William C Wohlforth
Biographic Data
| ID | 1000156 |
|---|---|
| NAME | William C Wohlforth |
| GIVEN NAMES | William C |
| FAMILY NAME | Wohlforth |
| SIGNATURE | WOHLFORTH W C |
| AFFILIATIONS | Dartmouth College |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 65 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 783 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 62 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 3 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1987 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 17 |
Unipolarity, Grand Strategy, and the Economics Security Trade-Off
A decade after Nuno Monteiro’s Theory of Unipolar Politics (TUP) appeared, major developments, from renewed great power rivalry to Russia’s war in Ukraine to the unraveling of the open international economic system, seem to contradict the book’s arguments. A taproot of this disjuncture is TUP’s implicit assumptions about the interaction between economics and security. We show that relaxing those assumptions exposes a complex set of interactions b…
Polarity and International Order: Past and Future
The Challenge of Evaluating Grand Strategy
This chapter demonstrates that evaluating grand strategy is central to the study of international relations, establishes just how big a challenge it is, and proposes principles for meeting that challenge in a rigorous manner. A grand strategy is a sustained, major intervention in a mind-bogglingly complex social world that aims to advance an actor’s interests over the long term. Evaluating such a strategy requires ruthless discipline in defining …
The tragedy of US–Russian relations: Nato centrality and the revisionists’ spiral
Realism and great power subversion
I present a realist theory of subversion among great powers, an understudied phenomenon in the burgeoning literature on subversive statecraft. I show that a simple, rational cost-benefit calculus accounts for comparatively low-levels of subversion among non-belligerent great powers, much higher levels among belligerent great powers, and more frequent, violent and larger-scale subversion against weaker targets. Brief case studies of mid-twentieth …
Status-Seeking and Nation-Building: The "Piedmont Principle" Revisited
The pursuit of status on the international stage through participation in the Crimean War was critical to Italy's drive toward unification. Piedmont's Prime Minster Count Camillo di Cavour's entry into the wartime alliance with France and Great Britain was a major component in his nation-building project, which Italy's enhanced status after the war brought to fruition. Primary sources highlight the nexus between status competition at the internat…
Raison de l’Hégémonie (The Hegemon’s Interest): Theory of the Costs and Benefits of Hegemony
When and under what conditions does hegemony pay? The fate of any hegemonic order hinges on the answer to this question. Notwithstanding major relevant research traditions, international relations scholarship remains poorly equipped to answer it. We fill this gap with a theoretical framework for understanding the costs and benefits of hegemony that identifies the conditions that affect potential complementarity between military protection and eco…
The Oxford Handbook of International Security
Future-oriented questions are woven through the study and practice of international security. The 48 essays collected in this Handbook use such questions to provide a tour of the most innovative and exciting new areas of research as well as major developments in established lines of inquiry. The results of their efforts are: the definitive statement of the state of international security and the academic field of security studies, a comprehensive…
Moral authority and status in International Relations: Good states and the social dimension of status seeking
We develop scholarship on status in international politics by focusing on the social dimension of small and middle power status politics. This vantage opens a new window on the widely-discussed strategies social actors may use to maintain and enhance their status, showing how social creativity, mobility, and competition can all be system-supporting under some conditions. We extract lessons for other thorny issues in status research, notably quest…
An abiding antagonism: Realism, idealism and the mirage of western–Russian partnership after the Cold War
Realism and foreign policy
This chapter considers how familiarity with realist theory improves foreign policy analysis (FPA), focusing on two features of realism that are often in tension with each other: its firm grounding in centuries of real foreign policy practice, and its aspiration to create powerful general theories that help to simplify and explain the international setting in which foreign policy takes place. The chapter begins with a discussion of the main theore…
Is US grand strategy self-defeating? Deep engagement, military spending and sovereign debt
Questions regarding the economic consequences of US grand strategy have gained new salience. This article provides an empirical test of the relationship between US military expenditures and public debt and clarifies the real constraints the US faces issuing debt. Neither results from the statistical analysis nor the economic theory of sovereign debt support the retrenchment position regarding the impact of military spending on public debt (1973–2…
The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers in the Twenty-first Century: China's Rise and the Fate of America's Global Position
Unipolarity is arguably the most popular concept used to analyze the U.S. global position that emerged in 1991, but the concept is totally inadequate for assessing how that position has changed in the years since. A new framework that avoids unipolarity's conceptual pitfalls and provides a systematic approach to measuring how the distribution of capabilities is changing in twenty-first-century global politics demonstrates that the United States w…
Realism and security studies
It is impossible to understand contemporary Security Studies without a grounding in realism.1 After all, many of the most influential theories that have ever been advanced about violence and security among human groups fall within this intellectual tradition.2Given the many scholarly criticisms of realism, ongoing debates about its place in security studies and the proliferation in recent years of such realist ‘brands’ as defensive, offensive and…
Nation-Building through War
How do the outcomes of international wars affect domestic social change? In turn, how do changing patterns of social identification and domestic conflict affect a nation’s military capability? We propose a “second image reversed” theory of war that links structural variables, power politics, and the individuals that constitute states. Drawing on experimental results in social psychology, we recapture a lost building block of the classical realist…
Status and World Order
Can the international order be modified to incorporate a greater role for rising or more assertive powers such as China, Russia, India, Brazil, and Turkey? While the rise and decline of major powers cannot be forecast with precision, there is scant uncertainty about the core expectation that relative economic and military clout will shift away from the states that created and have upheld the current international order – the United States and its…
Power, Order, and Change in World Politics
Are there recurring historical dynamics and patterns that can help us understand today's power transitions and struggles over international order? What can we learn from the past? Are the cycles of rise and decline of power and international order set to continue? Robert Gilpin's classic work, War and Change in World Politics offers a sweeping and influential account of the rise and decline of leading states and the international orders they crea…
Status Dilemmas and Interstate Conflict
A rising China seeks the status of a great power second to none in a multipolar world. A developing China wants to retain the status of a poor country, a proud member of the Group of 77 (G77), resisting attempts to accord it developed country status. The United States is the "indispensable nation," the world's Number One, whose proper role in all global endeavors is that of the leader. Washington is a coequal partner with all other major powers, …
Status in World Politics
Rising powers such as Brazil, China, India, Russia, and Turkey are increasingly claiming heightened profiles in international politics. Although differing in other respects, rising states have a strong desire for recognition and respect. This pioneering volume on status features contributions that develop propositions on status concerns and illustrate them with case studies and aggregate data analysis. Four cases are examined in depth: the United…
Don't Come Home, America: The Case against Retrenchment
After sixty-five years of pursuing a grand strategy of global leadership—nearly a third of which transpired without a peer great power rival—has the time come for the United States to switch to a strategy of retrenchment? According to most security studies scholars who write on the future of U.S. grand strategy, the answer is an unambiguous yes: they argue that the United States should curtail or eliminate its overseas military presence, abolish …
Debating American Engagement: The Future of U.S. Grand Strategy
October 01 2013 Debating American Engagement: The Future of U.S. Grand Strategy Campbell Craig, Campbell Craig Campbell Craig is Professor of International Politics at Aberystwyth University, and coauthor, with Fredrik Logevall, of America's Cold War: The Politics of Insecurity. The author is grateful to Jan Ruzicka and Benoît Pelopidas for their many comments and suggestions. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Ben…
The Cold War and After: History, Theory, and the Logic of International Politics
Journal Article The Cold War and After: History, Theory, and the Logic of International Politics Get access The Cold War and After: History, Theory, and the Logic of International Politics by Marc Trachtenberg. Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 2012. 322 pp. Cloth, $75.00; paper,$27.95. William C. Wohlforth William C. Wohlforth Dartmouth College Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Political Science Qu…
US Leadership and the Limits of International Institutional Change
It has become commonplace to bemoan the gap between today's institutional order and the nature and scope of the global problems that fall under its purview. For the order to change, however, one of two things must occur. Either the current powerful backers of the current institutional order need to reform it, or they need to stand aside and let the others do the job. For either of those things to occur, the system's still most-powerful actor woul…
How Not to Evaluate Theories: How Not to Evaluate Theories
The recent decline in the United States' economic fortunes does not vindicate any prediction made by any balance-of-power realist, has no implications for any theoretical proposition about the functioning of a unipolar system, and has not caused a structural shift to bi- or multipolarity. Things can be made to seem otherwise only when scholars use inconsistent measures of capabilities, do not define terms with precision, forward inherently unfals…
Introduction: Unipolarity, state behavior, and systemic consequences
American primacy in the global distribution of capabilities is one of the most salient features of the contemporary international system. The end of the Cold War did not return the world to multipolarity. Instead the United States – already materially preeminent – became more so. We currently live in a one superpower world, a circumstance unprecedented in the modern era. No other great power has enjoyed such advantages in material capabilities – …
The Stability of a Unipolar World
July 01 1999 The Stability of a Unipolar World William C. Wohlforth William C. Wohlforth Assistant Professor of International Relations in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Author and Article Information William C. Wohlforth Assistant Professor of International Relations in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University…
Unipolarity, Status Competition, and Great Power War
Most scholars hold that the consequences of unipolarity for great power conflict are indeterminate and that a power shift resulting in a return to bipolarity or multipolarity will not raise the specter of great power war. This article calls into question the core assumptions underlying the consensus: (1) that people are mainly motivated by the instrumental pursuit of tangible ends such as physical security and material prosperity and (2) that maj…
Unipolarity, State Behavior, and Systemic Consequences
The United States emerged from the 1990s as an unrivaled global power to become a “unipolar” state. This extraordinary imbalance has triggered global debate. Governments and peoples around the world are struggling to understand to how an American-centered unipolar system operates—and to respond to it. What is the character of domination in a unipolar distribution? To what extent can a unipolar state translate its formidable capabilities into mean…
Hard Times for Soft Balancing
The development of the concept of soft balancing is an attempt to stretch balance of power theory to encompass an international system in which traditional counterbalancing among the major powers is absent. There are two fundamental faws, however, in current treatments of soft balancing: the failure to consider alternative explanations for state actions that have the effect of constraining the United States, and the absence of empirical analysis …
Realism and the End of the Cold War
iNlodern realism began as a reaction to the breakdown of the post-World War I international order in the 1930s. The collapse of great-power cooperation after World War II helped establish it as the dominant approach to the theory and practice of international politics in the United States. During the Cold War, efforts to displace realism from its dominant position were repeatedly thwarted by the continued salience of the U.S.-Soviet antagonism: a…
The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers in the Twenty-first Century: China's Rise and the Fate of America's Global Position
Unipolarity is arguably the most popular concept used to analyze the U.S. global position that emerged in 1991, but the concept is totally inadequate for assessing how that position has changed in the years since. A new framework that avoids unipolarity's conceptual pitfalls and provides a systematic approach to measuring how the distribution of capabilities is changing in twenty-first-century global politics demonstrates that the United States w…
The Perception of Power: Russia in the Pre-1914 Balance
International relations scholars do not agree on the connection between the balance of power and war. They question whether or not an equal distribution of power among states or alliances leads to stability, whether the preponderance of power in favor of one actor or alliance leads to peace, or whether the key lies in the transition of preponderance from one power to another. Everyone is familiar with these questions; yet, more than twenty years …
Don't Come Home, America: The Case against Retrenchment
After sixty-five years of pursuing a grand strategy of global leadership—nearly a third of which transpired without a peer great power rival—has the time come for the United States to switch to a strategy of retrenchment? According to most security studies scholars who write on the future of U.S. grand strategy, the answer is an unambiguous yes: they argue that the United States should curtail or eliminate its overseas military presence, abolish …
American Power in the 21st Century
American Power in the 21st Century. Edited by David Held and Mathias Koenig-Archibugi. Cambridge, UK, and Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2004. 299p. $64.95 cloth, $26.95 paper. American primacy is destined to be one of the defining features of international politics for years to come. David Held and Mathias Koenig-Archibugi have assembled essays on the topic by a high-powered stable of scholars. Michael Cox, one of the most prolific and penetrating an…
Moral authority and status in International Relations: Good states and the social dimension of status seeking
We develop scholarship on status in international politics by focusing on the social dimension of small and middle power status politics. This vantage opens a new window on the widely-discussed strategies social actors may use to maintain and enhance their status, showing how social creativity, mobility, and competition can all be system-supporting under some conditions. We extract lessons for other thorny issues in status research, notably quest…
Nation-Building through War
How do the outcomes of international wars affect domestic social change? In turn, how do changing patterns of social identification and domestic conflict affect a nation’s military capability? We propose a “second image reversed” theory of war that links structural variables, power politics, and the individuals that constitute states. Drawing on experimental results in social psychology, we recapture a lost building block of the classical realist…
Power, Globalization, and the End of the Cold War: Reevaluating a Landmark Case for Ideas
Power test: Evaluating realism in response to the end of the cold war
(2000). Power test: Evaluating realism in response to the end of the cold war. Security Studies: Vol. 9, No. 3, pp. 60-107
Testing Balance-of-Power Theory in World History
The balance of power is one of the most influential theoretical ideas in international relations, but it has not yet been tested systematically in international systems other than modern Europe and its global successor. This article is the product of a collective and multidisciplinary research effort to redress this deficiency. We report findings from eight new case studies on balancing and balancing failure in different international systems tha…
American Primacy in Perspective
MORE THAN A DECADE AGO, political columnist Charles Krauthammer proclaimed in these pages the arrival of what he called a unipolar moment, a period in which one superpower, the United States, stood clearly above the rest of the international community (The Unipolar Moment, America and the World 19go/91). In the following years the Soviet Union collapsed, Russia's economic and military decline accelerated, and Japan stagnated, while the United Sta…
International Relations Theory and the Case against Unilateralism
What are the general costs associated with a U.S. shift toward unilateralism? According to the overwhelming majority of international relations (IR) scholars, the costs are very high. We evaluate the key arguments that underlie this assessment, namely that increased U.S. unilateralism will: (1) spur the formation of a coalition to check U.S. power; (2) reduce efficiency gains through lost opportunities for institutionalized cooperation; and (3) u…
Reality Check: Revising Theories of International Politics in Response to the End of the Cold War
The end of the cold war has produced a sustained debate on international relations theory. Some scholars argue that the unexpected and unexpectedly peaceful demise of the post-World War II international order undermines the entire research agenda of the subfield; others maintain that it warrants an adjustment of the balance between theories or theoretical traditions; and still others hold that it has little or no relevance to theory. This essay r…
Brother, Can You Spare a Paradigm? (Or Was Anybody Ever a Realist?)
July 01 2000 Brother, Can You Spare a Paradigm? (Or Was Anybody Ever a Realist?) Peter D. Feaver, Peter D. Feaver Associate Professor of Political Science at Duke University. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Gunther Hellmann, Gunther Hellmann Professor of Political Science at Johann Wolfgang Goethe-University, Frankfurt, Germany. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Randall L. Schwel…
How Not to Evaluate Theories: How Not to Evaluate Theories
The recent decline in the United States' economic fortunes does not vindicate any prediction made by any balance-of-power realist, has no implications for any theoretical proposition about the functioning of a unipolar system, and has not caused a structural shift to bi- or multipolarity. Things can be made to seem otherwise only when scholars use inconsistent measures of capabilities, do not define terms with precision, forward inherently unfals…
The tragedy of US–Russian relations: Nato centrality and the revisionists’ spiral
From Old Thinking to New Thinking in Qualitative Research
International Security - Volume 26, Number 4, Spring 2002
A Certain Idea of Science: How International Relations Theory Avoids the New Cold War History
So far, scholars of international politics have displayed relatively little inclination to use new evidence from Cold War-era archives to test their theories and generalizations. This indifference is unfortunate. The new archival evidence and memoirs can—and should—provide a reality check for theoretical debates. It is time for students of international relations to recognize the crucial link between historical explanation and theoretical proposi…
Is US grand strategy self-defeating? Deep engagement, military spending and sovereign debt
Questions regarding the economic consequences of US grand strategy have gained new salience. This article provides an empirical test of the relationship between US military expenditures and public debt and clarifies the real constraints the US faces issuing debt. Neither results from the statistical analysis nor the economic theory of sovereign debt support the retrenchment position regarding the impact of military spending on public debt (1973–2…
Assessing the balance
Save for the single issue of balance of power theory's relevance to the current system, where we and some of our critics are in real disagreement (and they are wrong), every aspect of this symposium has been highly productive. Our critics do not directly dispute the proposition that a rapid end of a single superpower world is extremely unlikely. They generally endorsed our core finding that the systemic constraints featured in IR scholarship are …
Gilpinian Realism and International Relations
I argue that realism in particular and IR more generally erred by assigning Kenneth Waltz's Theory of International Relations pride of place in revivifying realist thought. Had Robert Gilpin's War and Change in World Politics been given equal billing, international relations research would have unfolded quite differently over the past three decades. Scholars would not have been bewildered by change, bewitched by the balance of power, blind to num…
The Perception of Power: Russia in the Pre-1914 Balance
International relations scholars do not agree on the connection between the balance of power and war. They question whether or not an equal distribution of power among states or alliances leads to stability, whether the preponderance of power in favor of one actor or alliance leads to peace, or whether the key lies in the transition of preponderance from one power to another. Everyone is familiar with these questions; yet, more than twenty years …
Innovation and the Arms Race: How the United States and the Soviet Union Develop New Military Technologies. Matthew Evangelista
Realism and the End of the Cold War
iNlodern realism began as a reaction to the breakdown of the post-World War I international order in the 1930s. The collapse of great-power cooperation after World War II helped establish it as the dominant approach to the theory and practice of international politics in the United States. During the Cold War, efforts to displace realism from its dominant position were repeatedly thwarted by the continued salience of the U.S.-Soviet antagonism: a…
We All Lost the Cold War
Realism and the End of the Cold War
Leadership Style and Soviet Foreign Policy: Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Gorbachev, by James M. Goldgeier
How do world leaders make decisions in important foreign policy encounters? James Goldgeier argues that modern leaders come to power trained not as diplomats but as politicians, and their experiences as the most successful politicians at home provide the schooling for how to deal with friends and foes in the international arena. In Leadership Style and Soviet Foreign Policy, Goldgeier explores this important and understudied connection between ke…
New Evidence on Moscow's Cold War: Ambiguity in Search of Theory
Journal Article New Evidence on Moscow's Cold War: Ambiguity in Search of Theory Get access William C. Wohlforth William C. Wohlforth Yale University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Diplomatic History, Volume 21, Issue 2, April 1997, Pages 229–242, https://doi.org/10.1111/0145-2096.00066 Published: 17 December 2002
Reality Check: Revising Theories of International Politics in Response to the End of the Cold War
The end of the cold war has produced a sustained debate on international relations theory. Some scholars argue that the unexpected and unexpectedly peaceful demise of the post-World War II international order undermines the entire research agenda of the subfield; others maintain that it warrants an adjustment of the balance between theories or theoretical traditions; and still others hold that it has little or no relevance to theory. This essay r…
A Certain Idea of Science: How International Relations Theory Avoids the New Cold War History
So far, scholars of international politics have displayed relatively little inclination to use new evidence from Cold War-era archives to test their theories and generalizations. This indifference is unfortunate. The new archival evidence and memoirs can—and should—provide a reality check for theoretical debates. It is time for students of international relations to recognize the crucial link between historical explanation and theoretical proposi…
The Stability of a Unipolar World
July 01 1999 The Stability of a Unipolar World William C. Wohlforth William C. Wohlforth Assistant Professor of International Relations in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Author and Article Information William C. Wohlforth Assistant Professor of International Relations in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University…
Power test: Evaluating realism in response to the end of the cold war
(2000). Power test: Evaluating realism in response to the end of the cold war. Security Studies: Vol. 9, No. 3, pp. 60-107
Ideology and the Cold War
Scholars interested in international relations theory and history are indebted to Mark Kramer for his splendid review of new historical evidence on the role of ideas and power during the Cold War. I agree with Kramer that new evidence by itself never settles learned debates such as the one he reviews. However, the sharper the debate, the bigger the potential payoff from fresh evidence. Toward that end, I have three comments
Brother, Can You Spare a Paradigm? (Or Was Anybody Ever a Realist?)
July 01 2000 Brother, Can You Spare a Paradigm? (Or Was Anybody Ever a Realist?) Peter D. Feaver, Peter D. Feaver Associate Professor of Political Science at Duke University. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Gunther Hellmann, Gunther Hellmann Professor of Political Science at Johann Wolfgang Goethe-University, Frankfurt, Germany. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Randall L. Schwel…
The Russian-Soviet empire: A test of neorealism
Russia is by some measures the most successful imperial enterprise in history. Surpassed in size only by the British and Mongol empires, Russia and its Soviet successor proved far more durable than either one. It retained its peak territorial extent longer than any other empire, and for most of the last 400 years it has been the largest polity on earth. Moreover, both St. Petersburg and Moscow were hugely successful as great powers, playing major…
Power, Globalization, and the End of the Cold War: Reevaluating a Landmark Case for Ideas
From Old Thinking to New Thinking in Qualitative Research
International Security - Volume 26, Number 4, Spring 2002
American Primacy in Perspective
MORE THAN A DECADE AGO, political columnist Charles Krauthammer proclaimed in these pages the arrival of what he called a unipolar moment, a period in which one superpower, the United States, stood clearly above the rest of the international community (The Unipolar Moment, America and the World 19go/91). In the following years the Soviet Union collapsed, Russia's economic and military decline accelerated, and Japan stagnated, while the United Sta…
Cold War Endgame: Oral History, Analysis, Debates
Introduction: The Role of Ideas and the End of the Cold War
The end of the Cold War helped to prompt new interest in the study of ideas in international politics. Once the province of a few dedicated researchers on the fringes of the discipline, scholarship on the role of ideas now occupies an important place in the mainstream of North American and especially European international relations research. The five articles in this special issue of the journal are intended to move the research agenda on ideas …
The End of the Cold War as a Hard Case for Ideas
The articles in this special issue of the journal succeeded in meeting the core objective set out in the introduction: to refine, deepen, and extend previous studies of the role of ideas in the end of the Cold War. In particular, they confront more forthrightly than past studies a major challenge of studying ideas in this case; namely, that ideas, material incentives, and policy all covaried. Two other important problems for those seeking to esta…
Hard Times for Soft Balancing
The development of the concept of soft balancing is an attempt to stretch balance of power theory to encompass an international system in which traditional counterbalancing among the major powers is absent. There are two fundamental faws, however, in current treatments of soft balancing: the failure to consider alternative explanations for state actions that have the effect of constraining the United States, and the absence of empirical analysis …
International Relations Theory and the Case against Unilateralism
What are the general costs associated with a U.S. shift toward unilateralism? According to the overwhelming majority of international relations (IR) scholars, the costs are very high. We evaluate the key arguments that underlie this assessment, namely that increased U.S. unilateralism will: (1) spur the formation of a coalition to check U.S. power; (2) reduce efficiency gains through lost opportunities for institutionalized cooperation; and (3) u…
Brooks and Wohlforth Reply
January 01 2006 Brooks and Wohlforth Reply Stephen G. Brooks, Stephen G. Brooks Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar William C. Wohlforth William C. Wohlforth Hanover, New Hampshire Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Author and Article Information Stephen G. Brooks William C. Wohlforth Hanover, New Hampshire Online ISSN: 1531-4804 Print ISSN: 0162-2889 © 2006 by the President and Fello…
American Power in the 21st Century
American Power in the 21st Century. Edited by David Held and Mathias Koenig-Archibugi. Cambridge, UK, and Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2004. 299p. $64.95 cloth, $26.95 paper. American primacy is destined to be one of the defining features of international politics for years to come. David Held and Mathias Koenig-Archibugi have assembled essays on the topic by a high-powered stable of scholars. Michael Cox, one of the most prolific and penetrating an…
Introduction: Balance and Hierarchy in International Systems
The balance of power is one of the most influential ideas in international relations (IR). No theoretical concept has been the subject of as much scholarly inquiry and none is more likely to fall from the lips of foreign policy analysts and practitioners. This continued fascination with the balance of power is understandable, for it appears as central to scholarly debates about the basic properties of international systems as it is to policy deba…
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