Delivered. It is no longer enough to say that the world has entered a confrontation between the United States and China. We must go beyond this realistic principle of international relations and understand what this shock could be in today’s geopolitics and tomorrow’s geoeconomics. This is precisely what Thomas Gomart, director of the French Institute for International Relations (IFRI), accomplishes, with rigor and pedagogy, in his latest book.
Rigor, because this leader of the main French think tank in strategic studies has been able to benefit from his discussions with his European, American, Indian and Chinese colleagues and from exchanges with representatives (military and diplomats) of these same states. Pedagogy, because this historian by training dissects the complexity of international issues, as if he called on everyone to become aware of the irreversible impact of the new tensions between the West and Asia, their theater of rivalries and their visible and invisible depth. .
Ode to neorealism
The interest of the book is threefold. It is first read in one go, so the story is captivating and the analysis crisp, especially when Thomas Gomart guides us through the invisible platforms of the Sino-American rivalry (data warfare, AI, 5G, technologies military, intelligence, finance, etc.). It then reads like a stage analysis, in the sense that its author proposes to go beyond the threshold of the foreshadowing effect of a China-United States rivalry to enter the heart of the bipolar tension without reaching the hasty conclusions of a Graham Allison, for whom Chinese and Americans are very likely to fall into the trap of Thucydides, that of an inevitable war. Admittedly, Thomas Gomart uses the word “war” in the plural as a framework for reading global tensions, but he does not draw any conclusions on the outcome of this competition-cooperation.
Finally, it can be read as an ode to neorealism, this theoretical current of international relations which, while relying on the State as the sole strategic actor, no longer relies on power as the basis of rivalries between States, but on their security in a global world. By opening his analysis to non-institutional issues (such as the weight of social inequalities in the origin of conflicts) or to the growing role of the digital world in government decision-making processes, Thomas Gomart delineates the contours of the Sino-American shock and offers a complete outline of their real or hidden intentions: from the environment to the social, including politics, economics, military, cyberspace and space.
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