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The ongoing confrontation between the United States and China has highlighted the current deficit in international leadership. A theoretical tour de force, Leadership and the rise of Great Powers by Yan Xuetong, which aims to explore international leadership and the mechanisms behind power transitions, could not be more timely. The book further develops Yan's previous works on moral realism and draws on political determinism in ancient Chinese philosophical thought. The author attributes the rise and fall of Great Powers to political leadership, which he defines as the ability of the government to meet its domestic duties and hold international ‘strategic credibility’, without which a country cannot wield global authority. Yan identifies four types of international leadership: humane authority, hegemony, anemocracy and tyranny. For him, the ideal type is humane authority, as it is trustworthy and consistently generates policies which others would want to follow. This corresponds to Joseph Nye's...
Yuanyuan Fang (Fri,) studied this question.