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Commercial liberalism would suggest that whereas globalization was conducive to great power cooperation—or at least moderated competition—deglobalization is likely to ignite greater competition amongst the Great Powers. In reality, however, the picture is much more complex. To begin with, the intense globalization of the 1990s and 2000s is not responsible for moderating Great Power tensions; instead, it is itself a product of the security situation resulting from the end of the Cold War. Furthermore, while globalization did serve to reinforce cooperation between the United States and rising challengers, such as China, which sought to harness the economic gains of globalization to accelerate their rise, it also created or intensified fault-lines that have led to heightening tensions between the Great Powers. Finally, while we are currently witnessing increasing tensions between the US and both China and Russia, deglobalization does not appear to be the primary cause. Thus, geoeconomic conditions do not drive security relations; instead, the geoeconomic environment, which is itself influenced by Great Power politics, is better understood as a medium of Great Power competition, which may affect the character of Great Power competition and its intensity, but does not determine it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A growing body of scholarly literature argues that globalization has weakened the national security state. In this article, we investigate the impact of globalization on four core areas in which globalization scholars contend that the national security function of states has been affected: 1) the frequency of interstate wars; 2) the level of global military spending and the size of armed forces worldwide; 3) the participation of multilateral security providing institutions and international non-governmental organizations (INGOs) in international security activities; and, 4) the challenge of global terrorism. Our analysis reveals that most of the globalization theorists' expectations about the worldwide pursuit of national security remain unfulfilled. There is no major evidence of a decline in global military spending, a reduction in armed forces worldwide or an increasing reliance on international institutions or INGOs to foster security in the contemporary era. Moreover, those changes that are evident -- such as an apparent reduction in interstate warfare cannot be attributed with confidence to the phenomenon of globalization, rather than to other geopolitical factors, such as the end of the Cold War and the entrenchment of American hegemony. Thus, while globalization may transform the pursuit of security in the future, there is no evidence that it has done so profoundly to-date. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

International relations scholars do not adequately conceptualize or measure economic inter-dependence, a crucial variable in studies of trade and conflict, economic sanctions, and globalization. Most studies conflate vulnerability with sensitivity and confuse interconnectedness with genuine interdependence by relying on inadequate indices of interdependence such as unadjusted trade as a percentage of GDP. Such measures fail to capture the true cost to states of a termination of normal trading relations and ignore completely interstate financial and monetary ties. In this article, we offer a new method, the Contextual Sensitivity Estimator (CSE), for gauging sensitivity interdependence. The CSE addresses existing shortcomings in several noteworthy ways. First, it takes into account the strategic and domestic economic context of external economic linkages. Second, it assesses the composition of trade and the uses of trade proceeds. Third, it provides a detailed conceptualization of critical channels of sensitivity like foreign investment and exchange rate ties. Using Arab—Canadian economic relations in 1979, after a threatened boycott of Canada, as a case study, we show that our CSE yields a more accurate assessment of sensitivity interdependence than traditional measures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]