Understanding International Relations, Third Edition

Part of this reluctance to recognize US dominance was no doubt a function
of the gradual realization that winning the Cold War did not mean that con-
flict would disappear, but rather that new forms of conflict, perhaps rather
less easy to manage, would appear. The rise of post-Cold War nationalist
movements, and the ‘clash of civilizations’ observed by Samuel Huntington
(discussed in Chapter 10) contributed to this downbeat mood. But, amongst
the American academic International Relations community, there were
other, theoretical, reasons for a reluctance to acknowledge US dominance.
Put simply, realist, and, especially neorealist, thinking committed many
scholars to the belief that American dominance would be short-lived and
create the conditions for its own demise. These theories – discussed in gen-
eral terms in the first half of this book – took as their central, organizing
concept the notion of a balance of power. Fundamental to the way of think-
ing of theorists such as Kenneth Waltz, Joseph Grieco, John Mearsheimer
and other leading realists was that if one state came to occupy a preponder-
ant position – for whatever reason – its behaviour would be changed
thereby, and other states would change their behaviour in response. Thus,
with the Soviet Union no longer a threat to the US, American security guar-
antees to Western Europe and Japan would fall into disrepair, and the
Western Europeans and Japanese would be obliged to look after their own
security – in these circumstances, Mearsheimer famously anticipated,
Germany and Japan would develop and deploy nuclear weapons to protect
themselves from their powerful neighbours (Mearsheimer 1990). Moreover,
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a ‘unipolar’ international system would, in the medium run, be unacceptable
to all save the single pole. Other states would realign and/or increase their
own capacities to counter the power of a dominant America – failure to do
so would bring costs that would soon seem unacceptable (Waltz 1993, 2000).
It should also be remembered that in the 1980s and early 1990s much was
made of the coming Pacific century, with a widespread belief that Japan’s
economic miracle would continue unchecked.
These are not the kind of predictions that come with an expiry date
specified, and it may indeed be the case that a new balance of power will
emerge, but it hasn’t yet and there is no sign that it is on the way. Instead,
US relative power has become greater over time, and although many coun-
tries are clearly unhappy about this – including three of the five permanent
members of the UN Security Council – they have been unwilling or unable
to do anything about it. Why not? The best answer to this question has been
provided by William Wohlforth, and what follows draws on his seminal
article (1999). There are two basic reasons for the non-emergence of a new
balance of power. First, the military superiority of the US is, to all intents
and purposes, unchallengeable in its own terms. America’s expenditure on
military power, and, especially, its extensive military research and develop-
ment budget has placed it so far ahead of the game in terms of conventional
(and sometimes unconventional) weaponry that no other power can com-
pete. Moreover the gap here is increasing because the US military spend,
although relatively small in terms of the US GDP, is increasing at a faster
rate than that of its potential competitors. American soldiers on the ground
can be killed by out-of-date weaponry but American warplanes are increas-
ingly almost invulnerable, and pilot-less weapons such as the Predator
drone put no US serviceman’s life at risk. US control of the ‘high frontier’
via satellite surveillance and, soon, satellite-based weapons systems is more
or less total, and some of the potential developments in terms of miniatur-
ization of weapons system make most science-fiction movies look decidedly
unimaginative. The US is, of course, vulnerable to non-conventional attacks
by terrorists and guerrillas, but conventional state militaries offer no threat
to the US.
Does this mean that the US could conquer China or Russia, or even India
or Indonesia with the ease with which it recently disposed of the Iraqi army?
No, and if that were to be the definition of unipolarity, then the system is
not unipolar. But this places the bar at a very high level. It also introduces
the second reason why a new balance of power has not emerged. If coun-
tries such as France, Russia, China and India, which claim to be concerned
at the emergence of American hyperpower, really believed that the US was
a direct threat to their security, then they might well sink their differences,
join together and do everything they could to increase their capabilities; but
they don’t because they don’t. The point is that, contrary to the neorealist
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belief that capabilities are absolutely central, states actually also look to
intentions, and in so doing, these countries realize that although US power
may be used for objectives of which they do not approve, it is unlikely to be
used to attack their core interests. For this reason, they are likely to ‘band-
wagon’ rather than balance – in other words, they will join with the US in
the hope of helping to shape its policies rather than attempt to resist them
directly. Moreover, these potential balancers – and all the others – are, in
fact, far more worried about each other than they are about the United
States. Japan is more threatened by North Korea and China than by the US;
most central Europeans are more afraid of either German or Russian power
than they are of the US, and Russia and Germany are afraid of each other’s
long-term ambitions. The only potential competitor that genuinely feels
threatened by the US is probably China – largely because of the status of
Taiwan – but even there, the Russian–Chinese relationship is, in the medium
run, far more tense; for how much longer will more than 1.5 billion Chinese
allow fewer than 30 million Russians to exploit the riches of Siberia?
In short, the US is currently in a very strong position, stronger than in
1945, stronger than in 1989. It possesses a concentration of the physical
attributes of power not seen since the beginnings of the Westphalia System,
or indeed ever before, and its potential competitors are not intent on seri-
ously challenging this preponderance. It is remarkably well placed to pre-
serve its dominance for as long as it wishes. The key question is how long
that will be, and what the US will do with its power.