Power and the Varieties of Order - Liberal Leviathan: The Origins, Crisis, and Transformation of the American World Order - page 30

Sources: Eighteenth-century data: Paul M. Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (New
York: Random House, 1987). GDP for 1870-1985: Angus Maddison, Monitoring the World Economy,
1829-1992 (Paris: OECD , 1995); GDP for 2009: sources from Table 1.2; military expenditures for
1872-1985: National Material Capabilities data set v. 3.02 at http://www.correlatesofwar.org . The con-
struction of these data is discussed in J. David Singer, Stuart Bremer, and John Stuckey, “Capability
Distribution, Uncertainty, and Major Power War, 1820-1965,” in Bruce Russett, ed., Peace, War, and
Numbers (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage, 1972), 19-48. Military exenditures 2009: sources from Table 1.1
a R ussia = USSR in 1950 and 1985; Maddison's estimates are based on states' modern territories. For
1872, Austria, Hungary, and Czechoslovaikia are combined, as are Russia and Finland.
Seen in this light, a global unipolar distribution of power is historically unique. In the last
two decades, the United States has stood alone at the top of the worldwide power hierarchy,
commanding an especially large share of the material capabilities and unique in possessing
the full range of economic, technological, military, and geopolitical assets. 7 Only the United
States has had the attributes of a pole.
Unipolarity is reflected in the distribution of economic, military, and technological cap-
abilities. 8 In 2008, the United States accounted for over a quarter of global GNI and over 43
percent of GNI among the traditional great powers. This is greater than the economic position
of any other state in history—aside from America's own relative economic size after World
War II when the economies of the other major were temporarily depressed. 9 The U.S. share
of world GNI among the great powers has remained relatively stable over the postwar dec-
ades. In 1992, the U.S. share of great-power GNI was approximately 41 percent and in 2002
it was 48 percent. (See table 2-1 . )
While its share of total world GNI has declined slightly (as a result mainly of economic
growth in Asia and the developing world), the United States continues to possess economic
capacity far greater than that of the other great powers. Indeed, since the end of the Cold War,
these economic disparities have intensified between the United States and the other advanced
industrialized countries—Western Europe and Japan. Over the last twenty years, American
GDP growth has averaged over 2.7 percent, while Japan has averaged 1.48 percent growth,
Germany and France have averaged less than 1.9 percent, and the United Kingdom has aver-
aged 2.37 percent. 10
The American advantage in economic size is extended by its advantages in per capita GNI.
The other democratic great powers—Japan, Germany, France, and Britain—have a per capita
GNI roughly 10 to 20 percent below the United States', while China—a potential geopolitic-
al rival—has only a fraction of the American total. This comparison is useful as a measure of
relative potential taxable income that a state has at its disposal. 11
Militarily, the disparities between the United States and the rest of the world are even more
pronounced. At the end of the Cold War, the United States cut its expenditures less sharply
than other major states—including, most importantly, the former Soviet Union—and it rap-