Power and the Varieties of Order - Liberal Leviathan: The Origins, Crisis, and Transformation of the American World Order - page 32

quarter to a third of world GNP for most of the last hundred years. As Brooks and Wohlforth
observe, no other economy today or in the near future “will match its combination of wealth,
size, technological capacity, and productivity.” 13 To be sure, the U.S. power advantages are
most pronounced in the area of military capacity. This is a problematic feature of power be-
cause military spending is a reflection of a government's policy effort, not its underlying po-
tential. Nonetheless, the prevailing distribution of power is unipolar in character and this is
unique in world-historical terms.
The polarity of the international system provides important but limited information about
the character of international order. It is a description of the distribution of power capabilities.
That is all. It is not a description of the political formation that is built on and around these
distributed capabilities. Multipolar systems of power have provided the setting for both stable
and unstable, peaceful and conflict-ridden, relations among states. During the Cold War, a
bipolar power distribution existed, but the actual relations between the United States and the
Soviet Union varied from intense conflict and security competition to periods of and nego-
tiated peace. The post-Cold War era of unipolarity has also provided the setting for a wide
variety of American policies and patterns of conflict and cooperation. We need to look more
closely at the various ways that states can build international order.
Order and the Balance of Power
States have built international order in many different ways, doing so around various config-
urations of power. International order refers to the settled rules and arrangements that guide
the relations among states. These rules and arrangements can differ in many ways. They can
be regional or global, they can be more or less institutionalized, and they can be built around
more or less agreed-upon rules and institutions. International order can be dominated by one
or a few states or organized around more far-flung forms of cooperation among powerful and
weak states. Most fundamentally, international order can differ in terms of the underlying
source of order; that is, in the mechanisms that give shape to order and render it stable. In this
regard, there are three general logics of order: order built on balance, command, and consent.
Each offers a general account of the origins and changing character of the modern interna-
tional system. Each has a conception of the sources and locations of political authority within
the system. 14 Table 2-3 summarizes key characteristics of these logics.
One of the oldest and most studied sources of international order is the balance of power.
This is order built around either a multipolar or bipolar distribution of power. No one state
dominates the system. States compete and counterbalance each other. When one state grows
increasingly powerful or aggressive, other states respond by aggregating power. Out of the
resulting stalemate of power, order arises. Balance can be achieved through internal mobiliz-