Unipolarity and Its Consequences - Liberal Leviathan: The Origins, Crisis, and Transformation of the American World Order - page 108

Strategy,” International Security 22, no. 1 (Summer 1997), 86-124; and Christopher Layne, “The Unipolar Illusion
Revisited: The Coming of the United States' Unipolar Moment,” International Security 31, no. 2 (2006), 7-41.
5 See Robert Pape, “Soft Balancing Against the United States,” International Security 30, no. 1 (Summer 2005),
7-45; T. V. Paul, “Soft Balancing in the Age of U.S. Primacy,” International Security 30, no. 1 (Summer 2005),
46-71; and Stephen Walt, Taming American Power: The Global Response to U.S. Primacy (New York: Norton,
2005), 126-32. For skepticism about the notion of soft balancing—its presence, significance, and measurement—see
Stephen G. Brooks and William C. Wohlforth, “Hard Times for Soft Balancing,” International Security 30, no. 1
(Summer 2005), 72-108; and Keir A. Lieber and Gerard Alexander, “Waiting for Balancing: Why the World Is Not
Pushing Back,” International Security 30, no. 1 (Summer 2005), 109-39.
6 For an exploration of the various strategies that weaker and secondary states have adopted to engage and resist
American unipolar power, see Stephen M. Walt, Taming American Power: The Global Response to U.S. Primacy
(New York: Norton, 2005), chaps. 3 and 4.
7 See Ikenberry, After Victory , chap. 7.
8 For general efforts to grapple with the logic of balance under conditions of unipolarity, see Ikenberry, America
Unrivaled ; and T. V. Paul, James J. Wirtz, and Michael Fortmann, eds., Balance of Power: Theory and Practice in
the 21st Century (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004).
9 Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000
(New York: Random House, 1987).
10 Waltz, Theory of International Politics .
11 This argument is advanced most systematically by Wohlforth. See William Wohlforth, “The Stability of a
Unipolar World,” International Security 24, no. 1 (Summer 1999), 4-41; William Wohlforth, “U.S. Strategy in a
Unipolar World,” in Ikenberry, America Unrivaled , 98-118.
12 John Mearsheimer stresses this dynamic in The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (New York: Norton, 2001),
chap. 6.
13 On the puzzle of underbalancing, see Randall Schweller, Unanswered Threats: Political Constraints on the
Balance of Power (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006). Jack Levy argues that the realist theory of bal-
ance of power has quite circumscribed conditions, and therefore it should not be surprising that the logic of balance
is not seen in wide stretches of international history. See Jack Levy, “What Do Great Powers Balance Against and
When?” in Paul, Wirtz, and Fortmann, Balance of Power , 51; and Jack Levy and William R. Thompson, “Hege-
monic Threats and Great-Power Balancing in Europe, 1495-1999,” Security Studies 14, no. 1 (2005), 1-31. For a
survey of the balance of power across world history, including in premodern and non-Western settings, see Stuart
J. Kaufman, Richard Little, and William C. Wohlforth, eds., The Balance of Power in World History (New York:
Palgrave, 2007).
14 See Brooks and Wohlforth, World Out of Balance , chap. 2.
15 There is a huge literature on the democratic-peace theory. See Michael Doyle, “Kant, Liberal Legacies, and
Foreign Affairs,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 12 (1983), 205-35, 323-53; and Bruce Russett, Grasping the Demo-
cratic Peace: Principles for a Post-Cold War World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).
16 The argument is not just that democracies do not fight each other, it is also that they have “contracting ad-
vantages” that allow them to develop more thoroughgoing cooperative relations. These relations, in turn, provide
mechanisms to signal restraint and commitment that reduce insecurity that might otherwise still exist between states
in unequal power relations. See Charles Lipson, Reliable Partners: How Democracies Have Made a Separate Peace
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003). On security communities, see Karl Deutsch et al., Political Com-
munity and the North Atlantic Area (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957), and Emanuel Adler and Mi-
chael Barnett, Security Communities (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
17 On liberal democracies' relative support for American unipolarity and hegemony, see John M. Owen,
“Transnational Liberalism and American Primacy: Or, Benignity Is in the Eye of the Beholder,” 239-59; and Tho-
mas Risse, “U.S. Power in a Liberal Security Community,” 260-83; both in Ikenberry, America Unrivaled ,.