Dr Madison Cartwright1
1UNSW, Australia
Biography:
Madison is a Senior Lecturer in International Political Economy and the convenor for the Politics and International Relations undergraduate programme. Madison's research interests include the political economy of intellectual property, free trade agreements, and geoeconomics – notably the economic-security nexus.
Abstract:
At the end of the Cold War the United States’ (U.S) economic order, which had served as a pillar in its ‘containment’ policy against the Soviet Union, was opened to formerly excluded states, including China. The heralded a transformation of the global economy in the new era of U.S. unipolarity. However, the U.S. and its allies have since began to view China as a strategic threat and are seeking to marginalise its prominence in the global economy. This article argues that such efforts will prove too costly, as China’s integration into the U.S.-led order has shaped both the international division of labour and the domestic political economies of the U.S. and its allies. First, using trade data from the BACI database the article develops a new measure of trade dependency called the vulnerability index. Applying this index the article finds high levels of dependence on China, for both imports and exports, among U.S. allies in the Indo-Pacific. Second, the article examines the case study of Australia to demonstrate how the domestic political economies of U.S. allies have been moulded by access to the Chinese market, illustrating the steep costs that economic containment against China will have.