Weak Neighbour Research Articles

Small States and the War in Ukraine

The War in Ukraine signals a return to the sphere of influence politics and great powers’ use of military instruments against their weaker neighbors. The consequences for small states are negative. Although some small states will find new opportunities for hedging and brinkmanship, most small states will see their chances of shaping international agendas reduced as they increasingly focus on defensive aims. To meet these challenges small states must work together to promote their shared interests: 1) A modus vivendi between the great power, which minimizes the risk of great power war as well as the annexation and invasion of smaller states, 2) a rule-based international order; 3) a relaunch the United Nations as the central arena for debates on international society among sovereign states.

The Rise and Fall of Greater Syria: A Political History of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party

In the 1940s and 1950s, it was common among ʿAlawi high school students in Lataqiya to ask one another “shu dinak” (what is your religion, or creed?), by which they meant “are you a member or supporter of the Baʿath of the SSNP [Syrian Social Nationalist Party]?” These were two radical but different parties. The Baʿath was a Pan-Arab nationalist party combining a doctrine of secular Arab nationalism with a belief in social democracy. The SSNP expounded a doctrine of secular Syrian territorial nationalism rejecting Arab Nationalism and a separate existence of Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan, which were instead to be united in a large Syrian state. Both ideologies were attractive to members of minority communities in Syria and Lebanon who were uncomfortable with the Sunni tinctures of classical Arab Nationalism. The dividing line ran sometimes within families. Thus, Ghassan Jadeed was a prominent officer in the Syrian army, a member of the SSNP, who was assassinated by emissaries of Syria’s military intelligence in Beirut in 1955. His brother, Sallah Jadeed, was a prominent member of the Baʿath Party, who became one of the principal leaders of the Baʿath regime in Syria after the coup of March 8, 1963.The SSNP was one of the most interesting political movements to emerge in the Fertile Crescent during the first half of the twentieth century. It was founded by Antuna Saʿadeh, a Greek Orthodox Lebanese, who returned from Brazil and became active in the political and intellectual circles of Beirut in the 1940s. Saʿadeh was influenced by the right-wing and fascist movements in Europe, as were other politicians and movements in the region (the name Phalange given by Pierre Jumayyel to his party was clearly reflective of the trend). According to Saʿadeh, there was and there had been a national entity called Greater Syria composed of Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Palestine. This entity had existed for many centuries but was brutally divided by the colonial powers into four “artificial states.” The purpose of the movement was to abolish this artificial division and to establish Greater Syria. Saʿadeh’s specific opposition to the Lebanese state reflected the Greek Orthodox’s opposition to the Maronite-Catholic hegemony in Lebanon. He actively sought to topple the dominant order in Lebanon, staged a failed coup, escaped to Syria, was extradited to Lebanon, and executed in 1949. His disciples continued their activity in Lebanese politics, staging another failed coup in 1961, but the brunt of their activity shifted to Syria, where, in the 1950s, they fought against rising tide of Arab Nationalism and Soviet influence.It was an ironic twist of fate that when the Baʿath finally came to power in Syria, particularly after the establishment of Hafez al-Asad’s regime in 1970, that the SSNP in Syria, a minor party by that time, was tolerated by the regime and came to support it. This was facilitated by personal relationships and by Hafez al-Asad’s quest to establish Syria’s hegemony over Lebanon and the Palestinians. The Baʿath that had been the most distinctive Pan-Arab political movement and played a key role in establishing Syria’s union with Egypt (1958–61), ended up after 1963 as the champion of Syria’s separate existence, and then as a regional power, exercising influence over its weaker neighbors. Members of the SSNP could argue that Hafez al-Asad was in fact implementing Antun Saʿadeh’s legacy.Carl Yonker’s book, based on his doctoral dissertation at Tel Aviv University, describes and analyzes the SSNP’s history and its remarkable journey during several decades. He does it well. The one comment to be made is that the contemporary part of the book dealing with current events should have been extended.

HEGEMONIC POWER RIVALRY IN THE SOUTH CHINA SEA AND THE FUTURE OF THE GLOBAL ORDER

The issue of the South China Sea is obvious in terms of the Sino-American New Cold War, and is one of the most important issues today.Importantly, China's ultimate goal of dominance can be seen here, as well as its potential to have serious consequences for its much smaller and weaker neighbors. . In the wake of the post-Cold War optimism and courage, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) has sought to create a more inclusive, stable and comprehensive order in the wider East Asian region. For example, the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) provided an unprecedented platform for constructive and institutional dialogue between all major powers, such as the United States, China, Japan, India, Australia, the European Union and Russia. In general, the issue of the South China Sea is mainly related to disputes over the sovereignty of the South China Sea with the participation of the United States, some countries in Southeast Asia, and China. The study analyzes the conflict in the South China Sea through the balance of forces in the region, and the US and China's position on regional hegemony.

How Weak Neighbours Manage Their Relationship with China: The Case of Laos

How Weak Neighbours Manage Their Relationship with China: The Case of Laos

Rising to the Challenge: Europe’s Security Policy in East Asia amid US-China Rivalry

ABSTRACT China’s growing power and assertiveness towards its smaller and weaker neighbours has been a wakeup call for the European Union and its member states which, as a result, have stepped up their involvement in East Asia. EU security policy in the region shows many elements of alignment with the United States, but also differences. In North East Asia, the EU has adopted harsh sanctions against North Korea but, contrary to the Trump administration which continues to seek regime change, has left the door open for dialogue. Moreover, the EU supports the process of trilateral cooperation among China, Japan and South Korea, while Washington has traditionally been lukewarm towards a process that excludes the US and risks being dominated by Beijing. The transatlantic allies also show differing approaches with regard to maritime disputes in the South China Sea. While EU security policy in East Asia is largely complementary to that of Washington, in some cases Europe tends – albeit inadvertently – to favour Beijing.

A new neighbourhood formation approach for solving cold-start user problem in collaborative filtering

Collaborative filtering (CF) is the most widely accepted recommendation technique. Despite its popularity, this approach faces some major challenges like that of a cold-start user problem where a user has rated a handful of items. Due to very few ratings available for the cold-start users, their similarities with rest of the users has been questioned in the past, none have focused on their approach for neighbour identification. Whilst the traditional CF approaches select only those similar users as neighbours who have rated the item under consideration, the neighbourhood comprises of weak neighbours of the cold-start users. To address this shortcoming, our proposed approach selects neighbours with highest similarity irrespective of their availability of ratings for that item. Moreover, for the selected similar neighbours with missing ratings, an item based regression is performed to partially populate the matrix. The efficacy of the proposed neighbourhood formation approach addressing cold-start user problem is validated on two publicly available MovieLens datasets. Our approach provides superior quality of recommendations evaluated on a range of prediction and classification accuracy metrics. The results are encouraging particularly for systems having higher percentage of cold-start users which indicates the effectiveness of our approach in practical settings of new internet portals.

A new neighbourhood formation approach for solving cold-start user problem in collaborative filtering

Collaborative filtering (CF) is the most widely accepted recommendation technique. Despite its popularity, this approach faces some major challenges like that of a cold-start user problem where a user has rated a handful of items. Due to very few ratings available for the cold-start users, their similarities with rest of the users has been questioned in the past, none have focused on their approach for neighbour identification. Whilst the traditional CF approaches select only those similar users as neighbours who have rated the item under consideration, the neighbourhood comprises of weak neighbours of the cold-start users. To address this shortcoming, our proposed approach selects neighbours with highest similarity irrespective of their availability of ratings for that item. Moreover, for the selected similar neighbours with missing ratings, an item based regression is performed to partially populate the matrix. The efficacy of the proposed neighbourhood formation approach addressing cold-start user problem is validated on two publicly available MovieLens datasets. Our approach provides superior quality of recommendations evaluated on a range of prediction and classification accuracy metrics. The results are encouraging particularly for systems having higher percentage of cold-start users which indicates the effectiveness of our approach in practical settings of new internet portals.

Editor's Note

Editor's Note Judith Giesberg Readers of this issue will find essays that align over questions about border diplomacy and Civil War–era American expansionism, with an opening essay weighing in on when and why the war ended as it did and a review essay that reflects on the future of military history. In between there are spies, rogue diplomats, and double agents. We begin with Andrew F. Lang's Thomas Watson Brown Book Prize talk, "Union Demobilization and the Boundaries of War and Peace," which joins the work of scholars like Gary Gallagher and Mark Wahlgren Summers in arguing that Civil War Americans did not bemoan the war's civil rights shortfalls as much as recent scholars do. In the essay, as in his book In the Wake of War, Lang argues that because regular army men "viewed the momentous collapse of the Confederate state as the signal feat of national purpose," they had little patience or stomach for serving as the agents of federal Reconstruction policy, the boots on the ground charged with administering the postwar era's civil rights legislation and protecting freedmen from white insurgents. Their mission accomplished, these men in blue were concerned that a prolonged occupation would threaten democracy, or worse, destroy it. So, the postwar army quickly shrank, before regular army men's fears for the nation's democratic institutions could be realized and just as the democratic aspirations of black volunteers had been. William S. Kiser's essay, "'We Must Have Chihuahua and Sonora': Civil War Diplomacy in the U.S.–Mexico Borderlands," explores the tangled diplomacy of agents representing the United States; the Confederacy; and two northwestern Mexican states bordering New Mexico, Arizona, and Texas. At issue were Confederate interest in opening up a supply line from Mexico that could sustain their invasion of New Mexico and, later, U.S. aspirations for a naval station in Mexico, but in the background, too, Apaches and an invading French army moving northward toward the border posed continued threats. This is a story of how "powerful nineteenth-century nations attempted to manipulate and reshape tenuous systems of political power in their weaker neighbors." Expecting to easily lure local authorities into deals that violated official Mexican neutrality, Confederate and U.S. military men and self-appointed diplomats discovered, instead, that they came to the diplomatic table from a point of weakness as Mexican authorities played Americans off of each other and remained resolutely out of the war along Mexico's northern border. It was a diplomatic miscalculation [End Page 175] to think that local Mexican officials, facing a threat to their south, would abandon their national loyalties and seek to cut a deal with their neighbors to the North. Patrick Kelly's essay picks up this story where Kiser's leaves off. Whereas U.S. diplomatic efforts in Mexico came to naught early in 1863, by June, French emperor Napoleon III's army was in Mexico City, the Mexican national government was in exile, and the Confederacy anticipated reaping the rewards of a forthcoming alliance with France. The survival of the republics of Mexico and the United States hung in the balance as monarchy seemed posed to make a comeback in the Americas. These concerns weighed heavily on Lincoln as he sent troops to south Texas in October and were evident in the words he chose in the speech he delivered that November at Gettysburg. Lincoln opened that speech with words hearkening back to when the founders "brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal." Kelly reads these words as evidence of Lincoln's continentalism. It was no accident, Kelly says, that "continent" appeared in the first line, for it reflected a "a powerful, if short-lived, moment of solidarity between the United States and the hemisphere's Spanish-speaking republics articulated on both sides of the Rio Grande within the discourse of a politically united American continent." In "The Lost Continent of Abraham Lincoln," Kelly locates the Gettysburg Address in that moment, when liberal nationalists imagined a future in which new world nations stood in solidarity against the old and...

Latin America Confronts the United States: Asymmetry and Influence, by Tom Long

Reviewed by : Oliver Stuenkel, Fundacao Getulio Vargas, BrazilThe history of US-Latin American relations is, above all, shaped by the vast power asymmetry between the two, US-American dominance over its weaker neighbours in the South, and attempts by Latin American leaders to reduce the influence of the Colossus of the North. Indeed, in International Relations theory, large states are seen as decisive, while small and weak states are vulnerable and usually enjoy only limited autonomy. Most traditional analyses of the topic - ranging from Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano's famous text The Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent (1971), and American scholar Lars Schoultz's Beneath the United States: A History of U.S. Policy toward Latin America (1998), to the works of Brazilian political scientist Moniz Bandeira - use this framework and generally identify attempts by the United States to dominate or weaken Latin America, framing the latter as an object or victim.In a new book on the subject, Tom Long questions this traditional approach, examining how Latin American leaders have been able to overcome power asymmetries to influence US foreign policy. Latin America Confronts the United States explores a series of moments in post-Second World War inter-American relations - foreign economic policy before the Alliance for Progress, the negotiation of the Panama Canal Treaties, the NAFTA agreement, and the growth of counter-narcotics strategies in Colombia - to show how Latin American leaders influenced Washington's behaviour.Aside from providing detailed and engaging historical accounts of the cases above, Long makes interesting points vis-a-vis the dynamics shaping asymmetrical relations between great and weaker powers, arguing Latin America has exercised more influence in US-Latin America relations than is normally understood.Long's first case describes Brazilian president Juscelino Kubitschek's efforts during the late 1950s to rally the region to obtain more development aid from the United States - a remarkable and often overlooked example of regional cooperation at a time when ties between Brazil and its neighbours were still incipient (it took another three decades before Brazil's president Joao Figueiredo would become the country's first head of state to visit Colombia and Peru). Long says while Latin American attempts to convince President Eisenhower to finance a new Marshall Plan failed, they set the stage for Kennedy's 1961 Alliance for Progress, which aimed to establish economic cooperation between the US and Latin America.The second case, perhaps the most remarkable, explains how Omar Torrijos, dictator of one of the hemisphere's smallest countries, shrewdly used postcolonial rhetoric and international institutions to convince the United States to hand over control of the Panama Canal, something US foreign policymakers were strongly opposed to at first. Comparing Torrijos's goals in 1972 with the final treaty signed in 1977, it becomes evident Panama attained most of its objectives, Long writes. Most importantly, the treaties eliminated perpetuity. Panama began seeking a full transfer of the canal by 1995. After more than five years of negotiations, Panama's fallback position of 2000 was accepted - a remarkable concession from the 1972 US goal of perpetual defence rights, or a 90-year extension. Rejecting traditional historical accounts, which point to US president Jimmy Carter's arrival as the transformative event in the negotiations, Long argues: that the treaties figured so high on Carter's agenda was a testament to a long Panamanian struggle to put them there (110). …

Realism under Hegemony: Theorizing the Rise of Brazil

What light can international relations theory shed on how developing countries such as Brazil have achieved regional leadership and international influence? This comprehensive examination of Brazilian foreign policy over the last few decades argues that Realism provides a better account of Brazil's strategy than Liberalism and Constructivism. Despite changes of government and regime, Brasília has persistently pursued relative political gain, especially international influence. However, because this rising country has faced an established hegemon in the form of the United States, it has not been able to employ conventionally Realist instruments and tactics. Its subordinate position in the current power constellation has forced Brazil to forego political or military confrontation and instead use economic cooperation, both with the hegemon and its weaker neighbors. Through this collaboration, Brazil hopes to derive disproportionate benefits that will enhance its relative power. By elucidating these complex calculations, the present essay explains the Realist strategy that ambitious nations such as Brazil have pursued and helps design a version of Realism that captures recent power dynamics in the international system.

Making Sense of Malaysia's China Policy: Asymmetry, Proximity, and Elite's Domestic Authority

Using Malaysia’s China policy as a case study of a smaller state’s response to a rising power, this article challenges the mainstream neorealist notion that the growing capability and geographical proximity of a rising power tend to induce fear among its weaker neighbours. By tracing the transformation of Malaysia’s China policy, the article’s findings indicate that power asymmetry and geographical proximity have no inherent logic of their own; rather, whether and to what extent the two variables will prompt smaller states to become fearful and/or attracted to a rising power is often a function of intervening factors at the domestic level, i.e. the imperative of ruling elite’s domestic legitimation. In the case of Malaysia’s China policy, it is the ruling Barisan Nasional elite’s desire to capitalize on the big power’s rise—for the ultimate goal of enhancing and justifying its political authority at home—that has driven the smaller state to adopt a hedging approach characterized by an inclination to prioritize immediate economic and diplomatic benefits over potential security concerns, while simultaneously attempting to keep its strategic options open for as long as the systemic conditions allow.

Interactive effects of herbivory and competition intensity determine invasive plant performance

Herbivory can reduce plant fitness, and its effects can be increased by competition. Though numerous studies have examined the joint effects of herbivores and competitors on plant performance, these interactive effects are seldom considered in the context of plant invasions. Here, we examined variation in plant performance within a competitive environment in response to both specialist and generalist herbivores using Chinese tallow as a model species. We combined tallow plants from native and invasive populations to form all possible pairwise combinations, and designated invasive populations as stronger neighbours and native populations as weaker neighbours. We found that when no herbivory was imposed, invasive populations always had higher total biomass than natives, regardless of their neighbours, which is consistent with our assumption of increased competitive ability. Defoliation by either generalist or specialist herbivores suppressed plant growth but the effects of specialists were generally stronger for invasive populations. Invasive populations had their lowest biomass when fed upon by specialists while simultaneously competing with stronger neighbours. The root/shoot ratios of invasive populations were lower than those of native populations under almost all conditions, and invasive plants were taller than native plants overall, especially when herbivores were present, suggesting that invasive populations may adopt an "aboveground first" strategy to cope with herbivory and competition. These results suggest that release from herbivores, especially specialists, improves an invader's performance and helps to increase its competitive ability. Therefore, increasing interspecific competition intensity by planting a stronger neighbour while simultaneously releasing a specialist herbivore may be an especially effective method of managing invasive plants.

Aspect coherence for graph-based semantic image labelling

In image semantic segmentation a semantic category label is associated to each image pixel. This classification problem is characterised by pixel dependencies at different scales. On a small-scale pixel correlation is related to object instance sharing, whereas on a middle- and large scale to category co-presence and relative location constraints. The contribution of this study is two-fold. First, the authors present a framework that jointly learns category appearances and pixel dependencies at different scales. Small-scale dependencies are accounted by clustering pixels into larger patches via image oversegmentation. To tackle middle-scale dependencies a conditional random field (CRF) is built over the patches. A novel strategy to exploit local patch aspect coherence is used to impose an optimised structure in the graph to have exact and efficient inference. The second contribution is a method to account for full patch neighbourhoods without introducing loops in the graphical structures. ‘Weak neighbours’ are introduced, which are patches connected in the image but not in the inference graph. They are pre-classified according to their visual appearance and their category distribution probability is then used in the CRF inference step. Experimental evidence of the validity of the method shows improvements in comparison to other works in the field.

Lordship and Environmental Change in Central Highland Scotland c.1300–c.1400

Whilst there has been an increasing recognition of the influence of natural agency on human society in Scotland in the medieval period, conventional historiography has generally presented the wholesale reconfiguration of structures of secular lordship in the Scottish central Highlands in the 14th century as an essentially political consequence of the socio-political dislocation associated with the Anglo-Scottish wars that occurred after 1296. The establishment within the region of militarised Gaelic kindreds from the West Highlands and Hebrides of Scotland has come to be regarded as either a symptom of efforts by externally based regional lords to bolster their authority, or an opportunistic territorial aggrandise-ment by newly dominant neighbouring lords. Feuding and predatory raiding associated with these kindreds is recognised as competition for resources but generally in a context of projection of superior lordship over weaker neighbours. Evidence for long-term changes in climate extrapolated from North Atlantic proxy data, however, suggests that the cattle-based economy of Atlantic Scotland was experiencing protracted environmentally induced stress in the period c.1300–c.1350. Using this evidence, we discuss whether exchange systems operating within traditional lordship structures could offset localised and short-term pressures on the livestock-based regime, but could not be sustained long-term on the reduced fodder and contracting herd sizes caused by climatic deterioration. Territorial expansion and development of a predatory culture, it is argued, were responses to an environment-triggered economic crisis.

Security Dilemmas in Asia

A chain of asymmetrical security dilemmas exists in Asia, in which rivalries between pairs of weaker and stronger states are driving security conflicts. Pakistan views India as its primary threat; India is focused on China; China's principal security concern is the United States; and the United States worries about any potential challengers. States confronting stronger rivals often feel the need to improve their military capabilities, even if this threatens their weaker neighbours. The asymmetrical relationships in Asia not only complicate global arms control and non-proliferation efforts, but also have the potential to fuel ballistic missile and nuclear weapons proliferation throughout the region. A key question is whether China, India and Pakistan will remain satisfied with relatively small strategic forces, or whether they will seek to develop large, operationally deployed forces. It is perhaps true that the United States has an increasingly determining role in fixing proliferation linkages among these states. Three sets of potential proliferation linkages (based on security, prestige and domestic coalitions) can influence decisions about the force structure. Further, there are many factors which may act as potential drivers for nuclear build-ups. A key question remains whether CBMs like transparency might dampen the linkages between the overlapping security dilemmas in Asia.

Structural Sources of China's Territorial Compromises

More than a decade ago, in a review of Jack Snyder's Myths of Empire, Fareed Zakaria noted: After over a decade of vigorous debates about realism, structural realism, neoliberal institutionalism, and hegemonic stability theory, political scientists are shifting their attention to the internal sources of foreign policy. Some even contend that realism's dictum about the 'primacy of foreign policy' is wrong, and that the domestic politics of states are key to understanding world events. Innenpolitik is in.' evidenced by Taylor Fravel's Regime Insecurity and International Cooperation: Explaining China's Compromises in Territorial Disputes, Innenpolitik is still in.2 In Fravel's words, Regime insecurity best explains China's pattern of cooperation and delay in its territorial disputes between 1949 and 2004 (p. 81). According to the regime insecurity hypothesis, Internal conflict often creates conditions for cooperation, producing a 'diversionary peace' instead of war (p. 49). Given the domestic vulnerability of the Chinese Communist regime during periods such as the revolt in Tibet and the upheaval that followed the Tiananmen crisis, Chinese leaders reached territorial compromises to extend their tenure in office (p. 51). Although intuitively plausible, Fravel's regime vulnerability argument is flawed, for two reasons. First, his confidence in the empirical accuracy of the domestic insecuritydiversionary peace theory rests on a realist straw man, arguing that China's behavior is inconsistent with the predictions of realist theories because China has not used its power advantages to bargain hard over contested land, especially with its weaker neighbors (p. 46). When properly construed and understood, realist theories can explain territorial compromises as well as conflict. Realist theories suggest that strong states exploit the weak, but only under certain conditions because powerful states often face powerful incentives not to exploit their weaker neighbors: As Stuart Kaufman suggests, the logic of self-help under anarchy 'encourages strong powers to absorb

Fiddler crabs help weaker neighbours

Males weigh up the advantages of pitching in.

U.S. Military Bases and Empire

Empires throughout human history have relied on foreign military bases to enforce their rule, and in this respect at least, Pax Americana is no different than Pax Romana or Pax Britannica. "The principal method by which Rome established her political supremacy in her world," wrote historian Arnold Toynbee in his America and the World Revolution (1962), was by taking her weaker neighbors under her wing and protecting them against her and their stronger neighbors. Rome's relation with these protégées of hers was a treaty relation. Juridically they retained their previous status of sovereign independence. The most that Rome asked of them in terms of territory was the cessation, here and there, of a patch of ground for the plantation of a Roman fortress to provide for the common security of Rome's allies and Rome herself.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

Phase diagram and phase transitions of the adsorbate system S/Ru(0001): a Monte Carlo study of a lattice gas model

We investigate the phase diagram and the critical properties of the adsorbate system sulphur/ruthenium(0001) in the coverage region 0 < Θ < 1/3 using Monte Carlo simulations of a lattice gas model on a triangular lattice. From experiments it is known that for low coverages an island phase appears in the phase diagram of this system at low temperatures. To capture this feature we include in our lattice gas model a weak third neighbour attraction in addition to the repulsive first and second neighbour forces. The phase diagram obtained from simulations of this model is in very good agreement with the experimental phase diagram. The critical properties of the lattice gas model are found to be compatible with the results of experiments on the system sulphur/ruthenium(0001). Finer details of the phase diagram, e. g. the location of tricritical points, which may be difficult to assess experimentally will also be discussed.

Assessing the Dispute in the South China Sea: A Model of China's Security Decision Making

Chinese foreign policy is represented as a function of internal, domestic political considerations. Through the analysis of Chinese policy, we illustrate a method for predicting the outcome of policy decision making inside China. The substantive issue is China's expected approach toward territorial disputes in the South China Sea, especially surrounding the Spratly Islands. We address the extent to which China can be expected to reallocate resources from economic reform to foreign policy undertakings in that area and how likely China is to utilize force to impose its will on weaker neighbors. The approach represents a marked departure from the predominant neorealist paradigm in international politics. We assume that decision makers seek an optimal compromise between enhancing their security and pursuing their specific policy or ideological goals. Using this perspective, we conclude that, despite a dramatic increase in military expenditures and a significant strengthening of China's naval force in the South China Sea, China is unlikely to engage in any significant uses of force to pursue its agenda in the South China Sea.