Shifrinson Publishes New Book, Rising Titans, Falling Giants
Rising Titans, Falling Giants: How Great Powers Exploit Power Shifts (Cornell University Press, 2018), the new book from Pardee School Assistant Professor of International Relations Joshua Shifrinson, examines how rising powers manage relationships with states suffering from decline in a careful and strategic manner.
In Rising Titans, Falling Giants, Shifrinson focuses on the policies that rising states adopt toward their declining competitors in response to declining states’ policies, and what that means for the relationship between the two.
“Readers should come away with insight into how rising states – such as China today – manage declining great powers – such as the U.S. right now – and why they pursue more or less friendly or competitive strategies,” Shifrinson said.
Buy a copy of Rising Titans, Falling Giants: How Great Powers Exploit Power Shifts here.
Shifrinson integrates disparate approaches to realism into a single theoretical framework, provides new insight into the sources of cooperation and competition in international relations, and offers a new empirical treatment of great power politics at the start and end of the Cold War.
“In this, the book actually reverses most scholarship on rising and declining states. Most studies as how declining states manage rising states and/or why states rise or decline in the first place,” Shifrinson said. “This is the first book that looks at how rising states themselves shape policy towards declining states. It thus carries novel insights for those interested in thinking through how states like China may act as their relative power grows — and that of other states wanes.”
Rising Titans, Falling Giants challenges the existing historical interpretations of diplomatic history, particularly in terms of the United States-China relationship. Whereas many analysts argue that these two nations are on a collision course, Shifrinson declares instead that rising states often avoid antagonizing those in decline, and highlights episodes that suggest the US-China relationship may prove to be far less conflict-prone than we might expect.
“Along the way, it should also interest students of history: the core of the project shows how the start and end of the Cold War were shaped by the decline of great powers and rising states efforts to address these changes,” Shifrinson said. “Here, it brings to light extensive new archival findings on U.S. and Soviet strategy in the postwar era, and supplements it with interviews with nearly 50 policymakers who shaped U.S. policy in the late Cold War. So, besides the theory and argument itself, the history engages and, in some cases, challenges much existing historical work on the course of the Cold War.”
Joshua R. Itzkowitz Shifrinson’s teaching and research interests focus on the intersection of international security and diplomatic history, particularly the rise and fall of great powers and the origins of grand strategy. He has special expertise in great power politics since 1945 and U.S. engagement in Europe and Asia. Shifrinson’s first book, Rising Titans, Falling Giants: How Great Powers Exploit Power Shifts (Cornell University Press, 2018) builds on extensive archival research focused on U.S. and Soviet foreign policy after 1945 to explain why some rising states challenge and prey upon declining great powers, while others seek to support and cooperate with declining states.