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Focusing on the US–China rivalry in the Horn of Africa (HoA), this study investigates the geoeconomic implications of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) on long-standing US preeminence, using offensive realism as a theoretical lens. Based on an in-depth literature review and using a qualitative research approach, the authors examine Beijing’s growing geoeconomic engagement with the HoA and its consequences for great power competition on the African continent. It examines the strengths and weaknesses of President Biden’s Build Back Better World (B3W), a development initiative designed to counter China’s BRI economic influence on the HoA. The study concludes that both the BRI and B3W initiatives and their implementation strategies demonstrate that both Beijing and Washington have strong national interests in the HoA regions, resulting in fierce geopolitical competition.

Since its entry into the WTO in 2001, Chinese expansion in South America has been increasingly evident, mainly in economic and financial terms. However, it is verified that a more active participation has been presenting a duality that generates, concomitantly, benefits and harms for the South American economies. This article seeks to discuss this specific characteristic, presenting the hypothesis of the establishment of a hybrid geoeconomy, defined as the use of economic instruments through a multifarious and asymmetric dualism. Thus, based on an empirical-deductive methodology based on quantitative and qualitative data, the objective is to show that even though the Chinese geoeconomic instruments are a non-imposing strategy, they can result in negative externalities for the South American productive structures and intraregional flows in the long run. This work is divided into three sections, in addition to the present introduction and the final considerations: First, the theoretical-conceptual definition of what is called hybrid geoeconomics will be carried out, based on a discussion of a geopolitical and geoeconomic nature. Subsequently, Chinese economic instruments in South America will be evaluated in quantitative terms, basically using data from trade flows, foreign direct investments and loans, over the period from 2001 to 2016. In the last section, we intend to qualify the debate on China’s hybrid geoeconomics in South American territory, demonstrating its intrinsic characteristics, as well as its objectives, counterparts, protagonists and models. Therefore, it is concluded that the Chinese presence has been changing the geopolitical and geoeconomic map of South America, with positive and negative impacts.

The intensifying trade war between the United States and China has been the focal point of geoeconomics as well as geopolitics, in the purview of the current times. Trump’s unilateral trade tariffs imposed on China and the latter’s retaliation with further duties against the United States has jostled the global trade chains, which has had repercussions beyond the two largest economies. Furthermore, while the G20 summit in Osaka witnessed the US and China returning to the negotiating table to end the tariffs and the Phase One deal between both the countries provided some amnesty, the tensions are much deeper rooted and are far from being resolved. However, as the implications of the trade war move beyond the stratagem of the US–China tug-of-war, many countries like India maneuver through the tussle to find a delicate equilibrium between national interests and global power politics. In this regard, this paper tends to analyze India’s perspective towards the trade war, arguing that New Delhi is taking a non-confrontational, measured approach to surpass the fluid international affairs; in a way that is letting New Delhi shape its decisions on the basis of its national interests and concerns, rather than taking sides.

The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) occupies a prominent place in studies of regional organisations, especially in what is still referred to sometimes as the ‘developing world’. For a long time ASEAN had few parallels or competitors for the title of the most effective institution outside of ‘the West’ generally or Western Europe more particularly. As a consequence, ASEAN has received a good deal of analytical attention and has attracted highly divergent views in the process. For some observers — most famously Amitav Acharya (2000), perhaps — ASEAN is an example of the potential influence Southeast Asian states acting collectively can exert over their more powerful peers. For other scholars, ASEAN is noteworthy primarily as a mechanism for avoiding rather than resolving problems (Jones and Smith 2007). Both these arguments have their merits. One way of trying to resolve which side of the debate has the most credibility is to see whether they can explain specific challenges. Fortunately for the scholarly community but less so for ASEAN, such a challenge is at hand…

Even enthusiasts would have to concede that trade policy discussions are usually a specialist interest and can often be a little dull. No longer. The largely unpredicted election of Donald Trump as the 45^th President of the United States has given trade relations an unaccustomed prominence in policy debates, and overturned many of the rather complacent assumptions experts had about the likely trajectory of America’s economic relations. This continues a trend, which began with the Obama Administration’s launch of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) in 2010, where trade initiatives have featured centrally in US geopolitical strategy. Trade has become an increasingly important and contentious part of American foreign policy, and is likely to remain so given the Trump Administration’s activist trade policy agenda. And yet this development should have come as less of a surprise than it did. For the theoretical and practical reality is that ‘geoeconomics’ — the application of economic instruments to advance geopolitical ends (Blackwill and Harris 2016) — has been an increasingly important part of the way states are pursuing international objectives…

China has become the second largest economy in the world in an historically unprecedented space of time. Remarkable as this achievement is that it is not only China’s sheer material significance that has attracted so much attention, but also the feature of China’s ascent that has really begun to define recent commentary is what the leadership of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) will do with its growing power and economic leverage (Heilmann and Schmidt 2014; Kastner 2016). In short, China has begun to exert a form of ‘geoeconomic’ influence that is changing the way we think about both the nature of international relations in the twenty-first century and about the precise uses China’s policymakers will put their growing power (Beeson and Li 2015; Norris 2016; Blackwill and Harris 2016)…