Wow, I'm impressed by your post. I've been reading the book and I have to admit I was not convinced by their arguments either. In fact, I wasn't back then when Wohlforth wrote his article in Intl. Sec. about the stability of a unipolar world... and I'm not convinced now with this new book. As you correctly point out in your post, there's a HUGE contradiction between "World Out of Balance" and "The BoP in World History". This is of some concern since Wohlforth was one of the main authors behind both projects. Besides that, this second book he co-authored seems to contradicts with itself when, on the one hand, claims to have discovered that "Waltz was wrong" (BoP are not regularities), and on the other, concludes the final chapter saying that Hegemony and BoP are both regularities which explain world history roughly in a 50%-50% ratio.
Yesss, we miss Stephen... but if it's you who's going to write when he's away, it's going to be much more beareble. You're great too. You should get a blog yourself, man!!!

Greetings from Argentina,

nick.

Thanks a lot, Nick. I don't have a sense whether people here are more interested in policy topics or theory, so I appreciate the feedback. If you have any interest, I do blog at the Cato Institute's weblog. My posts are available here: http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/author/justin-logan/

A rising state may overstretch in the process of becoming a hegemon. Initially a middle power will be limited to moderate maneuvers because it is not strong enough to impose its preferences about the system to other states. However, if this middle power becomes stronger and builds the potential to change the system despite opposition it is likely to take that risk. Some of the time this attempt will succeed and we will observe the rise of a new hegemon. Other times the attempt will fail and it will be labeled as another example of overstretch.

The correct analogy is not a man who goes from 1m to 10m dollars. It is someone who goes from 10m to 1bn dollars and tries to buy off politicians. If he succeeds he is an oligarch; if he fails he overstretched.

The state dept. budget is about 1/20 th the defense (and, on occasion, offense) dept. budget. surely this ratio is relevant.

Great stuff, thanks. It's refreshing because we don't often (or ever) get balanced analysis here on Walt's blog. The only time we even see both sides of a story is when Walt posts a link with some dismissive or disparaging comment. All this leads one to be skeptical even of his book recommendations given that everything else seems to be agenda driven here. I'll definitely be stopping by to check out your blog.

it's good for rebranding "benevolent global hegemony", for one thing... following in the footsteps of blackwater rebranding itself as Xe, i spose.

that's how things are sposed to work, isnt it? if you got the PR machinery and the hacks, you can create your own reality and stuff it down everyone's throats.

...you just change the name and keep stuffing.

...when it seems pretty obvious that peak oil was the thing that triggered the neocon push to achieve "unipolarity" or "benevolent global hegemony" or whatever the flavor of the day is.

you must realize that your denial of peak oil and global warming dovetails precisely with the position taken by the neocons at the AEI, CERA and exxon...

...who have a very good reason to deny the existence of peak oil and global warming if peak oil and global warming were their motives to stage the "new pearl harbor" which they so wistfully yearned for a year before it happened.

the PNAC project, including 9/11, might have been too little, too late... which explains why some neocons want another 9/11... and the longer they delay that next step, the more people become aware of the setup, the riskier the next step becomes.

...which may explain why so many big players are reverting to default mode: looting.

I've not read the Brooks/Wohlforth book, and so don't know how they deal with the problem of inertia. But no one here has mentioned it, so I thought I would.

A substantial portion of the resources America devotes to defense spending is directed at sustaining capability we already have. The capital-intensive branches of the American military, the Navy and Air Force, need not only to maintain very expensive weapons and logistics platforms but to replace them as they age. Obviously the high cost of this is raised still further by the need to replace equipment lost or worn out by all services in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, but the problem would exist regardless. Overstretch, or at least important components of it, can result from simply trying to stay where you've been for decades.

This is actually a small aspect of a much larger issue. Vastly greater than the resources required for all defense spending combined are the resources needed for Americans to maintain the standard of living to which they are accustomed. This includes maintaining the level of service from all levels of government to which they are accustomed. For the great majority of Americans, the questions commonly addressed in discussions of "overstretch" are much less important than those relating exclusively to the domestic economy. This matters because, at some point, it is likely to affect the American government's ability to project power in any form overseas.

I appreciate Brooks/Wohlforth's vote of confidence in America's ability to transcend structural constraints, an ability in which I believe myself. My belief, though, is based on the knowledge that America has resources at its disposal for which foreign policy schools of thought do not adequately account -- not on an assumption that it has super powers. I am left with a suspicion that dismissal of fiscal imbalances in this country as a problem that "can be fixed" is a judgement born of lack of interest in economic questions not obviously and directly related to foreign policy.

A) I don't see a contradiction between the BoPinWH and World Out of Balance.

The argument in BoPinWH *is not* that overextension always (or rapidly) leads to the collapse of hegemony/empire. Rather, its seven authors claim, the ability of a state to project power and maintain political control over subordinate polities (which they term "administrative capacity") is one of the two most important factors that account for whether a systemic balances of power will emerge or whether a single state will become predominate. Balance-of-power dynamics (contra Waltz, Walt, and others), on the other hand, don't matter very much.

The argument in World Out of Balance, on the other hand, is that the US doesn't need to worry about strategic overextension because it is unlikely to happen.

It isn't difficult to understand why many IR scholars just aren't that worried about strategic overextension: despite its current levels of defense spending, the US is far from full military mobilization. That's why some of them have started to talk about "political overextension," i.e., the idea that strategic overextension might be the consequence of a lack of political will to divert sufficient resources for the US to meet its political and military commitments. So, in essence, what the previous commentator said.

Anyway, the nature of this argument always struck me as somewhat odd, because if you look most of the standard historical cases of great-power overextension the processes were usually dominated by political developments, including not just political constraints at home but also failures of political management that produces resistance against the great power in the periphery.

B) I won't mount a full-blown critique of World Out of Balance here, but let me say two things. The first is an IR theory objection: there's a kind of disconnect in it. If we think unipolar systems are more like hierarchies than anarchies, than we should analyze them as such. But Steve and Bill take anarchical dynamics as their baseline. I know they plead that we need "new theories," but we actually do have some pretty strong theories about how hierarchical international orders work.

The second is more practical: they demand too tight a correlation between policies that generate opposition to the US and serious opposition to core US policies. The processes that translate the first into the second tend to work more subtly and over longer time periods. Indeed, a growing body of evidence suggests that Bush foreign policy did diminish the ability of foreign elites to cooperate with the United States.

But, as some have noted (including Charles Glaser), none of the policies pursued by the Bush administration were of the kind likely to trigger serious fears of predation by second-tier powers. I wrote about this back when I was still blogging: http://duckofminerva.blogspot.com/2009/02/realism-and-great-balance-of-power.html

1. Unipolarity is not one of the hot topics in IR theory for political science academics (for better or worse). It's one of the hot topics for realists who don't like US foreign policy. There is more work going on than just that, but that's a lot of it.

2. Given that you are from the CATO Institute, I think most of us can probably predict your opinions on these issues. You think we are overstretched and Iranian nuclear weapons don't bother you. Check and check. What's a foreign policy issue where you *disagree* with the general CATO line on these issues? One of the things that makes this blog interesting is when Walt goes against the grain of what other realists think.

3. Nexon (author of the post above this one) is right. And he is very smart and people should read and buy his book (http://www.amazon.com/Struggle-Power-Early-Modern-Europe/dp/0691137935/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1249667791&sr=8-1).

No, this isn't Dan Nexon. But it's someone that knows his work and thinks he is great.

Well, Justin, thanks for calling my attention to your blog. I'll surely visit it regularly.
Let me point out, given Dan Nexon's comments, that I still think both books are contradictory with one another, but also that his (Nexon's) counter-arguments for "why they do not contradict" are also weak. Let me explain:
On the one hand, and following Brooks & Wohlforth, Dan Nexon supports the argument that because the U.S. faces no strong structural constraints it should follow the B&W advise and be more active in the intl. scene. In one part of his comments, Nexon says the argument in the book is that "administrative capacity is one of the two most important factors that account for whether systemic balances of power will emerge or whether a single state will become predominate. Balance-of-power dynamics (contra Waltz, Walt, and others) [...] don't matter very much." Well... you can't have it both ways. Hegemony cannot be "one of the two most important factors", and at the same time be the only explanation. In fact, the central argument in the book --as I already pointed out in my first comment-- is put foward in the final chapter when Wohlforth et al., say that at least Hegemony AND BoP explain the long history of Intl. Politics (roughly 50%-50%). So far for the theoretical part of the story. But what about the policy recomendations?

On the other hand, Nexon's attempted rebuttal repeats that: "The argument in World Out of Balance [...] is that the US doesn't need to worry about strategic overextension because it is unlikely to happen." And here we come to the major central contradiction between both books. The main policy recommendation in "World Out of Balance" is, according to the authors, that following their theoretical argument, the U.S. should not fear overextention (nor any other "structural constraint" for that matter --take that J.J.!), and instead try to be more active in the world; to try to re-shape it. Well, one more time, the two-faced Wohlforth has presented two disparaging arguments in two contemporary books on very related issues. In his --much more interesting book-- "BoP in World History", Wohlforth et al. introduce one very important idea: out of that roughly 50% of world history that is explained by Hegemony (and not BoP --that that Waltzy!), the main cause of its ultimate demise was not BoP but --be prepare for this one-- "boondoggling" (which seems to be just another academic word for "stupid and reckless state behavior"). Since "boondoggling" is given very much attention and explicative power in the book, one is left wondering why Wohlforth decided to write with Brooks another book recommending the U.S. to be much more active in World Politics now that there's no one to check its unlimited power. Wouldn't this very simple policy advise serve, in the end, as a "highway to hell"? Or to put it in less musical terms, as a maximization of the chances to screw it up? If one looks back at history and agrees with the idea that "power corrupts, but absolute power corrupts absolutely", why would you recommend such a risky Grand Strategy? In the end, if Waltz is wrong, as Wohlforth et al. claim, he is wrong in only half the story but not the whole of it. I think the big moral is that, maybe, for a change, more modesty is needed (in the academic world as well as in intl. politics). Take that Hegemon!

Nick, from Argentina.

I have to admit I never understood the IR theory obsession with 'polarity'. There is a tendency towards reductionism, and another tendency towards exporting the dynamics of pre-21st Century Europe (constant, existentially threatening security dilemmas, the possibility of hegemony), and exporting (rather absurdly) to intercontinental international relations including the U.S., China, South Asia, and any number of areas only tenuously "controlled" by the great powers (and even that word is an exaggeration).

Here is the barebones facts of the matter. Military and economic interdependence can only suggest, they don't dictate. A country can do whatever it wants with the means at its disposal. The tendency towards military impotence of the rest of developed world (Europe, Japan) continues apace. The United States' relative demographic and economic weight will continue for some time (as will its military spending). Other countries are only regional military powers with only limited projection capabilities. It follows that U.S. military unipolarity (if that is a useful term) will continue: Gulf War 1, Panama, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan Iraq, nothing can stop the U.S. from doing anything it pleases with its armed forces. That will continue. U.S. economic superpowerdom has largely been a myth, ever since the 1960s really, with plenty of countries/regions proving equal negotiators. That tendency, will, no doubt, continue.

Now, if one wants to call that order unimilieconomulti or whatever is completely up to the prof,,

I am suggesting that according to current economic and demographic trends, there is nothing to suggest fundamental revision of the U.S.'s status as 'sole superpower'. (That does not exclude limited retrenchment, such as withdrawal from Afghanistan or Iraq).

The end of other states as great powers in peacetime can be traced fairly closely to inexorable trends. It should have been no surprise by Suez in 1956, that 50 million Britons could not hold their own in a world with 180 million wealthy Americans and 250 million militarized Soviets. Perhaps we should also have been more skeptical of the state like the Soviet Union's when it spent so much for so long on defense, distorting its entire economy for a pointless military-industrial complex. A state's projection of power abroad cannot long outlast its economic and demographic base at home.

The U.S., in contrast, has (at the risk of a McCain moment) a good fundamental base. The current crisis will pass eventually, I do not believe the U.S. will de-industrialize any time soon. It has decent fertility rates (unlike the rest of developed world) and (whether it likes it or not) receives massive immigration. The U.S. spends about 5% of GDP on defense which by historical postwar standards, is neither high nor unsustainable. We can also assert, with some confidence, that no other countries will become comparable intercontinental military powers for at least two decades. After that, I would not want to speculate as to when in the next century the great Asian nations will reach economic parity with the E.U. and the U.S.

I think the U.S.'s fall into normalcy, if it occurs, will be rather graceful. It doesn't have enough of a formal empire for a dramatic collapse like for the British or the Warsaw Pact. The problems of healthcare and the prison system are literally comparable, in terms of waste and inefficiency, to the madness of the Soviet military-industrial complex or their agriculture. But it is a (slightly) lower order of magnitude, that I don't think sufficient to bring about a general collapse.