Unipolarity, Grand Strategy, and the Economics Security Trade-Off

Abstract A decade after Nuno Monteiro’s Theory of Unipolar Politics (TUP) appeared, major developments, from renewed great power rivalry to Russia’s war in Ukraine to the unraveling of the open international economic system, seem to contradict the book’s arguments. A taproot of this disjuncture is TUP’s implicit assumptions about the interaction between economics and security. We show that relaxing those assumptions exposes a complex set of interactions between unipolarity and economics–security trade-offs. We develop propositions concerning these interactions that help identify the conditions under which leading states face trade-offs between the pursuit of economic gains and security. Drawing on Monteiro’s approach, we derive a dynamic framework for understanding system incentives for the unipole’s grand strategy. This allows us to generate a typology of contemporary strategic choices, clarifying the complex debate on US grand strategy.