The concept of containment is central to the study of great power politics. IR scholars have traditionally sought to understand how a dominant power can maintain its supremacy when facing a peer challenger: this question has returned to center stage in recent times due to the growing competition between the United States and China. The last two US administrations have deployed a range of countermeasures against China, a country perceived to be the most ominous challenger to US primacy.
This book by Dong Jung Kim addresses these issues head-on, focusing on this question: When does a reigning great power of the international system supplement the military containment of a challenging power by restricting its economic exchanges with that state? Kim seeks to provide a theoretical foundation for a containment strategy that brings together both military and economic aspects; hence the title of the book, Compound Containment. The book also brings together IR perspectives with economics, adopting a historical approach to a select number of cases ranging from the Anglo-German rivalry in the run-up to World War I, US containment of Japan before the attack on Pearl Harbor, US containment of the Soviet Union in the early years of the Cold War and then during the first half of the 1980s, to US-China policy under Obama (chap. 7).
Kim’s work is built in a way that the last case study examined, US-China policy, weaves together the main points raised in previous chapters, making the book an interesting and useful read for those US experts and policy makers seeking to devise ways to restrict China’s power projection. Thus, Compound Containment makes a valuable contribution not only to the IR literature on great power competition but also to that on US-China relations, providing intellectual ammunition to those advocating in favor of containment.
The debate whether China’s power projection should be restricted—and to what extent—is not confined to academia but cuts across party lines. Advocates of containment point to China’s accumulation of military power, its growing economic strength, and its increasingly nationalistic and adversarial postures on regional issues—control of Taiwan and the territorial and maritime disputes in the East and South China Seas—as reasons for a firm policy of restricting the projection of such power. To those arguing for such a policy of containment, lenient initiatives undertaken with the aim of supporting China’s transformation or changes in the domestic arena merely embolden the Chinese Communist Party in its authoritarianism at home, encourage further nationalistic posturing abroad, and, by facilitating the growth of China’s trade surplus, provide resources for additional arms development.
A tiny minority continues advocating in favor of engagement, arguing that China spends less as a proportion of GDP on defense than the United States and that China cannot rely on a system of alliances as can Washington, though they recognize that the People’s Liberation Army has made some dramatic improvements in recent years. Those who support an engagement policy argue that the United States and its allies should continue to cooperate with China on issues of global concern, such as climate change and energy security.
Since President Trump took office in 2016, the reasons for engagement have thinned, preparing the ground for a more hostile US-China policy that is also based on the assumption that Beijing is pursuing a long-term strategy to displace, if not replace, the US-led global democratic order with a Communist China-led global authoritarian system. To this perceived challenge, Trump responded by unleashing a trade and technology war, seeking to subordinate Beijing to US interests, an approach that has not changed with the arrival of Joe Biden in the White House.
The publication of Compound Containment thus could not be timelier. In the book, Dong Jung Kim provides a theoretical foundation for the need to marry military and economic countermeasures if the dominant power of the day wants to retain its supremacy over the challenger: a reigning power makes its military containment of a challenging power “compound” by simultaneously using restrictive economic measures. Kim argues that “economic measures for compound containment try to weaken the material foundation for the challenger’s military power and impede translation of latent power into military power” and that these economic restrictions “would be viable options when the reigning power can inflict relative economic losses on the challenging state” (3). Moreover, the ability to impose relative losses is “deeply affected by the availability of alternative economic partners for the two competing states” (137). Reading these lines, one cannot but think about the current US strategy of “friends shoring” or ally shoring—the act of manufacturing and sourcing from countries that are geopolitical allies—and of Washington’s efforts to restrict Beijing’s access to semiconductors by pressuring European and Asian allies to decrease their investments in China in critical technologies and to limit the export of chips to the Asian giant.
Kim’s book seeks to contribute to IR studies by challenging the way great power politics has been studied. He argues that the nexus of security and economy in a reigning power’s response to a challenging power cannot be explained by traditional theories that dominate research in international security. Compound Containment convincingly shows that IR conventional studies are flawed without a sound understanding of the multilayered aspects of containment strategy in great power politics, making the argument that because economic capacity and military power are intimately linked to one another, countering a challenging power requires addressing both economic and military dimensions. By doing so, the book provides an original and plausible explanation of the failed attempts by some reigning powers in the past to contain the challenging power of their day, as in the case of Britain’s inability to successfully contain Wilhelmine Germany—and thus avoid the Great War—as discussed in chapter 3.
Subsequent chapters provide evidence of successful cases where the United States was able to contain the challenge posed by Japan before World War I and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. However, the most compelling case study is chapter 7’s examination of US-China policy between 2009 and 2016. The author argues that there was a glaring absence of compound containment against the Asian giant under Obama, which allowed Beijing to increase its overall power and become an ominous challenger to US primacy. There is no doubt that this claim will be welcomed by the Trump and Biden administrations that have indeed adopted a series of countermeasures to contain China not only militarily but also in terms of economic and technological exchanges.
Today, “de-risking” the US economy from China has become the guiding principle of Congress and the White House. The Biden administration is making an increasing use of economic tools from sanctions to export controls. These economic measures, coupled with Washington’s efforts to restrict China’s access to emerging military technologies such as quantum computing, artificial intelligence, and robotics, seek to contain Chinese power both in the military and economic realms. This containment strategy can be aptly called “compound,” to use the term put forward by Kim’s book. Unfortunately, the book ignores the growing US-China rivalry that began under the Trump presidency. One hopes that a second and revised edition of Kim’s work will redress this shortcoming.
Overall, however, the volume is a welcome addition to contemporary IR debates on great power competition, although its theoretical claims are a bit overstated. Compound Containment offers valuable insights to scholars and policy makers on how past hegemons successfully adopted countermeasures to contain the challenging power of the day.
