Unipolar stability: the rules of power analysis.

The potential for the rise of a multipolar world order certainly seems far more plausible now than it did several years ago. In 2003, pundits considered the term "unipolar" to be too modest; only "empire" could capture the extraordinary position of power that the United States appeared to occupy. Indeed, in the eyes of the foreign policy commentariat, the United States has fallen from global empire to hapless Gulliver in a mere four years. When Charles Krauthammer--the columnist who originally coined the term "unipolar moment"--has announced the end of unipolarity, it is hardly a leap to suggest that multipolarity is nigh.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Perceptions of rapid polarity shifts of this sort are not unusual. In the early 1960s, only a decade after analysts had developed the notion of bipolarity, scholars were already proclaiming the return of multipolarity as postwar recoveries in Europe and Japan took off. After the fall of Saigon in 1975, they again announced the advent of multipolarity. The most influential scholarly book on international relations of the past generation, Kenneth N. Waltz's Theory of International Politics, was written in part to dispel these flighty views and show that bipolarity still endured. If one looks past the headlines to the deep material structure of the world, Waltz argued, one will see that bipolarity is still the order of the day. Yet in the early 1990s, Waltz himself proclaimed that the return of multipolarity was around the corner. Such perceived polarity shifts are usually accompanied by decline scares--concern that as other powers rise, the United States will lose its competitive edge in foreign relations. The current decline scare is the fourth since 1945--the first three occurred during the 1950s (Sputnik), the 1970s (Vietnam and stagflation), and the 1980s (the Soviet threat and Japan as a potential challenger).

In all of these cases, real changes were occurring that suggested a redistribution of power. But in each case, analysts' responses to those changes seem to have been overblown. Multipolarity--an international system marked by three or more roughly equally matched major powers--did not return in the 1960s, 1970s, or early 1990s, and each decline scare ended with the United States' position of primacy arguably strengthened.

It is impossible to know for sure whether or not the scare is for real this time--shifts in the distribution of power are notoriously hard to forecast. Barring geopolitical upheavals on the scale of Soviet collapse, the inter-state scales of power tend to change slowly. The trick is to determine when subtle quantitative shifts will lead to a major qualitative transformation of the basic structure of the international system. Fortunately, there are some simple rules of power analysis that can help prevent wild fluctuations in response to current events. Unfortunately, arguments for multipolarity's rapid return usually run afoul of them.

Rule No. 1: Be Clear About Definitions of Power

It is important to ask why opinion has gyrated so wildly from bullishness to bearishness in conversations on US power. It is not--as in some of the earlier cases--that perceptions of actual US capabilities or resources have changed. The United States is still widely recognized to be the most powerful state in a material sense since the modern international system took shape in the sixteenth century. I have conducted many of these measurements myself, and I can report that there has been no change in these "objective" indicators over the past three years sufficient enough to explain a shift in elite perspectives of US power.

What have shifted are peoples' views of the real utility of these resources and capabilities. Current discussions of the limits of US power are really focused on the limited usefulness of large amounts of military and economic capabilities. Political scientists generally use the term "power" to refer to a relationship of influence. As Robert Dahl put it, power is "A's ability to get B to do something it would not otherwise have done" (or, of course, to prevent B from doing something it otherwise would have done). In international relations, the same term of "power" is often equated with resources: measurable elements that states possess and use to influence others. In popular commentary, these two meanings of power are often conflated, with unfortunate results.

To begin with, the challenge of converting power-as-resources into power-as-influence is not a uniquely US problem. All great powers confront these challenges. If the cause of the new gloominess concerning US power had to be reduced to one word, it would be "Iraq." In 2003, fresh from apparent military victories in Afghanistan and Iraq, the United States appeared to be a colossus. Yet in 2007, its inability to suppress the Iraqi counterinsurgency and civil war seems to have revealed feet of clay. All the hard data on US military superiority--its over one-half of global defense spending, some 70 percent of global military R & D, and dominance in information-intensive warfare--now appear in a new light. The world's most vaunted military machine is not even able to tame disorganized Sunni and Shi'a militias in Mesopotamia.

But the example of Iraq exhibits a balance of power dynamic between states and non-state insurgents, not one between several different states. There is no reason to believe that China, Russia, India, or the European Union would perform any better if faced with the challenges that the US military confronts in Iraq. Some scholars argue that Iraq demonstrates new information about the state versus non-state balance. They contend that counterinsurgency campaigns have become much more difficult to execute than what used to be the case. But if this is so, then it applies to all the great powers, not just the United States. According to numerous recent studies conducted by the US military and independent scholars, this argument is not correct. Insurgency has always been difficult to thwart. Once an insurgency takes root, governments rarely prevail. When they do--as in the case of Britain in South Africa at the turn of the last century and more recently, Russia in Chechnya--it is usually the result of deploying very large military forces willing to use ferocious violence on a mass scale against innocent civilians. With a comparatively small force in a large and populous country, the United States' inability to foster stability in Iraq is tragic, but not surprising.

The bottom line is that the world did not suddenly become multipolar when the United States' counterinsurgency in Vietnam failed. And simply because high-technology weaponry has not altered the centuries-old power balance between governments and armed insurgents, it does not necessarily follow that unipolarity is about to end.

Rule No. 2: Watch the Goalposts

The larger problem with conflating power-as-resources with power-as-influence is that it leads to a constant shifting of the goalposts. The better the United States becomes at acquiring resources, the greater the array of global problems it is expected to be able to resolve, and the greater the apparent gap between its material capabilities and the ends it can achieve. The result is an endless raising of the bar for what it takes to be a unipolar power. Samuel Huntington defined a unipolar state as one able "effectively to resolve all important international issues alone, and no combination of other states would have the power to prevent it from doing so." This is an extraordinary standard that essentially conflates unipolarity with universal empire. Great European powers did not lose great power status when they failed to have their way, in, for example, the Balkans in the nineteenth century. In turn, the United States did not cease to be a superpower when it failed to overthrow Fidel Castro in the 1960s. The fact that Washington cannot prevent Hugo Chavez from thumbing his nose at US power is interesting and perhaps even important, but it does not have bearing on the polarity of the international system.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Defining power as the ability to solve whatever global problem is currently in the headlines virtually guarantees highly volatile prognostications about polarity. This sort of headline chasing led to talk of "empire" in 2002 and 2003, just as it feeds today's multipolar mania. Assessing active attempts by the United States to employ its power capabilities may well be the most misleading way to think about power. This approach inevitably leads to a selection bias against evidence of the indirect, "structural" effects of US power that are not dependent upon active management. Many effects that can be attributed to the unipolar distribution of power are developments that never occur: counter-balancing coalitions, Cold War-scale arms races, hegemonic rivalry for dominance, security dilemmas among Asian powers, and decisions by Japan and others to nuclearize. Clearly, assessing unipolarity's potential effects involves weighing-such non-events against the more salient examples in which active attempts to use power resources are stymied.