Then employing that logic to think about what happens when the networks fall apart (ie "fractionalize", and notice that the most important leg is the trading system... same as with Kindleberger but in a different way because it's not about volume per se, but connectivity and path lengths):
If you remember the OG view of "complex interdependence", the Keohane and Nye version, it was an ideal type on the opposite end of a unidimensional spectrum from anarchy. It was a very convoluted argument in many ways, which is why the interventions of Oatley are necessary (I encouraged him to use the CI frame, we were talking a lot about "regime complexes" back then; originally we were collaborating on a paper titled "A System Is Not A Level" which split into several papers, including the CI paper).
Once you do that you still need a way of analyzing interdependent structures, just calling them interdependent doesn't accomplish anything. That's what the Cranmer/Menninga approach provides from a very descriptive macro lens: if the networks fractionalize then we get increased conflict propensity in the system. Hmm... do we observe increased conflict propensity in the system? Yes, that is why this post was written.
But we still don't know why they fractionalize. What could cause that? The EJIR article proposes a specific growth model that ties together the Oatley implication -- no steady state -- with the Cranmer/Menninga implication (fractionalization = disorder), and also specifies the conditions under which that model breaks down, to understand why we are about to experience what we are about to experience.
The conclusion referenced (caps added): "Barring events similarly catastrophic to those that occurred from 1914–1945, in all of these subsystems, the United States’ structural power is likely to persist. In the past this has usually occurred following a revision of the fitness distribution that was substantial enough to swamp the positive feedback processes. In the future, it could come from AN INTENTIONAL DISRUPTION OF GLOBAL NETWORKS by the CORE states, through malintent and/or short-sightedness. Those concerned about the long-run effect of the Trump presidency on the United States’ structural power thus have strong reason for concern."
Or, as Lincoln put it: "If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide."
We are fighting the same war Lincoln was fighting.
Why not use AI agents to simulate the interactions of nations and back test against specific events? This seems doable today, but difficult even a year ago.
I am a simple retired high school teacher (served mostly farmworker kids in the San Joaquin Valley) but in a former life was a state university political science grad student in the Age of Reagan. My last seminar was in IR, spring 1984(!). I remember that we read Machiavelli and Thucydides, from whom I used the Melian Dialogue to lever my discussion about justice and dominance as it applied to U.S. intervention in Nicaragua. I had migrated ideologically from a military brat’s Cold War true believer perspective to something of a reformed drunk’s self-righteous neo-Sandalista one.
Before that I remember Rational Actor vs Bureaucratic Politics models vying to explain. Some other names still float in the wastewater of my brain: Waltz, Art, and even Wallerstein. As much as it entertained me for a time, my 32 years in the public high school classroom was more fruitful and rewarding.
The more I look at the world, the more it seems to me that rather than seeing the emergence of a new IR framework we’re seeing the reassertion of old frameworks. When I started studying ir at the dawn of the post Cold War era, there was real debate about whether balance of power geopolitics were over. The answer now is clearly “no.”
Might I humbly suggest working backward from the conclusion here:
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1354066120952876
Then employing that logic to think about what happens when the networks fall apart (ie "fractionalize", and notice that the most important leg is the trading system... same as with Kindleberger but in a different way because it's not about volume per se, but connectivity and path lengths):
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1509423112
If you remember the OG view of "complex interdependence", the Keohane and Nye version, it was an ideal type on the opposite end of a unidimensional spectrum from anarchy. It was a very convoluted argument in many ways, which is why the interventions of Oatley are necessary (I encouraged him to use the CI frame, we were talking a lot about "regime complexes" back then; originally we were collaborating on a paper titled "A System Is Not A Level" which split into several papers, including the CI paper).
Once you do that you still need a way of analyzing interdependent structures, just calling them interdependent doesn't accomplish anything. That's what the Cranmer/Menninga approach provides from a very descriptive macro lens: if the networks fractionalize then we get increased conflict propensity in the system. Hmm... do we observe increased conflict propensity in the system? Yes, that is why this post was written.
But we still don't know why they fractionalize. What could cause that? The EJIR article proposes a specific growth model that ties together the Oatley implication -- no steady state -- with the Cranmer/Menninga implication (fractionalization = disorder), and also specifies the conditions under which that model breaks down, to understand why we are about to experience what we are about to experience.
The conclusion referenced (caps added): "Barring events similarly catastrophic to those that occurred from 1914–1945, in all of these subsystems, the United States’ structural power is likely to persist. In the past this has usually occurred following a revision of the fitness distribution that was substantial enough to swamp the positive feedback processes. In the future, it could come from AN INTENTIONAL DISRUPTION OF GLOBAL NETWORKS by the CORE states, through malintent and/or short-sightedness. Those concerned about the long-run effect of the Trump presidency on the United States’ structural power thus have strong reason for concern."
Or, as Lincoln put it: "If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide."
We are fighting the same war Lincoln was fighting.
I endorse Footnote 3, true also for economists
Why not use AI agents to simulate the interactions of nations and back test against specific events? This seems doable today, but difficult even a year ago.
I am a simple retired high school teacher (served mostly farmworker kids in the San Joaquin Valley) but in a former life was a state university political science grad student in the Age of Reagan. My last seminar was in IR, spring 1984(!). I remember that we read Machiavelli and Thucydides, from whom I used the Melian Dialogue to lever my discussion about justice and dominance as it applied to U.S. intervention in Nicaragua. I had migrated ideologically from a military brat’s Cold War true believer perspective to something of a reformed drunk’s self-righteous neo-Sandalista one.
Before that I remember Rational Actor vs Bureaucratic Politics models vying to explain. Some other names still float in the wastewater of my brain: Waltz, Art, and even Wallerstein. As much as it entertained me for a time, my 32 years in the public high school classroom was more fruitful and rewarding.
The more I look at the world, the more it seems to me that rather than seeing the emergence of a new IR framework we’re seeing the reassertion of old frameworks. When I started studying ir at the dawn of the post Cold War era, there was real debate about whether balance of power geopolitics were over. The answer now is clearly “no.”