LSE: The Ballpark | America as a revisionist power with Professor Phillips O’Brien

My name is Professor Phillips O'Brien, and I'm the Chair of Strategic Studies at the University of St. Andrews.

My subjects of study are somewhat depressing subjects.

I look at war and grand strategy and economic production and logistics, and that takes up a lot of my research time.

So I just finished a book that came out last year called War and Power, Who Wins Wars and Why? And my next project is going to be a study of strategic logistics from classical period to today.

So those are the things I have been working on and will be working on.

Thank you.

So your talk at LSE is titled, America as a Revisionist Power and What It Means to the Rest of the World.

For decades, America has built and maintained the international order.

How is it now seeking to break this down? And is it seeking a permanent change to the global order?

Well, it is trying to break down its own order in a number of ways.

One, it is sabotaging its own alliance system.

And much of the international order as constructed by the United States was based on a global alliance system, a network of strategic partners or former allies.

And for now, the United States is de-emphasizing those in many ways, breaking with those and setting up new relationships and looking at issues more hemispherically.

So if you look at the kind of discussion they're having, it's more about having hemispheric dominance, threatening Canada, threatening Greenland, and moving away from other parts of the world.

So that's much of the American internal one.

But there's more going on than that, too.

The United States has not kept its crown as the world's manufacturing powerhouse.

It was at the time of the Second World War a manufacturing powerhouse.

It's not anymore.

And that leaves it certainly vulnerable militarily in a number of ways.

It also is, I would argue, politically divided.

It's become far more divided against itself than it had been.

So all these internal and historic factors are moving it away from this period of global dominance in which it led an alliance structure or created international organizations.

And I don't think there's any going back when we talk about that, even if you have a new president in two years.

The problem that that new president will face is the relationships will be fractured.