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Randall L. Schweller is Associate Professor of Political Science at Ohio State University and author of
Deadly Imbalances: Tripolarity and Hitler's Strategy of World Conquest (New York:ColumbiaUni-
versity Press, 1998).
I thank Colin Elman, Paul Fritz, John Ikenberry, Amy Oakes, David Schweller, and Jack Snyder for
their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this essay.
161
1. Notable exceptions include John Gerard Ruggie, Winning the Peace:Americaand WorldOrder in
the New Era (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996); Kalevi J. Holsti, Peace and War:Armed
Conflictsand InternationalOrder,1648-1989 (New York:Cambridge University Press, 1991); Charles
W. Kegley and Gregory A. Raymond, How Nations Make Peace (New York: St. Martin's, 1999);
Nissan Oren, "Prudence in Victory," in Oren, ed., Terminationof Wars (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1982),
pp. 147-163; and Henry A. Kissinger, A WorldRestored:Metternich, Castlereagh,and the Problemsof
Peace, 1812-22 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957). See also Eric J. Labs, "Beyond Victory: Offensive
Realism and the Expansion of War Aims," Security Studies, Vol. 6, No. 4 (Summer 1997), pp. 1-49;
and Paul Fritz, "The Management of Defeated Great Powers," unpublished manuscript, Ohio State
University, 2001.
2. The collective silence of international relations theorists on this subject is all the more remark-
able when compared with the vast theoretical literature devoted to the opposite problem: how to
deal with a rising challenger. Perhaps this theoretical bias is yet another example of prospect the-
ory's claim that people are more motivated, and thus more risk-acceptant, to avoid losses than to
make gains. Theories about how to manage a rising challenger attempt to explain what a declining
hegemon can and should do to minimize its losses; theories about how to manage victory explain
what a new hegemon can and should do to maximize and secure potential gains. For prospect the-
ory, see Barbara Farnham, ed., Avoiding Losses/TakingRisks (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 1994).
3. G. John Ikenberry, After Victory:Institutions, Strategic Restraint, and the Rebuilding of Order after
Major Wars (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001). Further references to this work ap-
pear parenthetically in the text.
This type of strategic restraint through the creative use of multilateral institu-
tions explains the emergence of stable and cooperative relations between the
United States and the other industrial democracies despite rapid shifts and ex-
treme disparities in power among them. After Victory ambitiously synthesizes
important liberal and realist theories into one elegant and compelling package
of exceptional theoretical and empirical sweep. It addresses a crucial and time-
less issue at the heart of international politics and contemporary American for-
eign policy; and it should have an enduring impact on the study and practice
of international relations.
Although Ikenberry provides the most sophisticated theoretical account to
date on why powerful states might find it in their interest to pursue restraint
and commitment, I am not entirely persuaded by the logic and empirical evi-
dence used to support the book's key theoretical innovation-the concept of
binding institutions. According to Ikenberry, binding institutions, such as the
North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the World Trade Organization
(WTO), establish interlocking institutional constraints that effectively limit the
exercise of concentrated power; they are multilateral, power-restraint mecha-
nisms that bind the leading state's power and enable weaker states to bargain
effectively with it. To accomplish these tasks, binding institutions must operate
independently of the leading state's power and interests. Yet Ikenberry also
claims that these same binding institutional arrangements extend the leading
state's preponderant power by locking in favorable future returns that con-
tinue well beyond the zenith of its relative power advantage. In Ikenberry's
view, institutions both limit and project state power; they are mechanisms of
hegemonic self-restraint and tools of hegemonic power.
I argue that institutions cannot be both autonomous from the hegemon's
power and interests and capable of checking its exercise of power. Moreover,
the simultaneous presence of a durable set of multilateral institutions and hege-
monic restraint does not necessarily indicate that the former is a cause of the
latter. At best, what Ikenberry calls "binding institutions" merely signal to the
hegemon's potential partners that it does not intend to use its power to settle
all matters between them. Intentions can change, however; and that is the true
acid test for the concept of binding institutions: Will they limit the hegemon's
exercise of power when it does not want to be restrained? I suspect that, like
most liberal-multilateralist remedies for security problems, binding institutions
either work best when they are needed least or simply do not work at all.4
4. See, for example, Richard K. Betts, "The Delusion of Impartial Intervention," ForeignAffairs,Vol.
73, No. 6 (November/December 1994), pp. 20-33; and Richard K. Betts, "Systems for Peace or
The essay unfolds as follows. After presenting the basic arguments of the
book, I offer a critique of Ikenberry's conception of international order, which,
by definition, rules out the most common version of balance of power as a pro-
vider of international order. As a practical matter regarding the shape of con-
temporary U.S. grand strategy, Ikenberry's arguments about international
order load the dice in favor of adopting liberal policies of cooperative security
and assertive multilateralism (for the rather perfidious purpose, given the
strategy's communitarian means, of perpetuating America's global suprem-
acy) and against the alternative realist strategy of selective engagement, in
which the United States assumes its traditional role as both a regional
hegemon and an offshore balancer.5 I then challenge Ikenberry's claim that
decisionmakers of the victorious leading state should act on the assumption of
the inevitability of hegemonic decline. Finally, I dispute the logic and evidence
for Ikenberry's main concept-binding institutions. The empirical record
strongly suggests that international institutions have not checked the use of
American power, which, in the most dramatic decisions since 1945, has been
repeatedly exercised unilaterally-often without prior consultation with or
even advance warning of its allies.
TheProblemof InternationalOrder
The question of how international order emerges and changes over time has
received inadequate treatment in the study of international relations. The most
important reason for this pattern of neglect is that efforts to uncover laws of
change require the study of dynamics, which presents a formidable challenge
to the still relatively young field of political science. As Robert Gilpin points
out, "The natural development of any science is from static analysis to dy-
namic analysis. Static theory is simpler, and its propositions are easier to
prove."6 What scholars have learned is that international change most often oc-
curs after dramatic and episodic wars among all or most of the great powers.
At the very outset of these titanic struggles, which have come to be known as
hegemonic wars, the combatants understood that at stake was not just their
Causes of War? Collective Security, Arms Control, and the New Europe," InternationalSecurity,Vol.
17, No. 1 (Summer 1992), pp. 5-43.
5. For essays championing these competing U.S. grand strategies, see Michael E. Brown, Owen R.
Cot6, Jr., Sean M. Lynn-Jones, and Steven E. Miller, eds., America'sStrategic Choices,rev. ed. (Cam-
bridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000).
6. Robert Gilpin, Warand Change in WorldPolitics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981),
p. 4.
relative power positions and roles in the world (namely, possible shifts in their
territorial boundaries, colonial possessions, and military power) but a total re-
ordering of the globe.7 The victors of hegemonic wars reap a windfall of power
assets, which provide them with a unique opportunity to establish a new inter-
national order. Possession of the requisite capabilities to assume hegemonic
leadership, however, has not always translated into a willingness to do so. In-
stead great postwar junctures confront the leading state with a decision: What,
if anything, should it do with its new abundance of power?
Ikenberry narrows the hegemon's menu of choice to three generic options:
(1) it can dominate the weaker and defeated states, using its preponderance of
power to grab the lion's share of the postwar division of spoils; (2) it can aban-
don the other states and simply go home, washing its hands of the inevitable
postwar distributional disputes; or (3) it can transform the international sys-
tem into a durable institutionalized order that commands the allegiance of the
other states within the system (p. 4). Each option is associated with an ideal
type of international order. The choice to dominate creates a hegemonic or im-
perial order, in which the organizing principle is hierarchy, checks on concen-
trated power are nonexistent, and the source of system stability is the coercive
use of the hegemon's superior power. The decision to abandon (by which
Ikenberry means to retreat from world politics) triggers the emergence of a bal-
ance-of-power order, in which the logic of anarchy and self-help governs the
behavior of the states, counterbalancing coalitions form to prevent dangerous
concentrations of power, and stability is achieved by maintaining system equi-
librium.8 Lastly, the choice to transform is associated with the establishment of
a constitutional order in which the rule of law prevails, binding institutions re-
strain the exercise of power, and stability is accomplished by limiting the re-
turns to power. The value-added element of Ikenberry's theory is the concept
of international constitutional order, and so an explication of its details and
logic follows.
7. Challenging the conventional wisdom, Gerhard L. Weinberg argues that World Wars I and II
were entirely separate events based on fundamentally different aims and intentions. Only World
War II qualifies as a hegemonic war because the protagonists recognized from the outset that a to-
tal reordering of the international system was at stake. In contrast, all of the great powers were ex-
pected to survive World War I, the aims of which were limited to changes in the relative roles of
the great powers within an unchanged international order. See Weinberg, A Worldat Arms: A Global
History of World War II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 1-5.
8. Unlike in hegemonic and constitutional orders, the source of stability in a balance-of-power
system (equilibrium) may arise as an unintended consequence either of actors seeking to maxi-
mize their power or of the imperative for actors wishing to survive in a competitive self-help sys-
tem to balance against threatening accumulations of power. See Kenneth N. Waltz, Theory of
InternationalPolitics (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1979), pp. 88-93 and chap. 6. See also Robert
TheLogicof ConstitutionalOrders
Jervis, System Effects: Complexity in Political and Social Life (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University
Press, 1997).
9. For an extended discussion on this point, see G. John Ikenberry and Charles A. Kupchan, "So-
cialization and Hegemonic Power," International Organization, Vol. 44, No. 2 (Summer 1990),
pp. 283-315.
10. Ikenberry developed these ideas in earlier articles. See G. John Ikenberry, "Constitutional Poli-
tics in International Relations," EuropeanJournalof InternationalRelations, Vol. 4, No. 2 (June 1998),
pp. 147-177; and G. John Ikenberry, "Institutions, Strategic Restraint, and the Persistence of Ameri-
can Postwar Order," International Security, Vol. 23, No. 3 (Winter 1998/99), pp. 43-78. Regarding
the concept of voice opportunities, Ikenberry extends the work of Joseph M. Grieco, "State Inter-
ests and Institutional Rule Trajectories: A Neorealist Interpretation of the Maastricht Treaty and
European Economic and Monetary Union," Security Studies, Vol. 5, No. 3 (Spring 1996), p. 288; and
Joseph M. Grieco, "The Maastricht Treaty,Economic and Monetary Union, and the Neo-Realist Re-
search Programme," Review of International Studies, Vol. 21, No. 1 (January 1995), pp. 21-40. The
logic of voice opportunities is derived from Albert O. Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty-
Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1970); and Paul W. Schroeder, "Alliances, 1815-1945: Weapons of Power and Tools of Man-
agement," in Klaus Knorr, ed., Historical Dimensions of National Security Problems(Lawrence: Uni-
versity Press of Kansas, 1975), pp. 227-262. Charles A. Kupchan borrows Ikenberry's concepts of
strategic restraint and self-binding strategies in his discussion of benign unipolarity in Kupchan,
"After Pax Americana: Benign Power, Regional Integration, and the Sources of a Stable
Multipolarity," International Security, Vol. 23, No. 2 (Fall 1998), pp. 45-55.
11. Here, Ikenberry essentially reiterates the logic behind the theory of complex interdependence.
See Robert 0. Keohane and Joseph S. Nye, Power and Interdependence:WorldPolitics in Transition
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1977).
12. See Peter Haas, ed., Knowledge,Power,and InternationalPolicy Coordination,special issue of Inter-
national Organization, Vol. 46, No. 1 (Winter 1992).
13. See Daniel Deudney, "The Philadelphia System: Sovereignty, Arms Control, and Balance of
Power in the American States-Union," International Organization, Vol. 49, No. 2 (Spring 1995),
pp. 191-228; and Daniel Deudney, "Binding Sovereigns: Authorities, Structures, and Geopolitics in
Philadelphia Systems," in Thomas J. Biersteker and Cynthia Weber, eds., State Sovereigntyas Social
Construct (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 213-216.
14. Although Ikenberry does not make this point, what distinguishes constitutional systems from
the alternatives is not the property of systemic binding but rather the institutionalized and purpos-
type of institutional bargain between weak and strong states. In one of its own
documents, entitled "Ten Benefits of the WTO Trading System," the WTO as-
serts that a "system based on rules rather than power makes life easier for
all.... The WTO cannot claim to make all countries equal. But it does reduce
some inequalities, giving smaller countries more voice, and at the same time
freeing major powers from the complexity of having to negotiate trade agree-
ments with each of their numerous trading partners."15
ConceptualProblemsof Order
There are many kinds of orders and just as many definitions of the concept.
When speaking of the ordering principle of a system, we are referring to how
the constitutive parts are interrelated, that is, how the parts are arranged and
function together. Social orders vary according to the amount of order dis-
played, whether the order is purposive or unintended, and the type of mecha-
nisms that provide order. On one end of the spectrum, there is rule-governed,
purposive order, which is explicitly designed and highly institutionalized to
fulfill universally accepted social ends and values.16 At the other extreme, the
social order is an entirely unintended and uninstitutionalized recurrent pattern
to which the actors and the system itself exhibit conformity but which serves
none of the actors' goals or, at least, was not deliberately designed to do so.17
Ikenberry defines international political order as the "governing" arrange-
ments among a group of states: "The focus is on the explicit principles, rules,
and institutions that define the core relationships between the states that are
party to the order. This limits the concept of order to settled arrangementsbe-
tween states that define their relationship to each other and mutual expecta-
tions about their ongoing interaction" (p. 23, emphasis added). This definition,
ive nature of constitutional-type binding strategies. International systems of all varieties, from the
most imperially integrated to the most fragmented clusters of multiple independencies, essentially
bind together in some way discrete political entities. This is because, to be labeled a system of any
kind, the constitutive parts must be more or less interconnected so as to form a whole. History re-
cords a wide range of international systems. How these distinct patterns of relations among states
have functioned to produce order and stability has varied according to the unique set (or lack
thereof) of institutions, assumptions, and codes of conduct by which the groups of political entities
have attempted to regulate the systems that have bound them together. See Adam Watson, The
Evolution of International Society: A ComparativeHistorical Analysis (New York: Routledge, 1992).
15. The WTO web page is available at http://www.wto.org. I am grateful to John Ikenberry for
pointing this out.
16. This is Hedley Bull's definition of social order in Bull, The AnarchicalSociety:A Study of Orderin
World Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977), chap. 1.
17. This is Kenneth Waltz's definition of the ordering principle of international systems in Waltz,
Theory of InternationalPolitics.
18. In his comments on an earlier draft of this essay, John Ikenberry strongly disagrees with me
on this point. He claims, instead, that settled arrangements can include all three types of order:
balance of power, hegemonic, and constitutional. He agrees that his definition rules out for pur-
poses of analysis those "orders" that are unintended and spontaneously generated, which would
include the automatic type of balance-of-power system. But it does not rule out balance-of-power
orders that are recognized as such by the actors themselves. (Inis L. Claude refers to this type of
system as a manually operated balance of power. See Claude, Power and International Relations
[New York: Random House, 1962], pp. 48-50.) The settlements of 1648, 1713, and 1815, Ikenberry
claims, were all settled orders in the sense that he is talking about, and none of them was a consti-
tutional order. In response, I would point out that the idea of a manually operated balance-of-
power system-one that is managed by the great powers according to shared rules, principles, and
norms for the purpose of maintaining system equilibrium-is a fiction that has arisen from a mis-
nomer; such an order, if one ever existed, is actually a "concert" system, which some historians be-
lieve emerged after 1815. For the theoretical details that distinguish these two systems, see Robert
Jervis, "From Balance to Concert: A Study of International Security Cooperation," in Kenneth A.
Oye, ed., Cooperationunder Anarchy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986), pp. 58-79.
Moreover, if settled arrangements are necessary for international order, it is hard to see how hege-
monic systems, as Ikenberry conceives of them, can produce order. Hegemonic systems, according
to Ikenberry, are characterized by the domination and sometimes even subjugation of secondary
and weak states by the hegemon. In my view, such a system is more accurately called an imperial
order or malign hegemony as opposed to benign hegemony, which, in many respects, is akin to
what Ikenberry refers to as a constitutional order. If hegemonic "order," as Ikenberry defines this
type of system, emerges from a settled arrangement, it must be a very one-sided bargain to say the
least.
composition," equating the whole with the sum of its parts.19 Complex sys-
tems, however, tend to exhibit what are known as "emergent properties."20
Kurt Lewin explains: "The whole might be symmetric in spite of its parts being
asymmetric, a whole might be unstable in spite of its parts being stable in
themselves.... Properties of a social group, such as its organization, its stabil-
ity, its goals, are something different from the organization, the stability, and
the goals of the individuals in it."21
Of course, theorists may within reason define concepts any way they choose.
But ultimately, adherence to this restricted notion of political order puts
Ikenberry himself in a bind: He cannot compare constitutional systems with
the standard version of balance of power, as he claims he does, to see which
system is better at causing order and stability. The game is rigged such that
constitutional systems, by definition, provide more order than the alternatives.
Ultimately it is a misleading argument for an American grand strategy of pri-
macy through policies of assertive multilateralism and cooperative security-
all of which Ikenberry claims will promote greater international order and sta-
bility than would exist under traditional balance-of-power politics. But rather
than explaining why this should be so and then showing empirically that his
model best fits the facts, Ikenberry unwittingly makes the case by fiat: His
definition of international order simply excludes from consideration the auto-
matic version of a balance-of-power system, which he nonetheless claims to be
testing as a competing model of international order.
This is not a picayune semantic point. Indeed it goes to the core of
Ikenberry's argument. To see why, I consider the two values most associated
with order: predictability and stability. The predictability of a social system de-
pends on, among other things, its degree of complexity, whether its essential
mechanisms are automatic or volitional, and whether the system requires key
members to act against their short-run interests in order to work properly.
Constitutional orders are complex systems that rely on ad hoc human choices
and require actors to voluntarily choose to subordinate their immediate inter-
ests to communal or remote ones. As such, how they actually perform when
confronted with a disturbance that trips the alarm, so to speak, will be highly
unpredictable. In contrast, the operation of a balance-of-power system is fairly
automatic and therefore highly predictable. It simply requires that states, seek-
ing to survive and thrive in a competitive, self-help realm, pursue their short-
run interests: That is, states seek power and security as they must in an anar-
chic order.22
Here, I do not mean to suggest that balance-of-power systems always func-
tion properly and predictably: Balancing can be late, uncertain, or nonexist-
ent.23These types of balancing maladies, however, typically occur when states
consciously seek to opt out of a balance-of-power system, as happened in the
interwar period, but then fail to replace it with a functioning alternative secu-
rity system. The result is that a balance-of-power order, which I view as a de-
fault system that arises spontaneously in the absence or failure of concerted
arrangements among all the units of the system to provide for their collective
security, eventually emerges but is not accomplished as efficiently as it other-
wise would have been.
Turning to system stability, Ikenberry defines stability in terms of the sys-
tem's resilience in the face of disturbances, such as shifts in power, the rise of
new states, and changes in the goals of states (p. 45). Here again, balance-of-
power orders can be expected to perform better than constitutional ones. In a
balance-of-power system, status quo states respond to rising challengers by
arming themselves and forming counterbalancing coalitions. Precisely what
the corresponding response mechanisms are in constitutional orders is unclear.
Ikenberry provides only the vague notion that the rule of law and institutional
binding will suffice to restore system equilibrium. Given the logic of constitu-
tional orders, however, rising challengers should not appear in the first place.
Shifts in power will be benign because all states, including rising states, agree
that the order is legitimate. Once a strong state or group of states decides oth-
erwise, all bets are off; in other words, when a disturbance arises, there is no
telling how the system will behave. This is obviously not evidence of system
stability as Ikenberry defines it, but rather an argument that constitutional or-
ders are so robust that the problem of instability never arises in the first place.
It is a rosy picture of international politics-one that provides little comfort
to defensive states if it proves incorrect. In practice, if strong states defect
from the constitutional order and seek to overthrow it, the institutional order
will naturally devolve into a balance-of-power system. In summary, while
Ikenberry, by definition, rules out a self-regulating (or automatic) balance
of power as a system of order, it does a better job than his constitutional vari-
22. These arguments are drawn from Betts, "Systems for Peace or Causes of War?"
23. I am grateful to Colin Elman and Sean Lynn-Jones for raising this point.
ant at providing the two values most associated with order: predictability and
stability.
What, then, is the benefit of constitutional orders? Thomas Hobbes stated
that what makes men give up their independence is not reason but fear. The
hegemon has the least to fear and so little incentive to create an order that
binds its strength. Secondary and weak states have a good deal to fear, but a
system that merely has certain characteristics of a constitutional order but not
the crucial one-competent agents able and willing to enforce the rule of law-
will not protect them.
What Ikenberry sees as constitutional order is little more than what Charles
Krauthammer calls "pseudo-multilateralism: a dominant great power acts es-
sentially alone, but, embarrassed at the idea and still worshipping at the shrine
of collective security, recruits a ship here, a brigade there, and blessings all
around to give its unilateral actions a multilateral sheen."24 The danger is that
American political leaders, and those countries that have placed their security
in their hands, might come to believe their own pretense. China, Ethiopia,
Czechoslovakia, and Austria learned this lesson the hard way in the 1930s;
Britain and France followed in 1940.
Ikenberry claims that a new hegemon should pursue a policy of strategic re-
straint if it realizes at the outset of the postwar juncture that its capability ad-
vantage is a wasting asset. Accordingly, the hegemon will forgo short-run
gains and instead invest in its future, establishing a durable set of institutional
arrangements that bind its power but lock in long-term benefits. There are sev-
eral problems with this logic.
First, although hegemonic decline may be inevitable, it is not self-evident
that a policy of strategic restraint better serves the hegemon's long-
run interests than simply taking advantage of its power position to grab imme-
diate gains. Indeed there is no a priori reason to conclude that instant post-
war benefits (e.g., increases in the size of the new hegemon's territorial bound-
aries, spheres of influence, colonial possessions, etc.) will not continue
to accrue significant future gains and thereby better serve to arrest the pace of
hegemonic decline than Ikenberry's alternative of a constitutional peace settle-
24. Charles Krauthammer, "The Unipolar Moment," Foreign Affairs, Vol. 70, No. 1 (Winter 1990/
1991), p. 25.
ment. Because one can make an equally impressive logical case to support
either position, theoretical arguments alone will not tell us whether the choice
to transform is more likely to benefit the hegemon over the long run than is
the decision to dominate. It is ultimately an empirical question.
In practice, there has been a strong relationship between the growth in
power of a state and its desire to extend its territorial control, political
influence, and domination of the international economy.25 Great powers have
tended to expand when they can. They have done so not necessarily to satisfy
an innate lust for power, prestige, and glory-though history is replete with
such cases-but rather because anarchy compels states to enhance their secu-
rity and influence over others and their environment whenever it is possible
and pragmatic for them to do so.26 Hegemonic postwar junctures are precisely
when great powers, especially the leading state, can be expected to expand, not
bind, their power. Because nature and politics abhor a vacuum, the victors will
move quickly to fill the political vacuums left behind by the defeated great
powers. This is predictable behavior because, when presented with such an ex-
traordinary opportunity to expand the state's territory and influence, political
leaders "can be said to act under external compulsion rather than in accord-
ance with their preferences":27That is, their actions are driven by irresistible
temptation.
Second, even if decisionmakers believe that hegemonic decline is inevitable,
there are plenty of reasons why they would not and should not act on that be-
lief. First, leaders have few if any domestic incentives to abandon policies of
autonomy and unilateralism in favor of multilateralism and self-restraint. The
incentive structure of elites, even foreign policy ones, is primarily a function of
domestic, not international, politics. No matter how much internationalists
may champion multilateral solutions, elected officials must answer to a do-
mestic audience, and unelected bureaucrats must serve and promote the au-
tonomy and interests of the bureaucratic organization to which they belong.
Second, Ikenberry's claim rests on an unrealistic assumption about the time
horizons of democratic leaders. Even if we concede the point that the creation
of a constitutional order is a wise long-term investment for the new hegemonic
state, history records few decisionmakers who acted in such a farsighted man-
ner. This is particularly true for leaders of democratic states, because the pri-
mary goal for most elected officials is to ensure reelection. Why, then, should
we expect democratically elected policymakers of a newly hegemonic state to
forgo immediate gains for long-run payoffs that may or may not be reaped de-
cades later-long after they have left office? Finally, the deliberate choice to re-
strain the exercise of power now because of the possibility (but not certainty)
of exerting relatively less power later is like committing suicide for fear of
death. The key question for postwar leaders is not whether but when decline
will come and how much deterioration can be expected. Had American
policymakers, for example, been persuaded by the chorus of scholars in the
1970s to late 1980s proclaiming that U.S. power was in terminal decline, the
Cold War might have continued for decades longer; and it surely would noth
ave ended in total victory for the West. Thankfully, instead of constraining
American power and preparing for inevitable decline, the Reagan administra-
tion began ramping up U.S. power capabilities in the 1980s, arresting Amer-
ica's relative decline through bold policy choices.28 Consequently, as Ikenberry
himself acknowledges, "American power in the 1990s is without historical
precedent" (p. 270).
It is worth pointing out that even in the late 1980s, few if any foreign policy
experts forecasted America's current supremacy in a unipolar world. This pre-
dictive failure, however, is not proof of the impoverishment of international re-
lations theories, as many have claimed.29 The (painful for some) truth is that
the future power position of the United States or any other country is simply
beyond prediction. This is because the power trajectories of nations, especially
powerful ones, are not structurally determined; they are the result of wise or
imprudent policy choices. Hence it is impossible to tell whether the United
States has currently reached its power zenith, or is only halfway there, or is
anywhere in between.30 What can be said is that if current U.S. policymakers
28. See George Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph:My Years as Secretary of State (New York: Charles
Scribner's Sons, 1993); John Lewis Gaddis, "Hanging Tough Paid Off," Bulletin of the Atomic Scien-
tists, Vol. 45, No. 1 (January/February 1989), pp. 11-14; and Robert Einhorn, Negotiating from
Strength: Leveragein U.S.-Soviet Arms Control (New York: Praeger, 1985).
29. For an extended version of this argument, see Randall L. Schweller and William C. Wohlforth,
"Power Test: Evaluating Realism in Response to the End of the Cold War," Security Studies, Vol. 9,
No. 3 (Summer 2000), pp. 60-107.
30. For the 1990s' debate between American declinists and triumphalists, see Krauthammer, "The
Unipolar Moment," pp. 23-33; Paul M. Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic
Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (New York: Random House, 1987); Christopher
Layne, "The Unipolar Illusion: Why New Great Powers Will Rise," International Security, Vol. 17,
No. 4 (Spring 1993), pp. 5-15; Christopher Layne, "From Preponderance to Offshore Balancing:
act on the belief that Pax Americana is an artificial moment, they run the risk of
achieving a foolish, self-fulfilling prophecy. More to the matters at hand, after
fifty-six years of American leadership of the free world and still counting,
it would have been a terrible mistake for U.S. policymakers to have acted on
this assumption of inevitable decline in 1945, in accordance with Ikenberry's
prescription.
America's Future Grand Strategy," InternationalSecurity, Vol. 22, No. 1 (Summer 1997), pp. 86-124;
Michael Mastanduno, "Preserving the Unipolar Moment: Realist Theories and U.S. Grand Strategy
after the Cold War," International Security, Vol. 21, No. 4 (Spring 1997), pp. 49-88; William C.
Wohlforth, "The Stability of a Unipolar World," InternationalSecurity,Vol. 24, No. 1 (Summer 1999),
pp. 5-41; and Kupchan, "After Pax Americana."
31. Betts, "Systems for Peace or Causes of War?" p. 8.
cases in which institutions were effectively used by secondary and weak states
to protect themselves from the arbitrary exercise of hegemonic power, that is,
cases in which the institution prevented the hegemon from doing something it
was determined to do and otherwise would have done.
Contrary to Ikenberry's claim that the institutional arrangements con-
structed after 1945 worked to check American power, the historical record
shows that these international institutions, when they played any role at all,
have been used by U.S. policymakers to project and enhance the unilateral ex-
ercise of American power. What restrained U.S. power and made its use legiti-
mate in the eyes of its postwar partners was not the creation of a constitutional
order but rather the common Soviet threat and the bipolar structure of the in-
ternational system. The postwar institutions that were created and led by the
United States were used to project American power throughout the globe; they
were the means to implement military containment of the Soviet Union, its
partner in victory. This American postwar strategy and its institutional struc-
tures were clearly incompatible with the interests of the Soviet Union as
defined by Josef Stalin, and some historians argue that they even accentuated
the Russian problem and caused the Cold War.
Indeed Ikenberry's own version of the settlement of 1945 essentially con-
forms to the predictions of balance-of-power theory, as he himself admits
(p. 216, n. 3). He argues, however, that America's agenda to bind the Europe-
ans together "was driven by the demands of postwar economic renewal and
the need for some solution to the German problem, imperatives that existed in-
dependently of the worsening of relations with the Soviet Union-although
the Cold War did raise the stakes and sped the process" (p. 211). But the Ger-
man problem was not independent of bipolarity and the Cold War. A reluctant
hegemon, the United States sought to create a "third force" in Europe precisely
for the purpose of balancing Soviet power so that Americans could come
home. The problem with this transparent attempt to pass the balancing buck to
the West Europeans is that it required the economic revitalization and military
rearmament of West Germany. A strong West German state, however, might
not be dependent on the Western allies for protection, and that would pose a
serious threat to the security of its neighbors and that of the Soviet Union,
greatly increasing the risk of war. The Truman administration's preferred solu-
tion to this so-called German problem was to bind West German economic and
military power within a more integrated Europe, such that Germany would
not be free to act independently. With the establishment of a stable balance of
power between this third force and the Soviet Union, America could then
safely abandon the Eurasian continent and assume its natural role as an off-
shore balancer.32In the absence of a dangerous and immediate Soviet threat to
Western Europe, however, there would have been no need to rearm West Ger-
many and therefore no problem of German power. Under such circumstances,
why would the Europeans have feared American abandonment, and what
would have prevented the United States from disengaging from the Eurasian
continent?
More generally, the logic of Ikenberry's constitutional model asserts that
binding institutions are designed to check concentrated power in the hands of
the leading state. Yet the European industrial democracies and Japan feared
American abandonment, not the unfettered exercise of its preponderant
power. As Ikenberry writes: "The most consistent British and French objective
during and after the war was to bind the United States to Europe. The evolu-
tion in American policy, from the goal of a European 'third force' to acceptance
of an ongoing security commitment within NATO, was a story of American
reluctance and European persistence" (p. 206). No doubt, Ikenberry would
counter that he explicitly argues that for secondary great powers, binding in-
stitutions mitigate the twin fears of abandonment and domination by the vic-
torious leading state; thus, there is no inconsistency between the logic of his
model and European fears of American abandonment. But this merely begs the
larger question: Although it is obvious why subordinate and secondary states
would not want to be dominated by the leading state, why in the absence of
some other immediate threat or one looming on the horizon would they fear
its abandonment?33 If Nazi Germany had won World War II, would the United
States have sought to bind German power to the Western hemisphere?
Ikenberry would say no because Nazi Germany was not a liberal democracy. If
liberal democracy is a sufficient condition for his model to work, however,
why in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars did the United States go to war
with a liberal hegemon, Great Britain, in 1812 and then declare the Monroe
Doctrine in 1823 to keep European powers out of its hemisphere?
Leaving aside the issue of bipolarity and conventional balancing behavior as
direct causes of the institutional structures that emerged after 1945, history
shows that the United States consistently violated the spirit of multilateral co-
operation within its own alliance system. Many of the most momentous deci-
sions to exercise American power or dramatically change the direction of U.S.
32. The definitive account of this historical case is Marc Trachtenberg, A Constructed Peace: The
Making of the EuropeanSettlement, 1945-1963 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999).
33. I am grateful to Robert Edwin Kelly for pointing this out.
foreign policy were made unilaterally, without prior consultation among its al-
lies. Indeed one would be hard put to find any solid evidence throughout the
entire Cold War period of institutions restraining the arbitrary use of American
power. At the very outset, the U.S. Senate rejected the International Trade Or-
ganization treaty in 1947, and a less institutionalized arrangement, the General
Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, took its place. The Eisenhower administration
unilaterally ended the imperial careers of Britain and France during the 1956
Suez War. The Kennedy administration adopted the doctrine of flexible re-
sponse against the wishes of West Europeans, who, for obvious reasons, did
not want to increase the likelihood of tactical, limited nuclear war or conven-
tional defense on their territory. The United States similarly ignored the wishes
of its NATO allies and fought unpopular wars in the Pacific against North Ko-
rea (which, in Krauthammer's view, is "still the classic case study in pseudo-
multilateralism") and North Vietnam.34 Then, in an extraordinarily arrogant
display of unilateralism reminiscent of Adolf Hitler's surprise attack against
Stalinist Russia, the Nixon administration shocked Japan on July 15, 1971,
when it unexpectedly announced that it was normalizing relations with China.
Mere months later, it once again stunned Japan and the other industrial de-
mocracies when it unilaterally and without consultation decided to close the
gold window. The Bretton Woods agreement, which had regulated interna-
tional monetary arrangements since 1944, was suddenly made irrelevant be-
cause it was no longer seen as serving American interests, narrowly defined.35
Whither the ability of binding institutions to provide the leading state with fu-
ture favorable returns beyond what is warranted by its actual power? Not only
did the Bretton Woods system fail both to prolong American economic domi-
nance and to protect its partners from the arbitrary exercise of U.S. power, as
Ikenberry claims, one can reasonably argue that it actually accelerated Amer-
ica's relative economic decline.
This pattern of unilateral American actions and the use of international insti-
tutions simply to give them an air of multilateral legitimacy has continued
reaction of America's allies, see Henry A. Kissinger, WhiteHouse Years(Boston: Little, Brown, 1979),
pp. 755-763, 955.
36. See Philip Zelikow and Condoleezza Rice, Germany Unified and EuropeTransformed:A Study in
Statecraft (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995); and Schweller and Wohlforth,
"Power Test."
37. Quoted in Schweller and Wohlforth, "Power Test," p. 95.
38. Ikenberry's discussion of the case (pp. 222-233) makes it seem as if Mikhail Gorbachev was
happy that a unified Germany would be situated within NATO-as if the United States had some-
how compromised on this issue to reassure the Soviets.
39. Kenneth N. Waltz, "Structural Realism after the Cold War,"InternationalSecurity, Vol. 25, No. 1
(Summer 2000), p. 20.
40. Ibid., p. 21. The best account of the controversial decision to expand NATO is James M.
Goldgeier, Not Whetherbut When:The U.S. Decision to EnlargeNATO (Washington, D.C.: Brookings,
1999).
that "once created, organizations take on a life of their own"-misses the forest
for the trees.41NATO essentially serves the same purposes today that it always
has: to keep America in, Germany down, and Russia out. The expansion of
NATO and survival of other U.S.-led security arrangements tell us less about
the benefits and vigor of multilateralism and constitutional orders than they
do about America's determination to maintain its grip on the foreign and mili-
tary policies of the European states and Japan. As Waltz remarks, "Realism re-
veals what liberal institutionalist theory obscures: namely, that international
institutions serve primarily national rather than international interests."42
Inasmuch as NATO serves to reassure U.S. allies that the United States will
not turn inward and abandon them, Ikenberry's binding institutions thesis is
partly correct. But it incorrectly identifies the leading state as the target of the
binding strategy rather than the subordinate state, in this case, Germany. This
is a critical error because it exposes the logical problem at the core of his argu-
ment-namely, that institutions can bind a hegemon's power. Institutions can-
not be both autonomous and capable of binding strong states. Institutions are
either instruments of strong states, and therefore capable of binding subordi-
nate ones, or they are independent of strong states and thus unable to perform
a binding function. In any case, leading states can never be bound by institu-
tions. A hegemon may choose to exhibit restraint, and then again it may not. In
these matters, however, institutions are guarantors of nothing. At one point,
Ikenberry remarks: "Institutional binding is like marriage: two individuals
realize that their relationship will eventually generate conflict and discord, so
they bind themselves together in a legal framework, making it more difficult to
dissolve the relationship when those inevitable moments arrive" (p. 69, n. 58).
A recent study by the Council on American Families found that 50 percent of
all first marriages end in divorce.43
If the United States suddenly stopped behaving like a huge but usually
placid elephant and turned into a carnivorous Tyrannosaurusrex, the protection
of international institutions and the rule of law would be of small comfort to
the rest of the world.44 We would quickly see a return to tried-and-true bal-
ance-of-power politics, which is precisely the problem: When the safety mech-
41. See, for example, Robert O. Keohane and Lisa L. Martin, "The Promise of Institutionalist The-
ory," International Security, Vol. 20, No. 1 (Summer 1995), pp. 39-51.
42. Kenneth N. Waltz, "Intimations of Multipolarity," in Birthe Hansen and Bertel Heurlin, eds.,
The New WorldOrder:Contrasting Theories(London: Macmillan, 2000), p. 5.
43. Ross Wilymz, "Low Marriage, High Divorce Rate Hits Kids Hard," Reuters, April 4, 1995.
44. I have borrowed these metaphors from Josef Joffe, "How America Does It," ForeignAffairs,Vol.
76, No. 5 (September/October 1997), p. 16.
anisms of the institutional system are actually called on to perform, they will
not work as designed and will, most likely, be counterproductive with the ob-
ject of security. This is because the logic of how security is caused by constitu-
tional order rests entirely on the hegemon's voluntary compliance to the rules
of the game. The system therefore can neither ensure that the hegemon will not
defect nor survive the hegemon's defection; yet this is precisely the danger that
a constitutional order is designed to guard against. Here, Betts's observation
that advocates of collective security confuse causes and consequences applies
equally well to Ikenberry's concept of constitutional order: "Peaceis the premise
of the system ratherthan the product."45I would add that Ikenberry's notion that
the international system may exhibit features of a constitutional order is like
describing someone as a little pregnant. Either a full-blown constitutional or-
der is in place-which means that there is a sovereign arbiter to make and en-
force agreements among states-or we are dealing with a balance-of-power or
hegemonic system with international institutions, which, after all, are always
present in some form or another.
Ikenberry claims that his institutional theory of order explains why American
primacy has not engendered the "normal response" of resistance and counter-
balancing and "why international order has remained so stable after the Cold
War despite these heightened power asymmetries" (p. 270). Once again, there
are several plausible alternative explanations for why secondary states have
not yet balanced against U.S. power.
First, the international structure that emerged out of World War II was bipo-
lar, not unipolar. Bipolarity and the common Soviet threat explain how and
why the United States created a web of supranational institutional arrange-
ments among the industrial democracies and why they voluntarily partici-
pated in them. These U.S.-led institutions were primarily designed not to bind
American strength but rather (1) to project U.S. power more effectively than it
otherwise could in an overall strategy of containment, and (2) to reassure am-
bivalent allies to accept the risks that accompanied Germany's and Japan's re-
vivals within a U.S.-led anti-Soviet coalition. Because America is an offshore,
insular state, its power is not as threatening to other regional powers as their
power is to each other. Thus, although the structure of the international system
has changed from bipolarity to unipolarity, the problems that the institutions
45. Betts, "Systems for Peace or Causes of War?" pp. 23-24 (emphasis in original).
were designed to solve largely remain. The Europeans want the United States
to maintain its military presence on the continent to guard against the twin
threats of a Germanized Europe and a revitalized Russia. Likewise, the United
States must remain engaged in East Asia to contain rising Chinese power and
to prevent the emergence of an independent, nuclear Japan, which would
destabilize the region and trigger a dangerous arms race between Japan and
China.
Second, the industrial democracies have had no reason to fear that the
United States, with little history of imperialism or greedy expansion, would
use its power for malign purposes. The benign nature of American intentions,
not the illusion of protection from American power provided by binding insti-
tutions, explains why members of the Western alliance have not defected to
aggregate their power against the United States after the Cold War. The dura-
bility of the West's institutional arrangements is a consequence, not a cause, of
peace among the industrial democracies, which share common goals and val-
ues and trust that the United States will not act aggressively.
Finally, some argue that the United States is so overwhelmingly powerful
that there is no possible combination of states that could balance against it. As
William Wohlforth points out, "Unipolarity is a structure in which one state's
capabilities are too great to be counterbalanced.... Unipolarity should not be
confused with a multi- or bipolar system containing one especially strong po-
lar state."46This is precisely the error that Ikenberry commits in labeling the
postwar structures after 1815, 1919, and 1945 hegemonic systems. The first two
were multipolar systems, the last was a bipolar one. All systems prior to the
current one were balance-of-power systems, not hegemonic or constitutional
orders. All except the present unipolar system witnessed balancing among the
great powers. Ikenberry myopically focuses on America's bloc system and
calls it a constitutional international order. Yet the high degree of institu-
tionalization within the U.S.-led coalition was merely a by-product of collec-
tive-defense balancing in a bipolar system.
The novelty of After Victory's analysis is largely derived from the rather inter-
esting duality at its core: It prescribes liberal idealist means to achieve Machia-
vellian realist ends. On the one hand, Ikenberry's basic institutional argument
is entirely consistent with liberal idealism and what E. H. Carr called the "doc-
trine of the harmony of interests."47 Thus Ikenberry believes that the leading
state can establish a constitutional-like order among democratic states that is
governed by the rule of law and viewed as legitimate by all its members, who
therefore willingly participate in it and abide by its rules and principles. Here
Ikenberry, like many liberal theorists, employs an explicit domestic analogy to
theorize about international politics.
On the other hand, the purpose of this institutional order is to lock in the
hegemon's advantage well after it has reached its peak in actual power. Here,
the strategy illustrates the Machiavellian maxim that the Prince should always
appear virtuous but not act virtuously. For the leading state, the aim of the
grand strategy is primacy; the means are "sticky" institutional arrangements
that lock in advantageous returns for the hegemon that are no longer war-
ranted by its actual power position. The key to the success of this rather decep-
tive strategy is for the hegemon not only to appear benign but to make all
others believe that its order is in their best interests. Accordingly, the
hegemon's constitutional order must be continually extended to achieve uni-
versal legitimacy. Otherwise, powerful revisionist states will emerge to chal-
lenge the established order, and the system's touted stability will be lost. To
believe that such a strategy can work, however, is to embrace the fallacy of the
doctrine of the harmony of interests among nations. Because there is no inter-
national order that serves everyone's interests, any strategy-no matter how
clever or well intentioned-that attempts to preserve American primacy is
doomed to failure. The dilemma for American policymakers is that the more
the United States exerts itself to maintain its hegemonic status, the more others
will work to undermine it. In the end, assertive multilateral schemes such as
those prescribed in After Victory will not fool anyone.
Ikenberry himself seems to recognize this problem and the limitations of his
constitutional model to solve it. For example, given his claim that "democra-
cies have special capacities to establish binding institutional agreements"
(p. 78), and his use of NATO as an exemplar of a binding institution, one
would reasonably expect that the book's policy prescriptions would strongly
support NATO enlargement and its declared rationale to establish a unified,
democratic, and peaceful Europe. They do not. Instead, Ikenberry writes: "If
NATO was partly attractive to alliance members because it lessened European
fears of American domination and abandonment, it also reassured outside
47. For the realist critique of the harmony of interests, see Edward Hallett Carr, The Twenty Years'
Crisis, 1919-1939: An Introductionto the Study of InternationalRelations (New York:Harper and Row,
1964), pp. 80-85.
states to some extent by restraining abrupt and offensive shifts in Western mili-
tary policy. But the NATO bombing in Serbia takes the alliance along a new
path of military intervention outside alliance territory. China and Russia-
along with other countries-publically condemned the NATO action pursued
without UN Security Council sanction. If NATO was an alliance that bound
power together and down-thereby reassuring both its members and its
neighbors-it looks very different today" (p. 273). Yes, it looks like a tool of
American power and interests.
Why does NATO no longer restrain U.S. power? Why does it no longer reas-
sure nonmembers that the United States will not abruptly shift to an offensive
military policy? The answer is that it was not the institution that assured oth-
ers that American power would be checked and defensively oriented but
rather the countervailing power of the Soviet Union and its allies. In the ab-
sence of that power, there are no assurances about how American power will
be exercised. Other states can only hope and trust that the United States will
remain benign and self-restrained. "But," as Waltz points out, "American be-
havior over the past century in Central America provides little evidence of self-
restraint in the absence of countervailing power."48
That said, the threat of American power is more imagined than real and
tends to be overstated. Regional and global hegemony are entirely different
matters. Since the emergence of the modern states system, the United States is
the only country to have achieved regional, much less global, hegemony. The
world is simply too vast and unwieldy a place to be ruled by any one state.
Geography and the common sense of the American people, who have shown
little enthusiasm for multilateralist internationalism, will effectively restrain
current U.S. power and aspirations. The American public, if not its leaders, in-
tuitively recognizes the limits of U.S. power and influence in the world; they
have little trouble grasping the difference between feasible goals that are worth
the costs entailed and counterproductive American meddling in the internal
and external affairs of distant sovereign nations.49