Unipolar Politics: Realism and State Strategies After the Cold War, by Ethan B. Kapstein and Michael Mastanduno (eds.)

 

Preface

Michael Mastanduno and Ethan B. Kapstein

For the past decade, policymakers and scholars who focus on international affairs have found themselves adrift without chart or compass. The end of the Cold War surely meant profound changes in the international system, but what form did the “new world order” take? Were we on the road toward a world of liberal, peace-loving democracies, as Francis Fukuyama proposed in “The End of History?” Or were we facing instead, as Samuel Huntington asked, “The Clash of Civilizations?” Wherever one looked, scholars and policymakers seemed to be presenting conflicting visions of world politics, and in most cases they failed to provide the sort of testable propositions that would help us discover whether or not their assertions were correct.

At the level of foreign policy, authors were also asking about the future direction that countries would take around the world. Would the Western alliance survive the end of the Cold War, or was it doomed to collapse? Would Japan and/or China challenge American leadership, or would they “bandwagon” with the United States? Was the European Union likely to develop a single foreign and defense policy, or would it continue to “free-ride” on Washington? Again, we have faced a barrage of questions and answers without a filter to help us separate out the serious ideas from those that were frivolous.

The authors of this volume came together to bring some analytical clarity to the increasingly contested realm of world politics. Specifically, we wanted to know whether the dominant research program in international relations, realism, could help us to understand both changes in the systemic environment and in the grand strategies of nation-states. Overall, our answer is “yes.”

At the systemic level, we took the concept of polarity seriously, and focused on what the world was like now that one country, the United States, dominated other states in economic, security, and even cultural terms. What was the meaning of international politics in a unipolar system, and how stable was that order? Not surprisingly, most authors feel that unipolarity is fundamentally an unstable system, and that the United States should expect an array of challenges. Some of these would naturally come from other emerging powers, while others, and perhaps the most significant among them, would come from inside the American polity itself, blocking Washington's leadership activities.

This book was written in the context of the Changing Security Environment project at Harvard University's John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies. We would like to express our gratitude to Professor Samuel Huntington, director of the Olin Institute, not only for his support of this work, but more broadly for his unwavering commitment to academic research in the field of national security. More than any other individual, Sam has animated contemporary security studies, and all of us who seek to pursue scholarship in that area owe him a considerable debt.

We also wish to thank Ms. Inga Peterson of the Olin Institute for her administrative assistance, and Mr. Keith Vargo of the Stassen Center at the Humphrey Institute for Public Affairs, University of Minnesota, for turning twelve different word processing programs into a book! Finally, we want to express our appreciation to each of our authors for their hard work, as well as to Ms. Kate Wittenberg, editor-in-chief of Columbia University Press, who supported this project from its early stages, and whose anonymous referees provided us with a superb set of constructive comments on an earlier draft.

 

Unipolar Politics: Realism and State Strategies After the Cold War