1 - Introduction: Geopolitical Shocks and Global Supply Chains

Summary

Chapter 1 introduces the broader framework for the volume and its place in the broader literature on the relationship between economic interdependence and international cooperation and conflict. It draws attention to the deeper political origins of GSCs in the grand strategies of outward-oriented political survival models and identifies some of the pivotal questions regarding the broader role of GSCs in the international relations of East Asia. A focus on GSCs is especially pertinent to our world time as East Asia faces the most complex bundle of geopolitical and geo-economic threats in decades. This provides a natural experiment of sorts for gauging the extent to which GSCs may provide a more resilient foundation for interstate cooperation than older forms of interdependence have at various historical junctures or, alternatively, whether they amount to equally vulnerable targets of nationalistic and autarkic ambitions, inward-looking turns in the US and China, the trade and technology war, and other geopolitical shocks from within the region. Finally, the chapter introduces the rest of the volume, with different chapters addressing various dimensions of the relationship between GSCs and changing features of East Asian and Asia-Pacific international relations.