Is Geopolitics ending the IMF’s role as Lender of Last Resort? - By Talal Rafi

By Talal Rafi

The article argues that rising geopolitical tensions and the shift in global economic power are challenging the International Monetary Fund’s role as a neutral and universally trusted lender of last resort. As China expands its influence as a major bilateral lender and questions Western dominance in global financial institutions, the IMF is increasingly perceived as politically influenced by the interests of the United States and its allies. To remain credible and effective, the IMF must strengthen institutional neutrality, reform voting structures to reflect modern economic realities, and develop clearer multilateral debt restructuring frameworks.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has been seen and used by Washington as a soft power tool in global politics. The organisation has a vastly important role as the lender of last resort and is called on by nations around the world when countries face a balance of payments crisis or a debt crisis. It is one of the most powerful institutions in the world, shaping economic policy in most of the developing world. The United States has the most influence in the IMF as the largest shareholder. In the second half of the 20th century, the United States was able to use this soft power tool as it did not have a serious economic rival. But in the 2020s, the world has changed. China is now the second largest economy in the world in GDP terms, the largest bilateral lender in the world and the largest creditor to developing nations, surpassing the World Bank, IMF and Paris Club countries. How will this new dynamic play out going forward? What is the future of the International Monetary Fund?

Soft Power and International Financial Institutions

The concept of “soft power” was coined by Joseph Nye, defined as a country’s ability to influence other nations without resorting to coercive pressure. Where hard power uses coercion to get other nations to do what the United States wants, soft power is where other governments are made to want what the United States would want them to want, without using coercion.[GW1] 

Since the end of the Second World War, two multilateral institutions, the World Bank and the IMF, have had global influence in shaping the economic narrative, especially in the developing world. The World Bank is the largest multilateral development bank in the world, and the IMF is the global lender of last resort. Though both institutions have shareholders across the world, including China, they are both dominated by the United States and its allies in terms of voting share. The IMF  is the most influential financial institution in the world, as a last resort for countries in a balance of payments crisis or a debt crisis. The dominant economic thinking in the US has been seen to be pushed by the IMF globally. A good example is that in the 1980s, the IMF’s technical thinking, along with that of the World Bank Group, was referred to as part of the “Washington Consensus”. The IMF has been a hallmark of American soft power in economic terms around the world since the Second World War.

The IMF’s American Foundations and Global Debt Landscape

The IMF was a product of the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944, attended by 44 nations, which sought to build a framework for international economic cooperation. The IMF’s objectives are to promote monetary cooperation and financial stability. Since the organisation was created under the leadership of the United States, they remain the largest shareholder with 16.49% of voting power, followed by Japan (6.14%), China (6.08%) and Germany (5.31%). Though this may seem like the US only has around one-sixth of the voting share, it is all the US needs. Major decisions at the IMF require 85% of the votes, and as the US has 16.49% of the voting share, the United States holds a veto power on any major decisions at the IMF.

The second half of the 20th century was a period when sovereign debt of developing nations was dominated by the Paris Club members (the US and its allies), multilaterals such as the World Bank and the IMF (dominated by the US) and private creditors (mostly based out of the West and lent under New York and London laws). But the 21st century has changed this. Today, China is the largest bilateral lender for most countries, where China alone has lent more than all the Paris Club members combined.

China’s Belt and Road Initiative has resulted in countries across the developing world opting for bilateral credit from China, which has higher interest costs when compared to multilateral debt. Private creditor lending has also grown, as an UNCTAD report shows that the percentage of private creditors in the debt composition for developing nations in 2013 was 52%, but by 2023, had risen to 60%.

Three scenarios where the IMF was perceived as an American-influenced organisation

Sri Lanka’s debt restructuring

The clearest point of geopolitical tensions between the United States and China with regard to the IMF was in the case of Sri Lanka. In 2022, Sri Lanka defaulted on its external debt as it was unsustainable. The largest bilateral creditor to Sri Lanka was China, followed by Japan and India. But over half of Sri Lanka’s bilateral debt was held by China. Multilateral debt was largely owed by Sri Lanka to the Asian Development Bank and the World Bank. Sri Lanka had requested an IMF program, but the IMF could not proceed as Sri Lanka’s debt was deemed unsustainable, so in order for the IMF to proceed, it needed financing assurances from Sri Lanka’s creditors. That is, for bilateral nations to give an assurance to the IMF that debt relief and/or financing to restore debt sustainability will be given to the debtor nation.

India was the first nation to give financial assurance to Sri Lanka. But China delayed giving financing assurance to the IMF, arguing that multilateral debt should also be restructured. As a principle, multilateral debt (World Bank, ADB, IMF) is not restructured as they have preferred creditor status,which helps them have an AAA Credit rating so that they can borrow at low interest costs. Multilaterals need to borrow at cheaper interest rates as they lend to some of the poorest nations in the world, with the World Bank’s IDA even giving grants to lower-middle-income countries. IMF debt, in particular, cannot be restructured as it is the lender of last resort,  lending to countries that are in severe financial crisis. If IMF debt were to be restructured, it would not be able to borrow at low interest rates, and the IMF itself may factor in credit ratings before helping debt-stressed nations.

But in Sri Lanka’s case, China still insisted that multilateral debt should also be restructured, with the United States pushing back, saying multilateral debt was not for restructuring. Finally, China gave in[GW2] , but this caused a delay in Sri Lanka starting its IMF program, which resulted in uncertainty and further economic pressure in a country that had just defaulted.

But China’s making the case, where it saw the IMF as an American-led organisation, shows that the showdown seen between the two superpowers in the case of Sri Lanka is not going to be the last. Especially, when the UN says 54 countries are under debt stress and debt levels are at a record high across the world. China’s increasing economic clout may make it come back later with a stronger case against the IMF or find a way around it.

Russia-Ukraine Conflict

The Russia-Ukraine war, where the US Dollar was weaponised against Russia, led the world to question the US Dollar’s status as a reserve currency. It was considered a reserve currency because of the trust it had, and when the US used it as a weapon against Russia, the rest of the world took note and looked at diversifying away from the US dollar. The US Dollar remains supreme as it has no strong alternative yet.

In the same way, the IMF has shown itself to be an instrument against Russia. In 2024, the IMF, under pressure from allies of Ukraine, scrapped its mission to Moscow, which is a routine mission to assess Russia’s economic situation. Though this will not have a major impact on the Russian economy, it does send a symbolic message to the world that the West will use the IMF as a tool against anti-Western nations. It hits at the core of the IMF, exposing to the world that it may not be a neutral organisation. This is at a time when the IMF is lending to Ukraine, with the IMF announcing a new $8.1 billionprogram in November 2025.

In a world where bilateral debt is increasingly being dominated by China, the globally accepted lender of last resort doing the bidding of the West does not give a good impression on the IMF, which was to have been a neutral institution.

The IMF Program in Argentina

The IMF has also been influenced by geopolitics in geopolitically important nations like Egypt, Argentina and Pakistan. Argentina is the largest borrower from the IMF at USD 57 billion, and it accounts for one-third of all IMF lending.

Political influence was seen when the Argentine President Javier Milei objected to Rodrigo Valdez, who was the Director of the IMF’s Western Hemisphere Department, which led to him recusing himself from the Argentine negotiations. The Argentine President states that he could not work with Valdez due to the policies Valdez implemented when he was the finance minister of Chile.

But in the case of Argentina, there was also politics involved. According to Bloomberg, about half of the 25 executive board chairs of the IMF had serious concerns about the $20 billion IMF loan to Argentina. The deal was also seen to be muscled through management, with some viewing[GW3]  it as being driven more by politics than policy. Argentine President Milei is a strong ally of US President Trump,  who has even referred to Milei as his “Favourite president”. It was considered, by some, that Argentina was getting special treatment as the Argentine President even announced the details of the IMF program hours before it was officially approved by the board.

This applies to other countries also, which have been on the good side of Washington, most notably Egypt, Pakistan and Ukraine. After Argentina, the three largest borrowers from the IMF have been Ukraine, Egypt and Pakistan, and all three of them are geopolitically critical nations, which is a point to be noted.

The reason IMF deals are pushed through faster, like in the example of Argentina in 2024 and other geopolitically strategic nations, is also the fact that the world has changed. If the US-influenced IMF does not step in, these desperate nations will knock on the doors of Beijing. Pakistan is a case in point for this as the US tries to maintain influence in this critical nation.

Why is the rise of China a challenge to the IMF’s role as a lender of last resort?

Though the IMF has been used by the United States in certain cases to help countries that it favours in the second half of the 20th century, the key difference is that the US did not have a serious economic superpower to rival it. Today, China is emerging as a formidable rival. In a world where China is already the largest bilateral lender in the world, and with a trade surplus of over $1 trillion, it will become increasingly easier for it to establish another organisation to rival the IMF. It must be noted that China is still a member of the IMF and abides by its rules.

But in a world that is seeing increasing rivalry between the two dominant superpowers, where one superpower has dominant voting rights in an institution which was supposed to be managed neutrally, but is being used geopolitically in certain cases, it is a matter of time before China questions this more strongly.

China has already been advocating to increase its voting share in the IMF, and its shares were increased to 6.08% in 2016, slightly below Japan. But China has been adding pressure to increase its voting share further. China’s economy is more than 4 times larger than Japan’s economy, but its voting share is smaller than Japan’s. But the biggest stumbling block would be the United States, which may not like to have its voting share dip below 15%, removing its veto power in the IMF. An agreement to reduce US voting shares will need to be ratified by the US Congress, which means it would need strong political support to go ahead, making it unlikely. But it appears that China is not going to relent, so the IMF voting share may be an area for a geopolitical showdown in the coming years.

But China is playing a role bilaterally in rescuing debt-ridden nations, where in 2021 its bailout of other nations amounted to $40 billion. Chinese rescue lending has been more than 40% of IMF lending in the three years leading up to 2021. China is slowly rising as an alternative to the IMF as a lender of last resort. What China is doing today is similar to what the United States did in the 1930s and post World War 2, where it used the US Federal Reserve, US Ex-Im Bank and the US Exchange Stabilisation Fund to provide rescue funds to other nations, bolstering its financial clout.

With China's increasing economic clout on the world stage, its rescue lending will only increase. China’s emerging as a rescue lender is also a reason the US wants IMF programs to be fast-tracked for countries which are geopolitically strategic.

The Way Forward for the IMF

Firstly, key IMF decisions, such as stepping in to rescue a country from a debt crisis or a balance of payments crisis, should be made in an independent manner. Clear and transparent frameworks for decision-making ensure the IMF  is perceived as a neutral and credible institution. Argentina's case in 2025, where management viewed the deal as driven more by politics than policy, and Ukraine's case in 2023, where the IMF reformed its rule of not lending to countries with unsustainable debt to allow lending as long as creditors gave financing assurances, are both signs that the IMF can be swayed by its most powerful shareholders. Independent decision-making at the IMF is essential as it is not only the lender of last resort, but its assessments of countries are seen to bring credibility to bilaterals, private creditors and other multilaterals.

Secondly, adjusting the voting shares at the IMF to a fairer level would help its global credibility and make it a global institution. China, whose economy is more than 4 times the size of the Japanese economy, still has a slightly smaller voting share than Japan, which would seem unfair to China. The United States, holding onto 16.49%, giving it veto power, could also be negotiated. Reducing below 15% would remove America’s veto-like power, but  I would suggest that, if this continues, an economically powerful nation like China may start working towards an alternative institution to the IMF, and in that case, America’s control over the IMF would anyway become less useful for global influence. Even if it reduces its vote share below 15%, the combined voting share of its allies together will still make the US highly influential in the IMF.

Lastly, to prevent geopolitical flashpoints from occurring during times of debt restructuring, which exacerbate tensions, a debt restructuring framework should be agreed to, especially with agreement from the United States and China. There is precedent for this, as creditors, including China, came to an agreement known as the G20 Common Framework in 2020 to help low-income countries to restructure their debt in an orderly way, with the requirement for comparability of treatment for all creditors, and the requirement of an IMF program. An agreement at the G20 level addressing key issues such as debt restructuring mechanisms, the question of multilateral debt restructuring and transparency among creditors, can greatly assist the IMF in making clearer decisions.

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Talal Rafi is a Sri Lanka-based economist, currently serving as Policy Advisor to Sri Lanka's opposition leader, a regular columnist for the International Monetary Fund and an expert member of the World Economic Forum, while also holding appointments as a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Poverty Analysis and as a consultant to the European Commission. He has extensive experience in development policy and public finance, with prior experience as a consultant to the Asian Development Bank, a Director at Ernst & Young Sri Lanka, and having served on the Board of Sri Lanka's government foreign policy think tank. His work has been published by the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the Asian Development Bank, the World Economic Forum, Johns Hopkins University's SAIS Review, and the London School of Economics.

Trump, Davos and the History of Political Economy - By James Cullis

By James Cullis

Donald Trump’s Davos speech earlier this year generated significant interest and debate. It was analytically notable for the way it challenged the conventional historical narrative of political economy.[1] At the heart of his critique, he made plain his objections to liberal capitalism and the international order, stating: “In recent decades, it became conventional wisdom in Washington and European capitals that the only way to grow a modern Western economy was through ever-increasing government spending, unchecked mass migration and endless imports.” (Trump, 2026, Davos) Although often dismissed as national populism, these comments function as an intervention in debates over the historical rise of modern political economy. Trump’s speech directly contested the Smithian‑inspired commercial‑society narrative articulated by István Hont in Jealousy of Trade.[2] The ethos of the speech attacked the idea of open markets and the free exchange of goods and services.

In chapter two of Jealousy of Trade, Hont reconstructs the eighteenth‑century moment in which political economy emerged as a response to the structural limits imposed on sovereign states by commercial society. As global markets expanded and mercantilism waned, states found their capacity to determine their own destinies increasingly constrained by interdependence. Trump’s Davos narrative rejects the merits of this historical settlement by arguing that the shift toward global interdependence fundamentally weakened state sovereignty. “This was the path … [that] Western governments very foolishly followed, turning their backs on everything that makes nations rich and powerful and strong.” (Trump, 2026, Davos) By insisting that the state remains the decisive actor in world markets, Trump rejects the idea that globalisation represents an irreversible structural condition. For him, economic interdependence has been neither historically inevitable nor justified. On Hont’s account, by contrast, globalisation generates structural constraints on the nation‑state.[3]

Trump’s speech embraces a post‑liberal interpretation of globalisation in which the liberal order appears as a force that corrodes the state’s internal harmony. On this view, the post‑war international economic settlement progressively eroded national sovereignty. Davos, therefore becomes, within Trump’s framing, the symbolic culmination of that process: a forum in which the forces of liberal capital and liberal democratic states gather to exchange ideas, thereby institutionalising the pressures he identifies as corrosive. Deep into his speech, Trump stated: “Virtually all of the so‑called experts predicted my plans to end this failed model would trigger a global recession and runaway inflation. But we have proven them wrong. It’s actually just the opposite.” (Trump, 2026, Davos) For Trump, his fiscal programme overturned what he presents as the orthodox liberal vision of political economy.

Such claims also strike directly at the heart of international relations theory since 1945. For G. John Ikenberry, the rules‑based system that emerged in the wake of the Second World War stabilised the international order by embedding states within dense networks of economic interdependence and institutionalised cooperation.[4] Through this architecture, the fortunes of individual nation‑states became mutually bound, and it was this institutionally embedded global capitalism that generated a durable sense of order. Thus, Trump’s  Davos speech signals not only a wholesale rejection of the historical development of the liberal economic order outlined by Hont, but also a withdrawal from—and overturning of—the structure of international relations that has underpinned U.S. growth since 1945

The spectre of Trump’s speech directly challenged the limits that Ikenberry argues were deliberately imposed on U.S. power. For Trump, the leverage supposedly gained by the United States since the Second World War was a myth, and one that had ultimately weakened rather than strengthened American power. As highlighted above, the imposition of constraints not only ensured that the United States did not abandon its responsibilities but also generated significant economic benefits in return. In this sense, Trump’s intervention at Davos sought to overturn that trajectory by redirecting American power away from a liberal internationalist model of global order and toward a more unilateral and sovereignty‑centred strategy. This appeal to unilateralism and sovereign power was framed at one point in cultural terms: “many other Western governments very foolishly followed, turning their backs on everything that makes nations rich and powerful and strong” (Trump, 2026, Davos). Here, the point was to suggest that the liberal internationalist model weakened the internal character of states. Yet its true intended aim was also to offer an alternative vision of political economy.

Seen in this light, Trump’s speech sought to offer an alternative account of post‑1945 international history, one where the rise of globalisation had undermined the ability of states to govern themselves. Here, attention may be turned back to the final part of the quote: “everything that makes nations rich and powerful and strong” (Trump, 2026, Davos). The wording “rich and powerful and strong” is crucial as it suggests that globalisation itself has frustrated the nation’s functioning capabilities. Thus it is with this point that Trump attempted to clip the liberal narrative of global history.

One of the central premises of Trump’s speech was to depict globalisation as a historical error of political economy. Many commentators disputed the factual basis of his claim, yet Trump’s wording identifies the “so‑called experts” as responsible for assuming that the development of globalisation and the international liberal economic order was inevitable. His conflict with them begins at this point of historical interpretation.

A central interlocutor here is Thomas Hobbes and his discussion of sovereign power in Chapter 18 of Leviathan.[5] Hobbes argues that the sovereign cannot be overthrown and that no common sovereign exists between independent states. Read in the context of Trump’s speech, this point clarifies the force of his claim. Trump stated: “We never ask for anything and we never got anything. We probably won't get anything unless I decide to use excessive strength and force, where we would be, frankly, unstoppable.” (Trump, 2026, Davos) Drawing on the Hobbesian premise that, in an anarchic world, states must rely on their own power to secure their interests, Trump frames international politics as governed by force and unilateral action rather than by the cooperative norms of the post‑war commercial order. Hobbes thus provides Trump with an intellectual template that legitimises his voluntarist claim that a state may act decisively — even coercively — when no higher authority exists to restrain it.

Here, Trump’s argument draws on a Hobbesian characterisation of the international state system to challenge Hont’s account of commercial society. In doing so, he revives a pre‑commercial, mercantilist model of sovereignty that he presents as a new economic logic for the twenty‑first century. The seeds of this shift were visible in his inaugural address of January 2017, but the moment at Davos marks its most explicit articulation. Framing his argument around mercantilist assumptions, Trump criticised the principles of free trade and directed his remarks toward the French President, Emmanuel Macron:

…you've been taking advantage of the United States for 30 years... the answer is, you're going to do it. You're going to do it fast. Then if you don't, I'm putting a 25% tariff on everything that you sell into the United States, and a 100% tariff on your wines and champagnes... and you're going to do it. (Trump, 2026, Davos)

Such rhetoric targets the post‑war international commercial order premised on free trade. One indication is Trump’s claim — contrary to the conventional understanding of private enterprise — that the French government enabled its firms to “flood” the American market with French agricultural goods, thereby exploiting the American consumer.[6] This claim is analytically significant: it reframes international exchange not as a spontaneous, market‑driven process but as a field of state‑directed advantage. In doing so, Trump seeks to re‑establish a mercantilist conception of political order in which sovereigns actively manage trade flows and national wealth is tied to strategic control over economic exchange.

This position becomes clearer when attention turns to Greenland and the question of Arctic security. Trump’s assertion of US claims over the territory rests on a logic of resource sovereignty. Greenland contains significant deposits of rare‑earth minerals — notably neodymium and dysprosium — which are critical for high‑performance magnets used in electric motors, advanced computing hardware, and components of artificial‑intelligence infrastructure.[7] One estimate places Greenland’s reserves at roughly 1.5 million tonnes.[8]

Understood in these terms, Trump’s claims align with classic mercantilist understandings of the economy, centred on state‑directed accumulation of wealth through control of trade and resources. In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith drew a sharp distinction between productive capacity and the mere possession of resources.[9] That distinction is crucial for interpreting Trump’s actions and for understanding how his voluntarist claims collide with Hont’s structural account of commercial society. Hont treats commercial society as producing structural interdependence that constrains sovereign action; Trump’s voluntarism, grounded in state control of resources and trade, challenges that constraint.

For Trump, possession of raw minerals functions both as an index of economic strength and as the basis for a re‑emergent resource sovereignty capable of re‑territorialising economic power and overturning the logic of commercial society outlined by Hont. Trump’s Davos speech therefore reignites a contest over the history of political economy and forces a reconsideration of the limits of the commercial order.

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[1] For an analysis of Trump’s rhetorical technique, see: Raunak M. Pillai, Eunji Kim, and Lisa K. Fazio, “All the President’s Lies: Repeated False Claims and Public Opinion,” Public Opinion Quarterly 87, no. 3 (Fall 2023): 764–7.

[2] István Hont, Jealousy of Trade: International Competition and the Nation‑State in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 54-88.

[3] For a discussion of this point, see Susan Strange, The Retreat of the State: The Diffusion of Power in the World Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 24-36.

[4] G. John Ikenberry, Liberal Leviathan: The Origins, Crisis, and Transformation of the American World Order (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011).

[5] Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Noel Malcolm, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2012).

[6] On the topic of private enterprise and global markets, see Strange, The Retreat of the State,  24–36.

[7] Julie Michelle Klinger, Rare Earth Frontiers: From Terrestrial Subsoils to Lunar Landscapes (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2017), 101–105.

[8] Diogo Rosa, Per Kalvig, Henrik Stendal, and Jakob Kløve Keiding, Review of the Critical Raw Material Resource Potential in Greenland, MiMa Rapport 2023/1 (Copenhagen: Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland (GEUS), 2023).

[9] Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. R. H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1981).

Review of "King Dollar: The Past and Future of the World’s Dominant Currency" - by Michael Wakin

Review - King Dollar: The Past and Future of the World’s Dominant Currency by Paul Blustein. Yale University Press, 2025. 320 pages.

By Michael Wakin

In 1971, following the Nixon administration’s decision to summarily close the gold convertibility window and dismantle the Bretton Woods system of global fixed exchange rates, Charles Kindleberger, the influential economic historian, pronounced: “The dollar is finished as international money.” Decades later, as the financial crisis originating in the U.S. housing market nearly toppled the global economy, former German finance minister Peer Steinbrück proclaimed in 2008: “The United States will lose its superpower status in the world financial system.” After the United States unleashed its unprecedented financial warfare campaign against Russia following its invasion of Ukraine in 2022, a Foreign Affairs article predicted such sanctions would “deprive the United States of the very power that makes sanctions so devastating.” As reconstructed in Paul Blustein’s King Dollar: The Past and Future of the World’s Dominant Currency, the chorus singing the inevitable demise of the dollar as the international currency of choice has proven unfounded. Bluestein concludes that the United States remains the undisputed financial hegemon of the world.

King Dollar argues that the dollar is here to stay as the primary form of global money – i.e., as the leading global reserve currency for central banks, medium of exchange for cross-border trade, and unit of account for invoicing. Dollar supremacy is sustained, first, by structural features of the U.S. economy – most notably its sophisticated, deep, and liquid financial markets – and, second, by a dearth of alternative currencies that can legitimately rival the dollar on the international stage. Blustein contends that it is only the U.S. itself that has the capacity to dethrone the dollar, either through recklessness or zealous unilateralism in wielding the tremendous power that dollar supremacy confers.

Blustein posits that as long as the dollar maintains its preeminence in international trade and finance, the U.S. has an obligation to wield its financial heft with responsibility. For policymakers, this admonition translates into an acknowledgement that extreme dollar weaponization will further incentivize foreign governments to circumvent the dollar system. They must also consider that U.S. financial sanctions can prove destructive for the livelihoods of vulnerable populations in targeted countries, damage diplomatic relations, and engender reciprocal financial consequences. Furthermore, dollar dominance endows the U.S. with the singular capacity to stabilize the global economy amidst crisis, as demonstrated by the Federal Reserve’s extensive campaign to pump dollar liquidity to central banks around the world during both the 2008 Global Financial Crisis and the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. Shading King Dollar is an underlying belief that “the United States has historically been the closest thing to a benevolent hegemon that the world has,” informing Blustein’s conclusion that, given the lack of current alternatives, the sustainment of dollar hegemony is ultimately desirable. 

King Dollar’s strength lies in its ability to fit decades of political economy history into a readable, coherent narrative that challenges revisionist or apocryphal thinking around dollar dominance. Blustein, who has worked as an economic journalist for the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal, brings accessible prose to oft-tedious topics, such as the intricacies of rolling out central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) to global trade imbalances of the early 2000s. Chapters 2 and 3 offer a brisk jog through U.S. monetary history spanning the late 18th century to the collapse of the Bretton Woods system in 1971, followed by a chronicling of the hurdles and triumphs of dollar dominance in the period that followed. Chapter 4 documents the threats and ultimate failures of four alternative currencies – the Euro, Yen, Special Drawing Rights (SDRs), and Renminbi. Chapters 5 and 6 detail a history of sanctions as a form of economic statecraft and the role of the dollar in financial sanctions, with a particular focus on the post-September 11 environment, which witnessed the rise of the U.S. Department of the Treasury as the primary instrument of the country’s financial weaponization. Chapters 7 and 8 dive into the threat, or lack thereof, posed by digital assets – cryptocurrencies, stablecoins, Facebook’s Libra, and CBDCs – to dollar dominance, most notably assessing the potential internationalization of the e-CNY, China’s central bank digital currency. Chapters 9 and 10 spotlight two recent events that capture both the ubiquity and resilience of the global dollar: the COVID-induced market collapse in 2020, which again required the Federal Reserve to step in as the international lender of last resort (ILOLR), and the unparalleled financial sanctions against Russia in 2022. In particular, the freezing of central bank reserves, which failed to generate initial catastrophic effects on Russia’s economy as predicted by many.

A noteworthy theme that runs throughout King Dollar is the question of whether continued dollar dominance is actually beneficial to the United States. Not everyone agrees it is. Michael Pettis and Matthew Klein in Trade Wars are Class Wars make the case that the dollar’s global status is not an “exorbitant privilege” but an “exorbitant burden.” In short, given the leading role of the dollar, the United States is the endpoint for much of the world’s excess capital and manufacturing goods, which, the authors contend, contributed to the bursting of the housing bubble in 2008 and the hollowing out of the country’s industrial and manufacturing base. Relatedly, former Fed chairman Ben Bernanke has argued that the dollar dominance’s economic benefits for Americans are negligible when observing that the United States’ borrowing costs are no lower than those of other wealthy industrialized economies. While acknowledging these arguments, Blustein emphasizes the scope of the benefits to the United States carries beyond the economic realm and extends to the country’s national security apparatus through the long arm of financial sanctions. Perhaps the better question is not whether dollar dominance is overall beneficial to the United States, but rather to whom such benefits accrue. 

Another consideration brought to the fore by Blustein is the consequences of dollar dominance for the rest of the world. In addition to the continued reality that banks from around the globe must inevitably route their dollar transactions through New York, thus placing them under the jurisdiction of the U.S. government, the implications of dollar hegemony can be acute and at times devastating. Particularly poignant for low-and-middle-income countries, shifts in Fed interest rate policy, which in turn affects the value of the dollar vis-à-vis other currencies, can lead to wide fluctuations in prices for critical imports, which are often priced in dollars, as well as result in surges of servicing costs for sovereign debt borrowed in dollars. More abstractly, as the global financial crises of 2008 and 2020 demonstrated, the Fed serves the function of the final backstop for the world economy. Many countries are thus left with the tenuous prospect that they will likely be reliant on international bailouts amidst the next global crisis from a central bank with no legal mandate to operate beyond U.S. borders.

Finally, while Blustein consciously circumscribes his analysis narrowly, King Dollar risks obscuring the realized and unrealized contributions of Global South countries to past and present global monetary orders. One is reminded of Eric Helleiner’s Forgotten Foundations of Bretton Woods, which uncovers the important, yet often overlooked, history of voices from the Global South in shaping the Bretton Woods negotiations. Delegations from Latin America, in particular, played a prominent role in strengthening the World Bank’s development mandate and pushing the IMF towards more generous relief for commodity-exporting countries. Similarly, Stefan Eich’s The Currency of Politics stresses the deeply political nature of international monetary regimes. One such example was the rise of the New International Economic Order (NIEO) following the collapse of the Bretton Woods system, which consisted of a set of principles advocated by recently decolonized and developing nations that sought to create a more equitable international economic order. Adherents to the NIEO were acutely aware of the disproportionate power that dollar dominance conferred to the United States and “called for a wholesale, democratic reform of the international monetary constitution” (Eich, p. 192). Ultimately, while King Dollar convincingly catalogues the durability of dollar dominance and its likelihood of remaining atop the global monetary hierarchy, the account reveals a more fundamental question that extends beyond Blustein’s scope: who benefits from this arrangement, and at what costs for the rest of the world to bear?

Slavery Heritage, Ownership and Economic-Cultural Politics in Southern Benin - By Sanne Molenaar

By Sanne Molenaar

Since Patrice Talon was elected President of Benin Republic in 2016, he has massively invested in the cultural sector. The restitution of cultural treasures from France, the construction of museums, the revalorization of cultural heritage, and the development of ‘memorial tourism’, have led to a veritable cultural boom. Based on my research, the aim is to create international recognition and agency for the country through the cultural sector, and negotiate political and economic partnerships.

According to Talon, the cultural sector should not just be developed for its own sake, but should foremostly lead to economic profit.[i] One aspect of this is the revalorization of the heritage of the Transatlantic slavery. The slavery route in Ouidah, a town in south-western Benin, has been rehabilitated, the Portuguese fort is under reconstruction and will be transformed into a Slavery Museum, and nineteenth-century Afro-Brazilian houses are being renovated. These investments, as well as the marketing campaigns around it, have turned Benin into a popular destination for African-Americans and other diasporas, who are looking for their origins. While the country received 325 000 tourists in 2020, it aims to receive 2 million tourists in 2030.[ii] Its raising popularity enables the country to compete economically with other West African countries, such as Ghana and Senegal, who also invest largely in the cultural heritage of slavery.

Despite the economic benefits, Talon’s cultural politics only scarcely acknowledges Beninese scholarly knowledge nor does it recognize the needs and interests of the local people who are concerned. By this, I mean the people whose ancestors were reduced into slavery, or were slave merchants from Brazil and Western European countries. This short article, resulting from field research in Southern Benin from 2020-2025, explains the underlying reasons as well as the aims and disadvantages of the cultural policies related to the heritage of the Transatlantic slavery, while focusing on belonging, ownership and authenticity, and aiming to propose a more inclusive and ethical cultural politics.

Benin’s contested relationship with the slavery heritage

Global discussions about the legacy and reparations of slavery often concern mainly Western European countries; those who are often considered as the main actors, or perpetrators, of the Transatlantic slave trade.[iii] [iv] In Benin, though, reparations for slavery do not only concern Western Europe, but the own country in the first place. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, many Brazilian and European slave merchants got installed on the West African coast and married African women.[v] They collaborated with the Dahomean kings, some of whom would exchange war captives for goods. Until today, according to some of my informants, the descendants of the Dahomeans are accused by the population of having had an active role in the slave trade. This is also the case for the descendants of the slave merchants, who are of mixed origins but have nowadays integrated into the Beninese society. President Talon himself is concerned as well, as he descends from Pierre Manoël Titi Talon, who was a French administrator who directed the Slavery Fort of Ouidah at the end of the nineteenth century. Thirdly, liberated Africans moved from Brazil to the West African coast, amongst which the contemporary Benin, in the first half of the nineteenth century, and many of these people also got engaged in the slave trade on their arrival. The descendants of many of these people continue to be accused of having sold their brothers and sisters, and play an ambiguous role in society, according to my research.

Public apologies of European governments and recent global initiatives amongst which the construction of slavery museums, as well as scholarly discussions[vi], have given the Beninese government the urge to revalorize and restructure the country’s slavery heritage. The government has a feeling of discomfort, because of the country’s historical involvement with the slave trade. Revalorizing this heritage is a way to come to terms with the past, to diminish the stigma of the legacy of slavery, to raise awareness, and to manage and negotiate the national image.

At the same time, it is a form of soft power. [vii] [viii] Economic growth is generated through attraction, which is created by the country’s national branding. By acknowledging the past, a positive and responsible image of the country is created, which acts as cultural diplomacy. Benin has been turned into a popular tourist destination, especially for African Americans; people whose ancestors had been reduced into slavery. Benin’s rising popularity amongst tourists has important economic benefits. According to Ecofin Agency,[ix] Benin has approved a $1.4 billion strategic plan to develop its tourism, culture, and arts sectors over the 2025–2029 period, after having already invested $2 billion in recent years. The aim is to increase the tourism sector’s contribution to GDP from 6% to 13.4% by 2030.

Neglecting Local Knowledge: Scholars and Communities Ignored

An example of one of the cultural projects that have been initiated by the Beninese government is the Slavery Route in Ouidah. The route, which has a length of approximately four kilometers, starts at the center of Ouidah and ends on the beach. While the route was formerly a sand path, it has now been asphalted and made more accessible, as parts of the route formerly flooded during the rainy season. Nevertheless, Beninese archaeologists who aimed to do excavations on the route to contribute to the historical knowledge of the region, have been blocked by the rehabilitation works. Beninese anthropologists with whom I collaborate also question how this affects the authenticity of the route. The idea of suffering, which could formerly be felt while walking on the sand and, during the rainy season, through the water, has disappeared and is now replaced by cars and buses with tourists.[x] The heritage is being commodified and serves as a tourist attraction.[xi]

Another example is the Marina project: the construction of a ‘Boat of Departure’ on the coast of Ouidah.[xii] This place, which is considered as a key element of Beninese memorial tourism according to the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, aims to embody the suffering of the Africans.[xiii] When the construction will be finished, people will be able to visit the boat and hear the sounds of people who are suffering. They will also see hyperrealist bodies made of wax, representing the enslaved Africans who were attached on the boat. The main objective of this project is to make people experience what the enslaved people would have gone through, comparable with memorial sites of the Second World War such as the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland, and the memorial sites of the Apartheid on Robben Island in South Africa, creating a global recognition. The project aims to distinguish Benin from other West African countries such as Ghana and Senegal, who also invest largely in the heritage of slavery, and makes the country even more attractive for tourism.

Nevertheless, many Beninese people, especially those who descend from enslaved people or slave merchants, do not agree. According to the interviews I did with people from different families who feel concerned, especially the descendants of liberated returnees from Brazil, the heritage of slavery, which formerly belonged to them, is now owned by the state. Their history has been institutionalized and they cannot tell their own story anymore. As a result, they prefer to disengage from the public heritage of slavery, such as the memorial sites mentioned above, and prefer to hold onto their personal heritage. By this, I mean their house – many live in houses that were constructed in the nineteenth and early twentieth century – as well as family portraits, furniture, other objects, and family ceremonies.

Restorations Without Authenticity: Architectural and Symbolic Dispossession

Unfortunately, similar issues occur with these personal heritages. In Porto-Novo, the capital of Benin, several nineteenth- and twentieth-century houses that are inhabited by these people, have been restored by the Municipal Government in collaboration with the African School of Heritage (Ecole du Patrimoine Africain). These constructions were in a bad state and might have collapsed if they would not have been rehabilitated. Although the inhabitants were in a first instance glad their houses would be preserved, some of them now regret to have accepted. The owners of the houses have had to move and the government has transformed some of the houses into hotels, of which the families do not benefit the way they expected. Though not officially, for them it feels like they do no longer own their own houses. Similarly to the public heritage of slavery, their heritage is being commodified to accommodate for tourism.

To add to that, some of the houses do not look ‘authentic’ anymore after having been rehabilitated. An example of such as house can be seen in figure 1 (before renovation) and 2 (after renovation). The façade of the house has been changed – especially the left window, staircase, the pillars, and the upper part. The adjustments have made the façade look rather symmetric, while this was not the case before the renovation. The construction techniques that have been used also differ from the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century techniques. The walls are thinner, a different type of wood has been used, and the roof is made of roof tiles instead of the corrugated sheets that were used before. According to the family who owns this house, they have not been consulted and have not had the right to interfere with the rehabilitation of the house. A wall has been constructed around the house, which is now a hotel, and the family lives on the other side of the wall in a small apartment. They have been emotionally and spatially detached from the only tangible heritage they had left from their ancestors, apart from family portraits. It is clear that the aim of this project is mainly to attract tourists. Also in this case, the knowledge and ideas of Beninese scholars and specialists have been ignored, and part of the historical value and authenticity of the house has been lost. This is a common practice in Southern Benin,[xiv] [xv] and is also one of the reasons why other families prefer to demolish their old house to construct a new house. Although some are aware of the loss of their heritage, they find this to be a better solution than to have their house rehabilitated and disowned by the government. In this unfortunate case, ownership and belonging are more important than preservation.

Figure 1. House before renovation. Photo taken by the family that owns the house, 2019.

Figure 2. House after renovation. Photo taken by author, 2025.

Conclusion: Toward Ethical and Inclusive Cultural Politics

It is clear that the rehabilitation works and revalorization of the personal and public heritages of slavery has important economic and diplomatic benefits. Therefore, I strongly advise the Beninese government and the Ministry of Culture and Tourism to continue promoting and valorizing the material heritage of slavery. Nevertheless, it is crucial to revisit the cultural policies and take into account the opinions of the people who are concerned, in order to regenerate durable trust relations. Transparent contracts should be established before starting rehabilitation works. I also propose to create a heritage committee consisting of local scholars, who will have an advisory role and will contribute to the protection of authenticity and ownership. Ethical cultural politics is not only of great importance for the communities who inherit the slavery heritage, but also acts as cultural diplomacy and will contribute to the country’s growing popularity, without creating detachment.

 *   *   *

Bibliography: 

[i] Maureen Ogechi Aruomah; Neil Carr; Patrick Uche Okpoko, “Local people’s perceptions of the potential implications of cultural revitalisation through tourism in Benin, Nigeria,” Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change 18, No. 3 (2019): 1-15.

[ii] WorldData, “Tourism in Benin,” WorldData, 2025, https://www.worlddata.info/africa/benin/tourism.php.

[iii] Ana Lucia Araujo, Politics of Memory: Making Slavery Visible in the Public Space (New York: Routledge, 2012).

[iv] Araujo, Ana Lucia, Museums and Atlantic Slavery (New York: Routledge, 2021).

[v] Ana Lucia Araujo, Politics of Memory: Making Slavery Visible in the Public Space (New York: Routledge, 2012). 

[vi] Stephan Conermann; Claudia Rauhut; Ulrike Schmieder; Michael Zeuske, Cultural Heritage and Slavery: Perspectives from Europe, (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2023).

[vii] Joseph S. Nye, Jr., “Soft power,” Foreign Policy 80 (1990): 153-171.

[viii] Joseph Nye, “Soft power: the origins and political progress of a concept,” Palgrave Communications 3 (2017): 1-3.

[ix] Ecofin Agency, “Benin to Invest $1.4bn to Double Tourism’s GDP Share by 2030,” Ecofin Agency, 2025, https://www.ecofinagency.com/news/1206-47236-benin-to-invest-1-4bn-to-double-tourism-s-gdp-share-by-2030#:~:text=Benin%20has%20approved%20a%20$1.4,visa%20services%20to%20simplify%20entry.

[x] Gaetano Ciarcia, “Mémoire de l’esclavage au Bénin. Le passé à venir, ” Gradhiva 8 (2008) : 4-9.

[xi] Eric Cohen, “Authenticity and Commoditization in Tourism,” Annals of Tourism Research 15 (1988): 371-386.

[xii] The Conversation, “Benin is building a theme park to remember slavery — is history up for sale?,” TheWorld, 2022, https://theworld.org/stories/2022/12/22/benin-building-theme-park-remember-slavery-history-sale.

[xiii] Agence Nationale de promotion des Patrimoines et de développement du Tourisme, La “Marina de Ouidah,” ANPT, 2022, https://anpt.bj/projet/9/la-marina-ouidah/.

[xiv] H. Killion Mokwete, “Aguda/Afro-Brazilian architectural heritage in the bight of Benin,” Regional Studies, Regional Science 12, No. 1 (2025): 924–942.

[xv] Dallen J. Timothy, Cultural Heritage and Tourism in Africa, (London: Routledge, 2003).

Figure 2. House after renovation. Photo taken by author, 2025.

Conclusion: Toward Ethical and Inclusive Cultural Politics

It is clear that the rehabilitation works and revalorization of the personal and public heritages of slavery has important economic and diplomatic benefits. Therefore, I strongly advise the Beninese government and the Ministry of Culture and Tourism to continue promoting and valorizing the material heritage of slavery. Nevertheless, it is crucial to revisit the cultural policies and take into account the opinions of the people who are concerned, in order to regenerate durable trust relations. Transparent contracts should be established before starting rehabilitation works. I also propose to create a heritage committee consisting of local scholars, who will have an advisory role and will contribute to the protection of authenticity and ownership. Ethical cultural politics is not only of great importance for the communities who inherit the slavery heritage, but also acts as cultural diplomacy and will contribute to the country’s growing popularity, without creating detachment.

Bibliography: 

[i] Maureen Ogechi Aruomah; Neil Carr; Patrick Uche Okpoko, “Local people’s perceptions of the potential implications of cultural revitalisation through tourism in Benin, Nigeria,” Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change 18, No. 3 (2019): 1-15.

[ii] WorldData, “Tourism in Benin,” WorldData, 2025, https://www.worlddata.info/africa/benin/tourism.php.

[iii] Ana Lucia Araujo, Politics of Memory: Making Slavery Visible in the Public Space (New York: Routledge, 2012).

[iv] Araujo, Ana Lucia, Museums and Atlantic Slavery (New York: Routledge, 2021).

[v] Ana Lucia Araujo, Politics of Memory: Making Slavery Visible in the Public Space (New York: Routledge, 2012). 

[vi] Stephan Conermann; Claudia Rauhut; Ulrike Schmieder; Michael Zeuske, Cultural Heritage and Slavery: Perspectives from Europe, (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2023).

[vii] Joseph S. Nye, Jr., “Soft power,” Foreign Policy 80 (1990): 153-171.

[viii] Joseph Nye, “Soft power: the origins and political progress of a concept,” Palgrave Communications 3 (2017): 1-3.

[ix] Ecofin Agency, “Benin to Invest $1.4bn to Double Tourism’s GDP Share by 2030,” Ecofin Agency, 2025, https://www.ecofinagency.com/news/1206-47236-benin-to-invest-1-4bn-to-double-tourism-s-gdp-share-by-2030#:~:text=Benin%20has%20approved%20a%20$1.4,visa%20services%20to%20simplify%20entry.

[x] Gaetano Ciarcia, “Mémoire de l’esclavage au Bénin. Le passé à venir, ” Gradhiva 8 (2008) : 4-9.

[xi] Eric Cohen, “Authenticity and Commoditization in Tourism,” Annals of Tourism Research 15 (1988): 371-386.

[xii] The Conversation, “Benin is building a theme park to remember slavery — is history up for sale?,” TheWorld, 2022, https://theworld.org/stories/2022/12/22/benin-building-theme-park-remember-slavery-history-sale.

[xiii] Agence Nationale de promotion des Patrimoines et de développement du Tourisme, La “Marina de Ouidah,” ANPT, 2022, https://anpt.bj/projet/9/la-marina-ouidah/.

[xiv] H. Killion Mokwete, “Aguda/Afro-Brazilian architectural heritage in the bight of Benin,” Regional Studies, Regional Science 12, No. 1 (2025): 924–942.

[xv] Dallen J. Timothy, Cultural Heritage and Tourism in Africa, (London: Routledge, 2003).

Taiwan Undaunted: In Search of the Nation That Cannot Call Itself a Nation - by Dir. Neal Robbins

By Sarah Cao

On Monday 23 February, the Oxford Taiwan Studies Programme hosted a screening of Taiwan Undaunted: In Search of the Nation That Cannot Call Itself a Nation at the Kin-ku Cheng Lecture Theatre, followed by a discussion with the film’s director, Neal E. Robbins. The event brought together questions of history, identity, media, and geopolitics through a documentary that seeks to explain Taiwan not simply as a policy problem or strategic flashpoint, but as a lived political community.

An award-winning four-part documentary series produced by TaiwanPlus, Taiwan Undaunted explores the emergence of Taiwanese nationhood. Drawing on more than eighty in-depth interviews with ordinary people, experts, and politicians, Robbins captures not only Taiwan’s political dilemmas but also its aspirations, anxieties, and social complexity. At the center of the film lies a set of tensions that remain unresolved but deeply generative: between indigenous heritage and immigrant roots, between shared history with China and political divergence from it, and between Taiwan’s democratic self-understanding and its constrained international status.

What made the screening especially compelling was the documentary’s refusal to simplify Taiwan. Rather than offering a narrowed account, Taiwan Undaunted assembles a layered portrait of nationhood that is at complex, compelling, and personal. Robbins explained during the discussion that the film was intentionally built through “smaller vignettes” and the depiction of “rich lives being led,” with the aim of giving audiences “a taste” of the many lives being lived in Taiwan. The result is a well-rounded and holistic snapshot of Taiwan, one that resists the flattening tendencies of much contemporary geopolitical commentary.

That breadth was one of the viewing’s central themes. Discussion highlighted the documentary’s wide interview base, including academics, Kuomintang and Democratic Progressive Party figures, multi-party officials, activists, military officials, and artists. This wide range of perspectives matters. Taiwan’s identity debate is too often collapsed into a binary of “pro-independence” and “pro-China,” but the documentary’s method seems deliberately designed to resist such simplification. While Taiwan and China share elements of historical and cultural inheritance, Robbins’s account reportedly foregrounds the distinctiveness of Taiwanese society without denying those points of overlap. Taiwan Undaunted displays this distinct account through memory, democratic practice, cultural sensitivity, and a keen awareness of shared yet contested histories.

The title itself points to the paradox at the heart of the event. “In Search of the Nation That Cannot Call Itself a Nation” captures Taiwan’s peculiar international condition: a polity with democratic institutions, a distinct political identity, and a deeply rooted civic life, yet one that remains constrained by the language and structure of diplomatic recognition. Robbins’s choice of title highlights the gap between political reality and international form, and in doing so raises a broader question of who gets to count as a nation, and on what terms. The phrase “undaunted” also feels carefully chosen. It gestures not toward triumphalism, but toward endurance. The idea that there is ongoing insistence on living a vibrant life under conditions of exclusion and pressure.

The post-screening discussion also revealed how consciously the documentary was shaped as a medium. On the event page, Robbins notes that documentary enabled viewers to “fly like a bird over the land.” However, this resulted in deep considerations regarding breadth versus depth of documentary content. During the director Q/A, Robbins reflected on the challenge of maintaining a coherent theme, deciding what to include and leave out, and using B-roll and visual pacing to hold together a politically and historically dense subject. He also discussed the relationship between the film and his forthcoming book of the same name, suggesting that while the documentary offers a cohesive overview, the book allows for greater nuance, interconnection, and analytical depth.

During the Q/A, several of the most interesting points raised in discussion connected Taiwan’s present to broader comparative cases. Robbins reportedly drew on Hong Kong as an important reference point, including his own research travel there and reflections on the 2014 protest movements and their aftermath. The documentary also engages the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, particularly in relation to civil-military initiatives, asymmetric warfare, and the “will to fight.” These comparisons did not seem to function as easy analogies. Rather, they situated Taiwan within a wider landscape of democratic vulnerability, coercive pressure, and public resilience. The effect was to show Taiwan not as an isolated anomaly, but as part of a broader set of contemporary questions about sovereignty and political resolve.

There was also a productive tension in the conversation around geopolitics. Taiwan, as one audience member put it, finds itself “in between two super powers,” forced into a perpetual balancing act in which its room for maneuver is heavily affected by the state of U.S.-China relations. Yet the documentary seems to push beyond that familiar great-power frame. It asks how geopolitical exposure is experienced socially and culturally, and how ordinary people continue to imagine themselves politically under those conditions. In that sense, Taiwan Undaunted succeeds less by offering a definitive answer than by widening the frame of inquiry. It brings culture into dialogue with security, democratic aspiration into dialogue with diplomatic exclusion, and historical memory into dialogue with present risks. At a time when Taiwan is often discussed in the language of deterrence and strategic competition, Robbins’s documentary offers something more nuanced. Taiwan is not merely a flashpoint in international politics. It is also a contested site of belonging, narration, and political self-understanding.

The seminar was hosted by Dr Bo-jiun Jing, Senior Research Fellow and Programme Manager in Taiwan Studies at the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies. It forms part of the Oxford Taiwan Studies Seminar Series, and this recap was produced in partnership between the Oxford Taiwan Studies Programme and St Antony’s International Review (STAIR).

From Nobita to Gian: Rethinking East Asian Security Through Doraemon

Dependency, Resilience, and Reconciliation Across Taiwan, Japan, China, and the United States

By Meng Kit Tang

Why East Asia Needs a Humanized Strategic Framework

Mainstream International Relations theory explains power balances, deterrence, and alliances in East Asia with technical precision. What it often misses are the quieter forces that shape behavior just as deeply. Emotional asymmetry, dependency anxiety, and moral narratives rooted in history and identity influence how leaders interpret risk and responsibility. Decisions in Taipei, Tokyo, Beijing, and Washington rest not only on capability assessments, but also on fears of abandonment, concerns over dignity, and expectations of restraint. When structural approaches bracket these dimensions, they describe outcomes without fully explaining motivation.

This gap appears most clearly in asymmetric relationships. Taiwan calibrates its defense through military logic and persistent unease about external reliance. Japan advances its regional role cautiously, balancing new capabilities against postwar moral limits. China pressures Taiwan and signals toward Japan through performances of authority tied to national restoration. The United States acts as protector and manager, shaping incentives while preserving strategic distance. These interactions unfold through shared stories about obligation and hierarchy, not merely through treaties or force deployments.

Scholars have examined asymmetry, most notably Brantly Womack’s work on relational stability in unequal dyads. Yet this literature remains anchored in structure and bargaining. It clarifies leverage, but says less about how vulnerability feels, how restraint is learned, or why dominance often seeks recognition alongside compliance. This article proposes a humanized framework grounded in Fujiko F. Fujio’s Doraemon. Familiar across East Asia, Doraemon offers a practical language for understanding dependency, growth under pressure, and unequal bonds. Used as a heuristic rather than allegory, the framework exposes durable relational patterns beneath shifting material conditions.

The empirical context reinforces this need. As of January 2026, the United States continues implementing a $11.1 billion arms package for Taiwan, omits an explicit “One China” reference in its National Security Strategy, and responds to intensified China–Japan signaling over Taiwan amid new PLA capability milestones. Japan’s supportive role illustrates the framework’s relevance. The Chinese idiom 伸出援手 (“extending a hand of aid”) finds playful echo in Doraemon’s 伸出圆手: a rounded, gentle paw that provides tools without grasping control. Recent actions reflect this: Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s November 2025 Diet statement affirming collective self-defense in a Taiwan contingency signaled commitment despite provoking Beijing, while Taiwan’s “sushi diplomacy” reciprocated solidarity. These exchanges may appear tactical. In reality, they reveal something more enduring: East Asian security rests less on raw power than on disciplined relationships, where support must feel respectful, coercion must remain bounded, and resilience grows through repeated exposure to imbalance.

The Doraemon Framework and Its Theoretical Foundations

Origins and Core Themes of Doraemon Theory

Fujiko F. Fujio’s Doraemon has shaped the moral imagination of East Asia since its debut in 1969. The story follows Nobita, a weak and anxious child who depends on Doraemon, a robotic cat from the future, to navigate recurring crises. Doraemon’s tools provide short-term relief but often create new problems, forcing Nobita to confront his own limits. Three core themes give Doraemon analytical leverage:

• Dependency enables survival but increases vulnerability when reliance becomes excessive

• Moral growth emerges through repeated failure rather than safety

• Friendship persists alongside rivalry, as characters such as Gian combine coercion with moments of cooperation.

Power in Doraemon does not resolve conflict. It sustains unstable relationships that demand continual adjustment. These themes mirror East Asian security dynamics shaped by asymmetry, memory, and relational expectations.

Why Metaphor Works in International Relations

International Relations scholars often rely on metaphors to clarify complex strategic behavior. Graham Allison’s models of decision-making use stylized lenses to expose different causal logics, while Nissim Otmazgin’s workshows how popular culture structures regional expectations. The Doraemon framework follows this tradition but draws a firm line between allegory and heuristic. This framework does not suggest that states act like fictional characters. Instead, it uses Doraemon as a heuristic to help map recurring relational patterns such as protection, coercion, restraint, and moral learning. Its strength lies in revealing emotional asymmetries and role expectations that realist or liberal models often overlook, thereby complementing rather than competing with structural theories.

Methodological Clarification

The Doraemon framework functions as a mid-level interpretive tool. It does not predict outcomes or replace analysis of capabilities and alliances. Its value lies in clarifying how actors understand dependence, responsibility, and rivalry under pressure. The framework cannot explain domestic politics or sudden ideological shifts, and it loses relevance under conditions of total war. These limits maintain analytical discipline and allow the framework to be tested against empirical developments.

Mapping East Asian Actors Through Doraemon Roles

The Doraemon framework assigns familiar roles to East Asian actors to highlight recurring patterns of vulnerability, support, coercion, and orchestration. These roles capture behavioral logics that shape strategic interaction under pressure. Nobita represents Taiwan. Taiwan faces structural asymmetry and constant external pressure. It survives not through strength but through adaptation, learning, and resilience. Democratic governance, civil defense, and technological upgrading reflect growth through repeated challenges. Doraemon represents Japan. Doraemon wields advanced tools yet acts with restraint. Japan mirrors this through selective engagement with Taiwan, including semiconductor investments, disaster relief funding, and careful political signaling such as statements by senior leaders like Sanae Takaichi. Japan provides support without overreach, combining capability with judgment. Gian represents China. Gian asserts dominance through coercion and spectacle, seeking compliance while avoiding irreversible conflict. China’s military exercises, economic leverage, and diplomatic pressure follow the same logic. Sewashi represents the United States. Sewashi guides outcomes without constant presence. The United States underwrites regional order through alliances and strategic signaling, coordinating action while preserving distance. These roles reveal a system where dependency, restraint, coercion, and orchestration coexist in balance.

Relationship Dynamics Through Doraemon Themes

Taiwan–Japan Relations: The Nobita–Doraemon Bond

Taiwan’s relationship with Japan resembles the bond between Nobita and Doraemon. Nobita faces challenges he cannot overcome alone, yet he retains agency through Doraemon’s guidance. Japan provides support that strengthens Taiwan without replacing its responsibility. Recent developments illustrate this dynamic. Former foreign minister Lin Chia-lung’s July 2025 visit to Japan signaled goodwill and reinforced cooperation under regional pressure. Economically, Japan absorbed part of Taiwan’s seafood exports when China imposed restrictions, reducing vulnerability and encouraging market diversification. Like Doraemon’s tools, Japanese support eases immediate pressures while promoting adaptation and self-reliance. This relationship shows that dependency can coexist with agency. Taiwan draws strength from Japanese technological, economic, and diplomatic support, while continuing to invest in civil defense, industrial resilience, and social preparedness. Support fosters resilience when it preserves responsibility and reinforces shared values.

United States–Japan Alliance: Sewashi–Doraemon Coordination

The United States–Japan alliance reflects the Sewashi–Doraemon relationship. Sewashi intervenes selectively, shaping outcomes without managing daily crises. Doraemon carries responsibility on the ground. The United States structures the regional security environment through alliances, arms transfers, and strategic signaling, while encouraging Japan to act as a capable frontline partner. Japan’s growing defense posture and coordination on Taiwan-related contingencies reflect this logic. Their effectiveness depends on trust, clarity of roles, and complementary responsibilities. Too much control would stifle initiative, while too little guidance would invite miscalculation. The Sewashi–Doraemon dynamic shows how orchestration sustains stability without domination. The United States enables Japan’s agency while maintaining broader strategic influence.

Cross-Strait Relations: The Nobita–Gian Asymmetry

Cross-Strait relations resemble the asymmetrical relationship between Nobita and Gian. Gian dominates through intimidation and spectacle, compelling compliance without destroying the group. China’s military exercises, diplomatic pressure, and economic coercion operate similarly, signaling authority while avoiding irreversible escalation. Taiwan navigates this pressure through adaptation, external support, and strategic restraint. Intelligence sharing, coordinated exercises, and crisis management preserve autonomy without overturning the imbalance. Repeated interactions sometimes soften dominance, creating unintended coordination among Taiwan, Japan, and the United States. These patterns illustrate that agency survives even under coercive pressure. The Nobita–Gian dynamic explains coexistence under asymmetry. Resilience develops through disciplined adaptation rather than direct confrontation, showing how support, rivalry, and repeated interactions shape strategic outcomes.

Episodic Scenario Modeling: “Gian’s Concert” as Behavioral Simulation

The recurring episode “Gian’s Concert” serves as a behavioral simulation, revealing patterns of coercion, cooperation, and moral growth among asymmetric actors. Focusing on one arc allows observation of consistent strategic tendencies. In the episode, Gian forcefully organizes a concert and compels Nobita and his friends to participate or attend. He initially employs bullying and threats, creating a high-pressure environment. Nobita responds with reluctance and anxiety, yet he increasingly relies on Doraemon’s gadgets to navigate obstacles and mitigate risk. Over time, the group moves from coercion to hesitant cooperation. Doraemon’s interventions provide practical solutions while fostering agency and resilience in Nobita. Eventually, Gian’s performance is redeemed through collective effort, and the group achieves harmony, illustrating how dominance can soften when structured support and empathy are present.

The episode models three dynamics in East Asian geopolitics. Nobita’s reliance on Doraemon mirrors Taiwan’s dependence on Japan for economic, technological, and diplomatic support. Sewashi’s guidance, reflected in Doraemon’s planning, parallels the United States coordinating Japan’s frontline role, enabling outcomes without substituting Japan’s agency. Gian’s coercion and eventual moderation illustrate how cross-Strait asymmetries can evolve toward tolerable coexistence when shared stakes foster accommodation.

China’s large-scale military exercises around Taiwan, including the Joint Sword series and 2025–2026 blockade simulations, resemble the dynamics illustrated in “Gian’s Concert.” These coercive displays compel attention and coordination among Taiwan, Japan, and the United States. Yet, they sometimes produce unintended benefits: improved intelligence sharing, accelerated Japanese defense normalization, and space for back-channel diplomacy. The performance is tolerated rather than fully confronted, showing how structural asymmetry can coexist with pragmatic interdependence and how crises can strengthen resilience and enable latent reconciliation.

Policy Implications: A Practitioner’s Lens

The Doraemon framework, as a heuristic, does not prescribe specific policies but offers a distinctive outlook for navigating complex, asymmetric relationships in East Asia. It invites policymakers to reflect on how dependency, assertiveness, and coercion interact relationally, and to probe alternative ways of framing strategic choices. For Washington, the Sewashi role highlights the value of restrained orchestration. Over-controlling Japan risks stifling initiative, just as Sewashi avoids micromanaging Doraemon. U.S. strategy should prioritize enabling Japan’s frontline role through intelligence sharing, joint planning, and capacity-building incentives while maintaining strategic flexibility. This approach sustains alliance credibility without creating resentment or entrapment.

In Tokyo, the Doraemon metaphor encourages balanced assertiveness. Japan can extend support through economic aid, technology transfers, and disaster-relief cooperation without provoking irreversible backlash from Beijing. Examples such as semiconductor partnerships and Taiwan’s “sushi diplomacy” show how targeted assistance strengthens resilience while signaling restraint. Pairing support with encouragement of Taiwan’s self-reliance mitigates dependency and preserves strategic room for maneuver.

For Taipei, the Nobita Proposition highlights the value of adaptation. Framing reliance on Japan and the United States as temporary scaffolding, combined with investment in asymmetric capabilities, civil defense, and economic diversification, allows Taiwan to convert vulnerability into durable deterrence.

Even in Beijing, the framework offers a cautionary insight. Gian-like coercive displays often provoke unintended coordination among rivals, strengthening rather than weakening their resilience. Recognizing this dynamic opens space for moral signaling and back-channel diplomacy to reduce miscalculation. Ultimately, the framework counsels all actors to treat security as relational craftsmanship: patience in orchestration, discipline in assertiveness, and prudence in coercion foster stable coexistence amid persistent asymmetries.

Conclusion: Humanized Security in East Asia

The Doraemon framework presents East Asian geopolitics as a balance of dependency, resilience, and restrained rivalry. By translating structural asymmetries into familiar relational patterns, it humanizes interactions that material power alone cannot explain. Taiwan’s adaptation under pressure, Japan’s disciplined support, China’s coercive but bounded dominance, and the United States’ distant orchestration together sustain an uneasy yet durable regional order.

East Asian stability rests on a disciplined management of asymmetry. External support strengthens resilience only when it reinforces self-reliance rather than dependence. Crises, though destabilizing, often accelerate adaptation and coordination among partners. Coercion, meanwhile, can generate unintended alignment among those it seeks to intimidate. These patterns suggest that regional order persists not because imbalances disappear, but because actors learn to operate within them. Stability endures when support remains measured, signaling remains bounded, and rivalry stops short of rupture.

The framework has limits. It cannot predict internal political shifts or rapid escalation into conflict. Its value lies in clarifying patterns of behavior rather than forecasting outcomes. Ultimately, East Asian stability depends not on eliminating imbalance, but on managing it with judgment, patience, and disciplined alliances, showing that resilience and cooperation emerge through repeated trials under pressure.

Selective Sovereignty and the Politics of Uneven Intervention

By Alabbas F. Alsudani

Sovereignty has long occupied a foundational place in the study and practice of international relations. One of its earliest systematic formulations was offered by Jean Bodin, who defined sovereignty as the “absolute and perpetual power of a commonwealth,” a conception that emphasized ultimate authority and non-interference (Franklin, 1992). This understanding later became embedded in the legal architecture of the modern international system, most clearly through Article 2(1) of the United Nations Charter, which affirms the juridical equality of states and their exclusive authority over internal affairs. Together, these formulations have elevated sovereignty to a core organising principle of international order.

Yet despite its formal centrality, sovereignty has long been criticised as being honoured more in rhetoric than in practice. Empirical patterns of intervention, coercion, and conditional recognition reveal a persistent gap between sovereignty’s legal definition and its political operation (Bartelson, 2016). Rather than functioning as a fixed or uniformly applied rule, sovereignty appears increasingly contingent-invoked, suspended, or reinterpreted depending on context. This suggests that sovereignty operates less as an inviolable doctrine than as a historically constructed and politically mediated institution.

This article argues that sovereignty in contemporary international politics functions as a selectively applied principle within a hierarchical global order. Far from constituting a universally guaranteed right, sovereignty operates as a conditional privilege shaped by power asymmetries, institutional authority, and dominant normative frameworks. To develop this argument, the article proceeds in three analytical steps. First, it draws on realist and neoclassical realist perspectives to show how strategic interests, and geopolitical hierarchies normalise breaches of non-intervention, rendering sovereignty contingent on great-power calculations (Taliaferro et al., 2009). Second, it examines how global governance and evolving norms, such as human rights regimes and the Responsibility to Protect, redefine sovereignty as responsibility, drawing on insights from institutionalist and constructivist scholarship (Keohane, 1984; Wendt, 1999). Finally, it engages critical and post-colonial approaches to highlight how these transformations result in unequal recognition and the selective protection of sovereignty across the international system.

Power Asymmetries and the Conditionality of Sovereignty

Realist and neoclassical realist approaches begin from the premise that the international system is anarchic, lacking a central authority capable of enforcing rules uniformly (Waltz, 1979). Yet although realism emphasises the absence of a central authority above states, scholars have shown that this formal anarchy does not prevent hierarchy from shaping how power and rules operate in practice. Scholars have argued that hierarchy persists beneath the formal equality of states, shaping how rules are applied in practice. Hedley Bull (2012), for example, observed that while the international system is formally anarchic, it operates as a society of states governed by shared rules and institutions that nevertheless generate hierarchical patterns of authority and influence. In this context, sovereignty does not eliminate hierarchy, but coexists with it, structuring relations of dominance and dependence.

Stephen Krasner (1999) develops this insight by describing sovereignty as “organised hypocrisy,” in which legal norms of equality coexist with persistent practices of hierarchy and intervention. From a realist perspective, sovereignty is therefore neither absolute nor uniformly protected. Instead, its practical force is closely tied to material capabilities. Strong states enjoy effective sovereignty, while weaker states experience it as conditional and vulnerable. This logic aligns with offensive realism, which holds that great powers are driven to maximise relative power and pursue regional dominance, constrained less by international law than by strategic calculation (Mearsheimer, 2001). Within this framework, norms of non-intervention tend to restrain weaker states far more than they constrain powerful ones.

Neoclassical realism reinforces this argument by emphasising how domestic politics and elite perceptions mediate the exercise of power. Rather than treating sovereignty violations as automatic responses to systemic pressures, neoclassical realists highlight the role of threat perception, national identity, and domestic political incentives in shaping decisions to override the sovereignty of others (Lobell et al., 2009). The United States’ invasion of Iraq in 2003 illustrates this dynamic. Conducted without explicit United Nations authorisation, the intervention was justified through a combination of self-defence claims, threat inflation, and liberal order-building narratives. From a realist standpoint, however, the invasion reflected less a commitment to legal norms than an attempt to consolidate unipolar dominance and manage perceived future threats (Deudney & Ikenberry, 2017). Iraq’s sovereignty was violated not as an aberration, but as a predictable outcome of asymmetric power relations.

A similar logic underpinned Russia’s intervention in Georgia during the August 2008 war. Neoclassical realists argue that Russian leaders sought to reassert great-power status following the perceived humiliations of the post-Soviet period, using military force to reinforce domestic legitimacy and national identity (Tsygankov & Tarver-Wahlquist, 2009). Notably, Moscow framed its actions using justificatory language previously employed by Western states, invoking humanitarian necessity and the protection of civilians (Burai, 2015). This rhetorical symmetry underscores a central realist insight: sovereignty is respected or violated not according to universal legal principles, but in line with power, capability, and strategic interest.

Taken together, realist and neoclassical realist perspectives offer a compelling explanation for why sovereignty violations are both frequent and unevenly condemned. They illuminate how asymmetrical capabilities normalise breaches of non-intervention and why similar practices are judged differently depending on the identity of the intervening actor. However, while realism is effective in explaining when and why sovereignty is violated, it offers a more limited account of legitimacy and normative justification. This limitation becomes particularly visible in the differential treatment of cases such as Russia’s actions in Georgia and Ukraine, which are widely condemned, compared to U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia, which are often normalised within counterterrorism discourse.

Redefining Sovereignty through Norms and Institutions

While realist approaches explain sovereignty violations primarily through material power and strategic interest, institutionalist and constructivist perspectives offer an alternative account centred on ideas, norms, and governance structures. From this viewpoint, sovereignty is not disappearing but being redefined. Rather than functioning as an absolute right of non-intervention, it is increasingly understood as a conditional responsibility tied to state performance, legitimacy, and compliance with international standards (Evans, 2008). This shift reflects the growing influence of human rights norms, humanitarian imperatives, and international institutions that claim authority to act when states fail to meet accepted thresholds of conduct.

Liberal institutionalism emphasises how international institutions constrain state behaviour through rules, reciprocity, and reputational costs. Institutions such as the United Nations, the International Criminal Court (ICC), the World Trade Organization, and the International Monetary Fund embed sovereignty within regimes of governance that limit autonomy in exchange for cooperation and stability (Keohane, 1984). Within this framework, sovereignty is not overridden arbitrarily, but conditionally restricted in the name of collective security, justice, or economic order. Moral arguments further reinforce this logic, most notably in Michael Walzer’s (1977) claim that non-intervention becomes morally indefensible when states perpetrate or permit severe human rights violations (Nardin, 2013).

The ICC’s intervention in Kenya following the 2007–2008 post-election violence illustrates how sovereignty is reframed through institutional authority. After more than one thousand deaths and widespread displacement, the Court initiated investigations against senior political figures, including then-president Uhuru Kenyatta. Despite resistance from the Kenyan government and the African Union, both of which framed the prosecutions as violations of sovereign integrity, the ICC proceeded on the basis that accountability for mass violence constituted an international responsibility (Johnson et al., 2014). From an institutionalist perspective, this episode demonstrates not the erosion of sovereignty, but its conditional application: states retain formal equality, while their autonomy becomes contingent on adherence to shared norms.

Constructivist approaches complement this account by conceptualising sovereignty as a socially constructed institution sustained through processes of recognition and legitimacy. Because norms evolve, sovereignty itself is subject to reinterpretation as new moral expectations gain acceptance (Finnemore & Sikkink, 1998; Wendt, 1999). China’s shifting position during the Darfur crisis illustrates this dynamic. Initially, Beijing strongly defended Sudan’s sovereignty and opposed external intervention. Over time, however, mounting international pressure and reputational concerns reshaped China’s stance. By abstaining on UN Security Council Resolution 1706 and later facilitating the deployment of the UN–African Union Mission in Darfur under Resolution 1769, China demonstrated a recalibrated understanding of sovereignty that accommodated humanitarian norms while preserving multilateral legitimacy (Contessi, 2010; Ahmed, 2010). From a constructivist perspective, this shift reflects processes of norm socialisation rather than coercive imposition.

Despite their explanatory power, institutionalist and constructivist approaches remain incomplete. While institutionalism highlights how sovereignty is constrained through rules and governance mechanisms, it often underestimates how these constraints reproduce hierarchical authority under the guise of neutrality. Similarly, constructivism explains how norms enable intervention but offers limited insight into why certain norms are invoked selectively and applied unevenly across cases. As a result, both approaches risk obscuring how the redefinition of sovereignty may serve not only moral progress, but also the consolidation of power within an unequal international order.

Who defines Sovereignty? Critical and Postcolonial Prespectives

Critical and postcolonial approaches depart sharply from mainstream international relations theories by rejecting the assumption that sovereignty functions as a neutral or universally accessible norm. Instead, they conceptualise sovereignty as a stratified institution, whose meaning and application are historically produced through colonial encounters, racial hierarchies, and global political economy (Seth, 2011). From this perspective, what are often described as violations of sovereignty appear less as deviations from an otherwise equal order and more as the routine operation of an international system structured by inequality.

Barkawi and Laffey (2006) argue that sovereignty, as theorised in conventional IR, remains deeply Eurocentric, having been historically denied to non-Western societies through imperial governance and unequal incorporation into international society. Similarly, Anievas, Manchanda, and Shilliam (2014) demonstrate how colonial and racial hierarchies continue to shape contemporary understandings of political authority, rendering many states in the Global South as “less fully sovereign” and therefore more vulnerable to external intervention. In this reading, sovereignty does not operate as a uniform legal status, but as a differentiated condition shaped by historical position and geopolitical location.

International law plays a central role in sustaining these hierarchies. Modern international legal doctrines universalised a European conception of sovereignty while simultaneously excluding non-European polities from full recognition (Anghie, 2005). Through civilisational distinctions between the “modern” and the “backward,” sovereignty became conditional upon conformity with Western norms of governance. Although formal decolonisation extended juridical sovereignty to formerly colonised states, underlying hierarchies of recognition persisted, enabling continued intervention through legal and moral justifications.

The post-9/11 “war on terror” illustrates how these dynamics continue to operate in contemporary global politics. The United States’ global counterterrorism campaign relied on practices such as drone strikes, extraordinary rendition, secret detention, and targeted killing, all of which reconfigured sovereignty through a logic of security exceptionalism. As Anievas et al. (2014) argue, these practices reproduced racialised hierarchies in which Arab and Muslim populations were governed primarily as security threats rather than as rights-bearing political subjects. In these contexts, sovereignty became contingent upon perceived compliance with security norms defined by dominant powers.

From a critical legal perspective, these practices represent not a rupture but a continuation of international law’s historical role. Anghie (2005) characterises such practices as contemporary manifestations of a civilisational logic that has long structured global order, in which the non-Western world remains only conditionally sovereign. Sovereignty is thus not merely violated; it is selectively suspended through discourses that normalise intervention as necessary, moral, or inevitable.

Rather than asking why sovereignty is violated, critical and postcolonial scholars therefore redirect attention to a more foundational question: who possesses the authority to define sovereignty, and whose sovereignty is recognised as legitimate. At the same time, these approaches risk collapsing diverse forms of international interaction into a singular narrative of domination, leaving limited analytical space for agency, contestation, and normative change. Nevertheless, their central contribution lies in revealing how sovereignty operates as a technology of power that both reflects and reproduces global hierarchies. In doing so, they underscore that the selective application of sovereignty is not an anomaly within the international system, but a constitutive feature of its historical and structural foundations.

 *

The preceding analysis demonstrates that sovereignty in contemporary international politics is neither obsolete nor uniformly respected. Instead, it operates as a selectively applied principle, shaped by power asymmetries, institutional authority, and historically embedded hierarchies. Across realist, institutionalist, and critical perspectives, a consistent pattern emerges: sovereignty continues to structure international discourse, yet its protection and suspension vary systematically according to context, capability, and legitimacy.

Realist and neoclassical realist approaches reveal how sovereignty is conditioned by material power and strategic calculation, rendering violations of non-intervention predictable within a hierarchical system. Institutionalist and constructivist accounts show how sovereignty is redefined rather than discarded, increasingly framed as a responsibility contingent on compliance with evolving norms and governance regimes. Critical and postcolonial perspectives deepen this analysis by exposing how these transformations are embedded within longer histories of colonialism and racialised exclusion, in which authority to define and suspend sovereignty has never been evenly distributed.

Taken together, these approaches suggest that selective sovereignty is not an anomaly or temporary deviation from international order, but a structural feature of how that order functions. Sovereignty persists as a foundational norm precisely because it is flexible enough to accommodate unequal application, enabling intervention, constraint, or recognition to be justified through legal, moral, or security discourses. The challenge this poses is not merely analytical, but normative: selective sovereignty risks legitimising hierarchy while preserving the appearance of juridical equality.

Recognising this tension does not require abandoning sovereignty as a principle of international order. Rather, it calls for a more critical engagement with how sovereignty is mobilised in practice, by whom, and with what consequences. By foregrounding the conditions under which sovereignty is selectively upheld or suspended, this analysis invites a more honest debate about the relationship between power, norms, and authority in global politics, and about whether sovereign equality can meaningfully coexist with the persistent hierarchies that shape the international system.

 References: 

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Deudney, D. & Ikenberry, G. J., 2017. Realism, Liberalism and the Iraq War. The International Institute for Strategic Studies, 59(4), pp. 7-26.

Tsygankov, A. P. & Tarver-Wahlquist, M., 2009. Duelling Honors: Power, Identity and the Russia–Georgia Divide. Foreign Policy Analysis, 5(4), pp. 307-326.

Burai, E., 2015. Parody as Norm Contestation: Russian Normative Justifications in Georgia and Ukraine and Their Implications for Global Norms. Taylor & Francis, 30(1), pp. 66-67.

Evans, G., 2008. The Responsibility to Protect: An Idea Whose Time Has Come … and Gone?. International Crisis Group, 22(3), pp. 283-298.

Nardin, T., 2013. From Right to Intervene to Duty to Protect: Michael Walzer on Humanitarian Intervention. The European Journal of International Law , 24(1), pp. 67-82.

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Contessi, N. P., 2010. Multilateralism, Intervention and Norm Contestation: China’s Stance on Darfur in the UN Security Council. Security Dialogue, 41(3), pp. 323-344.

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Barkawi, T. & Laffey, M., 2006. The postcolonial moment in security studies. Review of International Studies, 32(2), pp. 329-352.

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Europe's Willingness to Pay for Security

European Willingness to Pay for Security: Why Increasing Resilience Should Precede Defence Spending

by Luca Moretto and Yacine Ouahioune 

With Europe fighting a war at its borders, Washington reneging on its international role, and revisionist powers coordinating more closely, European leaders increasingly acknowledge the need to increase defence spending. Yet, this imperative confronts a challenge of political economy that is only heightened by Europe’s recent social and economic turmoil: can European countries become more security-focused whilst preserving the socio-economic and democratic systems that were built after World War II, in part because the United States’ engagement in Europe’s defence freed them from such concerns? Our article argues that the USA’s disengagement from European security and the war in Ukraine alone are unlikely to sustainably reinforce Europeans’ willingness to pay for their own security, given the politically and culturally anchored delegation of this responsibility to the US after WW2. Beyond its role in mitigating increasingly unpredictable and diverse threats, building the resilience of the public is thus a necessary foundation for increasing European social democracies’ willingness to assume the economic and political costs of their own defence. Therefore, investing in resilience is a necessary condition to maintaining high budgetary commitments in the long-run, with or without the transatlantic alliance.

The political window for defence spending is narrower than argued

Stepping-up European countries’ political and financial engagement in defence is essential for strategic agency, yet the political window of opportunity to do so is narrower than argued in the defence community. The war in Ukraine and the USA’s ambition to step back from its hegemonic security burdens are thought to have created a political window for European political principals to increase defence budgets. In that respect, the defence community welcomed their commitment to spend 3.5% of their countries’ GDP to core defence capabilities and an additional 1.5% on defence-related expenditure like critical infrastructures, following Trump’s wish to see European NATO members commit to 5% of defence expenses by 2035. Experts like RUSI Director-General Rachel Ellehuus, who spoke at the Blavatnik School of Government’s Calleva-Airey Neave Global Security Seminar Series, see in these commitments a “good start” toward reinforcing the transatlantic alliance and putting European countries in the driving seat of their own defence. Yet, experience has shown not only that such commitments are unlikely to be increased, but that they may not be realized in practice at their current levels, the international context remaining equal. The challenges facing Europe’s political principals are first and foremost ones of political economy. Besides political barriers that are unequal among European countries – think France’s historical contestation of NATO and the role played by the US in it – they face domestic political and economic barriers linked to their status of social democracies. Sustainably increasing defence budgets requires reallocating strained public finance away from welfare systems that represent the bulk of public expenditures, or increasing debt levels beyond those which are already considered hardly sustainable. Born in the context of the post-WW2 reconstruction era, European welfare states benefitted from US commitment to Europe’s security. This is particularly the case in Germany, where this factor explains citizens’ low willingness to pay for defence, in addition to the broader will to disarm after the war.

With the most powerful European states – Germany, the UK, and France – facing domestic economic challenges, reallocating strained public finance from welfare states to defence is a political calculus political parties in power are unlikely to sustain.Despite the war in Ukraine, even a country like France, with a relatively important attachment to its military capacity, faces political challenges in stepping-up its capabilities, as suggested by popular discontent over the adoption of the Military Programming Law 2024-2030 in the context of the reform of the retirement system, and fears that the new aircraft carrier announced in December 2025 will further deepen France’s budgetary woes. Germany faces similar fears, formulated differently given recent history. For European political principals, the challenge is two-fold. First, domestic social and economic challenges such as inequalities and ramping indebtedness mean that citizens’ short-term priorities are elsewhere and that they are particularly cautious when it comes to public spending. Second, the risks posed by revisionist powers are not tangible enough, as suggested both by Rachel Ellehuus’ mention of the recent opinion polling of UK citizens about their perception of risks and by RUSI’s recent study on the link between European countries’ geographical proximity with Russia and their perception of the risks posed by the Kremlin. Although Trump’s pressuring of NATO members may have pushed them to commit to 5% defence spending by 2035, one might thus see European political principals renege on these commitments in the coming years, or simply not operationalize them beyond discourses, as seems to be the case with the EU-US trade agreement on energy.

Given these political economy challenges, our interpretation of minilateral, bilateral, and military-industrial agreements evoked by Rachel Ellehuus diverges from hers. During her seminar, she presented agreements like the Nordic Defence Cooperation, the Joint Expeditionary Force, or Lancaster House as a sign that multilateralism is eroding, in part because reaching consensus in bodies like NATO (comprised of 32 members) has become increasingly arduous as members pursue their domestic agendas through the organization. Instead, one could understand such agreements as an attempt to reinforce security partnerships without additional budgetary commitments, by reorganizing capabilities rather than augmenting them. Similarly, military-industrial partnerships with countries both within and outside NATO, like that of the Gulf Cooperation Council and Turkey Eurofighter deal, are less risky bets than increasing defence budgets given the economic advantages that they present for European countries with a defence industry like the UK and France. Yet, such deals present their own challenges to transatlantic security, with new economic dependencies devoid of binding security agreements given more contrasting politics. As such, they are primarily commercial agreements and fail to provide a satisfactory alternative to solving the political economy challenge of making a strong social democratic system coexist with large defence spending.

Building resilience increases public willingness to pay for security

Given this difficult political economy equation, investing in resilience should not be a cheap expedient for unpreparedness to hybrid threats. Instead, it must make distant and abstract risks tangible to overcome collective short-sightedness. Experts like Ellehuus argue that the increasing diversity and unpredictability of threats make citizens’ resilience the “most effective form of deterrence”. When seeing the significant political pressures faced by European principals in reaction to energy price hikes caused by European sanctions on Russia, one cannot but agree with this assessment. Citizens’ low tolerance for hardship amid conflicts and broader unpreparedness to face events like blackouts or shortages are an obvious disadvantage for countries under attack, made all the more vulnerable by the fact that their citizens are used to the state being tasked with improving their welfare. However, we argue that, beyond strategic advantages amid realized risks, policies meant to build resilience might also provide an opportunity to loosen the political economy constraints faced by European governments to increase their expenses in defence. Systems like blackout drills – already in place in Finland – or military services present the advantage that, beyond preparing populations, they reintroduce existential risks into public imaginaries and make more palpable the welfare costs the populations would incur in the case where such threats would be realized. As such, they could not only create a spirit of collective preparedness but also help overcome the behavioural shortcomings of citizens who discount future and abstract existential risks relative to present economic hardship.

From this, one may reevaluate the suitability of policies like that of Finland. The people of Finland are considered  to be generally well-prepared, with a stronger base level of resilience ingrained into society through regular blackout drills. Furthermore, Ellehuus suggests that countries like Finland with some level of military service are more resilient than countries with fully professional militaries. On an industrial level too, Finland particularly utilises its private sector in defence, which monitors the majority of critical infrastructure, allowing for greater flexibility in response to emerging cyber and technological threats. As Ellehuus puts it, “no longer can you count on government and military to have all the solutions… we’re going to have to find ways to work with private sector partners to grapple with these new challenges”. She contrasted the example of Finland with that of the UK, for which RUSI’s recent polling of how prepared the public is in the case of a hybrid attack is concerning. In the UK, at the very least, resilience could be developed through regular drills, information campaigns to prepare the public, and investment in reservists. UK defence would also benefit from greater private investment especially into its critical infrastructure. This all would mark an important shift for British security, which must first be rooted in recognition at the highest levels of developing threats and the necessary shift in the transatlantic alliance as well as in wider international relations. As such, resilience is not a cheap substitute for defence spending – it is the necessary foundation for building public willingness to make defence a political priority in the absence of immediate existential risk.

Resilience first: a long-term investment in the transatlantic alliance

For the transatlantic alliance, the role of resilience in nurturing a culture of collective security implies that it should precede expanding defence budgets logically. This is not a chicken and egg issue: investing in resilience must come first, otherwise commitments to step up budgets are empty and temporary promises. Solving the political economy challenge of sustainably increasing defence budgets in European social democracies first requires policies meant to shift citizens’ perception of the nature and likelihood of risks. Otherwise, one risks seeing commitments diminished or reneged in the medium-run, if, for instance, Europe were to find a more reliable ally in the next US administration. Therefore, we conclude this article by formulating three recommendations meant to loosen the political economy constraints faced by European social democracies in increasing defence budgets in the medium-run. First, reinstating military services across Europe under a shorter form meant to create a culture of collective security and a sense of urgency in stepping-up defence and security capabilities against hybrid threats. Second, a regular and explicit communication on risks, including for business. Finally, an emphasis on the fact that risks go beyond national borders and that security must be collective at the European level. Taken together, such policies would likely achieve a higher degree of willingness to pay for security among Europeans, requiring political principals to accept short-term unpopularity for the long-term security of Europe.