The Age of Strategic Exclusion

Major powers are increasingly trying to shut out their rivals. Russia invaded Ukraine in part to prevent the latter’s further integration with the West. The United States is restricting China’s access to advanced semiconductors and encouraging allies to do the same. China’s Belt and Road Initiative secures privileged positions in strategic infrastructure and economic relationships. Though these examples vary in aims and methods, they reflect a growing willingness of major powers to restrict rivals’ access and influence.I use the term ‘strategic exclusion’ to describe policies that move competition from shared access to restricted access. Territorial control is its most extreme form, but exclusion can also operate through technology, infrastructure, economic relationships, and security ties. Strategic exclusion is attractive because it can reduce vulnerabilities and impose costs on competitors. Yet the same qualities also make strategic exclusion dangerous. Exclusion in one place gives rivals reason to fear exclusion elsewhere, turning limited disputes into broader contests over the future terms of competition. Measures intended to increase one state’s security can consequently encourage countermeasures and progressively narrow the space in which major powers can coexist.The policy question for leaders is how far to close access. Some vulnerabilities, especially those that materially strengthen a rival’s military, justify exclusion. States can instead address other vulnerabilities through enhancing resilience. States can diversify supply chains and deepen domestic capacity without deliberately restricting the access of others. When exclusion is necessary, states should place careful limits on it to reduce the likelihood of retaliation, wider containment, and systemic closure.Strategic exclusion will remain an important feature of major-power competition. Understanding when competition becomes exclusionary, why states pursue it, and how states can attenuate its most dangerous effects is increasingly central to managing major-power relations.Monopolization and Major-Power ConflictMy forthcoming research in Security Studies provides evidence for the relationship between monopolization and major-power conflict. The quantitative analysis examines disputes involving rising powers between 1816 and 2010. Monopolization captures attempts to establish predominant control over a smaller state or territory while excluding other major powers from access, and the outcome is whether the dispute involves violent conflict with another major power. In the statistical analysis, monopolization raises the probability of such conflict by 12.3 percentage points, relative to a baseline probability of 4.7 percent.Two mechanisms help explain the association of monopolization with major-power conflict. Monopolization might itself impose upon another state severe enough material costs to risk a military response. But this scenario is rare. It is uncommon for the specific stakes involved in a particular case of strategic exclusion to be sufficient for war to be the outcome.However, monopolization also provides information about future intentions. What is at stake is not only access to a particular small state. Rivals fear accommodating strategic exclusion today because it sets a precedent for tomorrow. The immediate costs of exclusion, and concern about what accepting exclusion would mean elsewhere, consequently motivate opposition. Disputes over individual states or territories can therefore become contests over the future terms of international order.The breakdown of the Open Door in China illustrates this dynamic. Japan’s growing efforts to establish privileged control over China during the first half of the 20th century increasingly conflicted with American and British expectations that China would remain open to shared exploitation. The United States and Britain consequently came to interpret Japanese expansion as evidence of a wider challenge to the existing order in East Asia. Economic exclusion additionally played two crucial roles. British imperial preference from 1932 restricted Japanese access to imperial markets at a time when Japanese strategic planners were increasingly turning toward autarky. The American-led oil embargo threatened a resource on which Japan was acutely dependent. Japan’s attacks in December 1941 were therefore themselves partly a response to exclusion. A cycle that began with competing attempts to secure privileged access ultimately produced increasingly severe efforts by each side to deny access to the other.The Soviet consolidation of Eastern Europe after 1945 produced a similar change in how rivals of the Soviet Union understood intentions. Western policymakers were concerned about the loss of influence in countries such as Poland and Czechoslovakia, but the significance they attached to Soviet behavior extended well beyond those states. Soviet exclusion raised a wider question about the kind of postwar order Moscow intended to create. Churchill’s 1946 ‘Iron Curtain’ speech captured this concern by presenting Soviet control of Eastern Europe as evidence of a broader challenge to European security. American and British policymakers consequently directed their response toward future Soviet behavior as much as the immediate settlement in Eastern Europe, which contributed to the consolidation of deeply hostile blocs.Yet, the Cold War in Europe did not result in direct war between the United States and the Soviet Union. Strategic exclusion does not make major power conflict inevitable. This is consistent with the probabilistic finding in my research. The danger is greatest during attempts to assert exclusive control, as rivals are uncertain about where, and whether, exclusion will stop. In Europe during the Cold War, the rapid ossification of the two blocs and the construction of substantial nuclear arsenals reduced the signaling problem.The same dynamic is consequential today because strategic exclusion can become self-reinforcing. Measures intended to reduce vulnerability encourage competitors to protect themselves in turn, while measures designed to exploit another state’s vulnerabilities create still stronger incentives for retaliation. Economic interdependence magnifies this problem. These relationships make exclusion more tempting as an instrument of statecraft, but they can also make its material consequences more severe. Each side’s attempt to become more secure provides the other with further evidence that exclusion is necessary. As this process spreads, individual disputes increasingly become tests of what each side will tolerate and of the rules that will govern future competition. The danger lies in a succession of individually rational decisions progressively making the wider relationship more confrontational and less stable. The implication for policymakers is that the stakes of exclusion are not merely measured by its immediate target. Rather, leaders should evaluate the signal that this sends to rivals about access elsewhere.Strategic ExclusionCompetition between major powers for influence over smaller states is a persistent feature of major-power politics. What differentiates this competition is how major powers conduct it. This ranges on a spectrum in terms of the access afforded to major powers. Open access is one end of the spectrum and means major powers can pursue their interests in the territory of a smaller state. This does not imply a lack of competition. It can still be intense, but the established practice is for this competition to take place with shared access. By contrast, strategic exclusion is the attempt by a major power to secure privileged access, limiting the ability of others to operate in the same space. Territorial control is a common, though not necessary, component of strategic exclusion. In addition, infrastructure ownership, economic dependence, and security relationships all commonly form part of strategic exclusion.Strategic exclusion overlaps with several established concepts but focuses on different features of major-power competition. Spheres of influence describe geographically defined areas in which one power predominates, whereas strategic exclusion concerns the terms on which states grant or deny rivals access. Weaponized interdependence and Edward Fishman’s economic chokepoints identify sources and instruments of leverage within economic networks. These can facilitate exclusion but do not necessarily entail it. Geoeconomics similarly describes the use of economic instruments for strategic purposes, while de-risking principally seeks to reduce a state’s exposure. Strategic exclusion instead describes the aim of restricting rival access, regardless of the instrument used. It can feed a security dilemma, but differs from the classic spiral model because states often deliberately impose, and rivals correctly perceive, the harm involved. Major powers pursue monopolization precisely to deny others access, rather than simply being misinterpreted as threatening.The United States, China, and Russia do not sit in the same position on the exclusion spectrum, and not all of their foreign policy constitutes strategic exclusion. Nevertheless, strategic exclusion does increasingly underpin their foreign policies. Russia’s military efforts to prevent Western political influence in Ukraine are a clear contemporary attempt at monopolization through territorial control. The United States, meanwhile, is increasingly willing to use economic instruments and technology transfers as a means of coercing other states to restrict Chinese access. We should distinguish American efforts to restrict Chinese access from measures to bolster domestic production and diversify supply chains, which strengthen American resilience without themselves constituting strategic exclusion. While China’s grand strategic vision of the Belt and Road Initiative is not inherently exclusionary, Chinese projects have sidelined competitors in at least some recipient states. However, we should also note that China’s burgeoning security ties, especially with states in the Pacific like the Solomon Islands, are much more overtly exclusionary since it allows the potential deployment of Chinese security forces. Strategic exclusion is not, therefore, a synonym for all forms of major-power competition. Rather, it describes the shift from competition in a framework where access is possible, to the policy of preventing equivalent access by rivals.Policymakers increasingly treat economic interdependence as a vulnerability that competitors could exploit, rather than a shared interest which can support cordial relations. Policy responses to economic insecurity can include elements that do not exclude competitors, such as diversifying suppliers, stockpiling, or building domestic capacity. Exclusion is also a possible response. Successful strategic exclusion harms rivals while bolstering economic security. Although other states are unlikely to regard de-risking positively, since it signals fears about the future, it does not discard open ties. Other states are more likely to regard exclusion as a hostile act since it directly harms others, as intended.Why States ExcludeFrom the perspective of major-power leaders, strategic exclusion offers tangible advantages. Most clearly, exclusion can impose direct and material costs on rivals while securing privileged access for the state pursuing it. Major-power leaders can also perceive rival access as a threat. Both logics are clearly visible in contemporary major-power relations. Beijing understands the American military presence in South Korea, Japan, and the Philippines to be a threat, while Putin has repeatedly portrayed Western political and security influence in Ukraine as threatening Russian security and status. In such circumstances, exclusion offers a means of improving a state’s own position while reducing the opportunities available to its competitors.Similar logic applies to economic relationships. Strategic exclusion can serve both economic security, by reducing vulnerability to exploitation by others, and economic statecraft, by exploiting the vulnerabilities of rivals. It can also offer more straightforward economic advantages by securing privileged access to markets, resources, infrastructure, or technology. Major-power leaders should weigh these benefits against the considerable gains they derive from economic openness and interdependence. This tension is visible in contemporary American semiconductor policy. The United States has sought to increase domestic manufacturing capacity to reduce reliance on Taiwan while restricting Chinese access to the most advanced chips and the technologies required to produce them, even as all three countries continue to benefit from their wider economic relationships. Similar tensions increasingly surround critical minerals, strategic infrastructure, and access to advanced computing capabilities. Economic security can therefore encourage policies intended to make a state more resilient, but it can also create incentives to deny competitors access to strategically valuable economic relationships.Strategic exclusion can also serve broader political purposes. Privileged influence over other states demonstrates a major power’s ability to shape its strategic environment and can reinforce claims to regional or international status. These motivations often overlap. Control over a port, for example, might carry economic benefits while offering military advantages and demonstrating political influence. Major-power leaders can arrive at strategic exclusion through different calculations, often pursuing several objectives at once.The problem emerges at the level of the international system. From the perspective of an individual leader, strategic exclusion can be rational, at least in the short term. An open international system entails Chinese access to advanced technology, Western influence in Ukraine, and American military access throughout East and Southeast Asia. For the United States, Russia, and China, respectively, these represent significant costs and risks. Exclusion offers a means of reducing costs and minimizing risks but rarely goes unanswered. Measures intended to reduce vulnerabilities, and especially those designed to exploit the vulnerabilities of others, invite countermeasures. Individually rational attempts to secure privileged access can therefore progressively close the spaces in which major powers compete, intensifying security competition in the process. The calculation for policymakers should include both the benefit of exclusion today and the countermeasures it is likely to induce.Managing Strategic ExclusionMajor powers face genuine vulnerabilities that have arguably deepened due to economic interdependence. Governments have good reason to protect sensitive technologies, secure critical supply chains, and reduce dependencies competitors might exploit. Economic security is an important part of major power competition. The challenge is preventing efforts to reduce vulnerability from producing a wider spiral of exclusion. For policymakers, this means considering not only whether a measure reduces immediate vulnerability, but whether they can achieve the same objective without restricting rival access. These prescriptions primarily concern rivalries that have not crossed into armed conflict. Once a state uses force to impose exclusion, as Russia has in Ukraine, deterrence and resistance become central. The management problem addressed here is how governments respond to competition before it reaches that point.This requires greater attention to the distinction between resilience and exclusion, as rivals can readily discount verbal assurances. Restraint is credible when it is visible in policy, meaning governments should demonstrate clear boundaries for restrictions. Moreover, reviewing controls, relying on measures that reduce vulnerability by imposing costs on the state pursuing them, and preserving access in sectors lacking serious security vulnerabilities all demonstrate a willingness to retain rival participation. Restraint can also be rational for individual states, as broad exclusion imposes significant costs on domestic firms and the wider economy. Broad exclusion can also erode strategic value. When rivals deny states access, those states have stronger incentives to develop alternative technologies, suppliers, and networks, and these alternatives weaken the leverage rivals derive from existing dependencies. Restraint can therefore preserve both the economic benefits of interdependence and forms of influence that would disappear under wholesale separation.American semiconductor policy illustrates how this distinction might operate. Investment in domestic manufacturing and diversified supply chains strengthens American resilience without direct costs on rivals. Controls on technologies with clear military applications impose limits on Chinese access. Policymakers can justify these controls where the security benefits are sufficiently large. The risk arises when the boundary continually expands, and restrictions become a general effort to contain Chinese growth.Policymakers cannot permanently fix the boundary between resilience and exclusion. New technologies can create security vulnerabilities, and restrictions should expand when access would materially strengthen a rival’s military. The relevant test is therefore the security consequence of access. Governments should distinguish technologies with a demonstrable connection to military capabilities from measures intended principally to preserve a wider economic advantage. These judgments will remain contested and will often depend on classified assessments, but explicit criteria and periodic review can ensure restrictions are responsive to changes in security risk.Major-power competition will continue, as will efforts to protect states from the vulnerabilities it creates. A stable international order does not require an absence of rivalry, but it does require major powers to tolerate some degree of rival access and influence. Leaders should treat exclusion as a policy choice carrying wider strategic costs, not simply as an automatic response to vulnerability. Where resilience can provide sufficient security, policymakers should prefer it. Where exclusion is necessary, policymakers should bound it by identifiable security risks and reassess it regularly. Preserving international stability will depend on maintaining enough openness for that competition to remain manageable.Patrick Gill-Tiney, PhD, is a lecturer in security studies (economic statecraft) in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London. His research examines international security, economic statecraft, and international order, with a particular focus on how major powers compete for influence over smaller states. His work has been published in the Journal of Conflict Resolution, and his forthcoming Security Studies article is titled “Subordinate Monopolization and the Origins of Major Power Conflict.” He is currently completing a book manuscript, Open Hierarchies: Access and Order in World Politics.Image: RGB via Wikimedia Commons