Academic Papers
The use of AI in military decision-making raises concerns about escalation risks, especially as large language models (LLMs) may behave differently from humans in high-stakes scenarios. A wargame experiment with 107 national security experts comparing human teams to LLM-simulated teams in a fictional US-China crisis found that LLMs often responded more aggressively and were sensitive to scenario changes. While LLMs showed some high-level alignment with human decisions, their strategic tendencies, inability to capture human traits, and inconsistent behavior across models highlight the need for caution in relying on AI for autonomous military strategy.
Sino-Russian alignment is significant and growing, with both powers increasingly cooperating to challenge U.S. hegemony in Asia. A new alignment framework shows their military cooperation is limited to enhancing China’s independent combat capacity, with Russia potentially providing support functions rather than direct involvement. These dynamics shape deterrence calculations and reveal key insights into Chinese and Russian strategic thinking.
Along with co-author David A. Siegel of Duke University, Oriana Skylar Mastro explores why some states are more open to talking while fighting than other states. They find that states will only consider negotiations when their opponents cannot escalate at a reasonable cost and when there is a signal of high resilience that only the highly resilient care to use. They draw on research into the Vietnam War negotiations to bolster their argument.
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The Next Flashpoint? China, the Republic of Korea, and the Yellow Sea (Asia Policy, January 2023)
In this Asia Policy article, Oriana Skylar Mastro examines China's interests and activities in the Yellow Sea. While scholars usually pay little attention to the Yellow Sea, Mastro shows that China has significant economic and strategic reasons to prioritize its presence there. She makes use of a novel dataset on Chinese military activities in those waters and an examination of Chinese propaganda in her analysis. Her paper lays out several ways that US and ROK policymakers should respond to China's growing presence in the Yellow Sea.
Is China a Challenge to US National Security? (Harvard University Press, August 2022)
This chapter in The China Questions 2 considers the increasingly prevalent thought that China presents an outright threat to US national security. More specifically, Oriana Skylar Mastro evaluates the degree to which China threatens US national security and how. The chapter also assesses how this threat level may change as time passes. In evaluation the Chinese threat, she considers both unconventional means such as cyber and counter space weapons and analyze conventional military capabilities.
Reassurance and Deterrence in Asia (Security Studies, November 2022)
In this article, Oriana Skylar Mastro warns against using analytical frameworks developed from the US' experience in Europe to guide policy in the Indo-Pacific. When policymakers want to understand how they can reassure US allies and partners in the Indo-Pacific, they too often draw from Cold War experiences. To better understand how the US can go about building strong and stable alliances, Dr. Mastro analyzes the role of tripwire forces, the country's overall military capabilities, and transient military operations in reassuring partners and deterring aggression against them.
This peer-reviewed article presents a new framework for evaluating Chinese intentions. Setting forward five propositions, Oriana Skylar Mastro helps distinguish "intentions" from strategies and goals and advance how scholars can define and measure intentions. Through these five propositions, she presents a new lens for scholars and politicians to assess Chinese intentions and explain why labeling China as a revisionist power may be a problematic way to assess the PRC's intentions.
Chinese Grand Strategy (Oxford University Press, March 2022)
This chapter of Strategy in the Contemporary World covers how China's grand strategy has evolved over the span of 40 years, from Mao Zedong to Deng Xiaoping to modern day leaderes like Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao, and now Xi Jinping. As Xi's China has be especially active in building Chinese geopolitical power (and leveraging it to become a dominant power in Asia), this chapter covers new debates about current Chinese intentions towards international organizations as well and the potential impact of Chinese grand strategy goals.
Students and instructors alike have lamented the nature of methods instruction in political science curricula. This article argues that the policy memo is particularly suited for introducing basic methodological concepts to upper-division undergraduate students.
This chapter of Alliances, Nuclear Weapons and Escalation evaluates the role that nuclear deterrence plays in the US–China strategic relationship. It lays out the pathways to conflict and the implications for nuclear use, evaluates how allies influence nuclear dynamics, and explores how escalation to nuclear conflict may affect US allies in the region.
All in the Family: North Korea and the Fate of Hereditary Autocratic Regimes (Survival, March 2020)
What is the weakest link in a hereditary autocracy, what are the patterns of collapse and what typically happens after the end of such a regime? This article identifies four patterns concerning the collapse of such regimes, relevant to policy makers that hope to evaluate the stability of the North Korean regime.
What factors do autocracies evaluate when responding to perceived threats and why might they fail to balance appropriately? Do autocratic leaders choose greater exposure to an external threat if, by doing so, it preserves regime legitimacy?
Will China intervene if war breaks out on the Korean Peninsula, and if so, does Beijing have the willingness and capabilities to deal safely with North Korea's nuclear program? How can the United States account for China’s military role in this mission and work together to coordinate their shared interests?
What is the likelihood that China and the United States will fall into the Thucydides Trap, meaning that the two countries will fight a major war during a potential power transition? Can we predict the likelihood of major conflict between a rising and an established power?
How has China historically performed when it attempts to engage in conflict resolution? Are historical patterns of war termination behavior likely to manifest themselves in future conflicts, even with all the developments to China’s internal and external environments since its last war in 1979?
Why does Beijing exacerbate the asymmetric information problem, even though this theoretically increases the likelihood of conflict? Oriana Skylar Mastro offers an explanation, the vulnerability hypothesis, for why rising powers are likely to reject military transparency and the conditions under which this may change.
This is article assesses the factors shaping whether China will develop significant military expeditionary capabilities, the conditions under which Chinese leaders may decide to use the military outside East Asia, and implications for the U.S. This was also presented as written and oral testimony to the USCC.
On 8 March 2009, five Chinese vessels shadowed and aggressively maneuvered in close proximity to the USNS Impeccable. This paper explains the incident in the context of Chinese coercive diplomacy.