I’ve been working on a book project for several years about how major power competitions affect the internal politics – and often the foreign policy alignments – of “swing” states, focusing on South and Southeast Asia. Some early thought can be found in this 2024 Foreign Affairs article, while the scholarly book version is now under advance contract at Princeton University Press.
Part of the work was being done for a United States Institute of Peace contract that would explore this question in South Asia in a policy-focused way; I like being able to do analytical work that is aimed at a broader audience. The report was mostly finished when Elon Musk’s DOGE bizarrely decided to kill USIP, including my contract.
I took the project to my colleagues in the South Asia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who were interested in it. USIP then revived itself, and we decided to jointly publish the paper. USIP has now been shut down again literally days ago, but hopefully it will be resuscitated for a second time.
In any case, the report is now out from Carnegie (a link to the full PDF is there too). It offers a new typology of how major power rivalries can manifest themselves in the politics of third-party states (which I hope can be applied beyond South Asia), while also adding thoughts on mechanisms that can pull local and global politics together or push them apart. The piece concludes with some policy implications for American foreign policy. Here are some excerpts:
“there are important differences in whether and how domestic players in third-party states mobilize external major power rivalry in their own internal politics, ranging from making it central to their political strategies to ignoring major power competition in favor of a purely internal focus. To improve our understanding of how geopolitical rivalries intersect with swing states’ politics, this paper outlines a new framework of trajectories that helps us measure and compare the overlap between the contours of a major power international competition and the key lines of division within the domestic politics of third-party states. It then identifies three mechanisms that can increase or undermine this overlap, both across countries and over time within them. . . . .
Table 1 provides a new way to identify how major power competition can align with domestic political competition. These outcomes can be thought of as changeable trajectories because political systems can move along the spectrum over time. For instance, Cambodia in the mid-1950s was much less polarized than it would become by 1970, when the spillover of the Vietnam conflict and the collapse of Norodom Sihanouk’s balancing act into a direct communist-anticommunist showdown turned Cambodia into an open war zone. Major power competitions can also play out differently within the same state or region. For example, in the Sahel, China-India competition is far less relevant than U.S.-Russia competition, but far more important in Nepal. This lets us compare different countries to each other and study changes in one country over time. . . .
The United States should thus cultivate a role as a friendly outsider, being flexible and open to working with a variety of local players. It can carve out a narrow but valuable niche in the region’s smaller states as a provider of expertise, technology, and capital that helps these countries develop economically and achieve political stability. This approach will be most effective when explicitly not framed as simply reactive to China: consistent engagement can limit Chinese influence as a consequence, but it should not be the explicit driving force behind American strategy in the region. Indeed, there may be times when it makes sense to adopt a similar approach to China in order to advance American interests in a particular third-party state.
Such a nuanced, case-by-case approach that invests in deep knowledge of local political coalitions and public opinion can help the United States navigate a new era of rivalry in the region. Yet this goal has been undermined by sweeping cuts to American aid and development initiatives, as well as planned reductions in the U.S. State Department.55 Eliminating soft power instruments and regional expertise is a curious way to pursue major power competition. Such tools are obviously not always effective in building political influence for the United States—but it is very difficult to beat something with nothing. China has devoted substantial resources, both diplomatic and financial, in South Asia, while U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration appears to have decided to simply not compete in these countries. For instance, for months it appeared that the United States had cancelled the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) agreement with Nepal, while the elimination of the U.S. Agency for International Development has removed one of the main tools of American engagement in the region.56
As Carnegie’s Evan Feigenbaum has warned, the United States risks being seen as the “Hessians of Asia,” primarily useful in the military realm but absent, or even adversarial, in other domains.57 The Trump administration has further accelerated this drift in American policy—it is extremely unclear what a positive, forward-looking American policy message in the region could be. Emphasizing military aid and cooperation makes sense with countries locked in rivalries or deep territorial disputes with China, but that does not apply with much force to South Asia’s swing states. They do not want to be dominated by China, but also are not looking for American weapons or military backing. Development, domestic political survival, and governance are vastly more pressing domestic priorities. Without reinvesting in the tools and strategies that can help address these countries’ actual goals, the United States risks sitting on the sidelines.”
Paul Staniland 