Becoming a regional hegemony, I argued, is the best way for a country to maximize its prospects for survival. I also predicted that China’s neighbors as well as the US would try to contain China and prevent it from becoming a regional hegemon. The ensuring security competition would make Asia an increasingly dangerous region.
This cycle of violence will continue far into the new millennium. Hopes for peace will probably not be realized, because the great powers that shape the international system fear each other and compete for power as a result. Indeed, their ultimate aim is to gain a position of dominant power over others, because having dominant power is the best means to ensure one’s own survival. Strength ensures safety, and the greatest strength is the greatest insurance of safety. States facing this incentive are fated to clash as each competes for advantage over the others. This is a tragic situation, but there is no escaping it unless the states that make up the system agree to form a world government. Such a vast transformation is hardly a realistic prospect, however, so conflict and war are bound to continue as large and enduring features of world politics.
Consider what that approach would have told a European observer at the start of each of the previous 2 centuries. In 1800, Europe was in the midst of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, which lasted 23 years and involved all of that era’s great powers. Extrapolating forward from that bloody year, one would have expected the 19th century to be filled with great-power conflict. In fact, it is among the least conflictual periods in European history. In 1900, on the other hand, there was no warfare in Europe that involved a great power, and little evidence portended that one was in the offing. Extrapolating forward from that tranquil year, one would have expected little conflict in Europe during the 20th century. As we know. The opposite was the case.
Even though the Soviet threat has disappeared, the US still maintains about 100K troops in Europe and roughly the same number in Northeast Asia. It does so because it recognizes that dangerous rivalries would probably emerge among the major powers in these regions if US troops were withdrawn. Moreover, almost every European state, including the UK and France, still harbors deep-seated, albeit muted, fears that a Germany unchecked by American power might behave aggressively; fear of Japan in Northeast Asia is probably even more profound, and it is certainly more frequently expressed. Finally, the possibility of a clash between China and the US over Taiwan is hardly remote.
The overriding goal of each state is to maximize its share of world power, which means gaining power at the expense of other states. But great powers do not merely strive to be the strongest of all the great powers, although that is a welcome outcome. Their ultimate aim is to be the hegemon — that is, the only great power in the system.
Great powers are rarely content with the current distribution of power; on the contrary, they face a constant incentive to change it in their favor. They almost always have revisionist intentions, and they will use force to alter the balance of power if they think it can be done at a reasonable price.
A great power will defend the balance of power when looming change favors another state, and it will try to undermine the balance when the direction of change is in its own favor.
Three features of the international system combine to cause states to fear one another: 1) the absence of a central authority that sits above states and can protect them from each other, 2) the fact that states always have some offensive military capability, and 3) the fact that states can never be certain about other states’ intentions.
This situation, which no one consciously designed or intended, is genuinely tragic. Great powers that have no reason to fight each other — that are merely concerned with their own survival — nevertheless have little choice but to pursue power and to seek to dominate the other states in the system.
This view is wrongheaded. In fact, none of us could understand the world we live in or make intelligent decisions without theories. Indeed, all students and practitioners of international politics rely on theories to comprehend their surroundings. Some are aware of it and some are not, some admit it and some do not; but there is no escaping the fat that we could not make sense of the complex world around us without simplifying theories. The Clinton’s administration’s foreign policy rhetoric, for example, was heavily informed by the 3 main liberal theories of international relations: 1) prosperous and economically interdependent states are unlikely to fight each other, 2) democracies do not fight each other, and 3) international institutions enable states to avoid war and concentrate instead on building cooperative relationships.
It does not matter for the theory whether Germany in 1905 was led by Bismarck, Kaiser Wilhelm, or Hitler, or whether Germany was democratic or autocratic. What matters for the theory is how much relative power Germany possessed at the time. These omitted factors, however, occasionally dominate a state’s decision-making process; under these circumstances, offensive realism is not going to perform as well. In short, there is a price to pay for simplifying reality.
Offensive realism is like a powerful flashlight in a dark room: even though it cannot illuminate every nook and cranny, most of the time it is an excellent tool for navigating through the darkness.
Realists focus mainly on great powers, however, because these states dominate and shape international politics and they also cause the deadliest wars.
Second, realists believe that the behavior of great powers is influenced mainly by their external environment, not by their internal characteristics. The structure of the international system, which all states must deal with, largely shapes their foreign policies.
Third, realists hold that calculations about power dominate states’ thinking, and that states compete for power among themselves. That competition sometimes necessitates going to war, which is considered an acceptable instrument of statecraft. States may cooperate with each other on occasion, but at root they have conflicting interests.
Human nature realism, which is sometimes called “classical realism,” is based on the simple assumption that states are led by human beings who have a “will to power” hardwired into them at birth. That is, states have an insatiable appetite for power, or what Morgenthau calls “a limitless lust for power,” which means that they constantly look for opportunities to take the offensive and dominate other states.
Unlike Morgenthau, Waltz does not assume that great powers are inherent aggressive because they are infused with a will to power; instead he starts by assuming that states merely aim to survive. Above all else, they seek security. Nevertheless, he maintains that the structure of the international system forces great powers to pay careful attention to the balance of power. In particular, anarchy forces security-seeking states to compete with each other for power, because power is the best means to survival. Whereas human nature is the deep cause of security competition in Morgenthau’s theory, anarchy plays that role in Waltz’s theory.
Whatever merits realism may have as an explanation for real-world politics and as a guide for formulating foreign policy, it is not a popular school of thought in the West. Realism’s central message — that it makes good sense for states to selfishly pursue power — does not have broad appeal. It is difficult to imagine a modern political leader openly asking the public to fight and die to improve the balance of power. Most people prefer to think of fights between their own state and rival states as clashes between good and evil. Thus, leaders tend to portray war as a moral crusade or an ideological contest, rather than as a struggle for power. Realism is a hard sell.
Realism is at odds with the deep-seated sense of optimism and moralism that pervades much of American society. Liberalism, on the other hand, fits neatly with those values. Not surprisingly, foreign policy discourse in the US often sounds as if it has been lifted right out of a Liberalism 101 lecture.
Americans are basically optimists. They regard progress in politics as both desirable and possible. American believe that “man is endowed with an indefinite faculty of improvement.” Realism, by contrast, offers a pessimistic perspective on international politics. It depicts a world rife with security competition and war, and holds out little promise of an “escape from the evil of power, regardless of what one does.” Such pessimism is at odds with the powerful American belief that with time and effort, reasonable individuals can cooperate to solve important social problems. Liberalism offers a more hopeful perspective on world politics, and Americans naturally find it more attractive than the gloomy specter drawn by realism.
This perspective clashes with the realist belief that war is an intrinsic element of life in the international system. Most Americans tend to think of war as a hideous enterprise that should ultimately be abolished from the face of the Earth. It might justifiably be used for lofty liberal goals like fighting tyranny or spreading democracy, but it is morally incorrect to fight wars merely to change or preserve the balance of power.
Behind closed doors, however, the elites who make national security policy speak mostly the language of power, not that of principle, and the US acts in the international system according tot he dictates of realist logic. In essence, a discernible gap separates public rhetoric from the actual conduct of American foreign policy.
It should be obvious to intelligent observers that the US speaks one way and acts another. In fact, policymakers in other states have always remarked about this tendency in American foreign policy. As long ago as 1939, for example, Carr pointed out that states on the European continent regard the English-speaking peoples as “masters in the art of concealing their selfish national interests in the guise of the general good,” adding that “this kind of hypocrisy is a special and characteristic peculiarity of the Anglo-Saxon mind.”
Stalin put the point well during a war scare in 1927: “We can and must build socialism in the USSR. But in order to do so we first of all have to exist.” States can and do pursue other goals but security is their most important objective.
From the perspective of any one great power, all other great powers are potential enemies. This point is illustrated by the reaction of the UK and France to German reunification at the end of the Cold War. Despite the fact that these 3 states had been close allies for almost 45 years, both the UK and France immediately began worrying about the potential dangers of a united Germany.
Each state tends to see itself as vulnerable and alone, and therefore it aims to provide for its own survival. In international politics, God helps those who help themselves. This emphasis on self-help does not preclude states from forming alliances. But alliances are only temporary marriages of convenience: today’s alliance partner might be tomorrow’s enemy, and today’s enemy might be tomorrow’s alliance partner.
The US fought with China and the USSR against Germany and Japan in WW2, but soon thereafter flip-flopped enemies and partners and allied with West Germany and Japan against China and the USSR during the Cold War.
States operating in a self-help world almost always act according to their own self-interest and do not subordinate their interests to the interests of other states, or to the interests of the so-called international community. The reason is simple: it pays to be selfish in a self-help world.
Only a misguided states would pass up an opportunity to be the hegemon in the system because it thought it already had sufficient power to survive. But even if a great power does not have the wherewithal to achieve hegemony (and that is usually the case), it will still act offensively to amass as much power as it can, because states are almost always better off with more rather than less power.
The “security dilemma,” which is one of the most well-known concepts in the international relations literature, reflects the basic logic of offensive realism. The measure a state takes to increase its own security usually decrease the security of other states. Thus, it is difficult for a state to increase its own chances of survival without threatening the survival of other states. “Striving to attain security from attack, states are driven to acquire more and more power in order to escape the impact of the power of others. This, in turn, renders the others more insecure and compels them to prepare for the worst. Since none can ever feel entirely secure in such a world of competing units, power competition ensures, and the vicious circle of security and power accumulation is on.”
Stalin put the point well at the end of WW2: “Everyone imposes his own system as far as his army can reach. It cannot be otherwise.”
Some defensive realists go so far as to suggest that the constraints of the international system are so powerful that offense rarely succeeds, and that aggressive great powers invariably end up being punished. As noted, they emphasize that 1) threatened states balance against aggressors and ultimately crush them, and 2) there is an offense-defense balance that is usually heavily tilted toward the defense, thus making conquest especially difficult. Great powers, therefore, should be content with the existing balance of power and not try to change it by force.
Conquest certainly paid big dividends in these cases. If Hitler had restrained himself after the fall of France and had not invaded the USSR, conquest probably would have paid handsomely for the Nazis. In short, the historical record shows that offense sometimes succeeds and sometimes does not. The trick for a sophisticated power maximizer is to figure out when to raise and when to fold.
A state’s potential power is based on the size of its population and the level of its wealth. These 2 assets are the main building blocks of military power.
When a state surveys its environment to determine which states pose a threat to its survival, it focuses mainly on the offensive capabilities of potential rivals, not their intentions. Intentions are ultimately unknowable, so states worried about their survival must make worst-case assumptions about their rivals’ intentions. Capabilities, however, not only can be measured but also determine whether or not a rival state is a serious threat. In short, great powers balance against capabilities, not intentions.
Of course, the Navigation Act would hurt England’s economy as well, mainly because it would rob England of the benefits of free trade. “The act of navigation,” Smith wrote, “is not favorable to foreign commerce, or to the growth of that opulence that can arise from it.” Nevertheless, Smith considered the legislation “the wisest of all the commercial regulations of England” because it did more damage to the Dutch economy than to the English economy, and in the mid-17th century Holland was “the only naval power which could endanger the security of England.”
The claim is sometimes made that great powers can transcend realist logic by working together to build an international order that fosters peace and justice. World peace, it would appear, can only enhance a state’s prosperity and security. America’s political leaders paid considerable lip service to this line of argument over the course of the 20th century.
The US devoted enormous resources to deterring the USSR from starting a war in Europe, not because of some deep-seated commitment to promoting peace around the world, but because American leaders feared that a Soviet victory would lead to a dangerous shift in the balance of power.
The particular international order that obtains at any time is mainly a by-product of the self-interested behavior of the systems great powers. The configuration of the system, in other words, is the unintended consequence of great-power security competition, not the result of states acting together to organize peace. Neither the USSR or the US intended to create the Cold War order, nor did they work together to create it. In fact, each superpower worked hard in the early years of the Cold War to gain power at the expense of the other, while preventing the other from doing likewise.
Great-power rivalry will sometimes produce a stable international order, as happened during the Cold. Nevertheless, the great powers will continue looking for opportunities to increase their share of world power, and if a favorable situation arises, they will move to undermine that stable order. Consider how hard the US worked during the late 1980s to weaken the USSR and bring down the stable order that had emerge in Europe during the latter part of the Cold War.
International relations scholars have never reached a consensus on what the blueprint should look like. In fact, it seems there are about as many theories on the causes of war and peace as there are scholars studying the subject. But more important, policymakers are unable to agree on how to create a stable world.
In the 1950s, President Eisenhower sought to end the American commitment to defend Western Europe and to provide West Germany with its own nuclear deterrent. This policy, which was never fully adopted, nevertheless caused significant instability in Europe, as it led directly to the Berlin crises of 1958-59 and 1961.
States have 2 kinds of power: latent power and military power. These 2 forms of power are closely related but not synonymous, because they are derived from different kinds of assets. Latent power refers to the socio-economic ingredients that go into building military power; it is largely based on a state’s wealth and the overall size of its population. Great powers need money, technology, and personnel to build military forces and to fight wars, and a state’s latent power refers to the raw potential it can draw on when competing with rival states.
I define power largely in military terms because offensive realism emphasizes that force is the ultima ratio of international politics.
At its most basic level, power can be defined in 2 different ways. Power, as I defined it, represents nothing more than specific assets or material resources that are available to a state. Others, however, define power in terms of the outcomes of interactions between states. Power, they argue, is all about control or influence over other states; it is the ability of one state to force another to do something. According to this logic, power exists only when a state exercises control or influence, and therefore it can be measured only after the outcome is determined. Simply put, the most powerful state is the one that prevails in a dispute.
This belief also underpins Blainey’s famous argument that war breaks out in good part because states cannot agree on the balance of power, but the subsequent fighting then establishes “an orderly ladder of power between victors and losers.” If the rival states had recognized the true balance beforehand, he argues, there would have been no war. Both sides would have foreseen the outcome and been motivated to negotiate a peaceful settlement based on existing power realities, rather than fight a bloody war to reach the same end.
But it is impossible to conflate these definitions of power, because the balance of power is not a highly reliable predictor of military success. The reason is that non-material factors sometimes provide one combatant with a decisive advantage over the other. Those factors include, among others, strategy, intelligence, resolve, weather, and disease.
Consider strategy, which is how a state employs its forces against an opponent’s forces, and which is probably the most important of the non-material factors.
Despite never winning a major battle in the 1812 campaign, the less powerful Russian army routed the more powerful French army.
It should be apparent that Blainey is wrong to argue that there would be no war if states could accurately measure the balance of power, because less powerful states can sometimes defeat more powerful states. Therefore weaker states are sometimes going to initiate wars against stronger states.
One of the most interesting aspects of international relations is how power, which is a means, affects political outcomes, which are ends. But there is little to say about the matter if power and outcomes are indistinguishable; there would be no difference between means and ends.
The concept of wealth has various meanings and can be measured in different ways. For my purposes, however, it is essential to choose an indicator of wealth that reflects a state’s latent power. Specifically, it must capture a state’s mobilizable wealth and its level of technological development. “Mobilizable wealth” refers to the economic resources a state has at its disposal to build military forces. It is more important than overall wealth because what matters is not simply how wealthy a state might be, but how much of that wealth is available to spend on defense. It is also important to have industries that are producing the newest and most sophisticated technologies, because they invariably get incorporated into the most advanced weaponry.
GNP, which represents the market value of all the goods and services that a state produces in a fixed period of time, is a function of both the size and the productivity of a state’s labor force.
Despite its rapid economic development over the past 2 decades, China is still a semi-industrialized state. Roughly 18% of its wealth remains tied up in agriculture. Japan and the US, on the other hand, are highly industrialized states; only 2% of their wealth is in agriculture.
France was considerably wealthier than Prussia from 1816 until the late 1860s, when Bismarck transformed Prussia into Germany. In fact, Germany first gained an edge over France in steel production in 1870, the year that Franco-Prussian War broke out. From that point until the start of WW1, the wealth gap between France and Germany steadily widened in the latter’s favor. By 1913, Germany was roughly 3 times as wealthy as France.
This marked change in the relative wealth of France and Germany was due in part to the fact that Germany industrialized more rapidly than France in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The main cause, however, was a significant shift in the size of their respective populations, which illustrates how changes in wealth also capture changes in population.
Russia was probably Napoleonic France’s most formidable military rival. Indeed, the Russian army played the key role in driving Napoleon from power between 1812 and 1815. There was even fear in the wake of France’s collapse that Russia might try to dominate Europe. But Russia did not make a run for hegemony after 1815. Instead, its position in the European balance of power declined over the next hundred years. Russia fought 3 wars against other great power during that period and suffered humiliating defeats in each: the Crimean War, the Russo-Japanese War, and WW1.
Not surprisingly, Russia’s war economy could not support its army’s needs. Rifle production was so woeful that in 1915, only part of the army was armed, with others waiting for casualties to get arms.
Stalin ruthlessly but effectively modernized the Soviet economy in the 1930s, so that by the start of WW2 Germany enjoyed only a modest advantage in wealth over the Soviet Union. Thus, the Soviet war economy was able to compete effectively with there German war economy in WW2. Indeed, the Soviets outproduced the Germans in virtually every category of military weaponry for the year from 1941-1945.
Marshal Ogarkov was dismissed as the chief of the Soviet general staff in 1984 for saying publicly that Soviet industry was falling badly behind American industry, which meant that Soviet weaponry would soon be inferior to American weaponry.
During the 1930s, British policymakers kept a tight rein on defense spending despite facing multiple threats around the globe, because they feared that a massive increases would wreck the British economy, which they referred to as the “4th arm of defense.” Similarly, the administration of President Eisenhower was dominated by fiscal conservatives who tended to see high levels of defense spending as a threat to the American economy.
The available evidence indicates that Japan had a larger GNP than the Soviet Union’s by 1987. This case shows that although all great powers are wealthy states, not all wealthy states are great powers.
Throughout the Cold War, not only was the US much wealthier than the USSR, but it also enjoyed a significant advantage in naval forces, strategic bombers, and nuclear warheads. Nevertheless, France, West Germany, Italy, Japan, the UK, and eventually China considered the USSR, not the US, to be the most powerful state in the system. Indeed, those states allied with the US against the USSR because they feared the Soviet army, not the American army. Moreover, there is little concern about a Russian threat today — even thought Russia has thousands of nuclear weapons — because the Russian army is weak and in no position to launch a major ground offensive.
Land power is centered around armies, but it also includes the air and naval forces that support them.
Land power dominates the other kinds of military power for another reason: only armies can expeditiously defeat an opponent. Blockading navies and strategic cannot produce quick and decisive victories in wars between great powers. They are useful mainly for fighting lengthy wars of attrition. But states rarely go to war unless they think that rapid success is likely. In fact, the prospect of a protracted conflict is usually an excellent deterrent to war. Consequently, a great power’s army is its main instrument for initiating aggression. A state’s offensive potential, in other words, is embedded largely in its army.
Command of the sea means controlling the lines of communication that crisscross the ocean’s surface, so that a state’s commercial and military ships can freely move across them. For a navy to command an ocean, it need not control all of the sea all of the time, but it must be Abel to control the strategically important parts whenever it wants to use them, and deny the enemy the ability to do likewise.
Although navies often bombarded enemy ports in the age of sail (1500-1850), they could not deliver enough firepower to those targets to be more than a nuisance. Moreover, naval gunfire did not have the range to hit targets located off the coast.
The 2 great naval theorists of modern times, Corbett and Mahon, believed that a blockade is the navy’s ace strategy for winning great-power wars. Blockade, which Mahan called “the most striking and awful mark of sea power,” works by strangling a rival state’s economy.
But navies are not always necessary to carry out a blockade. A state that dominates a continent and controls its major ports can stop trade between the states located on that continent and states located elsewhere, thus blockading the outside states.
By late July 1945, Japan was a defeated nation, and its leaders recognized that fact. The only important issue at stake was whether Japan could avoid unconditional surrender.
There is not a single case in the historical record in which either a blockade or a strategic bombing campaign designed to punish an enemy’s population caused significant public protests against the target government. If anything, it appears that punishment generates more public anger against the attacker than against the target government.
Governing elites are rarely moved to quit a war because their populations are being brutalized. In fact, one could argue that the more punishment that a population suffers, the more difficult it is for the leaders to quit the war. The basis of this claim is that bloody defeat greatly increases the likelihood that after the war is over the people will seek revenge against the leaders who led them down the road to destruction.
In more than 30 major strategic air campaigns that have thus far been waged, air power has never driven the masses into the streets to demand anything.
Decapitation is a fanciful strategy. It especially difficult in wartime to locate and kill a rival political leader. But even if decapitation happens, it is unlikely that the successor’s politics will be substantially different from those of the dead predecessor.
The Japanese economy, which had only about one-eighth the size of the American economy at the start of WW2, was in shambles by the spring of 1945.
During the Cold War, it was difficult to assess the NATO-Warsaw Pact conventional balance, because there were substantial differences in the size and composition of the various armies on the central front. To deal with this problem, the US DoD devised the “armored division equivalent,” or ADE, score as a basic measure of ground force capability.
Insular powers are unlikely to initiate wars of conquest against other great powers, because they would have to traverse a large body of water to reach their target. The same moats that protect insular powers also impede their ability to project power. Neither the UK or the US has ever seriously threatened to conquer another great power.
Appeasement is a more ambitious strategy. The appeaser aims to modify the behavior of the aggressor by conceding it power, in the hope that this gesture will make the aggressor feel more secure, thus dampening or eliminating its motive for aggression.
During the Cold War, American strategists focused their attention on 3 regions outside the Western Hemisphere: Europe, Northeast Asia, and the Persian Gulf. The US was determined that the USSR not dominate any of those areas. Defending Western Europe was America’s number 1 strategic priority because it is a wealthy region that was directly threatened by the Soviet army.
The US paid less attention to Africa, the rest of the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and the South Asian subcontinent, because there was little potential power in those regions.
Not only does it involve death and destruction, sometimes on a vast scale, but it became fashionable in the 20th century to argue that conquest does not pay and that war is therefore a futile enterprise. The most famous work making this point is probably Norman Angell’s The Great Illusion, which was published a few years before the start of WW1. Nevertheless, the argument is wrong: conquest can still improve a state’s power position.
There are many examples of states expanding via the sword and yet not damaging their economies in the process. The US during the 1st half of the 19th century and Prussia between 1862-70 are obvious cases in point; aggression paid handsome economic dividends for both states.
As a senator, Truman had this strategy in mind in 1941 when he reacted to the Nazi invasion of the USSR by saying, “If we see that Germany is winning we ought to help Russia, and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany, and that way let them kill as many as possible.”
External balancing has a downside: it is often slow and inefficient. The difficulties of making an alliance work smoothly are reflected in the comment of the French general who said at the end of WW1, “Since I have seen alliances at work, I have lost something of my admiration for Napoleon [who almost always fought without allies against alliances].” Putting together balancing coalitions quickly and making them function smoothly is often difficult, because it takes time to coordinate the efforts of prospective allies of member states, even when there is wide agreement on what needs to be done. Threatened states usually disagree over how the burdens should be distributed among alliance members.
Threatened states can take 4 measures to facilitate buck-passing. First, they can seek good diplomatic relations with the aggressor, or at least not to do anything to provoke it, in the hope that it will concentrate its attention on the intended “buck-catcher.”
Second, buck-passers usually maintain cool relations with the intended buck-catcher, not just because this diplomatic distancing might help foster good relations with the aggressor, but also because the buck-passer does not want to get dragged into a war on the side of the buck-catcher.
Third, great power can mobilize additional resources of their own to make buck-passing work. By building up its own defense, a buck-passer makes itself an imposing target, thus giving the aggressor incentive to focus its attention on the intended buck-catcher.
Fourth, it sometimes makes sense for a buck-passer to allow or even facilitate the growth in power of the intended buck-catcher. That burden-bearer would then have a better chance of containing the aggressor state, which would increase the buck-passer’s prospects of remaining on the sidelines.
There is a strong tendency to buck-pass or “free-ride” inside balancing coalitions, although the danger that buck-passing will wreck the alliance is a powerful countervailing force. During the early years of WW1, for example, British policymakers tried to minimize the amount of fighting their troops did on the western front and instead get their alliance partners, France and Russia, to assume the costly burden of wearing down the German army. The UK hoped then to use its still-fresh troops to win the final battles against Germany and to dictate the terms of peace. The UK would “win the peace,” because it would emerge from the war in a substantially more powerful position than either the defeated Germans or the battle-worn French and Russians. The UK’s allies quickly figured out what was going on, however, and forced the British army to participate fully in the awful task of bleeding the German army white.
The US entered WW2 in December 1941 but did not land its army in France until June 1944, less than a year before the war ended.
Bandwagoning happens when a state joins force with a more powerful opponent, conceding that its formidable new partner will gain a disproportionate share of the spoils they conquer together. Bandwagoning is a strategy for the weak. Its underlying assumption is that if a state is badly outgunned by a rival, it makes no sense to resist its demands, because that adversary will take what it wants by force anyway and inflict considerable punishment in the process. The bandwagon must hope that the troublemaker is merciful. Thucydides’ famous dictum that “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must” captures the essence of bandwagoning.
The history of great-power politics involves primarily the clashing of revisionist states, and the only status quo powers that appear in the story are regional hegemons — i.e., states that have achieved the pinnacle of power. In other words, great powers look for opportunities to gain power and take advantage of them when they arise.
They were almost always looking for opportunities to expand through conquest, and when they saw an opening, they usually jumped at it. Gaining power did not temper their offensive proclivities; it whetted them.
In case anyone still had doubts about Japan’s intentions, its foreign ministry issued an important statement in 1934, proclaiming that East Asia was in Japan’s sphere of influence and warning the other great powers not to help China in its struggle with Japan. In effect, Japan fashioned its own version of the Monroe Doctrine for East Asia.
Two critical events in Europe during the early years of WW2 — the fall of France in the spring of 1940 and the German invasion of the USSR a year later — opened up new opportunities for Japanese aggression in Southeast Asia and the western Pacific.
In fact, it was because he and his successors correctly understood that the German army had conquered about as much territory as it could without provoking a great-power war, which Germany was likely to lose.
Germany controlled 20% of European wealth in 1880, while France controlled 13% and Russia 3%. The UK, however, possessed 59% of the total, which gave it nearly a 3:1 advantage over Germany. In 1890, Germany’s share had grown to 25%, while the figures for France and Russia were 13% and 5%, respectively. But the UK still controlled 50% of European wealth, which gave it a 2:1 advantage over Germany.
Probably the most important Soviet initiative of the 1920s was Stalin’s decision to modernize the Soviet economy through forced industrialization and the ruthless collectivization of agriculture. He was motivated in large part by security concerns. In particular, he believed that if the Soviet economy continued to lag behind those of the world’s other industrialized states, the Soviet Union would be destroyed in a future great-power war. Speaking in 1931, Stalin said, “We have lagged behind the advanced countries by 50-100 years. We must cover that distance in 10 years. Either we’ll it or they will crush us.” A series of 5-year plans, initiated in 1928, transformed the USSR from a destitute great power in the 1920s into Europe’s most powerful state by the end of WW2.
Moscow was in no position to take the offensive in Asia during the 1930s, but instead concentrated on containing Japanese expansion. Toward that end, the Soviets maintained a powerful military presence in the region and provided considerable assistance to China after the start of the Sino-Japanese War in the summer of 1937. Their aim was to keep Japan bogged down in a war of attrition with China.
Stalin apparently understood soon after Hitler came to power that the Third Reich was likely to start a great-power war in Europe and that there was not much chan of reconstituting the Triple Entente (the UK, France, Russia) to deter Nazi Germany or fight against it if war broke out. So Stalin pursued a buck-passing strategy. Specifically, he went to considerable lengths to develop friendly relations with Hitler, so that the Nazi leader would strike first against the UK and France, not the Soviet Union. Stalin hoped that the ensuing war would be long and costly for both sides.
Recalling how Stalin and his lieutenants reacted to news of the debacle on the western front, Khrushchev wrote, “Stalin’s nerves cracked when he learned about the fall of France. The most pressing and deadly threat in all history faced the Soviet Union. We felt as though we were facing the threat all by ourselves.”
By the early 1950s, the US and its allies around the globe had a formidable containment policy firmly in place, and there was little opportunity for further Soviet expansion in Europe, Northeast Asia, or the Persian Gulf.
The first wave of scholars to study these events argued that the Cold War ended because key Soviet leaders, especially Gorbachev, underwent a fundamental transformation in their thinking about international politics during the 1980s. Rather than seeking to maximize the USSR’s share of world power, Moscow’s new thinkers were motivated by the pursuit of economic prosperity and liberal norms of restraint in the use of force. Soviet policymakers, in short, stopped thinking and acting like realists and instead adopted a new perspective emphasizing the virtues of cooperation among states.
Mussolini saw WW2 as an excellent chance to conquer foreign territory and gain power for Italy. Specifically, Germany’s stunning military successes in the early years of the war “gave Italy unprecedented leverage and freedom of action.”
States should not start wars that they are certain to lose, of course, but it is hard to predict with a high degree of certainty how wars will turn out. After a war is over, pundits and scholars often assume that the outcome was obvious from the start; hindsight is 20-20. In practice, however, forecasting is difficult, and states sometimes guess wrong and get punished as a result. Thus, it is possible for a rational state to initiate a war that it ultimately loses.
Critics of offensive policies claim that balancing coalitions form to defeat aspiring hegemons, but history shows that such coalitions are difficult to put together in a timely and efficient manner. Threatened states prefer to buck-pass to each other rather than form an alliance against their dangerous foes. For example, the balancing coalitions that finished Napoleonic France and Nazi Germany came together only after these aggressors had conquered much of Europe.
It is hard to apply the argument to the first states that made a run at regional hegemony. After all, they had few precedents, and the evidence from the earliest cases was mixed. Wilhelmine Germany, for example, could look at both Napoleonic France, which failed, and the US, which succeeded. It is hard to argue that German policymakers should have read history to say that they were sure to lose if they attempted to conquer Europe. One might concede that point but argue that Hitler certainly should have known better, because he could see that Wilhelmine Germany as well as Napoleonic France had failed to conquer Europe. But, what Hitler learned from those cases was not aggression did not pay, but rather that he should not repeat his predecessor’s mistakes when the Third Reich made its run at hegemony. Learning, in other words, does not always lead to choosing a peaceful outcome.
Although he successfully kept France and Russia from allying against Germany during his tenure in office, Russia probably would not have stood by and watched Germany defeat France. Indeed, it was apparent by the late 1880s that France and Russia were likely to form an alliance against Germany in the near future, whether Bismarck remained in power or not.
But the main factor behind the UK’s decision to form that 3-cornered alliance was Russia’s devastating defeat in the Russo-Japanese War (1904-5), which had little to do with German behavior. Russia was effectively knocked out of the European balance of power with that defeat, which meant a sudden and dramatic improvement in Germany’s power position on the continent. In sum, changes in the architecture of the European system, not German behavior, were the main cause of the Triple Entente.
Hitler also recognized the need to fashion a military instrument that could win quick victories and avoid the bloody battles of WW1. To that end he supported the building of panzer divisions and played an important role in designing the blitzkrieg strategy that helped Germany win one of the most stunning military victories of all time in France. Hitler’s Wehrmacht also won stunning victories against minor powers: Poland, Norway, Yugoslavia, and Greece. “From 1930-1941, Hitler succeeded in practically everything he undertook, in domestic and foreign politics and eventually also in the military field, to the amazement of the world.” If Hitler had died in July 1940 after France capitulated, he probably would be considered “one of the greatest of German statesmen.”
Two stunning events in Europe — the fall of France in June 1940 and especially Germany’s invasion of the USSR in June 1941 — drove the US to confront Japan, and eventually led to Pearl Harbor. The US did not seriously consider stopping the Japanese advance by force of arms, or consider Japan as an actual enemy, until the Far Eastern war had become clearly linked with the far greater (and, to the US, more important) war in Europe.
The Wehrmacht’s victory in the west not only knocked France and the Netherlands out of the war, but it also forced a badly weakened UK to concentrate on defending itself against a German assault from the air and the sea. Since those 3 European powers controlled most of Southeast Asia, that resource-rich region was now an open target for Japanese expansion. And if Japan conquered Southeast Asia, it could shut down a considerable portion of the outside aid flowing into China, which would increase Japan’s prospects of winning its war there.
Most American policymakers believed that the Wehrmacht was likely to defeat the Red Army, thus making Germany the hegemon in Europe. A Nazi victory would also have left Japan as the hegemon in Asia, since the USSR was the only great power with an army in Asia could check Japan. Thus, if the Soviets lost to the Germans, the US would have found itself confronting hostile hegemons in Asia as well as Europe.
The aim, however, was not simply to deter Japan from striking the USSR, but also to coerce Japan into abandoning China, Indochina, and possibly Manchuria, and more generally, any ambition it might have to dominate Asia. In short, the US employed massive coercive pressure against Japan to transform it into a second-rate power.
The US was well-positioned to coerce Japan. On the eve of WW2, Japan imported 80% of its fuel products, more than 90% of its gasoline, more than 60% of its machine tools, and almost 75% of its scrap iron from the US.
In effect, the Japanese would be defanged either peacefully or by force, and the choice was theirs.
The main concern of American strategists during this period was how to stop the Red Army from overrunning Western Europe. They believed that the best way to deal with that threat was to launch a nuclear bombing campaign against the Soviet industrial base. In essence, the strategy was “an extension” of the American strategic bombing campaign against Germany in WW2, although “greatly compressed in time, magnified in effect, and reduced in cost.”
It would be more accurate to define US nuclear policy in the 1950s as “massive preemption” rather than massive retaliation.
These cases support my claims that states do not lose their appetite for power as they gain more of it, and that especially powerful states are strongly inclined to seek regional hegemony. Japan, Germany, and the Soviet Union all set more ambitious foreign policy goals and behaved more aggressively as their power increased.
The UK had substantially more potential power than any other European state during most of the 19th century. Between 1840-60, Britain controlled nearly 70% of European industrial might, almost 5 times more than France, its closest competitor.
The ultimate goal of great powers is to achieve regional hegemony and block the rise of peer competitors in distant areas of the globe. In essence, states that gain regional hegemony act as offshore balancers in other regions. Nevertheless, those distant hegemons usually prefer to let the local great powers check an aspiring hegemony, while they watch from the sidelines.
Hardly anyone disagreed with Richard Only, the American Secretary of State, when he bluntly told the UK’s Lord Salisbury in his famous 1895 note, “Today the US is practically sovereign on this continent, and its fiat is law upon the subjects to which it confines its interposition. Its infinite resources combined with its isolated position render it master of the situation and practically invulnerable as against any or all other powers.”
American leaders had been devising schemes since the early 1800s to acquire Florida, including a number of invasions by US troops.
However, the US did not acquire all the territory it wanted. In particular, it aimed to conquer Canada when it went to war with the UK in 1812, and many of its leaders continued to covet Canada throughout the 19th century. There was also pressure to expand southward into the Caribbean, where Cuba was considered the prize target.
This consolidation process, which was sometimes brutal and bloody, involved 4 major steps: fighting the Civil War to eliminate slavery and the threat of dissolution of the union; displacing the Natives who controlled much of the land that the US had recently acquired; bringing large numbers of immigrants to the US to help populate its vast expanses of territory; and building the world’s largest economy.
The population of the US more than tripled during the 2nd half of the 19th century, in good part because massive numbers of European immigrants crossed the Atlantic. Between 1851-1900, approximately 16.7M immigrants came to the US.
The UK was the world’s wealthiest country in 1850, with roughly 4 times the industrial might of the US. Only 50 years later, however, the US was the wealthiest country on the globe and had more than 1.6 times the industrial might of the UK.
In effect, the UK retreated across the Atlantic Ocean and left the US to run the Western Hemisphere. A commonplace explanation for this rapprochement is that the UK had to consolidate its military forces in Europe to check a rising Germany, so it cut a deal with the US, which was accommodating because it has a vested interest in getting the British out of North America, as well as having them maintain the balance of power in Europe. There is much truth in this line of argument, but there is an even more important reason why the British-American rivalry ended in 1900: the UK no longer had the power to challenge the US in the Western Hemisphere.
The Monroe Doctrine was laid out for the first time in President James Monroe’s annual message to Congress on December 2, 1823. He made 3 main points about American foreign policy. First, Monroe stipulated that the US would not get involved in Europe’s wars, in keeping with Washington’s advice in his famous “farewell address.” Second, he put the European powers on notice that they could not acquire new territory in the Western Hemisphere to increase the size of their already considerable empires. Third, the US wanted to make sure that the European powers did not form alliances with the independent states of the Western Hemisphere or control them in any way.
The world the American Revolutionary leaders found themselves in was a brutal, amoral cockpit. It was, above all, a world in which power was king.
Nevertheless, the Europeans, especially the British, were determined to do what they could to contain the US and prevent it from further expanding its borders. The UK actually succeeded at stopping the US from conquering Canada in the war of 1812. The UK has few good options for preventing the westward expansion of the US, but it did form brief alliances with the Native Americans of the Great Lakes region, and later with Texas when it was briefly an independent sate.
Europeans began speaking openly in the early 1840s about the need to maintain a “balance of power” in NA, a euphemism for containing further American expansion while increasing the relative power of the European empires.
The chief defense problem was the British, whose ambition seemed to be hem the nation in. On the periphery of the US, they were the dangerous potential aggressors. The best way to hold them off was to acquire the periphery. This was the meaning of the Monroe Doctrine in the age of Manifest Destiny.
The US reluctantly kept military forces in Europe after WW2 because the Soviet Union controlled the easter two-thirds of the continent and it had the military might to conquer the rest of Europe.
Meanwhile, the Japanese army remained an impressive fighting force. But Japan was not a potential hegemony because Russia was the wealthiest state in the region. Russia controlled 6% of the world industrial might in 1900, while Japan did not even control 1%. By 1910, Russia’s share had shrunk to 5%, while Japan’s share had grown to 1%.
The UK and China also helped check Japan in the 1920s. The UK was actually inclined to pull most of its forces out of Asia and strike a deal with Japan in the late 1930s, so that it could concentrate on containing Nazi Germany, which was a more direct and dangerous threat than was Japan. But the US, playing the role of the buck-passer, told the UK that any diminution of its force levels in Asia was unacceptable, and that the UK would have to remain engaged in Asia and balance against Japan. Otherwise, the US might not help it deal with the growing German threat in Europe. The British stayed in Asia. Although China was not a great power at the time, it managed to pin down the Japanese army in a costly and protracted war that Japan was unable to win. In fact, Japan’s experience in China between 1937 and 1945 bears considerable resemblance to the American experience in Vietnam and the Soviet experience in Afghanistan.
But the US did not fight to make peace in either world war. Instead, it fought to prevent a dangerous foe from achieving regional hegemony. Peace was a welcome byproduct of those endeavors. The same basic point holds for the Cold War: American military forces were in Europe to contain the USSR, not to maintain peace. The long peace that ensued was the happy consequences of a successful deterrence policy.
It was not until 1813 — more than 20 years after the fighting began — that all 4 of France’s great-power rivals came together in a balancing coalition and decisively defeated France.
The UK finally quite fighting on March 25, 1802, when it signed the Treaty of Amiens. This was the first time since the spring of 1792 that Europe was free of great-power war. But the peace, which was really just an armed truce, lasted only 14 months. Fighting broke out again on May 16, 1803, when the UK declared war against France.
Prior to the French Revolution, European armies were rather small in size and they were composed mainly of foreign mercenaries and the dregs of a state’s society. In the wake of the revolution, nationalism became a mighty force in France, and it led to the introduction of the novel concept of the “nation in arms.”
In essence, the UK and Russia were pursuing a buck-passing strategy, but their aim was not to get another state to balance against Prussia, which they did not a consider a threat, but instead to create a powerful Germany that could balance against France, which they did fear. The UK also thought that a unified Germany would help keep Russia’s attention focused on Europe, and away from Central Asia, where British and Russians were fierce rivals. Furthermore, Russia saw a powerful Germany as a check on Austria, which had recently become Russia’s bitter enemy.
The UK controlled about 68% of European wealth in 1860, whereas France controlled 14% and Prussia only 10%. By 1870, the UK still controlled roughly 64%, while Germany controlled 16% and France 13%.
Nationalism was the principal source of Austria-Hungary’s weakness. It was a multinational state, and most of its composite ethnic groups wanted independent states of their own.
The UK never made an explicit commitment to fight with its allies if Germany attacked them. The Triple Entente was not a tightly organized and formal alliance like the NATO.
Considered that the mobilized Germany army that went to war in 1914 was composed of 2.15M soldiers and 102 divisions. The 1933 version of that army had a little over 100K soldiers and 7 infantry divisions.
Hitler pulled Germany out of the Geneva Disarmament Conference and the League of Nations in October 1933, but he also signed a 10-year non-aggression pact with Poland in 1934, and a naval treaty with the UK in 1935.
The UK had powerful incentives to buck-pass in Europe, because it also faced threats from Japan in Asia and Italy in the Mediterranean, and its anemic economy could not provide for a substantial military presence in all 3 of those regions.
In reality, those alliances were largely moribund by the mid-1930s, in good party because France had no intention of coming to the aid of its allies, as it demonstrated when it abandoned Czechoslovakia at Munich in 1938. Indeed, France hoped to push Hitler eastward, where it hoped the Wehrmacht would get bogged down in a war in Eastern Europe or maybe even the Soviet Union.
To encourage Hitler to strike first in the East, French leaders went to some lengths during the 1930s to foster good relations with the Third Reich. That policy remained in place even after Munich.
In 1930, Weimar Germany accounted for 33% of European wealth, while the UK, its nearest competitor, controlled 27%. France and the USSR possessed 22% and 14%, respectively.
By 1940, Germany’s share of industrial might had grown to 36%, the USSR 28%, the UK 24%.
Germany had controlled 40% of European wealth in 1913, prior to WW1, while the UK had 28%. France and Russia accounted for 12% and 11%.
American policymakers also worried throughout 1946 and early 1947 that the Soviet Union would soon dominate Western Europe. Their fear was not that the Soviet army would drive its way to the Atlantic Ocean. Instead, US leaders feared that powerful communist parties with close ties to Moscow might come to power in France and Italy, because their economies were in terrible shape and their populations were deeply dissatisfied with their destitute status. The US responded to this problem in early June 1947 with the famous Marshall Plan, which was explicitly designed to fight “hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos” in Western Europe.
Throughout the 1950s, President Eisenhower was seriously interested in bringing American forces home and forcing the Western Europeans to defend themselves against the Soviet threat. Indeed, this impulse explains the forceful US support for European integration in the early Cold War.
In 1950, the USSR had a GNP of $126B, and it spent $15.5B on defense. The UK had a GNP of $71 and spent $2.3B on defense.
These limitations stem from the fact that nonstructural factors sometimes play an important role in determining whether or not a state goes to war. States usually do not fight wars for security reasons alone. Bismark’s decisions for war was also influenced by nationalism and other domestic political calculations.
Many theories about the causes of war have been propounded, which is not surprising, since the subject has always been of central importance to students of international politics. Some of those theories treat human nature as the taproot of conflict, while others focus on individual leaders, domestic politics, political ideology, capitalism, economic interdependence, and the structure of the international system. In fact, a handful of prominent theories point to the distribution of power as the key to understanding international conflict.
A system that contains an aspiring hegemon is said to be unbalanced; a system without such a dominant state is said to be balanced.
War is more likely in multipolarity than bipolarity for 3 reasons. First, there are more opportunities for war, because there are more potential conflict dyads in a multipolar system. Second, imbalances of power are more commonplace in a multipolar world, and thus great powers are more likely to have the capability to win a war, making deterrence more difficult and war more likely. Third, the potential for miscalculation is greater in multipolarity: states might think they have the capability to coerce or conquer another state when, in fact, they do not.
Bipolarity is the most stable of the different architectures, for 4 reasons. First, there are relatively fewer opportunities for conflict in bipolarity, and only one possible conflict dyad involving the great powers. Second, power is more likely to be equally distributed among the great powers in bipolarity. Furthermore, there is limited opportunity for the great powers to gang up against other states or take advantage of minor powers. Third, bipolarity discourages miscalculation and thus reduces the likelihood that the great powers will stumble into war. Fourth, although fears is constantly at play in world politics, bipolarity does not magnify those anxieties that haunt states.
Austria, which became Austria-Hungary in 1867, was a great power from 1792 until its demise in 1918. Great Britain and Germany were great powers from 1792-1945, although Germany was actually Prussia before 1871. Italy is considered a great power from 1861 until its collapse in 1943. Japan was a great power from 1895-1945.
The problem of discerning states’ intentions is especially acute when one ponders their future intentions, since it is almost impossible to know who the leaders of any country will be 5 or more years from now, much less what they will think about foreign policy.
Most American never think about it, but one of the main reasons the US is able to station military forces all around the globe and intrude in the politics of virtually every region is that it faces no serious threats in the Western Hemisphere. If the US had dangerous foes in its own backyard, it would be much less capable of roaming into distant regions.
The plain truth is that in the 19th century the supposedly peace-loving US compiled a record of territorial aggrandizement that has few parallels in recorded history. It is not surprising that Hitler frequently referred to America’s westward expansion as a model after Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941.
It is more likely that China will seek to grow its economy and become so powerful that it can dictate the boundaries of acceptable behavior to neighboring countries, and make it clear they will pay a substantial price if they do not follow the rules. After all, this is what the US has done in the Western Hemisphere.
A much more powerful China can also be expected to try to push the US out of the Asia-Pacific region, much as the US pushed the European great powers out of the Western Hemisphere in the 19th century. We should expect China to devise its own version of the Monroe Doctrine, as imperial Japan did in the 1930s.
The Chinese are interested in diverting the Brahmaputra River northward into the dying Yellow River. If this happens, it would cause major problems in India and Bangladesh. China is also working to redirect water from the Mekong River, a diversion that is almost certain to cause big problems in Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam.
Its aim will not be to threaten the American homeland directly, but rather to distract the US from looking abroad and force it to focus increased attention to its own neighborhood.
This problem is exacerbated by the “security dilemma,” which tells us that the measures a state takes to increase its own security usually wind up decreasing the security of other states. When a country adopt a policy or builds weapons that it thinks are defensive in nature, potential rivals invariably think that those steps are offensive in nature.
A retired Chinese admiral likened the American navy to a man with a criminal record “wandering just outside the gate of a family home.”
Unfortunately, many countries around the world would be eager to increase their economic intercourse with China, thus filling the vacuum created by Washington’s efforts to cut back its trade with and investment in China. For example, the countries in Europe, which would not be seriously threatened by China, would be prime candidates to take America’s place and continue fueling Chinese economic growth. In short, because China cannot be isolated economically, the US cannot slow its economic growth in any meaningful way.
Britain actually faced the same problem with a rising Germany before WW1. It was widely recognized in the British establishment that Germany’s economy was growing at a more rapid pace than Britain’s, which meant the balance of power between the 2 countries was shifting in Germany’s favor. A fierce debate ensued about whether Britain should try to slow German economic growth by sharply curtailing economic intercourse between the 2 countries. British policymakers concluded that this policy would hurt Britain more than Germany, in large part because Germany could turn to other countries that take the exports it sent to Britain, as well as provide most of the imports Germany received from Britain. At the same, the British economy would be badly hurt by the loss of imports from Germany, which would be hard to replace. So, Britain continued to trade with Germany — even though Germany gained power at Britain’s expense — simply because it was the least-bad alternative.
Nationalism, which is the most powerful political ideology on the planet, holds that the modern world is divided into a multitude of distinct social groups called nations, each desiring its own state. This is not to say every nation gets its own state or to deny that many states have more than one nation living within their borders.
People do not simply take pride in their own nation; they also compare it with other nations, especially those they frequently interact with and know well. Chauvinism usually emerges as most people come to believe that their nation is superior to others and deserves special recognition. This sense of specialness sometimes leads nations to conclude that they are the “chosen” people, a perspective that has a rich tradition in both China and the US, among other countries.
This perspective is popular among academics as well as policymakers in China. Many Chinese scholars like it because they see it as an alternative to the principal international relations theories, which are said to be Eurocentric and therefore oblivious to China’s exceptional culture. “Chinese culture advocates moral strength instead of military power, worships kingly rule instead of hegemonic rule, and emphasizes persuasion by virtue.”
Of course, this justification for war is remarkably pliable. As almost every student of international politics knows, political leaders and policymakers of all persuasions are skilled in figuring out clever ways of defining a rival country’s behavior as unjust or morally depraved. Hence, with the right spinmeister, Confucian rhetoric can be used to justify aggressive as well as defensive behavior. Like liberalism in the US, Confucianism makes it easy for Chinese leaders to speak like idealists and act like realists.