The task of reconciling order with change is an eternal challenge.Footnote 1 Over the course of history, international orders have come and gone. Before the American order, there was a British order, a French order, a Spanish order, a Chinese order, an Indian order, an Egyptian order, a Byzantine Oikumene order, a Roman order, a Greek order, a Macedonian order, a Persian order, a Mogul order, an Ottoman order, an Assyrian order, a Sumerian order, and many others. Political orders tend to be fragile and in constant need of adjustment to changing circumstances, whether military, economic, technological, demographic, ideological, institutional, or normative. Specifically, they change to close disjunctions that arise between existing institutions and present needs.Footnote 2 Power shifts among major actors bring about a crisis of the order’s legitimacy.Footnote 3 Entrenched actors who created the order to promote their interests will resist fundamental change. Rising powers will demand it. When such global dissensus exists, disorder reigns supreme.
Until recently, discussions of the impermanence of political orders seemed outmoded and unfashionable. After all, victory in the Cold War demonstrated the superiority of the West’s political and economic systems over those of the Soviet Union and its satellites. And unlike the aftermaths of the first two world wars, this time there were no viable alternatives to an international order built on liberal democratic capitalism. History would no longer be propelled forward by a clash of ideologies. The progressive evolution of history had arrived at its teleological endpoint with the universal validity of Western civilization.Footnote 4
Card-carrying members of the liberal foreign-policy establishment proclaimed a “world transformed” – from great-power competition to international cooperation, from anarchy to hierarchy, from might-makes-right to the rule of law, from national interest to the community interest, from a multipolar world to a multi-partner one. The liberal international order, in the eyes of American triumphalists, exerts an “inexorable magnetic attraction,” such that “countries and foreign-policy decisions are attracted to the liberal world order like iron filings to a magnet.”Footnote 5 A peaceful democratic–capitalist order had arrived among the developed countries and was here to stay. The rest of the world would have to conform.
Then, quite suddenly, the “end of history” ended. Amid deepening crises on Russia’s western frontiers, in the Middle East, and in the contested waters around China, it is ever more obvious that international politics have not progressed along a one-way road to peace, human rights, globalization, and market democracies. The world can still be rocked by old toxic patterns, by dormant atavisms previously thought crushed by the march of progress: the outbreak of a global pandemic, the rise of authoritarian alternatives to democracy, expansionist wars in Europe, preventive wars in the Middle East, and the return of galloping inflation, hyper-nationalism, genocides, and great-power competition and hostility.Footnote 6 Conjuring memories of World War II, Japan and Germany are, once again, mobilizing for war.Footnote 7 While “progressives” would like to believe otherwise, “in geopolitics, as in biology, mankind remains susceptible to new strains of old maladies.”Footnote 8 The anarchic external environment still constrains and pressures states into certain behaviors.
Most members of the foreign-policy establishment greeted these events, especially the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the prospect of a new Cold War between the United States and China, with shock and disbelief. How could the Western order suddenly end without anything to replace it? Some globalists have already started the grieving process; others are in denial. Virtually absent within America’s foreign-policy establishment, realists alone were not blindsided by this most recent evidence of history’s return. It was all too predictable. Given the many potential assaults on international political orders and the wide-ranging burdens and liabilities associated with their management, realists did not expect Pax Americana to persist for any great length of time.
Starting in 2007, contemporary world affairs seemed to be moving toward a state of disorder. Driven by an “unstemmable tide of entropy,” global politics appeared increasingly “subsumed by the inexorable forces of randomness, tipped off its axis, swirling in a cloud of information overload,” chaotically unfolding “without coherence.”Footnote 9 Today, the Chinese leadership echoes these observations. “Great changes unseen in a century” has become Chinese President Xi Jinping’s favorite slogan. It is shorthand for the central leadership’s assessment of the future structural trajectory of international politics. According to Xi Jinping’s Thought on Diplomacy – the current diplomatic and foreign policy doctrine of the People’s Republic of China – the world is witnessing a power transition “with America playing the role of faltering hegemon, and China the rising power.”Footnote 10 Xi expects a sea change in global structure reminiscent of the collapse of British hegemony and the Eurocentric system after the World Wars I and II, when the United States and the Soviet Union rose to become superpowers towering over everyone else.
In a broader sense, the “great changes” slogan captures the opinion of Chinese leadership, from Xi on down, that the world has entered a period of global disorder. Driven by political fragmentation and an unprecedented diffusion of global power, the age of disorder is not a future that China seeks or would wish to construct when and if it achieves international hegemony. It is an inevitable situation rooted in irreversible global trends (political, technical, cultural, and biological) battering the post-Cold War order – an order that, according to the contemporary Chinese way of thinking and contrary to the hopes and dreams of U.S. strategists, is irretrievably lost. Thus, Chinese strategists are not trying to comprehensively revise the U.S. global architecture built in the aftermath of World War II, nor are they seeking to replace it with something else. Rather, “Chinese strategists have set about making the best of the world as it is – or as it soon will be.” Defining its “goal as survival in a world without order,” China is taking steps to withstand global disorder and advising other states to do the same.Footnote 11
The Broken Cycle: Stuck in an Era of Purposeless Order
Why so much talk of global disorder? Where has the notion of disorder come from? To answer these questions, this book approaches world politics through the lens of the long cycle perspective, that is, through a dynamic lens focused on the driving historical forces of great-power rise and decline. Over the centuries, structural changes have repeatedly driven world politics through four phases:
(1) World Power, where a dominant power emerges, sets the rules of order, and imbues it with social purpose.
(2) Dissent, where a challenger appears to question the legitimacy of the order but still follows its rules, and the dominant power, burdened by the order, stops following its own rules.
(3) Crisis, where the challenger stops following the rules of the order, causing international conflict and wars.
(4) Hegemonic War, where the challenger and the dominant yet declining power determine, through global war, who sets the rules of the post-hegemonic war order.
This long cycle has existed in world politics since, at least, 1496, going through four hegemonic wars. The book’s Big Idea is that the long cycle of international history is now stuck. Like a bicycle with a broken chain, it is unable to move forward. There will not be another hegemonic war, and without such a war international order cannot be reset. While the cycle pushes states through the preceding stages of delegitimizing and breaking the rules of the old order, the force that restores political order is no longer available. This situation is not altogether a bad thing. After all, hegemonic war is tantamount to a global earthquake activated by long built-up pressures within the system’s core. The war, itself, generates rolling tremors, new political fissures, and a proliferating series of secondary struggles. It wipes out virtually all global structures and arrangements for international cooperation and order. We should hope that hegemonic war never reappears. Nevertheless, hegemonic war (paradoxical though it may seem) exerts positive effects on international politics. It performs three functions widely seen as necessary to restore global peace and order: it (1) wipes the global institutional slate clean; (2) concentrates power in the hands of one great power; and (3) clearly reveals the global pecking order (who has power and who does not). In so doing, it enables a new hegemon to reboot the crashed system by creating a legitimate global order in its own image.
In the 1930s, Antonio Gramsci nicely articulated the current problem: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”Footnote 12 Before the nuclear revolution, who could have doubted that, in the long term and in the abstract, an international order that reflects a bygone power pattern would ultimately be replaced by one that reflects the prevailing power pattern? This is no longer the case. If bringing about the congruence of order with power requires hegemonic war, then the world must learn to live with an ever-increasing disjuncture between the two. If, however, leaders know “how the power pattern has changed, is changing, or will change, then statesmanship is indeed a matter of causing the future to be born with the fewest possible broken heads.”Footnote 13 We can hope for peaceful change.
With the grand machinery driving “order replacement” stalled, the international system will likely operate in a messy but mostly peaceful manner. After all, there are no unlimited, universalist revisionist tendencies in the challenger state, suggesting that the dominant power can accommodate the challenger’s interest in what remains of the old order. The same forces that put an end to hegemonic wars will generate a relaxed balance of power consisting of great powers whose survival is not at issue. What may at first glance appear as a utopian future comes with its own troubles. After all, states preoccupy themselves with many things other than survival, and these preoccupations will continue to produce intractable positional competitions. As Reinhold Niebuhr boldly declared, international disputes are
never simple conflicts between competing survival impulses. They are conflicts in which each man or group seeks to guard its power and prestige against the peril of competing expressions of power and pride. Since the very possession of power and prestige always involves some encroachment upon the prestige and power of others, this conflict is by its very nature a more stubborn and difficult one than the mere competition between various survival impulses in nature.Footnote 14
Moving forward, the direction of international politics will be steered by four key drivers: nationalism, economic statecraft, negative power, and the absence of social purpose.
To reiterate, the core question that this book addresses is: How does world politics function when the long cycle stalls in place? The short answer is, not very well if the goal is order. Hegemonic war is one of four phases that comprise the long cycle, and it is the phase that the world can no longer enter. This is good news for peace but bad news for global order. Let me explain.
In the past, the international system cycled through regular phases of global power concentration, deconcentration, and reconcentration.Footnote 15 These phases correspond with varying levels of international order – from high-order maintenance during times of world leadership to complete disorder during global wars. Jack Levy outlines the logic of long cycle theory:
A world power emerges from a global war with monopoly control over military capabilities of global reach and control over world trade, and hence with the ability to help structure the new global political and economic systems and to maintain order. This state’s position of leadership gradually declines, with the deconcentration of power in the system deriving from the high debt burdens and overhead costs of the world power role, its reductions in naval capabilities as cost-cutting measures, and the emergence of new rivals. Thus, the system passes through phases of delegitimation and deconcentration until a new struggle for world leadership again results in a period of global war, and the cycle begins again.Footnote 16
Periodic systemwide wars, known as hegemonic wars, clarify the actual power distribution (who has it and who does not) and establish who rules the global core, the distribution of territory, the nature of the world economy, and the order’s social purpose. Regarding the latter, Henry Kissinger observes: “Almost as if according to some natural law, in every century there seems to emerge a country with the power, the will, and the intellectual and moral impetus to shape the entire international system in accordance with its own values.”Footnote 17
Global wars determine “who will govern the international system, and whose interests will be primarily served by the new international order.”Footnote 18 They crown a dominant state with the capabilities, resolve, and authority to construct and manage a new world order. The new hegemon inaugurates a legitimate leadership structure for the global system. Victorious hegemons have typically been maritime powers that put together and managed powerful continental coalitions to check rising challengers – the Habsburgs, France, and Germany, and the Soviet Union, successively. Challengers have been revisionist states that sought not only political influence commensurate with their growth in power but also the overthrow of the existing order, which they would replace with their own. None have succeeded. By means of this cyclical process, hegemonic wars have “reordered the international system and propelled history in new and uncharted directions.”Footnote 19
Robert Gilpin offers a realist variant of the theory. Realism posits that the fundamental cause of war and international change is the law of uneven growth among states. Swift and dramatic power shifts cause profound changes in state relationships and eventually in the nature of the international system itself. In time, differential rates of growth of declining and rising states redistribute power in the system, causing major-power conflicts and system disequilibrium. As Gilpin describes it:
Disequilibrium entails a disjuncture between the basic components of the existing international system and the capacity of the dominant state or states to maintain the system, between the costs of defending the existing distribution of territory, spheres of influence, rules of the system, and international economy, on the one hand, and the revenues necessary to finance these arrangements…. The consequence of continuing disequilibrium and of the financial drain it entails if it is not resolved is the eventual economic and political decline of the dominant power.Footnote 20
Disequilibrium describes a gap between the capabilities of states and the demands placed upon them by their international roles and obligations. But there is another important gap that drives Gilpin’s theory: the disjuncture that widens over time between the reputation for power (or prestige) and the genuine distribution of power in the system (the actual power of states at any given time). Immediately after a hegemonic war, actual power and prestige are perfectly aligned. The contradictory assessments of the distribution of capabilities that caused the war have now been settled on the battlefield. Ambiguity over who has power and who does not have power has been clarified. Over time, however, the law of uneven growth generates a gap between actual power and prestige. To peacefully restore system equilibrium, the waning hegemon must cede influence to the rising challenger to close the gap in actual power and prestige.
In theory, this process of appeasement should solve the problem without resort to war. In practice, it rarely works for several reasons. First, changes needed to satisfy a rising power’s demands can compromise the stability of the existing international order as well as the security and vital interests of the declining hegemon and its allies. Second, the rising power advances illegitimate grievances over which the established powers will not bargain. Third, concessions increase the rising challenger’s actual power, which may encourage it to demand more concessions. If its appetite grows with the eating, the revisionist power will be relatively stronger after its initial demands are met in the next round of bargaining. For a declining hegemon, the process of granting its rival one concession after another amounts to death on the installment plan.Footnote 21 If and when bargaining fails to resolve the system crisis, hegemonic war breaks out for one of two reasons: either the growth in power of the rising challenger reaches the stage where the benefits of war now outweigh its costs; or the declining hegemon initiates a preventive war in the belief that war is inevitable and better fought now than later. Regardless of who initiates it, the war will be one of unlimited means and scope to decide who designs and controls the post-war order.
Some readers may object that order can be achieved without human intention or purpose; it does not require a hegemon. Along these lines, Friedrich Hayek famously coined the phrase “the fatal conceit” to capture the fallacy “that man is able to shape the world around him according to his wishes.”Footnote 22 We know that markets are about price discovery, which is “determined not by objective physical facts known to any one mind but by the separate, differing, information of millions, which is precipitated in prices that serve to guide further decisions.”Footnote 23 Market logic suggests that order, like prices, can arise as an unintended consequence of actors seeking to pursue nothing more than their own self-interests. If so, then why cannot international orders arise without a hegemon and without purpose? Order can emerge by means of purely structural determinants, as neorealist balance-of-power theory explains, but it will not be a thick and deep order (see my discussion of a “relaxed” balance of power in Chapter 2).
The problem is that the domain of international politics does not resemble the market assumed by microeconomic theory; it does not conform with the “strict assumptions of perfect competition that hold when there is a very large set of small actors that have no power to affect the market (and are therefore labeled price takers).”Footnote 24 As Jonathan Kirshner points out, “most states in general, and great powers in particular, look much more like oligopolists regarding the behavior of each other than like tiny firms facing disembodied constraints under perfect competition.”Footnote 25 Because international politics takes place in an oligopolistic setting, it is “impossible to understand and anticipate the behavior of states by looking solely at structural variables and constraints. To explain world politics, it is necessary to appeal to a host of other factors, including domestic politics, history, ideology, and perceptions of legitimacy.”Footnote 26 The theory presented in this book accords with this multiple “level-of-analysis” causal view.
The Co-existence of Long Cycle and Balance-of-Power/Polarity Perspectives
Insights rooted in long cycle and balance-of-power/polarity logics explain important elements of international politics. The present study employs logics from both perspectives. My attempt to combine these theories will likely upset some scholars, who have been taught by international relations (IR) theorists that these are competing, not complementary, perspectives. Here, the conventional wisdom seems wrong for several reasons, which I discuss at length below. My analysis begins with an examination of the complementarities of balance of power and the long cycle, followed by a discussion of how polarity and the long cycle fit together.
Balance of Power and the Long Cycle
The standard IR view claims that long cycle and balance of power make opposite predictions regarding the systemic conditions for war and peace.Footnote 27 Actually, the two theories are not contradictory but rather complementary.Footnote 28 First, long cycle/power-preponderance theory explains when international peace will be most plentiful and when it will be scarce. In contrast, balance of power theory is not about the structural conditions most conducive to war and peace. Instead, the primary objective of balance-of-power theory is to preserve the independence of its member states, and this may sometimes require resort to war. As such, the theory does not claim that: (1) peace is most likely when the capabilities of rival states are roughly equal or (2) that imbalances of power are most conducive to war. Rather, it posits that the value of peace is subordinate to that of survival, and so the smooth operation of the balance of power requires that war be a legitimate tool of statecraft.Footnote 29 And because the overriding interest of states is not peace but the preservation of their autonomy as sovereign units, war may represent not the breakdown but the working of the system.
The primary goal of self-preservation generates an interest in preventing any single actor from becoming stronger than all the rest combined. Derived from this straightforward logic, balance of power theory explains the persistence of the multistate system.Footnote 30 The theory is disconfirmed if and only if a hierarchically arranged, imperial system displaces the anarchic multistate system.Footnote 31 So far, the balance-of-power system has worked. Would-be universal emperors – be they Louis XIV or Napoleon or Hitler – were defeated in accordance with balance-of-power principles: A coalition eventually arose to put down the imperial challenger and restore the independence of the system’s main actors. If a supreme power did emerge with the capability to roll up the states system and replace it with an imperial one, then the theory is disconfirmed.
To predict when large balancing coalitions will form, we must distinguish between imperial and hegemonic powers. The basis for an imperial power is entirely different from that of a hegemonic power. Imperial power is land-based military power in the form of large armies with the potential to dominate the Eurasian landmass or a large portion of it. Hegemonic power is measured in terms of finance, trade, and naval power on a global scale. Hegemons have come and gone; none has possessed anywhere near the capability to subjugate everyone else and thereby end the multistate system. Concentrated power in the hands of one state may or may not be acceptable to the other great powers. The crucial point is whether such power poses or is likely to pose a viable threat to their continued existence.Footnote 32 History shows that balancing coalitions emerge against power in the form of large armies capable of massing on others’ borders. This is why balancing coalitions have formed against European continental powers – “against the Habsburgs under Charles V in the early 16th century, Philip II at the end of the of the 16th century, and the combined strength of Spain and the Holy Roman Empire in the Thirty Years War; against France under Louis XIV and then Napoleon; and against Germany under Wilhelm and then Hitler”Footnote 33 – all of which constituted imperial threats to the multistate system.
Leaving aside the issue of liberty versus peace, many prominent members of the realist balance-of-power clan agree with Wilsonian liberals and long-cycle theorists that preponderant power causes peace, whereas balanced power causes war. Reinhold Niebuhr, father of the philosophical perspective known as Christian Realism, declared: “The idealists must learn that nothing but a preponderance of power in the non-communist world can preserve the peace.” Winston Churchill said, “If you wish to bring about war, you bring about such a balance that both sides think they have a chance of winning. If you want to stop war, you gather such an aggregation of force on one side that the aggressor, whoever he may be, will not dare to challenge.”Footnote 34 And Walter Lippmann viewed an adequate alliance as one “so overwhelmingly powerful that there is no way of challenging it. The combination must be so strong that war against it is not a calculated risk … but is instead an obvious impossibility because there would be no chance whatever of winning it.”Footnote 35
Second, the theories focus on different structural attributes of the international system. In power-preponderance theory, the most important structural cause of war and peace is the gap in power between the most powerful, satisfied state, which has always been a global power with economic, naval, and air mastery, and the strongest dissatisfied challenger, which has always been a continental power with massive land power. Focusing solely on the dyadic relationship between the world leader and most powerful challenger, theories of power preponderance ignore a core theoretical concern of balance of power: alliances. The main causal variable of structural balance of power (or neorealist) theory is the distribution of capabilities among the great powers; it takes a systemic view of structure.
But even here, the two theories are more similar than different for two reasons. First, changes in the gap in power between the system’s two top dogs certainly pressure states to engage in balancing behaviors. As the “relative power” gap narrows over time (after a hegemonic war), threat perception increases among geographically proximate states, which triggers the building of arms and the formation of counterbalancing alliances. Second, the two perspectives mostly agree about which power gaps matter to great powers and how they choose to close them. In theory, balance of power does, indeed, highlight alliances (also known as external balancing) for purposes of power aggregation to counterbalance threatening accumulations of power. The relative strength of the two opposing coalitions (the “balance” between them) should be the unit of analysis that matters most to great powers when making capability comparisons. In practice, however, great-power balancing behavior tells a very different story. Joseph Parent and Sebastian Rosato find that “states rely relentlessly both on arming and on imitating the successful military practices of peer competitors and rarely resort to alliances for their security. In other words, they constantly balance through internal means and seldom through external means.”Footnote 36 Great powers seldom trust alliances to keep them safe.
Third, balance-of-power theories focus on land power and its consequences for political and military affairs. In contrast, theories of power preponderance and hegemonic stability emphasize maritime power and its effects on the international political economy. Here, Jack Levy cautions,
conceptions of power in terms of land-based military power in nearly all applications of balance of power theory should be contrasted with hegemonic stability theory’s focus on financial and commercial strength, with power transition theory’s measurement of power in terms of gross national product, and leadership long cycle theory’s conception of power in terms of naval capability (at least until the 20th century) and dominance in leading economic sectors.Footnote 37
Fourth, power preponderance stresses the importance of changes in relative power over time, whereas balance-of-power theory takes a static view of the distribution of capabilities. Here, it is extremely important to point out that the two theories’ insights on the causes of war and peace are perfectly consistent. The main prediction of long cycle/power preponderance theory is that the probability of war is highest when the power of the rising challenger roughly matches that of the dominant state. This does not contradict balance-of-power logic. The catalyst for balancing behavior among the great powers is invariably the rise of a threatening challenger, which not only provokes status-quo states to form a counterbalancing coalition but also attracts other revisionist states to the challenger’s side. In the absence of a powerful rising challenger, there is little reason for states to form alliances and many reasons for them not to do so – most important of which is the sacrifice of national autonomy that necessarily results when states align with other states. It is precisely the intensifying rivalry between a rising challenger and a declining hegemon that triggers great powers to build arms and form alliances.Footnote 38 Under such conditions, balance of power and power preponderance predict system instability and war proneness.Footnote 39 It is not surprising, therefore, that the causal logics of both theoretical perspectives may be combined to yield richer structural explanations of state behaviors and system dynamics.
Polarity and the Long Cycle
What about the logics of the long cycle and system polarity? Do they align? The common understanding of the two perspectives makes them appear incongruent. Conventionally, the long-cycle perspective starts with the assumption of a hegemon that creates a set of rules for the system. The privileged power position of the dominant power provides much of the logical basis for the claim that concentration of power leads to stability. Second, preponderant power enables the hegemon to provide public goods without asking for compensation. A state must be significantly more powerful than the other states in the system to have the capability to provide public goods, so the argument goes. In the more coercive versions of hegemonic stability theory, the privileged power position of the dominant power is what allows it to extract what it wants from the other states in the system. Either way, one state that is significantly more powerful than the rest is necessary to drive the theory.
In contrast, conventional discussions of polarity follow a balance-of-power logic. According to the standard view, a pole of power is expected to be roughly equal in capabilities to other poles of power, such that any one state can always be balanced by a combination of other poles.Footnote 40 Supposedly, the rough equivalence in capabilities is very important to the logic. First, it is the basis of the claim that stability of the system stems from balancing behavior. Second, it is what allows the structure to produce effects. If there are no states to counterbalance, the structure has no constraining effect. Okay, now I will unravel these arguments to show why polarity and the long cycle do not follow incompatible logics.
To begin, what is the history of the international system in terms of its polarity? It was multipolar from 1648 to 1945.Footnote 41 Between 1945 and 1991, the system was bipolarity, and then, starting in 1991, the system moved from bipolarity to unipolarity – a system comprised of only one great power, which, by definition, does not confront a peer competitor. Unlike in bipolar and multipolar systems, a unipolar system is devoid of a systemic balance of power. If a peer competitor does emerge (i.e., if a non-polar power crosses the threshold to become a pole), the system moves from unipolarity to unbalanced bipolarity. It is unbalanced because, at this point in the challenger’s development, the former unipole remains dominant in terms of capabilities. If the challenger continues to close the power gap, the system will achieve balanced bipolarity.
Thus, when I speak of hegemony, I do not mean to suggest unipolarity, much less an empire that has replaced sovereign states. This definition of hegemony follows the original meaning of the word. As documented by Perry Anderson, “The origins of the term hegemony are Greek”; as “an abstract noun, hegemonia first appears in Herodotus, to designate leadership of an alliance of city-states for a common military end, a position of honour accorded to Sparta in resistance to the Persian invasion of Greece.”Footnote 42 Similarly, hegemony in ancient China meant military leadership of a hierarchically arranged group of states called city-state leagues: the “ruler of the dominant state was given the title of ‘senior’ or ‘hegemon’ (ba) by the Zhou king, who charged him to defend what was left of the Zhou realm.”Footnote 43 Though far from omnipotent, the “hegemon” is the dominant power of its day. As Robert Gilpin notes, because “no state has ever completely controlled an international system,” hegemony is a relative, not an absolute concept.Footnote 44 After a hegemonic war, the dominant power enjoys an exalted power position. Its power advantage fades over time, however, to the point where the declining hegemon becomes little more than primus inter pares.
In practice, hegemons control raw materials, sources of capital, and markets, and they benefit from competitive advantages in the production of highly valued goods.Footnote 45 Within the theory of the long cycle, hegemony has been associated with world leadership.Footnote 46 In Robert Keohane’s words, “hegemons are powerful enough to maintain the essential rules governing interstate relations and willing to do so”Footnote 47 Likewise, Gilpin points out, “the evolution of any system has been characterized by successive rises of powerful states that have governed the system and have determined the patterns of international interactions and established the rules of the system.”Footnote 48 How do they govern? The short answer is benevolently. Hegemons not only deliver high levels of peace and security but also the global economic goods of free trade, foreign investment, and a well-functioning international monetary system. Charles Kindleberger argued that hegemons provide a market for distressed goods, produce a steady flow of capital, ensure liquidity, and manage the structure of foreign exchange rates.Footnote 49
The question remains: can a dominant power capable of setting the rules for the system exist within non-unipolar systems? Put differently, can a system be properly called multipolar, tripolar, or bipolar when a dominant power exists? How much relative-power advantage does a state need to assume the roles of a hegemon? Ultimately, it is an empirical question. But we know that British and American hegemonies arrived well before the birth of a fully blown unipolar system. Both confronted powerful rivals during most of their hegemonic reigns.Footnote 50 Obviously, multipolar and bipolar systems can possess dominant hegemonic powers.
Less obviously, the combined logics of the long cycle and polarity yields a straightforward but hitherto unrecognized structural pattern: all systems start out as unbalanced systems. This proposition holds true for all polarities, whether multipolar, tripolar, bipolar, or unipolar (which, by definition, is unbalanced or “without balance”). Why is this so? Because hegemonic wars concentrate power in the hands of one state, the so-called hegemon, ensuring that the system will be unbalanced. Thus, after the Napoleonic Wars, Britain emerged as a dominant world power; Russia placed a distant second; and France an even more distant number three. Austria-Hungary and Prussia were great powers in name only. In terms of its polarity, the new European system of 1815 was an unbalanced tripolar system. Over time, the law of uneven growth narrowed the gaps in capabilities among the great powers, and the system became one of balanced multipolarity comprised of Britain, France, Russia, Austria-Hungary, and a reunited Germany in the middle of Europe. Likewise, after World War II, an unbalanced bipolar system emerged, with the United States far more powerful than the Soviet Union, which itself was far more powerful than everyone else. By 1970, the U.S.–Soviet gap closed to create a more balanced bipolar system.
The key point is that the polarity of any “post-hegemonic war” system must be unbalanced, or else it was not a “hegemonic” war. As the system cycles through its four phases – from concentrated to deconcentrated global power – it will achieve some form of balanced polarity (most likely during the late “dissent” or early “crisis” phases). Unipolar systems are so wildly out of balance that they take twenty-five years or more just to reach a state of unbalanced bipolarity. Several more decades will be needed for these systems to enter a state of balanced polarity, provided that the rising challenger does not reach the peak of its power trajectory well before achieving equality with the hegemon.
How, then, does the conventional wisdom on the incompatibility of polarity with the long cycle go wrong? Two problems. First, it requires that the poles be roughly equal in power. Second, it requires that the hegemon (or leader) be vastly more powerful than everyone else “to the point where it can control the external behavior of all other states.”Footnote 51 The latter condition rules out the possibility of the existence of a hegemon since 1648. But we know that hegemons have existed over the course of the past 350 years. So let us move on to the first requirement: poles must be roughly equal in power. How do we define a pole? Kenneth Waltz measures system polarity by counting the number of great powers. History shows that great powers have been wildly unequal in terms of relative capabilities – with the leading power often more than three times more powerful than the weakest great power. In her study of great-power capabilities, Jennifer Lind observes “historical analysis reflects significant imbalances in the global balance of power. Great powers often trailed the leading state substantially in terms of national capabilities: for example, with only a quarter or a third of the leading state’s gross domestic product (GDP). Those countries nonetheless competed vigorously against other great powers and the leading state.”Footnote 52
Consider the interwar period. Percentage of share distribution of great-power capabilities in 1938 based on the Correlates of War data-set: USSR: 25%, US: 22.7%, Germany: 20.2%, Britain: 10.4%, Japan: 9.4%, France: 6.9%, and Italy: 4.9%. (The data were compiled using the “Correlates of War” capability data-set printout [December 1987], made available through the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research at the University of Michigan.)Footnote 53 Everyone agrees that the system was multipolar, with Britain, France, Japan, and Italy among the ranks of the great powers. Yet, Italy was roughly one quarter as strong as the top power; France was less than a third as powerful as the leading state; Japan and Britain had roughly 40 percent of the capabilities of the leading power.
To check the validity of the COW numbers, I compiled my own capability index for 1938, using ten separate power indices – eight of which are not used in the COW capability index. My index is virtually identical to the previous COW numbers. The Schweller Index presents the percentage share distribution of great-power capabilities: Germany: 23.2%, USSR: 21.8%, US: 19.6%, Britain: 12.0%, Japan: 8.9%, France: 8.5%, and Italy: 5.9%.Footnote 54
Now consider the early Cold War period. Virtually everyone agrees that it was bipolar. Yet, the U.S. held a 50 percent share of global gross domestic product (GDP) immediately after the war. By 1960, the United States still enjoyed a 40 percent share of global GDP.Footnote 55 Again, the notion that poles must be roughly equal in power is empirically unsupported.
Both multipolar and bipolar systems can be unbalanced, containing lopsided power gaps between the two most formidable states in the system. Under such a condition, the system is said to be unbalanced. John Mearsheimer maintains that the system is unbalanced when there exists an aspiring hegemon, whether under multipolarity or bipolarity.Footnote 56 But it can also occur when a system moves from unipolarity to bipolarity, as it has done recently with the rise of China. The U.S. remains much stronger than China, but the latter has achieved polar status. A system may also be unbalanced after a major hegemonic war, when the next leading great power is trying to catch up to the hegemonic power, as happened after the World War II, when the Soviet Union lagged well behind the United States in material capabilities until 1970. The system was structurally bipolar because the Red Army possessed unquestioned conventional superiority on the Eurasian landmass, but it was an unbalanced bipolar system.
Finally, it is worth pointing out that long-cycle theory posits a “world leader” or “hegemon” only after a hegemonic war, when global power is most concentrated. Over time, power diffuses throughout the system, such that three of the four phases of the long cycle occur under deconcentrated global power – a condition entirely consistent with balance-of-power logics.
Types of International Order
In the international arena, objective rights and duties do not exist. No one is entitled to anything, and nothing can be expected of anyone.Footnote 57 Yet it would be incorrect to say that international relations and behaviors are disordered, that is, entirely unpredictable, uncoordinated, and without pattern. What do we mean by international order? We do not mean a binary concept, where order either exists or it does not. Rather, order is conceived as a continuum of possible values, ranging from more or less order. A system exhibits some measure of order when the set of discrete objects that comprise it are related to one another according to some pattern. Rather than miscellaneous or haphazard, system dynamics accord with some discernible principle(s). Order prevails, at a minimum, when the system displays some measure of predictability, that is, when there are regularities, when there are patterns that follow some understandable and consistent logic. This is a minimal definition of order. Disorder is a condition of randomness – of unpredictable developments lacking regularities and following no known principle or logic. Some systems are characterized by robust and durable orders. Others are extremely unstable, such that order can quickly and without warning collapse into chaos.
International orders vary according to: (1) the amount of order displayed; (2) whether the order is purposive or unintended; and (3) the type of mechanisms that provide order. On one end of the spectrum, there is rule-governed, purposive order, which is explicitly designed and highly institutionalized to fulfill universally accepted social ends and values.Footnote 58 At the other extreme, international order is an entirely unintended and uninstitutionalized recurrent pattern or outcome. Actors exhibit conformity within a system that serves no one’s envisioned purposes or, at least, was not deliberately designed to do so. Here, international order is spontaneously generated and self-regulating. The classic example of this kind of order is the balance of power. A balance arises, though none of the states seek balance or equality of power. To the contrary, all actors may seek greater power than everyone else, but the concussion of their self-interested actions produces the unintended consequence of a balance of power; and this structure constrains their behaviors in predictable ways.Footnote 59 There are essentially three types of international orders.Footnote 60
(1) A negotiated order: A negotiated order is a rule-based order that is the result of a grand bargain voluntarily struck between either a hegemonic power and secondary actors or among relatively equal actors of the system. Negotiated orders rest on political authority that fuses power with legitimate social purpose, such that all members view the order as legitimate and beneficial. They are highly institutionalized, rules-based orders that place limits on the returns to power, especially with respect to a hegemon.Footnote 61 Negotiated orders are associated with so-called “world order” phases of the long cycle, which emerge after hegemonic wars. They are orders with social purpose, by which I mean an order that promotes certain goals and values as opposed to others.Footnote 62 As John Ruggie puts it, “had the Germans succeeded in their quest to establish a ‘New International Order’ after World War II, the designs Hjalmar Schacht would have instituted were the very mirror image of Bretton Woods – obviously, differences in social purpose … provide the key.”Footnote 63 International orders rooted in shared social purpose may even approach something more akin to international society than international politics.
Before proceeding, it is worth emphasizing that international orders, even stable and durable ones, do not require social purpose. But, and this is equally important, robust “purposeless” orders are not as “highly ordered” as those rooted in social purpose. Cockroaches are among the world’s hardiest creatures; they may outlive everything else on the planet. But cockroaches are not as highly ordered as human beings.
(2) An imposed order: Sometimes order arises through coercion by a powerful actor. An imposed order is a non-voluntary order among unequal actors purposefully designed and ruled by a malign hegemon, whose power is unchecked. The imperial hegemon uses its superior material capabilities as an iron fist to coerce other states into compliance with the rules of its order. The Soviet satellite system exemplifies this type of order.
(3) A spontaneously generated order: Here, order is an unintended consequence of actors seeking only to maximize their interests and power. It is an automatic, self-regulating, self-equilibrating system. Within this leaderless order, power is checked by countervailing power. The source of stability (an equilibrium of power) arises as an unintended consequence either of actors seeking to maximize their power or of the imperative for actors wishing to survive in a competitive self-help system to balance against threatening accumulations of power. This type of order eventually emerges after a “world order” phase of the long cycle. Spontaneously generated orders are proof that social and political order can exist without rules or intended purpose and still serve the elementary goals of states – most important, their survival as sovereign entities. Any conformity to basic rules of conduct emanates not from a central rule-making authority but rather from precedent, custom, sanctions, reciprocity, and reprisal. In this type of order, structure does all the work of providing order; order becomes a “meaningless” or “purposeless” concept apart from any human contrivance, and as such, we do not need to bother with it. That said, compared with a negotiated order with legitimate social purpose, a balance-of-power order will be less cooperative, more war-prone, and driven more by power than rules of law, and by threats more so than rewards.
The Arrival of a New “Dissent” Phase of the Long Cycle
Every “intended” international political order must sooner or later confront two associated challenges to its cohesion: power shifts among major actors and tests of the order’s legitimacy. I refer to these two processes as “deconcentration” (of international capabilities) and “delegitimation” (of the hegemon’s authority and social purpose). Both coexist within a single phase, which I call the dissent phase, of the long cycle of great power rise and decline.Footnote 64 The world has recently entered this phase, wherein rising powers voice their dissatisfaction with the established order. Too weak to mount a frontal assault on the material dimensions of the order, rational revisionists attack the order’s ideational rather than material dimensions, championing a counter-hegemonic narrative.Footnote 65 How did we get here and what follows?
Since the financial crisis of 2007–2008, the global distribution of economic wealth, political influence, and military power has been evolving in a more pluralistic direction. The United States remains the most powerful state in the world. But it is no longer an Atlas capable of carrying the world on its shoulders. In a decade or so, the long cycle of global politics will enter its “crisis” phase. Here it will stay until something other than total war among the great powers, which has become unthinkable, enables it to enter the next phase of global order. The problem is straightforward: other than a hegemonic war or failed power transition (as occurred from 1945 to 1991), there is no known mechanism that can end the crisis phase and restore system equilibrium, allowing a rebirth of order to begin. The future, therefore, is one of rising entropy and further decay. It cannot resemble the past unless leaders choose to end the crisis by risking Armageddon. If the great powers do not choose suicide, the condition of rising disorder cannot be alleviated; the crashed international system cannot be rebooted.
The new era of global politics will be ungoverned by principles that give meaning and concrete institutional form to the globalization of political authority. What order we see in international politics will be uncomplicated and without overarching purpose. It will be, instead, the spontaneous and unintended product of state interactions dictated by simple, unheroic assumptions regarding their intentions. Great powers are expected to act according to their short-term national interests, maximizing their power, security, and prestige.Footnote 66
Even the most starry-eyed Western leaders grudgingly admit that the final curtain has not fallen on history, far from it. The game of power politics – with its fixation on balances of power, alliances, spheres of influence, expansion, and imperialism – has resumed play. In time, gravely disappointed Western leaders will overcome their current anxiety about a lost future, which they had collectively imagined – a technocratically managed future molded by legalism and public opinion. Acceptance, however, is only the first step in finding a solution. For governments everywhere the problem is more complex than the familiar one of meeting direct threats in traditional ways. It is a crisis of perplexity in an age of dissent and rising entropy. Threats will be sui generis as well as subtle and indirect.
Such unfamiliar threats are most likely to be unintelligible and unmanageable by traditional categories and means. Dangers that do not fit accustomed ways of thinking and acting drive foreign policy to misguided extremes: blind frenzy and misdirected action at one end; complacency and imprudent passivity at the other.Footnote 67 The new age of world politics requires a return to classical realism’s vision of political decision-making reminiscent of Carl Schmitt’s view that “the sovereign decision springs from the normative nothing and a concrete disorder” to create order, peace, and security. Typical of Weimar political thinkers, Hans Morgenthau also championed the seasoned statesman informed by realist wisdom making decisions “in the face of the unknown and the unknowable” – a statesman “capable of staking the fate of the nation upon a hunch,” confronting the “impenetrable darkness of the future and still not flinch[ing] from walking into it, drawing the nation behind him.”Footnote 68
As is true of politics in any era, the mighty will compete in the political arena to determine who gets what, when, and how, in Harold Lasswell’s classic definition of politics. And like always, the strongest will shape governing institutions in ways that enhance their own power and interests “to get the most of what there is to get.”Footnote 69 While great-power competition endures, various features of the emerging global environment (to be discussed in Chapters 6 and 7) suggest a robust and comparatively peaceful international system. Hence, we should not fear the birth of an empty global order. The ongoing devolution of order and power diffusion, however, calls for consciously transforming the world in more pluralistic ways, weaning it off American power.
A World without American Leadership
Leadership is a choice. But it is not made in a vacuum. Like all choices, it is constrained by the surrounding environment in which actors find themselves. A central thesis of this book is that America has chosen to abdicate as global ruler because of profound changes in the structure of international politics – chief among them, the diffusion of global power that had been concentrated in the hands of the United States since 1991. In the language of the long cycle, international politics has moved from a “world power” phase to a “dissent” phase. The emergence of something approaching a global balance of power, what I refer to as unbalanced bipolarity (see Chapter 5), has put an end to the liberal, rules-based international order – the social purpose of America’s choice upon assuming global hegemony in 1945.
This does not mean that the world will be disordered. Rather, it will serve no one’s intended purposes. It will be an empty order, as the world once again enters a dissent phase, marking the transition from hegemonic order to global disharmony. The dissent phase appears decades before the onset of a crisis phase, and a half century or more before the critical inflection point of a power transition between a rising challenger and a declining hegemon. Today, defenders of Pax Americana, such as former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott, warn that
this would be the worst time for the indispensable nation to step aside. An axis of dictatorships – a militarist one in Moscow, an Islamist one in Tehran and a communist one in Beijing – are united by a hatred of the West and a desire to undo history. Without America’s active engagement, the dictators will create a much bleaker and more dangerous world.Footnote 70
True, the unholy alliance of China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran appears bent on upending the U.S.-led international order.Footnote 71 Beijing has advanced its unique vision of international order on several issues, including human rights, international development and finance, peacekeeping, technology standards, and trade.Footnote 72 Meanwhile, Putin seeks to recreate a greater Russia on the Eurasian landmass; while Ayatollah Ali Khamenei uses a blend of ideological ambition and a vast network of proxies to build “an empire in which the Iranian people are but pawns in a much grander geopolitical game.”Footnote 73
But disruption of global stability during a dissent phase comes not only from the rising challenger and its allies working against the existing order and its underlying social purpose.Footnote 74 It also comes from the hegemon itself. To forestall decline, the hegemon behaves in ways that undermine its own order – one that it now sees as not only unprofitable but also a drain on its wasting assets. It grows increasingly unwilling, for instance, to accept sponging allies and the exorbitant costs of delivering global public goods. It increasingly views trade policy not in terms of price optimization, efficiency, and corporate profits but in terms of whether it makes the country weaker or stronger, whether it helps the working class find and maintain good-paying jobs, whether it builds or destroys communities, and whether it causes trade surpluses or deficits. A hegemon in decline no longer believes trade is free.Footnote 75
During the dissent phase, hegemony, once benevolent in nature, “deteriorates into the means for exploiting the international system for national ends rather than managing it in the general interest.”Footnote 76 It is this reluctance to lead for self-interested reasons that so worries and bedevils the “jet-setting” globalist crowd who gather annually in Davos, Switzerland. At the 2023 World Economic Forum, Founder and Executive Chairman Klaus Schwab observed: “We see the manifold political, economic and social forces creating increased fragmentation on a global and national level.”Footnote 77 He is correct. Global forces are driving a deeply divided, ungovernable world. Global elites at the World Economic Forum see the effects but do not appreciate the causal role played by international structure on state interests and behaviors. The world is no longer unipolar. International structure once again exerts constraints on the top dog, which now operates in a more competitive environment. The hegemon’s power and resources appear increasingly limited, its environment more threatening. Nationalism replaces cosmopolitanism.
Structural change is responsible for the slow death of the liberal international order. It explains the political rise of Donald Trump and his nationalist followers who champion America’s abdication of global leadership, who disdain what they see as corrupt, power-hungry globalists who put the world’s well-being above their own countries’ interests – those transnational elites and their postmodern cosmopolitan views of borders, patriotic nationalism, and other traditional loyalties as mere expendable social constructs. Structural change explains why U.S. leadership has been discredited to the point where foreign leaders have begun to reshape their alliances, bypassing altogether what they perceive as a gravely diminished and reluctant-to-lead hegemon.Footnote 78 Structural change, not Donald Trump’s election and re-election, explains the push to dismantle the liberal international order.Footnote 79 Structural change, not the rise of President Xi Jinping, explains the global turn from “human rights” cosmopolitanism to “self-interested” nationalism. After all, both Trump and Xi, though of entirely different personalities, pledged to make their nations great again. This should alert us to the fact that great structural forces are at work; that the driving impersonal forces of history – the rise of China and relative decline of American power and influence – explain the ongoing demise of Pax Americana and the growth of political fragmentation.
Walter Lippmann warned in 1943, commitments and power must always be in balance: “Without the controlling principle that the nation must maintain its objectives and its power in equilibrium, its purposes within its means and its means equal to its purposes, its commitments related to its resources and its resources adequate to its commitments, it is impossible to think at all about foreign affairs.”Footnote 80 A nation’s commitments must align with its structural position in the international system. Otherwise, its foreign policy becomes insolvent, its checks returned labeled “insufficient funds.” Successful great powers, like the U.S., prudently adjust to changed structural realities. Relative decline causes them to retrench promptly and proportionately.Footnote 81 Hegemonic great powers in decline abdicate their leadership roles.
Consider the postwar system of free trade, which relied on America’s soft and hard power. Both the Trump and Joe Biden administrations allowed it to crumble. The death spiral began after the 2008 financial crisis, when countries started to defect from the system of globally institutionalized cooperation and adopted, instead, mercantilist policies. Without U.S. leadership, the system lacked the authority to stop them. China finally broke the back of the pre-existing order through a combination of mercantilist policies, including “currency management, public procurement, state subsidies, protectionism, and other implicit subsidies.”Footnote 82 The United States responded by embracing economic nationalism in the form of tariffs, industrial policy, and export controls. As the cycle entered its dissent phase, every laissez-faire position (dominant during the prior “world power” phase) on topics ranging from trade to regulation has come under fire from an assortment of conservative economic nationalists, progressive populists, and neomercantilists. The entire international economic order is being restructured by government policies that erode the competitive market’s role in determining companies’ success. “We are all mercantilists now.”Footnote 83
Structure and Opposite Forms of Nationalisms in the U.S. and China
What is the relationship between international structure and domestic politics? International relations theories typically conceive of foreign policy as an inside-out process – that is, a state’s domestic politics (what goes on politically inside the state) cause it to adopt certain foreign policies rather than others. In 1978, Peter Gourevitch reversed this causal sequence: instead of domestic politics and structure being causes of international politics, they may be consequences of it. He viewed two aspects of the international system as having “powerful effects upon the character of domestic regimes: the distribution of power among states, or the international state system; and the distribution of economic activity and wealth, or the international economy.”Footnote 84 Likewise, realist theories predict that changing relative capabilities and competitive pressures (call this “power”) constrain, shape, and shove state behavior. By extension, realist logic suggests that relatively quick and dramatic changes in the distribution of power and wealth should exert especially deep and weighty causal effects on states’ domestic politics and foreign-policy choices.
Along these lines, I argue that the divergent power trajectories of the declining hegemon and rising challenger account for their opposite types of nationalisms: the former adopts an inward-looking nationalism, while the latter embraces an outward-looking imperialist nationalism.Footnote 85 This structural dynamic will be discussed at greater length in Chapter 6. For now, it is worth nothing that a declining hegemon seeks to reverse its downward power trajectory and revitalize itself. Becoming defensive and inward looking, it embraces strategies of global retrenchment and domestic renewal.Footnote 86 Hence, President Trump chose to emphasize themes of building walls and putting America first. The Biden administration, though less blatantly nationalist in tone and calling for “guardrails to ensure that [Sino-American] competition does not veer into conflict,” has continued the theme of putting up walls, advancing measures to curb exports of advanced semiconductors to China and to cut Chinese companies off from U.S. cloud computing platforms.Footnote 87
As a rising challenger, China wants to deepen its engagement with the rest of the world. Its Belt and Road Initiative looks outward, aiming to make China the center of a Eurasian hub-and-spoke system.Footnote 88 China similarly aims to replace the United States as the world’s top diplomatic broker, promoting its global leadership and credibility, while building a power base in the Global South from which to challenge U.S. hegemony.Footnote 89 In March 2023, Beijing successfully brokered a surprise détente between Middle East rivals Saudi Arabia and Iran. Beijing has also tried and failed to meditate a settlement of the Ukraine war.Footnote 90 In the words of European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, Beijing’s “clear goal is a systemic change of the international order with China at its center.”Footnote 91 While the U.S. builds guardrails, China builds fast lanes to achieve its long-term goals.Footnote 92
Order without an Orderer
As a cooperative liberal order gives way to a “beggar thy neighbor” mercantilist world, international politics can and will be ordered without an “orderer.” What order arises, however, will be an empty one devoid of social purpose. Order is generated as an unintended product of state interactions dictated by simple, unheroic assumptions regarding the system’s major actors. It is a classic balance-of-power order, in which great powers act in self-interested ways, maximizing their power, security, and prestige.Footnote 93 In the modern world going forward, states will be in motion, charting idiosyncratic journeys across an archipelago of economic, political, social, and religious views and ideologies. Rather than a single binary cleavage (characteristic of the Cold War), there will be a multitude of fractures splitting in all directions, generating many fault lines of conflict and cooperation.
Unfortunately, order without meaning comes at a price. As Paul Tillich’s mid-century classic, The Courage to Be, argued, meaninglessness is the most devastating and ubiquitous cause of anxiety in our time. In a situation of meaninglessness, one has the “unlimited freedom to change, to preserve freedom without content,” but one “pays the price of complete emptiness.”Footnote 94 The Age of Dissent is, thus, one of anxiety.
A Messy but Peaceful Future
Consistent with realism’s focus on structural-induced behaviors among states, great-power competition, grievances, modernizing arsenals, even arms racing have reappeared.Footnote 95 The comeback of these old system disturbances conforms with the twenty-first century’s wider theme of “back to the future.”Footnote 96 Their reappearance also introduces risks and complications into the international system that threaten to overwhelm the institutions of domestic and global governance. Order of any kind has become increasingly scarce in today’s politics of mounting chaos and randomness, of rising entropy.Footnote 97
The present study offers a dynamic theory that takes account of changes over time, identifying cyclical historical sequences that have shaped the trajectory of world politics. Such a comparative historical approach provides an opportunity to explore how and why some international systems have been more peaceful or war-prone than others. Though emphasizing continuities (in the form of sequences) over time, cycle theories rest on comparative historical frameworks that make it possible to identify fundamental discontinuities between present and past world systems. Appropriately, this book argues that the repetition of international history has now ended – the cycle of world politics is broken. At the same time, traditional great-power behaviors remain on the table and will likely intensify over time.
This begs the question, will war among the great powers reappear? I think not. Instead, I see a relatively peaceful, though uncertain, world of unbalanced bipolarity. What international order exists will be solely structural in nature. This is not to suggest that social purpose is a superfluous concept when it comes to order; that structure always and inevitably does all the work. Rather, it means that bipolar and multipolar structures (but not unipolar ones) place constraints on state behavior and, thereby, provide a measure of predictability, even in the absence of social purpose. Structure does not, however, determine the type of order provided. Multipolar structures are compatible with collective security, balance of power, or several imposed orders. Ditto for bipolarity. The only exception is that unipolarity rules out balance-of-power order.
Returning to the core point, structure will continue to provide order in the form of constraints and opportunities in the post-cycle age. But the international system will lack a fixed ideology or social purpose. World politics will not resemble an international society. Rather, it will be a work in progress, subject to constant revision through situational international engagements. The heterogeneity of the system’s units means that no one social, political, or ideological configuration is logically inevitable or predictable. Order will be a constant, contested process of many permutations. History will take the form of possibility, not inevitability.
Roadmap
The book unfolds as follows. Chapter 2 sets out the causal logic of the long cycle. It then moves on to discuss the advent of a new form of balance of power, what I call a relaxed balance of power, in which states will not need to engage in arms races, form tight alliances, compete over territory or military dominance, or struggle for global ideological supremacy. The competition will be mostly over global technological and commercial superiority. Chapter 3 canvasses the range of revisionist aims and types of great powers that have existed throughout international history. The emergence of rising powers does not inevitably trigger a struggle with the established powers over the fundamental nature of the existing order. Unlike traditional balance-of-power systems, war is no longer a legitimate tool of statecraft to settle great-power disputes. And, unlike balancing behavior during the Cold War, the new superpower competition will not be overlaid by an intense ideological rivalry: the system will not be primarily shaped by a systemwide contest over whose universal order will prevail – over whose preferred social purpose, design of international institutions, and norms will dominate.
Chapter 4 surveys the history of the long cycle of hegemonic war and peace from 1496 to the present. Chapter 5 addresses the subject of historical analogies and their abuse. Political and military leaders tend to deal with the stress of “unknown unknowns” by imposing unwarranted certainty on an uncertain environment. Such misplaced certainty is typically achieved by means of faulty analogies to the past. Today, we hear international politics compared with the conditions that obtained in 1914, 1939, and 1945. The danger of faulty analogies is that they can become self-fulfilling prophesies. Chapter 5 also posits a recent change in international structure, with the system moving from unipolarity to unbalanced bipolarity. The chapter explores the origins and various dynamics of unbalanced bipolarity, and how and why the current instantiation of this type of structure differs from the earlier version that existed from 1945 to 1970. Chapter 6 identifies four core drivers of contemporary world politics in the dissent phase: nationalism, economic statecraft, negative power, and the absence of social purpose. Unfortunately, the four core features tend to inhibit international cooperation and peace. On the bright side, the absence of a hegemon does not signal an order-less or frightfully unstable future.
Chapter 7 concludes by examining the current dissent phase as a pluralistic system in which the great powers coexist in a relatively polycentric world. It will operate as a rather moderate system. The future will see a perpetuation of the present coexistence of unbalanced bipolarity, polycentrism, and emergent regional multipolarity. As in the past, twenty-first-century world politics will be chiefly defined by competition among the powerful. But the Sino-American bipolar rivalry will be of a limited nature. Of course, there remain various dangers and risks in a world riddled by uncertainty and dissent. The book finishes off by outlining ways that leaders can navigate the choppy waters ahead.
