Springer Destined Statecraft: Eurasian Small Power Politics and Strategic Cultures in Geopolitical Shifts

Review In Destined Statecraft, Professor Pak Nung Wong addresses an interesting yet rarely handled topic of how small powers engage in foreign policy in a dynamic, fast-paced world. Most literary works on world politics revolve around great powers, based on the deeply ingrained belief that their decisions shape the world order, whereby middle and small powers merely sustain their destinies under their influence. Seldom do we come across a book where small powers are at the center of its focal point. Professor Wong defies such conventional notions and writes that there does exist considerable maneuvering room for small powers, on the premise that they have an accurate understanding of their given circumstances and status quo. What is idiosyncratic in Professor Wong’s approach to international relations is that he places the concept of strategic circumstances in parallel with Bourdieu’s sociological principle of “habitus”. Employing diverse theories ranging from Thucydides to Sun Tzu to Karl Marx, Professor Wong goes on to interpret historic events and current situations from multiple angles.Destined Statecraft enriches our understanding of global affairs by presenting a perspective where small powers are no longer in the periphery, but take up the main narrative. This standpoint is all the more valuable in an age where the proactive decision-making of small powers often goes unobserved. Professor Wong’s Destined Statecraft offers a fresh lens for discerning world issues, helping to extend the reader’s vision beyond the exterior towards a greater perception of the world we live in.Ambassador Mr Sungnam Lim, Vice-Minister of Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Republic of Korea Product Description ‘Destined Statecraft enriches our understanding of global affairs by presenting a perspective where small powers are no longer in the periphery, but take up the main narrative. This standpoint is all the more valuable in an age where the proactive decision-making of small powers often goes unobser ved. Professor Wong’s Destined Statecraft offers a fresh lens for discerning world issues, helping to extend the reader’s vision beyond the exterior towards a greater perception of the world we live in.’―Mr Sungnam Lim, Vice-Minister of Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Republic of KoreaThis book considers the post-2010 strategic shifts in the Anglo-American geopolitical approach to Asia as a pivotal new strategy in the U.S. geo- strategic containment plan, which has been reformed to rebalance the rise of China and the Eurasian heartland in the course of the two decades since the disintegration of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. At this critical global-historical juncture, the People’s Republic of China has also devised a new counter-containment endeavor – the ‘One Belt One Road’ initiative, which aims to re-connect it with all the countries on the Eurasian landmass, forming a single community. Against this backdrop of the intensifying geopolitical and geo-economic competition between the U.S. and China, this book calls for the revival and reinvigoration of selected Eurasian small powers’ embedded geopolitical, political-economic and strategic-cultural structures. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of habitus, the book argues that these self- changing and unceasingly structuring structures do not only constrain and limit, but also enable and galvanize small powers’ strategists and policy- makers to proactively generate creative means-and-ends calculations, conduct prudent security assessments, and devise measured and responsive strategic deployments. In this context, the book proposes that the small powers return to their own religious, cultural and intellectual roots. It also argues for the need to rediscover their own strategic cultures as an essential means of re-inventing and implementing their own unique models of national development. As a substantial contribution to the subfields of small power politics and strategic cultures