Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
the major great powers are democracies also has mattered in reducing the security competi-
tion that would otherwise push the system toward a balancing response.
Most importantly, the political-institutional character of the American pole has had con-
sequences for the rise and functioning of unipolarity. Major states around the United States
have actively sought to connect to and operate within the organizational space created by
American unipolarity. Democratic states that bound themselves to the United States during
the Cold War remained tied to the United States under conditions of unipolarity. Other coun-
tries—in Asia and Eastern Europe—also integrated into the American-led order. It is not just
that the United States is not threatening enough to trigger balancing. It is that the political
formation around unipolarity has an open and integrative logic. The United States is the hub
in a one-pole global system. The American-led liberal order offers benefits and services to
states that alternative orders or spheres cannot offer. In this way, unipolarity is the conse-
quence of the gradual disappearance of alternative organizing hubs in world politics.
Despite the absence of balancing, unipolarity does alter the array of incentives and con-
straints that bear on the organization of rules and institutions. Incentives exist to redraw the
institutional bargains. Conflicts over burden sharing and free riding are associated with uni-
polarity. The unipolar state has choices and alternative incentives for multilateral and hub-
and-spoke logics of order. The choices that the unipolar state makes will hinge on the way
it values legitimacy, makes credible commitments, and responds to the prospect of unipolar
decline.
Unipolarity—understood as a one-pole global system—is not just a reflection of the dis-
tribution of power but of organizational features of liberal international order. If this is true,
the global system could retain political characteristics of unipolarity even as the distribution
of material capabilities shifts away from the United States. A relative decline in Americ-
an power disparities will not inevitably lead to the formation of new poles or a balance-of-
power system. The critical question is whether the United States, under conditions of uni-
polarity, will continue to support liberal international order. Ironically, the prospect of a de-
cline in American relative power generates incentives for a renewed commitment by the Un-
ited States to open and rule-based order. In the end, it is these liberal features of the interna-
tional order that will slow down and mute the consequences of a return to multipolarity.
1
An international system is unipolar if it “contains one state whose overall share of capabilities places it unam-
biguously in a class by itself compared to all other states.” G. John Ikenberry, Michael Mastanduno, and William C.
Wohlforth, “Introduction: Unipolarity, State Behavior, and Systemic Consequences,”
World Politics
61, no. 1 (Janu-
ary 2009), 5.
2
See the discussion of anarchy and balance of power theory in chapter 2.
3
Kenneth Waltz, “Structural Realism after the Cold War,”
International Security
25, no. 1 (Summer 2000), 5-41.
4
Christopher Layne, “The Unipolar Illusion: Why Great Powers Will Arise,”
International Security
17, no. 4
(Spring 1993), 5-51; Christopher Layne, “From Preponderance to Offshore Balancing: America's Future Grand
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