Either or parallelism confusion

Question

IfAmerica allows China and Russia to establish regional hegemonies, either consciously or because its politics are too dysfunctional to muster a response, it will have given them a green light to pursue their interests by brute force.

This is an extract from the economist.please explain the parallel structure of either x or y in this sentence.

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nishantd88 · Answer

As per the rule, in 'either X or Y', X and Y should be parallel, i.e. they should stand for similar entities.

In the given sentence, X and Y are the causes why America may allow China and Russia to establish regional hegemonies.
America may allow it consciously or they may allow it because they cannot muster a response. So both X and Y are explanations as to why Russia and China may be allowed to establish regional hegemonies.

marinerindrajeet · Answer

So basically these 2 are acting as adverbs.i thought it should come grammatically parallel.

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EducationAisle · Answer

Hi  marinerindrajeet , normally you would  not  see this kind of structure on GMAT.

In the construct  Either X or Y , X and Y have to be  grammatically similar .

Here, X is a  phrase  while Y is a  dependent clause . This is  not  grammatically similar.

Of course, GMAT does occasionally throw curveballs, but they are (thankfully) very rare.

ccooley · Answer

A good approach is to try breaking the parallel structure into two pieces. Then, fit each piece back into the sentence, and make sure that it fits correctly. If each piece fits separately, and the two pieces have basically the same grammatical role (here, they're modifiers), the parallelism is good.

Here's what that would look like here:

1. If America allows China and Russia to establish regional hegemonies, consciously, it will have given them a green light to pursue their interests by brute force. 
2. If America allows China and Russia to establish regional hegemonies, because its politics are too dysfunctional to muster a response, it will have given them a green light to pursue their interests by brute force.

Those are both good sentences, so you're almost certainly good with the parallelism.

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Either or parallelism confusion

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