International history may be conceived in romantic terms – its movement determined by the contradictory forces of decadence and renewal, beginnings and ends, and exhaustion and innovation. Like dying suns, international orders and the hegemonic great powers that create them decay and burn out. This is not all bad. The twilight of a sun setting for the last time on a tired hegemon and its inhabitants signals daybreak for a new global leader and the revival ahead of international order. But first there is hell to pay. The path to renewed order is seldom a peaceful journey. It is most often the road to war, for the powerful rarely relinquish their rule without a fight. So goes the story of international history unfolding in repeating long cycles. Over time, hegemonic political orders start to fracture under the twin pressures of power shifts and contested legitimacy. Sometimes the reckoning comes sooner, say, within twenty-five years of the start of the world power phase; at other times, it comes later, fifty or more years. This chapter discusses the four phases of my version of the Long Cycle: World Power, Dissent, Crisis, and Hegemonic War. I then discuss the various features of a new kind of “relaxed” balance of power system.

In the past, the international system cycled through regular phases of global power concentration, deconcentration, and reconcentration. These phases correspond with varying levels of international order – from high-order maintenance during times of world leadership to complete disorder during global wars. Hegemonic war is one of four phases (along with the Dissent, Crisis, and World Power phases) that comprise the long cycle. It is the one phase that the world can no longer enter. This is good news for peace but bad news for global order. Hegemonic wars serve vital functions that provide international order. They 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. How does world politics function when the long cycle stalls in place? The short answer is, not very well if the goal is order.

The international system consists of four types of states: those who have, those who used to have, those who are trying to have, and those who never had and never will have. The movement of history itself can be seen as a constant battle between conservative and revolutionary forces, between those seeking to maintain the established order and those seeking to revise it. We see this most clearly when international systems are in transition. At such times, world politics is defined by a competition among established and emerging powers over whose preferred order will prevail. Still, the emergence of rising powers does not inevitably trigger a revisionist-led struggle with the established powers over the fundamental nature of the existing order. The engine that drives the long cycle is the rise of a powerful revisionist challenger, dissatisfied not only with its place in the established order but also with the global order itself. Given the unlimited extent of its aims, the revisionist power cannot be appeased without undoing the existing international order. Unlimited-aims revisionists are rare beasts. Most revisionists can be accommodated or contained.