or STRATIFIED COMPETITIONUNDER STRUCTURAL INTERDEPENDENCE
ABSTRACT
This article advances neo-containment as a theoretically distinct and empirically grounded category in International Relations, and offers a framework to understand the architecture of international relations in an increasingly reticular world, the American strategy of constraint against China, and the current trajectory of United States hegemony. Departing from the prevailing ‘new Cold War’ analogy and refining the recent scholarship on great-power competition for network centrality, the paper makes a single principal claim: the form a hegemon’s containment strategy takes is a function of two structural variables, the degree of its economic interdependence with the challenger, and the distribution of network centrality between them. Where the challenger is economically central rather than isolated, classical containment is structurally foreclosed, and the hegemon is driven toward selective constraint, or neo-containment. The paper recovers a forgotten intellectual lineage: that neo-containment is the descendant not of George Kennan’s militarized containment codified in NSC 68, but of Kennan’s earlier and subtler 1948 doctrine of ‘political warfare,’ independently rediscovered today by the French strategic school (Burkhard, Moinet, Chauvancy), the Chinese theory of ‘unrestricted warfare’ (Qiao and Wang), and the network-power scholarship of Farrell and Newman. From this recovery the paper develops its central contribution: a formal framework of Stratified Competition under Structural Interdependence (SCSI), defined by horizontal segmentation across functional domains, vertical gradation along a competition-contestation-confrontation spectrum, structural interdependence as both constraint and weapon, and gray-zone hybridization at domain interfaces. A corollary mechanism, the Dual Chokepoint Dilemma, explains why neo-containment yields a permanently unstable competitive equilibrium rather than victory. The argument is tested against the dense 2023-2026 record: the war in Gaza; the China-U.S. semiconductor and rare-earth export-control escalation and its serial suspension at Busan, Beijing and Washington; the Iran war, the Strait of Hormuz crisis, and the energy-financial constraint layer; the collapse of the Islamabad Memorandum and the Houthi seizure of the Bab el-Mandeb littoral; Operation Sindoor and South Asian nuclear brinkmanship; and the operational paralysis of the India-Middle East-Europe Corridor since the 7th October 2023. In the proposed framework, a four-category typology of systemic swing states (autonomous balancers, revisionist disruptors, hedging arbitrageurs, latent swing states) replaces the binary alignment logic the period’s events have falsified. The paper concludes that American primacy faces erosion not through military defeat, foreclosed by the nuclear-Thucydidean paradox, but through the slow institutional disaggregation of the Western normative and financial architecture, with the binding constraint being the domestic political sustainability of the containment effort itself.