive war (1) is expected to be absent from American strategic documents. The United States of the unipolar era, in fact, would never seem to have explicitly contemplated the possibility of launching a preventive war against the People's Republic of China to halt its rise. If on the one hand, in fact, Beijing, due to its size, conventional and nuclear military capabilities, economic integration in the international system, maintains a deterrent capacity, on the other hand it would not seem to have ever posed such a level of threat to justify a reaction of such intensity on the American side.
However, moving along the spectrum of other possible reactions for the dominant power, a comparative analysis of the documents published by post-Cold War US executives through a theoretical perspective that can bring out the different assessments made of China's rise and the different approaches advocated has not yet been conducted. The present project therefore aims to fill this gap in the literature to bring out the peculiar differences in evaluation and approach promoted by individual administrations and, therefore, the continuities and discontinuities in American foreign policy towards China.