The Diplomat author Mercy Kuo regularly engages subject-matter experts, policy practitioners, and strategic thinkers across the globe for their diverse insights into U.S. Asia policy. This conversation with Dr. Etel Solingen – Distinguished Professor and the Thomas T. and Elizabeth C. Tierney Chair in Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of California Irvine, and editor of “Geopolitics, Supply Chains, and International Relations of East Asia” (Cambridge University Press 2021) – is the 472nd in “The Trans-Pacific View Insight Series.”
Examine how China and the United States are relying on supply chains as a tool of statecraft.
The fields of international relations and international security had paid scant attention to global supply chains until relatively recently. I became interested in the topic around 2013, in the context of a contribution to a collaborative project on U.S.-China relations. Why 2013? At that time discussions about potential parallels between 1914 (the outbreak of World War I) and 2014 (the centenary) were in the air. The first wave of globalization in the late 19th century-early 20th century ended with World War I. Would the second wave of globalization incepted after World War II meet the same fate 100 years after 1914?
My view in 2013 was that there were significant differences between the two periods, especially the dramatic expansion of complex global supply chains. Could these prove more resilient to geopolitical tensions than other forms of economic exchange were prior to 1914? The hypothesis was that they might foster stronger incentives to sustain peace than would be the case in their absence. It’s important to be always aware of the “relative to what” question.
The U.S.-China trade and technology war was already transforming the tenor of East Asia’s international relations by the late 2010s. China’s “charm offensive” under Deng Xiaoping had been superseded in the early 2010s by a turn towards nationalist self-reliance under Xi Jinping. Reacting to these changes, the first Trump administration embarked on economic statecraft imbued with protectionism and delinking from China. China’s interactions with its neighbors were also reaching their lowest point in decades, with escalating tensions in the East and South China Seas over China’s intrusions into neighbors’ territorial waters. These frictions were bound to upset the economic infrastructure that had linked East Asian countries for several decades.
At the very heart of it lay a tangled web of interdependence created by global supply chains connecting the region with itself and with the rest of the world. This was already evident during the COVID-19 epidemic, as captured in “Geopolitics, Supply Chains, and International Relations in East Asia,” which appeared prior to an avalanche of work on the topic since. Having provided a robust foundation for interstate cooperation for decades, global supply chains become vulnerable targets as tools of nationalistic and autarkic ambitions. Yet it was Russia’s onslaught on Ukraine in 2022, and China’s alignment with [Russian President Vladimir] Putin, that accelerated the pace of coercive statecraft.
Analyze the use of export controls as a tool of geopolitical statecraft.
It is extremely hard to know a priori what the ultimate result of such controls is. To dismiss them completely would be as inaccurate as claiming that they are reliable tools – the two extreme positions often advanced regarding statecraft vis-à-vis Russia after its large-scale invasion of Ukraine. Two factors among many are key to affecting the likelihood that such controls might work in the intended direction.
First is the nature of the target. Countries that limit their engagement in the global economy via trade, foreign investment, and global supply chains are far less dynamic and barely grow economically – such as North Korea – but may also be less vulnerable. There is extensive theoretical and empirical foundation for this regularity. By contrast, China under Deng Xiaoping grew at an economic rate rarely seen in history because of its significant economic openness to trade, investment, and supply chains. While building on that inherited infrastructure, Xi Jinping ended that chapter in Chinese history, launching a massive strategy of self-reliance eventually codified in the Made in China 2025 plan. Export controls were wielded rather early in this process but accelerated with China’s concentration of global production.
The second factor regarding reliance on export controls has to do with the ability to act in concert, overcoming problems of collective action among states with different incentives. The community of democracies had achieved significant convergence on export controls vis-à-vis Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea in recent years. This has changed dramatically with the inception of tariffs and weakened commitments to fellow democracies under the Trump administration. Autocracies are bound to reap the benefits of diminished coordination among democracies.
Identify vulnerabilities of critical dependencies in U.S. and Chinese derisking strategies.
Critical dependencies can be elusive insofar as technological breakthroughs can make any given bottleneck obsolete. But vulnerabilities rarely dissipate overnight. The June round of U.S.-China negotiations revealed a tradeoff designed to attenuate, at least temporarily, mutual vulnerabilities. A long-time Chinese strategy of withholding exports of critical minerals as early as 2010 (rare earths) had mushroomed along with China’s virtual monopolies over the processing of several such minerals and magnets. U.S. policies precluding the export of sophisticated semiconductors, software, and equipment to develop them accelerated since 2022. The June 2025 agreement in London eased those export controls on both ends, at least for the moment.
Assess how U.S.-China economic statecraft regarding supply chains is reshaping the global economic order.
The era of expansion of economic interdependence is being superseded by an impulse toward inward-looking strategies premised on costly and sometimes elusive aspirations of self-sufficiency. Along the way, international collaboration that fosters reciprocity, trust, and transparency via multilateral institutions is at risk. Coercive unilateral economic statecraft can trigger counterproductive blowback and spillback effects, decreased investment, lower exports, corrosive uncertainty, rising unemployment, stagflation, and Pyrrhic victories that hurt those who coerce as much as their targets and that spill over into other domains in interstate relations. It may still be possible to manage mutual vulnerabilities without completely disposing of the international political and economic system that made both the U.S. and China wealthy and powerful. The security and welfare of the rest of the world hangs on that balance.