RWO Colloquium | David Lake, Strategic Sponsorship: Aligning International Interests in International Order

International orders have two necessary conditions: an alignment of interests and a credible commitment by the leading country not to exploit its partners. This paper focuses on the first condition and how the leading country intervenes in the domestic politics of potential partners to shape their interests in its favor, conditional on the degree of political polarization and strength of its allied group. Using a simple game theoretic model of great power competition, the paper shows when and how domestic politics in a potential partner are brought into alignment with one great power and when the great powers compete for but generally fail to influence interests in the partner. The model is illustrated with examples from the Cold War, especially the formation of the Liberal International Order, and extended to possible U.S.-China competition in third parties. David Lake will be presenting this project, which is coauthored with Yujia Wan. David Lake is the Distinguished Professor of the Graduate Division at the University of California, San Diego. He has published widely in international relations theory and international political economy. Lake's most recent book is Hierarchy in International Relations (2009). In addition to over seventy scholarly articles and chapters, he is also the author of Power, Protection, and Free Trade: International Sources of U.S. Commercial Strategy, 1887-1939 (1988) and Entangling Relations: American Foreign Policy in its Century (1999) and co-editor of eight volumes including most recently Governance in a Global Economy: Political Authority in Transition (2003) andDelegation and Agency in International Organizations (2006). He is also the co-author of a comprehensive new textbook on World Politics: Interests, Interactions, and Institutions (2009). Lake has served as Research Director at the Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation (1992-1966 and 2000-2001), co-editor of the journal International Organization (1997-2001), chair of UCSD's Political Science department (2000-2004), and Associate Dean (2006-2011) and Acting Dean (2011-12) of Social Sciences at UCSD. He is the founding chair of the International Political Economy Society, and was Program Co-Chair of the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association (2007). He is President-Elect of International Studies Association (2010-2011). The recipient of the UCSD Chancellor's Associates Award for Excellence in Graduate Education (2005), he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2006. He received his Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1984 and taught at UCLA from 1983 to 1992. --- Event Details: https://my.princeton.edu/rsvp?id=1974050