The puzzle Edmond sets out to solve is a persistent paradox in African security. States that receive large quantities of external military assistance often fail to deter threats or preserve their autonomy, while states with far fewer resources demonstrate resilience and strategic flexibility. Conventional explanations focus on institutional weakness, governance deficits, and state capacity, and these variables matter. But they cannot account for cases in which armed forces with superior numbers, foreign training, and modern equipment collapse rapidly under pressure. Drawing on Stephen Biddle’s demonstration that force employment and morale can outweigh numerical superiority, the study argues that materialist explanations miss the political and social dimensions of fighting power: the willingness of soldiers to fight, of civilians to support them, and of leaders to pursue national rather than regime interests.

The concept of will to fight has deep roots in military theory. Carl von Clausewitz identified moral factors—courage, unity, and purpose—as sometimes more important than numerical or technological superiority, and modern scholarship from Shils and Janowitz’s wartime cohesion studies to Anthony King’s work on the combat soldier has confirmed that resolve is socially and politically produced rather than an individual psychological trait. What Edmond adds is a reframing: instead of treating will to fight as an explanation of battlefield performance, he positions it as a pre-conflict strategic variable that shapes deterrence credibility, alliance durability, and a state’s capacity to keep its options open before the first shot is fired. In deterrence terms, resolve is the social and political foundation of a credible threat; without it, no quantity of material capability makes a threat believable.

The study’s central claims follow from this reframing. First, will to fight is essential for maintaining what Edmond calls strategic openness—the ability of a state to engage with multiple external partners without becoming dependent on any one of them or surrendering sovereignty. States lacking political legitimacy and civil-military cohesion increasingly trade sovereignty for short-term regime survival, outsourcing security to coercive external providers and watching their strategic options shrink. Second, great power competition in Africa is facilitated by weak will to fight rather than overcome by material superiority: external actors exploit it by offering regime-centric security solutions such as private military companies, surveillance technology, and personal protection that undermine long-term deterrence and institutional resilience. Third, authoritarian fragmentation and transnational threats create a self-reinforcing cycle in which regimes that prioritize internal control erode the societal foundations needed to resist those very threats, deepening external dependency.

The comparative cases illustrate the argument’s two directions. The Sahel presents the most visible erosion of will to fight in contemporary Africa. Counterterrorism operations initially framed as national defense gradually became regime-specific security projects that lost legitimacy with their own populations. In Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger, politicized chains of command, corruption, and coup-proofing strategies—parallel security units loyal to individuals rather than the state, promotions based on loyalty rather than merit—hollowed out institutional cohesion and morale. The result was desertions, mutinies, and battlefield withdrawals by numerically superior forces, followed by rapid strategic realignment. Mali, once considered a showcase of international security assistance, collapsed under the combined pressure of insurgency and political crisis; its successive coups, the study argues, reflected institutional failure rather than military strength. As domestic will to fight declined, the regime abandoned multilateral partnerships for individualized security agreements, trading long-term independence for short-term survival.

Cameroon occupies an intermediate position that sharpens the analytical contrast. Its armed forces remain operational against Boko Haram in the Far North and separatists in the Anglophone regions, but their will to fight is uneven and tied closely to regime survival rather than state legitimacy. Elite units demonstrate cohesion while broader institutional trust remains low, and operations framed as defense of regime stability limit societal buy-in. This partial will to fight sustains baseline deterrence against insurgents but constrains strategic openness: Cameroon maintains diverse external partnerships, yet these are defined by the security needs of the regime rather than by institutional reforms that would broaden legitimacy. The country is resilient enough to remain stable but not legitimate enough to convert resolve into strategic autonomy.

The Horn of Africa, and Ethiopia in particular, demonstrates the opposite logic. Despite insurgency, conflict, and intense external pressure in a strategically coveted region, Ethiopia has engaged multiple partners—including the United States, China, and Gulf states—without becoming wholly dependent on any of them. Edmond attributes this to a comparatively strong will to fight built on three sources: a narrative of national sovereignty shared across ethnic and regional lines, a military identity anchored in historical memory of resistance such as the Battle of Adwa, and a leadership that, while authoritarian, has framed security policy in terms of national defense rather than purely regime preservation. External actors, recognizing the costs of coercion, adjust their strategies accordingly. The Horn cases show that even under severe structural constraints, will to fight can function as a strategic asset that shapes the outcomes of competition.

Beyond the African cases, the study proposes a framework with general applicability, subject to three scope conditions: competition must be indirect rather than a direct great power war, transnational threats must be testing state legitimacy, and states must retain sufficient capacity for meaningful strategic choice. Edmond points to India as an illustrative non-African case, where democratic legitimacy, professional civil-military relations, and social cohesion have preserved strategic openness despite material disadvantages relative to China. He also offers defense planners a practical toolkit for assessing will to fight before conflict erupts, organized into political indicators such as public trust and whether security strategy protects the nation or the ruling party; institutional indicators such as meritocratic promotion, professional military independence, and the presence of parallel loyalist forces; and societal indicators such as civilian support for national defense and the extent of ethnic or regional exclusion. Data observable only during conflict—actual combat performance, leadership resilience under duress—should be treated as hypotheses to be tested through continued engagement rather than certainties.

The policy implications are pointed. Security force assistance, the study argues, must be understood as a political enterprise rather than a technical one; training and equipment that ignore legitimacy and civil-military cohesion produce hollow forces that perform in controlled environments but fail under sustained pressure, as the Sahel and Mali demonstrate. Deterrence in Africa rests on resilience rather than dominance, and supporting a partner’s political endurance signals that coercion will be resisted over time regardless of an adversary’s advantages. The study further recommends differentiating between partners capable of reform and those whose security institutions are structurally oriented toward regime preservation, treating credible state narratives linking security operations to national purpose as a deterrent function rather than a public affairs task, and integrating security assistance with development and humanitarian policy so that counterterrorism operations do not undermine the legitimacy they depend upon. Strategic openness, on this view, is an outcome to be supported, not assumed.

The study’s broader conclusion reframes what winning means in an era of indirect competition. In peripheral theaters like Africa, contests are decided not by decisive battles or formal alliances but by the ability of states and societies to maintain the resolve to resist coercion and protect their autonomy. Where will to fight is strong, competition is mediated by institutionalized domestic capabilities, and external actors must negotiate and accept limits; where it is weak, competition becomes extractive and destabilizing, accelerating fragmentation and dependence. The most important contests, Edmond concludes, occur before the first shot is fired—and for the states and external powers alike, will to fight must be assessed, developed, and protected with the same seriousness accorded to force structure and technology.

Subject of Research: The role of will to fight in African state deterrence, strategic openness, and great power competition

Article Title: Winning without war in Africa: the will to fight, strategic openness, and great power rivalry

Article References: Edmond, C. (2026). Winning without war in Africa: the will to fight, strategic openness, and great power rivalry. SN Social Sciences, 6(10), Article 521. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-026-01814-w

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43545-026-01814-w

Keywords: will to fight, great power competition, Africa security, deterrence, strategic openness, Sahel, Mali, Cameroon, Horn of Africa, civil-military relations, security assistance, transnational threats

Minnich builds his argument on an analogy drawn from economics rather than strategy alone. He applies theories of oligopolistic competition, the behavior of markets dominated by a small number of large firms, to the international system. Just as a handful of dominant companies in a concentrated market must anticipate each other’s moves, great powers in a multipolar world are locked in strategic interaction where each actor’s choices shape the competitive landscape. The analogy is imperfect, as the author concedes, but it illuminates a crucial structural point: whether firms or states compete or collude is not determined by structure alone. Oligopolists can slash prices to win market share, or they can quietly form cartels. Great powers, likewise, can compete for spheres of influence or reach accommodations that divide the world between them.

The starting point of the analysis is the behavior of a monopolist. When a single firm dominates a market, its overriding priority is to preserve that position by preventing rivals from emerging. Monopolists therefore have weak incentives to trade valuable assets, such as proprietary technology, for short-term sales, and strong incentives to restrict technology flows to potential future competitors. Minnich points to real-world examples such as the Dutch firm ASML, which monopolizes the production of cutting-edge lithography systems, and CFM International, which dominates the narrowbody aircraft jet engine market. Both sell heavily to China, yet neither has transferred meaningful technology to Chinese partners, even where doing so would have been legal. Control over supply gives such firms the leverage to dictate terms.

He then argues that after the Cold War, the United States occupied a broadly analogous position over global technology flows, since almost all high-technology companies were headquartered in the United States and its allies, and American firms controlled much of the core intellectual property behind high-tech goods produced elsewhere. The post-Cold War shift to an effective Western monopoly over technology coincided with the creation and expansion of a far more robust international intellectual property regime, embodied in the World Trade Organization’s agreements on Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights and Trade-Related Investment Measures. Whatever their motives and merits, Minnich suggests, these agreements plausibly slowed technology diffusion to less-developed countries by narrowing their development policy space. It is striking, he notes, that since 1990 lower-income countries’ share of global manufacturing value-add has generally stagnated, with the notable exception of China, which pursued precisely the technology transfer and industrial policies the Washington Consensus discouraged.

The situation changes when a challenger enters the market. In an oligopoly, incumbents must balance their long-term interest in preventing future competitors against the short-term need to fight current rivals for market share. The more intense the competition, the more willing incumbents become to trade long-term advantages for immediate access to new markets or influence over client states. At the same time, competition on the supply side boosts the bargaining power of prospective host countries, which can play rival suitors against each other to extract better terms, including pledges of technology transfer. History offers vivid illustrations. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union between 1953 and 1960 set up more than 200 industrial projects in China, transferred thousands of industrial designs, sent as many as 10,000 experts, and educated more than 50,000 Chinese engineers, transfers that research shows durably improved Chinese firms’ capabilities in steel and other heavy industries. American allies in East Asia benefited from direct military technology transfers and support for licensing commercial technologies.

There is evidence that this dynamic is already re-emerging. Aspects of China’s Belt and Road Initiative, including the Digital Silk Road, have been examined for the technology spillovers they enable in host countries. Drawing on recent data, Minnich highlights a sharp increase in Chinese greenfield investment in clean energy technology manufacturing, from electric vehicles and batteries to solar, wind, storage, and green hydrogen, with the vast majority flowing to countries outside North America, Europe, and Northeast Asia. Some of this investment has been accompanied by explicit calls for or pledges of technology transfer. Gulf governments, for example, have sought to leverage U.S.-China competition to secure transfers in battery technology and artificial intelligence data center development. Two factors could accelerate the trend: the decline of the WTO as an enforcement mechanism, eroding norms against state intervention, and the U.S.-China trade war, whose first phase from 2018 to 2025 helped fuel rising Chinese manufacturing investment across the Global South.

Yet the analysis carries a warning. Just as firms in concentrated markets may collude rather than compete, great powers can coordinate, tacitly or overtly, to carve up the geopolitical market at others’ expense. President Trump has repeatedly stated his desire for a deal with China and signaled openness to Chinese investment in American manufacturing, prompting prominent international relations theorists to speculate about a grand bargain between the two countries. Given the increasingly personalistic nature of policymaking under Trump, exemplified by his abrupt about-face on sales of certain AI chips to China, such possibilities cannot be dismissed. In theory, an agreement that durably lowered bilateral tensions could reduce both sides’ incentives to trade technology for political support in the periphery, effectively transforming oligopoly back into monopoly and stripping third countries of their leverage.

The consequences of such collusion would not be catastrophic relative to the post-Cold War status quo, but Minnich emphasizes that this status quo was dire for much of the developing world. According to United Nations figures cited in the study, between 1990 and 2022 lower-middle-income countries’ share of global manufacturing value-add rose only modestly from 5 to around 7 percent, while middle-income countries excluding China fell from almost 9 to under 7 percent, and low-income countries hovered near zero. China’s share, meanwhile, surged from 3 to 32 percent. Should the pattern of premature deindustrialization continue for another thirty years, the author warns, it would amount to a catastrophe for global development.

Fortunately for the Global South, a durable grand bargain appears unlikely, at least for now. Recent scholarship argues that lasting U.S.-China cooperation is most feasible when both countries face a common adversary and are led by pro-globalization domestic coalitions, neither of which holds today. Minnich adds a structural hypothesis: collusion is more sustainable when power is evenly balanced and stable, resembling the duopoly Boeing and Airbus enjoyed in commercial aircraft from roughly 2000 to 2018, and harder to sustain when power differentials are uneven and changing rapidly. The current U.S.-China balance of power fits the latter scenario, suggesting any attempted bargain would be unstable in the short to medium term, though a more even balance over time could eventually favor accommodation.

The study closes with a third, ironic possibility the author calls inadvertent collusion. The tariffs the second Trump administration imposes on the world outside China, combined with the uncertainty they generate, may lead firms to keep manufacturing in China rather than relocate to the United States or elsewhere, reinforcing Chinese manufacturing dominance and undercutting incentives to invest in and transfer technology to newly industrializing economies, as much as any formal deal might. Reports already suggest Chinese manufacturers are rethinking their Southeast Asian pivots. As with active collusion, this would likely be an unstable equilibrium, but inertia and path dependency are powerful forces, and the effects of even short-lived policies often outlast the policies themselves. For Minnich, the bottom line is bittersweet: great power rivalry will make the world more dangerous, yet insofar as it improves low-income countries’ access to and ability to bargain for technology, it would be a small silver lining to an otherwise fraught situation.

Subject of Research: The impact of U.S.-China great power competition and Trump-era geopolitics on technology transfer to the Global South

Article Title: Trump, U.S.-China competition, and the future of technology transfer

Article References: Minnich, J. (2025). Trump, U.S.-China competition, and the future of technology transfer. Global Public Policy and Governance, 5(4), 411-421. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43508-025-00125-9

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43508-025-00125-9

Keywords: technology transfer, U.S.-China relations, Global South, great power competition, oligopoly theory, industrial policy, Belt and Road Initiative, intellectual property, multipolarity, Trump administration, industrialization, foreign direct investment

The theoretical engine of the study is hegemonic transition theory, a structural realist framework rooted in Organski’s power transition model and later elaborated by Robert Gilpin. Gilpin argued that a dominant state’s relative capabilities inevitably erode as the costs of maintaining global commitments rise while rising states benefit from faster growth, generating pressure along three pathways: negotiated accommodation, hegemonic conflict, or managed adjustment, in which the declining power slows its relative erosion without fully arresting it. The Biden administration’s pivot away from the ideologically selective unilateralism of the Trump years toward economic pragmatism and multilateral institution-building is, in the authors’ reading, a textbook attempt at that third pathway. Latin America is an especially revealing test case precisely because it is the region where U.S. hegemonic prerogative was historically most assumed and least contested.

The review distinguishes carefully between efficacy, meaning the degree to which a policy achieves its own stated objectives, and effectiveness, meaning its broader impact on the strategic environment. On the efficacy side, the diplomatic record is genuinely positive. The administration restored functional relationships with left-wing governments that had been actively antagonized under Trump, navigating Colombia’s transition from conservative President Ivan Duque to leftist Gustavo Petro in 2022 without any disruption to security, energy, or climate cooperation. Biden held five bilateral meetings with Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador between 2021 and 2024, compared with a single meeting under Trump, and sustained engagement with Brazil after Lula’s 2022 electoral victory through summits in February and September 2023. Crucially, the authors note, this flexibility ran in both ideological directions: the administration maintained workable ties with libertarian President Javier Milei in Argentina alongside left-wing governments in Bogota, Brasilia, and Mexico City, indicating a genuinely bidirectional shift toward interest-based engagement.

Public opinion data reinforce the diplomatic gains. Favorable views of the United States among Brazilians rose from 26 percent under Trump to 37 percent under Biden, a change the authors judge plausibly attributable to policy recalibration rather than confounding factors. Yet the same section of the review documents the limits of normalization. Limited sanctions relief for Venezuela, extended in October 2023, was suspended just six months later after the Maduro regime disqualified opposition candidates. Relations with Cuba barely moved, with the embargo structure intact, and Nicaragua’s withdrawal from the Organization of American States in November 2023 represented outright deterioration of the multilateral framework. Accommodation, the authors conclude, persuades disaffected partners far more readily than governments already embedded in a rival power’s orbit.

The economic pillar reveals the sharpest gap between ambition and outcome. The Americas Partnership for Economic Prosperity, launched at the June 2022 Summit of the Americas, was deliberately built as a soft framework of memoranda of understanding and technical cooperation rather than binding commitments, because negotiating new free trade agreements faced insurmountable congressional opposition. By late 2024, APEP’s concrete achievements remained limited to those memoranda, and the absence of Brazil and Argentina significantly constrained its regional scope. The Inflation Reduction Act did generate measurable nearshoring momentum: U.S. automobile and parts imports from Mexico rose 15.6 percent, from 153.88 billion dollars in 2022 to 177.84 billion dollars in 2023, driven by electric vehicle battery tax credit provisions that incentivized regional manufacturing while excluding Chinese producers. The USMCA Rapid Response Mechanism was deployed 27 times, resolving 22 cases, including one in which workers at a Goodyear plant received over 4.2 million dollars in retroactive wages.

But the aggregate trade numbers complicate any story of success. U.S. Census Bureau data show total goods trade with the region averaging 839 billion dollars annually under Trump and 1,113 billion under Biden, an increase of roughly 33 percent, though much of that gap narrows once the pandemic-depressed 2020 baseline is set aside. The growth was driven disproportionately by imports: the U.S. merchandise trade deficit with the region more than doubled, from an average of 47.6 billion dollars annually under Trump to 78.8 billion under Biden, reaching 123.4 billion dollars in 2024, the highest in the eight-year series. The U.S.-Mexico goods deficit grew from an average of 89.4 billion to 148.6 billion dollars, hitting 168.6 billion in 2024, more than double the 2017 level. A services surplus of 24.24 billion dollars in 2023, while real, remained an order of magnitude smaller than the goods deficit. The widening gap, the authors argue, is not a single-year anomaly but a sustained four-year trend running directly counter to APEP’s stated goal of balanced regional integration.

The infrastructure contest tells a similar story of structural asymmetry. U.S. foreign direct investment accumulated to 1.04 trillion dollars in Latin America by 2022, but 61 percent of it flowed through British Overseas Territories, reflecting financial intermediation rather than productive manufacturing. China’s accumulated FDI of roughly 520 billion dollars remains half the U.S. total, yet its growth rate is far higher and its projects concentrate in high-visibility infrastructure that shapes how regional governments perceive partnership value. The 3.6 billion dollar Chancay Port in Peru, majority-owned by COSCO Shipping Ports, marked the first time a Chinese state-owned enterprise held majority control of a hemispheric seaport. The Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment committed to mobilizing 200 billion dollars globally, but actual disbursed capital by late 2024 remained limited and deployment lagged far behind China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers captured the asymmetry in a remark the review cites: developing-country governments reported receiving an airport from China and a lecture from the United States. On critical minerals, despite memoranda with Argentina, Chile, and Brazil and a 62.5 million dollar U.S. investment in the Pastos Grandes lithium project, Chinese firms still control 60 percent of global lithium production, 85 percent of processing capacity, and 70 percent of battery production.

The defense-security pillar is where the United States retained its clearest first-mover advantage, and the operational numbers are striking. The 64th UNITAS exercise in July 2023 assembled 7,000 military personnel from 27 countries, SOUTHCOM planned 1,014 cooperative operations during 2023-2024, the International Military Education and Training program trained roughly 800 students from 28 countries in fiscal year 2023, including three defense ministers and thirteen chiefs of staff, and the State Partnership Program conducted 426 events in a single fiscal year. Joint Interagency Task Force South disrupted 361 smuggling events, seizing nearly 308 tons of cocaine and 78 tons of cannabis worth 7.7 billion dollars, with partner forces conducting 79.5 percent of operations. Yet containment failed at the strategic level. China established at least ten space facilities across five countries, including a deep space station in Argentina that SOUTHCOM Commander General Laura Richardson warned could support surveillance, tracking, and targeting of U.S. forces. Huawei’s entrenched position across 24 countries, built over fifteen years of price advantages and preferential financing, proved resistant to U.S. advocacy for Open RAN alternatives, and Russia maintained active military cooperation with Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua throughout the period.

The review also documents a persistent contradiction that undermined the administration’s democracy-promotion rhetoric. Washington secured the release of 357 Nicaraguan political prisoners and allocated 453.1 million dollars in aid to Colombia in 2023, though that figure represents only a modest increase over late Trump-era baselines of 391.3 to 447.9 million dollars, suggesting bipartisan congressional continuity rather than a distinctive Biden initiative. Meanwhile, the administration maintained security and migration cooperation with El Salvador despite President Bukele’s authoritarian consolidation and unconstitutional re-election in 2024, and sustained strong relations with Peru after the controversial removal of President Castillo. Prioritizing relationship preservation over normative conditions, the authors observe, inevitably narrows the credibility gap between what the hegemon claims to stand for and what it tolerates.

The study’s central lesson is carefully framed. The authors do not conclude that managed adjustment failed; rather, they find that managed adjustment without the underlying structural capacity to match a rising challenger’s terms of engagement can slow a hegemon’s relative decline without reversing it. Congressional opposition to new trade agreements, slow administrative procedures for capital deployment, the asymmetry between U.S. conditionality-laden engagement and China’s unconditional financing model, and two decades of entrenched Chinese commercial penetration all constrained any administration regardless of ideological posture. The authors also acknowledge limits of their own analysis, including the difficulty of isolating the Trump-to-Biden shift as a causal variable and the framework’s hegemon-centric neglect of Latin American agency, exemplified by Brazil’s deliberate decision to stay outside APEP while deepening BRICS engagement. For future research, they point toward bottom-up analysis of how regional governments actually perceive U.S. versus Chinese partnership value, longitudinal tracking of Biden-era frameworks under subsequent administrations, and subnational studies of nearshoring that separate policy-induced gains from structural trends.

Subject of Research: Evaluation of Biden administration policy effectiveness toward Latin America through hegemonic transition theory

Article Title: Reassessing Biden administration policy toward Latin America between multilateral ambition and geopolitical constraints

Article References: Van, T. T. T., Loi, T. T. H., & Kiet, L. H. (2026). Reassessing Biden administration policy toward Latin America between multilateral ambition and geopolitical constraints. Discover Global Society, 4(1), Article 227. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44282-026-00591-4

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44282-026-00591-4

Keywords: Biden administration, Latin America, hegemonic transition theory, managed adjustment, great-power competition, China, nearshoring, APEP, trade deficit, U.S. foreign policy, SOUTHCOM, policy effectiveness