Brooks and Wohlforth Reply
Stephen G. Brooks and William C. Wohlforth
In “The Myth of Multipolarity,” we showed that if the term “polarity” is defined as it was by the scholars who invented it—namely, as the distribution of power resources that states can use to pursue their aims—the international system remains closer to unipolarity than to bipolarity or multipolarity. One country, the United States, is still far more powerful than even its closest competitors. It boasts the world’s strongest military and the world’s biggest economy. It is home to a vast proportion of the world’s leading technology firms. It dominates the world’s alliance systems. No other country, not even China, will be in the same league in the foreseeable future.
We labeled the current system “partial unipolarity” to emphasize that although Washington’s lead remains substantial, the power gap has narrowed from the “total unipolarity” that existed right after the Soviet Union’s demise. But this characterization of the world still earned objections from several notable scholars. In their responses to our piece, Joshua Shifrinson, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Bilahari Kausikan, and Robert Keohane take issue with our assessment of Washington’s power and what it means. They write that the world is no longer unipolar—or that if it is, this unipolarity is irrelevant.
But these authors fail to present compelling alternative definitions of multipolarity. They cannot prove that unipolarity is of little international consequence. They do not show that U.S. leadership is insignificant. And appearances notwithstanding, none of the responders ultimately contests our core claim: that the United States remains, far and away, the world’s most powerful country.
DOUBLE STANDARDS
How can this be, when Shifrinson flatly concludes that “unipolarity is no more”? The answer is that Shifrinson’s critique is largely semantic. He does not argue that other states have become true peers of the United States and indeed suggests they have not. Instead, he simply redefines unipolarity as a world “dominated by Washington—and by Washington alone.”
This definition is not unfamiliar. Analysts have a penchant for using implausibly high standards for judging U.S. power while using easy-peasy thresholds for other countries. Shifrinson, for example, says that if a state can “influence other leading countries’ calculations in peace and make a good showing against them in war,” it is a pole. But there has never been, and will never be, a country that can win against all others across all contingencies without much of a fight, just as there has never been, and will never be, a country that does not have to think about the potential influence of any other states when it makes foreign policy.
Consider, for example, the immediate post–Cold War years, when everyone agreed on the United States’ unprecedented preeminence. China and Russia still had what Shifrinson would describe as “good enough” technology to influence U.S. foreign policy choices. They would have been able to make a decent showing against the United States in a war had Washington been foolish enough to attack either of them. And they were hardly the only countries that challenged U.S. authority.
A quick glance at this magazine’s articles in the two decades after the Soviet collapse makes it abundantly clear that U.S. freedom of action was sometimes constrained and that Washington’s dominance was routinely contested by all kinds of unruly powers, including Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, North Korea, and Serbia. These countries took steps such as developing nuclear weapons, funding terrorists, and staring down the United States in tense conflicts. Balky allies jumped ship when Washington wanted to move against Iraq, and various countries formed regional trade blocs that created tension with the U.S.-led global economic system. Leaders across Asia and Europe talked about multipolarity and established new “anti-hegemonic” initiatives. Using a definition of unipolarity essentially the same as Shifrinson’s, the political scientist Samuel Huntington wrote an article admonishing U.S. officials “to stop acting and talking as if this were a unipolar world.” That was in 1999.
For Shifrinson, the requisites of a “pole” are so low that a lot of states qualify. Ukraine has proved it can “influence other leading countries’ calculations in peace and make a good showing against them in war.” States such as Iran and North Korea have been able to meet these thresholds since the 1990s. France and the United Kingdom both qualified in the early part of the Cold War, and by the Cold War’s later years, China, Germany, and Japan did as well. But during the Cold War, there was a near-universal consensus that the world had just two poles: the Soviet Union and the United States. It would be revisionism to suggest that other countries occupy anywhere near the same position. In defining unipolarity out of existence, Shifrinson waved away bipolarity as well. By his lights, all systems are multipolar.
The problem with Shifrinson’s thesis—changing the standards for what counts as a pole depending on the country—is endemic to debates over U.S. power. At any given moment, observers are struck by the limits of Washington’s influence and the challenges the United States faces. They are rarely as taken with the more severe constraints on Washington’s competitors. To use a baseball analogy, analysts ask the United States to consistently hit home runs and fixate on the moments it cannot. Meanwhile, they admire other powers for their ability to bunt. It makes sense that policymakers, defense planners, and defense contractors would use this double standard as they argue for their preferred priorities. But it is less clear why academics would adopt it, too. These analytical flaws do not mean Shifrinson is wrong about the obstacles the United States faces today. Indeed, we agree with his succinct summary of today’s strategic constraints, and we share his view that they are tougher than the ones the United States faced in the 1990s and the following decade. We stressed that in the age of total unipolarity, China and Russia were unwilling to even minimally challenge the status quo, whereas in a time of partial unipolarity, they are prepared to test Washington. They can even succeed if they choose small, easy, and less consequential targets (as Russia did with Crimea, and China is doing in the South China Sea). But the revisionist challenges the United States faces now pale in comparison to those faced by the most powerful countries in multipolar and bipolar eras.
These constraints are readily apparent when considering the worst-case scenario for U.S. interests. If matters go very badly for the United States and its allies, and very well for revisionist actors, Russia could successfully conquer around a fifth of Ukraine and China might acquire Taiwan. As tragic and unwelcome as those developments would be, they would not truly transform China’s or Russia’s international positions. But worries about such portentous revisionism were routine in past systems, as during the Cold War, which, as our article explained, would have fundamentally changed the balance of power.
INTERNATIONAL AUTHORITY
Slaughter, Kausikan, and Keohane—unlike Shifrinson—do not attempt to contest our description of U.S. power. They all agree that by the standard metrics used to measure power resources, the United States remains in a class by itself and that it will be a long time before China could be a peer. Their arguments instead center on a different point: that our argument is, effectively, immaterial. The United States’ standing as the sole superpower, they write, does not really matter in a world beset by a wide variety of transnational problems. And although they agree that the United States remains the dominant global force, they assert that we overlook other important international actors.
Slaughter, for example, takes a particular interest in the European Union, which she views as another pole. She points to its U.S.-sized economy and its members’ powerful armed forces as evidence of its weight. And she argues that the EU has shown it is an essential global player.
We agree the EU is a major force on trade, global regulation, international norms, international development, and other issues. But it is no pole. As we wrote in these pages 21 years ago, Brussels could only become a pole if it developed “impressive military capabilities” and wielded “its latent collective power like a state.” To do so, it would have to create “an autonomous and unified defense and defense-industrial capacity” that would be “under the control of a statelike decision-making body with the authority to act quickly and decisively.” Such a body could “be purchased only at the price of a direct frontal assault on European nations’ core sovereignty.” Unsurprisingly, Brussels never created it.
Basic explanations of global politics can help analysts uncover critical insights.
In fact, the EU has a smaller pool of power resources today, relative to the United States, than it did in the first decade of this century. And as one of us (Brooks) wrote in International Security, the EU’s ability to act decisively in foreign policy is hamstrung by the continued independence and “strategic cacophony” of its members. They diverge in many important domains, such as threat perceptions, constraining coordinated action. Real poles have the potential to mobilize resources at all times to act in all areas, not just sometimes in some areas.
The other responders might disagree with our conclusion about the EU, given that they are dismissive of raw calculations of power and instead focus on influence. Kausikan in particular suggests that any state with global sway should count as a pole and that there are, accordingly, many of them. It is easy, after all, to find anecdotes featuring the United States not getting what it wants as a comparatively poor actor exerts substantial influence. This fact is why Kausikan says our analysis of U.S. strength vis-à-vis China and other states is “correct but beside the point” and insists that the international order is “indeed multipolar.”
But Kausikan, like Shifrinson, makes the case against unipolarity by defining it out of existence. If unipolarity means that the United States must “run the show” and polarity is defined by how countries “perceive their strategic choices and exercise their agency,” then it is hard to think of a system that is not multipolar. This approach creates the same problem that Shifrinson’s does: multipolarity becomes a constant, not a variable, and the shifting balance of power therefore cannot be used to explain change.
THE POWER OF POLES
Like Kausikan, Keohane seems to suggest that polarity is an unhelpful concept and that analysts would be better off not reckoning with the power resources of states. If so, we strongly disagree: polarity remains a critical tool for understanding international relations for all kinds of reasons. Analyzing poles may be a simple way to describe the world, but basic explanations of global politics can help analysts uncover critical insights. By isolating the effects of polarity, analysts can also better understand the significance of variables that have little to do with the balance of power. And by focusing on polarity, experts can track how international politics changes over time.
For our part, we have used the same standard to measure polarity for more than two decades: How much of a lead does the United States have in the military, economic, and technological realms? We focused on that gap because it reflects the core insight from scholars, most notably Kenneth Waltz, who popularized the idea of polarity: international politics works differently depending on the number of roughly comparable states at the top. For all its bluntness, this approach does help experts see some key distinctions about the world today compared with the world of 1945, 1985, and even 2000.
Most foreign-policy analysts and policymakers grant that polarity is important; they would not frequently discuss it and make claims about it if they believed otherwise. In her response, Slaughter even writes that polarity is a “key background condition for officials to consider as they formulate policy.” Nonetheless, Slaughter’s main problem with our article seems to be that it is about polarity. It is not hard to infer why. Her critique—like Kausikan’s and Keohane’s—suggests that we think other factors do not matter in explaining the world. But at no point did we assert that polarity is the master variable that explains everything, and we are fully aware that the study of polarity is no substitute for careful consideration of webs of interdependence and relationships. We certainly accept that international institutions, norms, ideas, the global economy, technology, and new forms of interdependence are shaping the world. We simply believe that a careful focus on the balance of power is valuable, as well.
So why do these three responses all interpret our article as making extravagant claims about polarity’s importance? The answer may lie in the tendency of some prominent realist scholars to assert that polarity is far more important, empirically, than other variables. In our view, that claim was wrong even in the mid-twentieth century when the concept was invented, and it is less true now. Kausikan stresses that middle and smaller powers can and often do play key roles in important events; we certainly agree. Smaller powers exert more sway today than they did in the past, especially compared with the era when large empires ruled much of the planet. Yet the fact that lesser powers matter more does not mean that the world is multipolar or that polarity no longer influences global politics.
AMERICA FIRST
There is a final reason why polarity is worth studying and why the endurance of American unipolarity is important. Although Keohane is right that polarity alone does not prevent major war, and although Slaughter is correct that transnational threats receive insufficient attention, interstate conflicts and transnational threats would be even scarier if the world were bipolar or multipolar—and if the United States were not its leader.
To an extent, analysts can be forgiven for forgetting these facts. Washington has been leveraging its massive power resources to provide leadership for so long that people have trouble thinking about what the world would look like without U.S. oversight. In our 2016 book, America Abroad: The United States’ Global Role in the Twenty-First Century, we carefully examined this counterfactual. The picture was ugly: more states had nuclear weapons, the risk of war between major powers was significantly higher, the prospect of international cooperation was much lower, and disruptions to the global economy were more frequent and more harmful. Russia’s war in Ukraine offers a small taste of what life under those circumstances might be like, and it is so dangerous and destabilizing that it is easy to underestimate how exceedingly rare wars of territorial conquest have become. Great-power war has been completely absent in the nearly 80-year period since World War II, during which Washington has pursued a global grand strategy.
The deployment of U.S. power is not the only reason for this relative peace, but it is an important one. If the United States were not using its immense power to shape the world, global stability would likely hang by even more tenuous tenterhooks than it does now. The fears and apprehensions Keohane identifies would be even more intense, all exacerbated by the presence of dozens more nuclear weapons states than exist today. A world without the United States at the top of the global power heap would also be less likely to attain the international cooperation needed to address important transnational threats such as climate change and migration. After all, threats alone are rarely enough to compel states to cooperate.
For those who want more concerted action on transnational problems, our article’s findings should therefore offer hope. As Keohane stressed in a 2012 article in these pages, “Leadership is indeed essential in order to promote cooperation, which is in turn necessary to solve global problems ranging from war to climate change.” Yet for a leading state to promote international cooperation, it must want such cooperation to occur. Although there are many reasons to be disappointed in U.S. efforts to tackle transnational challenges, there is every reason to think that Beijing would be doing much less as the world’s leader. If the world truly had shifted away from unipolarity, its problems would likely be much more acute than they are now.
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