The American securitization of China and Russia: U.S. geopolitical culture and declining unipolarity

Abstract

ABSTRACT Policymakers define threats through the development and presentation of threat narratives, which seek to shape, promote, and limit policy agendas and debate through public discourse. Since 2015, American officials engaged in a securitization process which depicts great power competition, in the form of a rising and aggressive Eurasian alignment of China and Russia, as an existential threat to both America’s geopolitical position in the international system and the liberal-democratic world order. This led to the articulation of an international threat environment under threat from revisionist powers and a revival of Cold War-era rhetoric about both a democracy-autocracy binary and spheres of influence. Utilizing an original dataset which codes the content and evolution of these threat narratives, it seeks to answer the following questions: How is this securitization process reflective of American geopolitical culture? How does the U.S. believe that this challenge arose? How does Washington see its role in this process? It finds that the perceived intentions of these countries, fueled by their respective political cultures, were the crucial factors for precipitating this process, rather than their growing capabilities. It also identifies four ways in which this process reflects underlying fears found in American geopolitical culture under declining unipolarity.