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THE LONG GAME: China's Grand Strategy to Displace American Order. By Rush Doshi. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021. 432 pp. US$27.95, cloth. ISBN978019752 7917.
The United States is at a moment of grand strategic incubation. As American liberal hegemony has been crushed under the weight of its own strategic overextension, and China has defied imminent collapse prophets, a fervent debate about the future of America's grand strategy has proliferated inside the Beltway.
There are many potential candidates for the title of the next George Kennan, a strategic intellectual who will both present a unifying grand theory to explain the geopolitical challenger's behaviour and propose an overarching set of principles that should guide an American grand strategic response. What Kennan accomplished with his "Long Telegram," Rush Doshi accomplishes with his The Long Game: China's Grand Strategy to Displace American Order. Doshi's treatise is as rigorous as it is comprehensive, shedding light upon the evolution of China's grand strategy and advising an optimal US response.
Doshi demonstrates clearly that grand strategic adaptation is not automatic. Although America's hyper-power status post-1991 may have very well terrified China, Chinese response to unipolarity was shaped by a concerted Chinese political leadership-a leadership which subscribed to a prudent grand strategy, thus bypassing the friction of domestic politics (both the nationalist mass's demand for foreign policy assertiveness and the military's preference for offshore power projection).
While China economized resources by blunting US initiatives, the US spent frivolously on unnecessary wars and underperformed strategically. The Long Game should be read in parallel with John Mearsheimer's The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities, which highlights the grave strategic errors US leadership committed, and with Yan Xuetong's Leadership and the Rise of Great Powers, which offers a theoretical perspective for evaluating the consequential impact of leadership on hegemonic transition.
Chinese leaders, Doshi argues, made an accurate "net assessment" of American preeminence, and beginning with Deng Xiaoping, avoided confrontation with the US. They instead opted for a subtler blunting strategy, aimed at tearing down US advantages in political, economic,...