World Out of Balance: International Relations and the Challenge of American Primacy

World Out of Balance International Relations and the Challenge of American Primacy

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By Stephen G. Brooks William C. Wohlforth Princeton University Press
Copyright © 2008 Princeton University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-13784-1

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Introduction THE DISSOLUTION OF THE SOVIET UNION marked the emergence of historically unprecedented U.S. advantages in the scales of world power. No system of sovereign states has ever contained one state with comparable material preponderance. Following its invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, the United States loomed so large on the world stage that many scholars called it an empire, but the costly turmoil that engulfed Iraq following the toppling of Saddam Hussein in 2003 quieted such talk. Suddenly, the limits of U.S. power became the new preoccupation. Many analysts began to compare the United States to Britain at the beginning of the twentieth century-an overstretched, declining, "weary Titan" that "staggers under the too vast orb of his fate."

What accounts for this sudden shift in assessments of American power? For most observers, it was not new information about material capabilities. As Robert Jervis observes, "Measured in any conceivable way, the United States has a greater share of world power than any other country in history." That statement was as accurate when it was written in 2006 as it would have been at any time after 1991, and the primacy it describes will long persist, even if the most pessimistic prognostications about U.S. economic,military, and technological competitiveness come true. For most scholars of international relations, what really changed after 2003 were estimates of the political utility of America's primacy. Suddenly, scholars were impressed by the fact that material preponderance does not always translate into desired outcomes. For many, theories of international relations (IR) that explain constraints on the use of power were vindicated by American setbacks in Iraq and elsewhere.

For more than three decades, much IR scholarship has been devoted to theories about how the international environment shapes states' behavior. Applying them to the case at hand, scholars have drawn on each of the main IR theories-realism, institutionalism, constructivism, and liberalism-to identify external (or "systemic") constraints that undermine the value of the United States' primacy, greatly restricting the range of security policies it can pursue. Scholars emphasize a variety of elements in the international system that constrain U.S. security policy: international institutions, balancing dynamics, global economic interdependence, and legitimacy. The upshot is simple but portentous for the contours of international politics in the decades to come: the political utility of U.S. material primacy is attenuated or even negated by enduring properties of the international system.

The purpose of this book is to undertake a systematic evaluation of the external constraints that scholars have highlighted and thereby gain a better understanding of the United States' global role. This entails answering four questions: Does the United States face the imminent prospect of having its power checked by a balancing coalition of other great powers? As it has become increasingly exposed to the international economy, has the United States become more vulnerable to other actors' attempts to influence its security policies? Is the United States tightly bound by the need to maintain a good general reputation for cooperation in international institutions? Does the United States need to adhere to existing rules to sustain legitimacy and thus maintain today's international institutional order?

Our answer to each of these questions is no-a finding that overturns the scholarly conventional wisdom, according to which these factors strongly constrain U.S. security policy. On the contrary, the unprecedented concentration of power resources in the United States generally renders inoperative the constraining effects of the systemic properties long central to research in international relations.

Given the likely longevity of American primacy, this general finding has important repercussions for thinking about international relations scholarship and U.S. foreign policy. In the concluding chapter, we outline a new research agenda to address the analytical challenge of American primacy, and identify an important and heretofore neglected grand strategic alternative for the United States.

THE ARGUMENT

Our purpose is to analyze propositions drawn from all the theoretical schools that deal with the systemic constraints on U.S. security policy. Following many other scholars, we treat security policy as not simply the use and threat of military force, but also the use of nonmilitary tools to advance security interests. By systemic constraints, we mean constraints that are external to the United States itself, and that operate in the international system generally rather than within one set of actors or in response to a particular issue. More specifically, a systemic constraint is a property of the international system that restricts freedom of action by forbidding, or raising the costs of, certain kinds of actions, or compelling other kinds of actions.

Scholars stress that the shift from the bipolarity of the Cold War to the current unipolarity is not an unalloyed benefit for the United States because it comes with the prospect of counterbalancing, increased dependence on the international economy, a greater need to maintain a favorable reputation to sustain cooperation within international institutions, and greater challenges to American legitimacy. The conventional wisdom is that these systemic constraints impede the translation of U.S. power capabilities into influence over security outcomes, rendering the United States much less capable than its material capabilities imply. Put more generally, existing theoretical arguments sum up to the contention that once a state is at or near the top of the international heap, it confronts more and stronger properties of the international system that greatly diminish the marginal utility of additional capabilities for pursuing its security objectives.

The validity of this view depends on whether systemic constraints function in a unipolar system as they did in the bi-and multipolar systems on which most IR research is based. Yet answering that critical question has not been the explicit object of study. As a result, the research underlying the conventional wisdom suffers from one or more of the following problems: it uncritically applies theories developed to explain past international systems; it does not subject arguments to systematic theoretical or empirical analysis; it considers only a single theoretical perspective; and it is not specifically focused upon the constraints on U.S. security policy. To assess the conventional wisdom, it is necessary to examine the key systemic constraints to determine whether and to what degree their operation is transformed in a unipolar system. Ours is the first book to do this, and it does so for all the systemic constraints highlighted by IR theory.

This study turns the conventional wisdom on its head: our assessment is that as the concentration of power in a state increases beyond a certain threshold, systemic constraints on its security policy become generally inoperative. Scholars are right to hold that systemic constraints are potentially important, but wrong to assume that theories developed to explain previous international systems apply to unipolarity.

BEHIND THE CONVENTIONAL WISDOM

Two sets of constraints on U.S. security policy are featured in the scholarly literature: systemic constraints and those that emanate from the United States' domestic politics and institutions. The core domestic question is whether the public acts as a constraint on American security policy. Most of the scholarship focuses on how the public reacts to the use of force, and finds that the effect of public opinion varies according to case-specific factors, including the perceived likelihood of battlefield success, the number of actual or expected casualties, the nature of discourse among policymakers and political elites, the objectives in a given case, whether the mission is backed by multilateral institutions, and the nature of media coverage. The significance of public support or opposition also depends on the normative and political beliefs of the particular president who is fashioning policy.

In contrast to these complex influences is scholars' stark portrait of the systemic constraints facing the United States: rising power meets rising constraints. Perhaps because of the appeal of this relative clarity, scholars who evaluate U.S. policy generally focus on systemic constraints. Their conclusions, however, are not backed up by research that is as careful as that which addresses domestic constraints. Instead, their stark perspective on systemic constraints is initially plausible because it resonates with decades of theorizing on international relations.

Since World War II scholars have pursued general, systematic knowledge about international relations. Starting in the 1950s, this led to a preoccupation with systemic theory. A hallmark of the approach is its commitment to general explanations of patterns over long spans of time, as opposed to details of specific interstate interactions. Scholars developed and tested general propositions about the social system of states with little reference to their internal properties. Even though the influence of systemic theory declined in the late 1980s, most research in the field still either reacts to or develops this approach. Today's scholarship concerning constraints on the United States is the product of this intellectual history.

The provenance of the conventional wisdom on systemic constraints is clearest for realism. Indelibly associated with realism is balance-of-power theory, a quintessential theory of systemic constraints. It stipulates that the absence of a central authority that can enforce agreements (i.e., the condition of anarchy) puts a premium on states' long-term survival (security), which leads them to counter potentially dangerous concentrations of power (which balance-of-power theorists frequently call hegemony) through alliances (external balancing) or military buildups (internal balancing). According to the theory, the stronger a state gets, the more powerful become the incentives for other states to balance it. "Hegemony leads to balance," Kenneth N. Waltz observes, "through all of the centuries we can contemplate."

It is little wonder that scholars reached for this theory to analyze systemic constraints on the United States after the Cold War. No other single proposition about international politics has attracted more scholarly effort than the balance of power. It is perhaps as central in today's thinking as it has been at any time since the Enlightenment, when Rousseau and Hume transformed familiar lore about balancing diplomacy into coherent theoretical arguments. Waltz, who turned those arguments into a structural systemic theory in the 1970s, has been one of the most influential scholars of international relations over the last three decades. The theory's basic proposition, the self-negating nature of power, seemed tailor-made for the post-Cold War era, when the United States assumed unprecedented material preponderance in the international system.

Remarkably, scholars from normally competing theoretical traditions have reached similar conclusions about the self-negating nature of contemporary American power. Institutionalist, constructivist, and modern liberal theories all developed in part as critical reactions to realism. All reject simple power-centric models like the balance of power; all feature causal mechanisms that are downplayed or ignored in realist writings. Yet these theoretical schools reach the same general conclusion about the constraints facing the United States today: as its share of power in the international system increases, the systemic constraints on U.S. security policy also increase (though the link between them is not a matter of balancing-the causal pathways are less direct and linear than realism's notion of power begetting countervailing power).

Institutionalist theory shows how states gain from cooperating within international institutions and, conversely, how much they can lose if they fail to cooperate in a world with high levels of interdependence. To avoid these losses, institutionalists stress, states must bind themselves to institutional rules. While these constraints apply to all states that want to benefit from institutionalized cooperation, they are, according to recent analyses, especially salient for the leading state. As it becomes more powerful-as when the relative power of the United States increased with the Soviet Union's fall-it has a greater ability to exempt itself from inconvenient institutional rules of the game without being punished in the short term. Therefore, "the more that a powerful state is capable of dominating or abandoning weaker states, the more the weaker states will care about constraints on the leading state's policy autonomy."

The basic proposition emerging from institutionalist scholarship is that the United States faces a critical need to maintain a favorable reputation for international cooperation; any effort to revise or insulate itself from the current institutional order is dangerous, institutionalists maintain, because it will undermine America's "multilateral reputation," reducing other states' cooperation in areas where Washington strongly values it, such as trade. If true, this argument has major implications for U.S. security policy: to sustain institutionalized cooperation from weaker countries, the United States more than other nations needs to accept the constraints associated with multilateral agreements and rules.

Constructivist scholarship makes a similar argument regarding the constraining force of the international order, in which the concept of legitimacy plays the key role. Constructivists emphasize that America's material resources can translate into political influence only when they are bound by the rules of the institutional order. Christian Reus-Smit summarizes the core claims, namely "that all political power is deeply embedded in webs of social exchange and mutual constitution; that stable political power ... ultimately rests on legitimacy; and that institutions play a crucial role in sustaining such power." It follows that the more powerful a state is, the more it has to gain by legitimizing its power, and the more it has to lose if others question that legitimacy. The shift from bi-to unipolarity has magnified the salience of this basic proposition. Constructivist scholarship thus generates an argument with profound implications for the United States: failure to hew to the accepted rules in the security realm will degrade American legitimacy and thereby complicate and weaken American hegemony. However inconvenient accepted practices may be, departing from them will erode the foundations of American hegemony.

Thus, both constructivist and institutionalist analyses emphasize the institutional constraints on U.S. security policy. Liberalism, meanwhile, points to another aspect of the international environment: global economic interdependence, which has accelerated dramatically in recent decades. The liberal proposition is that economic interdependence can constrain the security policies of states, including those at the top of the power hierarchy. This effect is particularly significant today because the opportunity cost of reduced access to the world economy is now so high. By embracing globalization to an ever greater extent, the United States has enhanced its economic capacity and hence its overall power. However, this is a Faustian bargain, according to many analysts, because U.S. security policy is more exposed to potential constraints associated with economic interdependence.

(Continues...)

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