【英文】兰德报告：体系竞争：新兴战略对手的本质（49页）

英文研究报告 2022年12月02日 08:01 管理员

The United States faces a choice over the type of competition it pursues in the coming years: one focused on specific issues, where it strives to come out ahead of rivals in a series of bilateral relationships, or one where it exploits global interconnectedness to shape international systems and increase the likelihood of desirable futures from the standpoint of U.S. interests. Either form of competition can be zero-sum, positive-sum, or somewhere in between, but the fundamental distinction is between competing on a one-off basis and competing in systemic terms. Much of the current discussion of strategic competition focuses on contests with specific countries or over particular issues and measures them in terms of the degrees of power and influence held by the United States and a rival or competitor.

An underappreciated component of strategic competition is winning the contest to set the foundational global paradigm, or “the essential ideas, habits, and expectations” that govern the international system.32 This work builds on that of earlier scholars, such as Immanuel Wallerstein and Robert Jervis, who have emphasized the importance of structural and systemic power. Susan Strange, for example, argued that “structural power decides outcomes (both positive and negative) much more than relational power does.”33 World Systems theorists have thought in systemic terms for decades.34 In those and other examples, a rich tradition of scholarship has examined just such systemic dynamics in world politics for decades. In this section, we review some of that scholarship for hints of what a systemic mindset would suggest for U.S. strategy. That scholarship has been especially rich in three subjects: network effects, system dynamics, and complexity science. While somewhat theoretical, they lay the essential basis for a systemic approach to international strategy.