The Derisking Race: China, America and the Fragmentation of the Global Economy
About this ebook
In this Adelphi book, Aaron Friedberg argues that the derisking race is thus a struggle for power, waged in the realms of trade, investment and technology development; it is the economic dimension of the all-encompassing political, military and ideological ‘systemic rivalry’ now under way. How the race plays out will be crucial to determining the outcome of the larger geopolitical contest of which it is part. As it intensifies, it will also reshape the world economy, halting the trend towards ever-tighter integration and fracturing the global system, most likely into a cluster of partially closed blocs. While its pace and outcome have yet to be determined, this process of fragmentation has already begun.
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About the author
Aaron L. Friedberg is Professor Emeritus of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University, where he taught from 1987 to 2026, and Co-director of the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs’ Center for International Security Studies. He is also a non-resident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and a Senior Advisor to the National Bureau of Asian Research.
Friedberg is the author of The Weary Titan: Britain and the Experience of Relative Decline, 1895–1905 (1988), In the Shadow of the Garrison State: America’s Anti-Statism and Its Cold War Grand Strategy (2000), A Contest for Supremacy: China, America, and the Struggle for Mastery in Asia (2011), The Authoritarian Challenge: China, Russia and the Threat to the Liberal International Order (2017), Partial Disengagement: A New US Strategy for Economic Competition with China (2019) and Getting China Wrong (2022). His previous Adelphi book, Beyond Air–Sea Battle: The Debate Over US Military Strategy in Asia, was published in 2014. He is also the co-editor (with Richard Ellings) of three volumes in the National Bureau of Asian Research’s annual ‘Strategic Asia’ series.
In 2001–02 Friedberg was the first occupant of the Henry A. Kissinger Chair in Foreign Policy and International Relations at the Library of Congress. He has been a research fellow at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, the Norwegian Nobel Institute, the Smithsonian Institution’s Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and Harvard University’s Center for International Affairs. Dr Friedberg served from June 2003 to June 2005 as Deputy Assistant for National Security Affairs in the Office of the Vice President. After leaving government he was appointed to the Defense Policy Board and the Secretary of State’s Advisory Committee on Democracy Promotion. Between 2022 and 2026 he served two terms as a congressionally appointed member of the US–China Economic and Security Review Commission. He is a member of the editorial boards of Joint Forces Quarterly and the Journal of Strategic Studies and a member of the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS).
