While Barry Buzan and Robert Jervis share similar starting points but take us down different paths in their respective analyses, they reach a largely similar conclusion. The common point of departure is the present standing of the United States as the sole remaining superpower and the absence of Great Power challengers. Both authors note that this condition is significant because war among the Great Powers has been the driving force in world politics. Their common end point is the expectation that this condition may well endure and general agreement on the appropriate response strategies that should be followed by the Great Powers.

The core of Jervis's work consists of a series of articles published in 2002 and 2003 that have undergone only minor changes. New is the final chapter, “Where Do We Go from Here?” In it Jervis takes up the question “can the Bush Doctrine be sustained?” In presenting his answer, he engages in a discussion of its internal contradictions, the nature of American domestic politics as it relates to foreign policy, and the operation of the American intelligence system. His first chapter, “Theories of War in an Era of Leading Power Peace,” has as its core the construction of a synthetic explanation blending constructionist, liberal, and realist insights of how the current Security Community among the Great Powers came into existence. He ends with a brief examination of four possible futures, all of which are cast against what he sees as the need for Europe and Japan to restrain the United States.

From here on, Jervis concerns himself more with questions of foreign policy than international politics theory. Central to Chapter 2, “September 11: How Has It Changed the World?” is the assertion that the 9/11 terrorist attacks have triggered a more assertive U.S. foreign policy. A principal motivating force behind this change was fear (p. 55). Jervis holds that the structural features for American hegemony were in place. They were the size and vitality of the American economy, the lack of unity within Europe, and the collapse of the Soviet Union (p. 58). He also expresses doubts that this more assertive foreign policy can be maintained, and holds that regardless of its staying power, it takes the United States “into dangerous and new territory” (p. 58). The following chapter, “The Confrontation between Iraq and the United States,” focuses largely on the logic of deterrence theory, especially as it relates to extended deterrence and the Bush administration's rejection of deterrence as a foreign policy strategy. With regard to the former, the author argues that “even if Saddam had gained nuclear weapons, it is hard to believe that the stability-instability paradox would have strongly inhibited the United States, but not Iraq…. At the worst mutual deterrence at the level of WMD [weapons of mass destruction] would have prevailed” (p. 67). With regard to the latter, he argues that coercion and deterrence strategies did not fit well with the more expansive goals of the newly assertive U.S. foreign policy agenda. In his chapter “Understanding the Bush Doctrine,” he brings together idiosyncratic and structural factors to construct his explanation. He concludes that under the Bush Doctrine, the United States is “acting like a normal state that has gained a position of dominance” (p. 92) and that “in a process akin to the deep security dilemma, in order to protect itself, the United States is impelled to act in a way that will increase, or at least bring to the surface, conflicts with others” (p. 95).

Where Jervis begins with a discussion of international politics theory and then moves into the realm of foreign policy strategy, Buzan's study remains at this level of analysis for much longer before exploring the dynamics of U.S. foreign policymaking. Consequently Buzan investigates, dissects, and analyzes ideas that Jervis presents with little exploration. Buzan shares with Jervis a commitment to theoretical pluralism. For Buzan, the key conceptual pieces to fit together are polarity and identity. His is “a conscious attempt to combine material and social approaches … to locate polarity within a social context” (p. 3). Such an integration is necessary because “polarity does not determine outcomes” (p. 43); rather, “how the structural logic of polarity works in a system of enemies will be different from how it works in a system of rivals or one of friends” (p. 78).

The distinction among friends, rivals, and enemies is central to Buzan's analysis of U.S. foreign policy. From his perspective, a significant disjuncture exists in the outlook underlying U.S. foreign policy and that guiding the foreign policy of the Great Powers. U.S. foreign policy is based on the premise that the world is comprised of enemies and rivals, whereas contemporary Great Power foreign policies assume a world of rivals and friends. As one might expect given the title of his work, Buzan also directs considerable attention to what it means to be a Great Power. His examination of the historical evolution of the term and the contemporary social context within which it is used leads him to argue for a tripartite division of leading states: superpowers and great powers at the international-system level and regional powers at the regional level. This framework provides the basis for an extended investigation of the polarity of the international system and the basis for generating three future scenarios. Buzan characterizes the Cold War international system as 3 + 3 (three superpowers and three Great Powers). His future possibilities are a 1 + 4 system, a 2 + 3 or 4 system, and a 0 + 4, 5, or 6 system. He concludes his analysis of these three scenarios by observing that for the next 20 years, it is unlikely that the United States will face other powers actively seeking superpower status and that the most likely scenario for the future is a continuation of one superpower and several great powers. This is also the outcome that Jervis sees as being most likely.

In presenting an explanation for why U.S. foreign policy has begun to move away from a strategy that projects American values by persuasion to one that emphasizes coercion, Buzan, like Jervis, puts forward a multifaceted argument. He emphasizes three broad forces (American exceptionalism, unipolarity, and 9/11) that generate a powerful momentum behind unilateralism, Manicheanism, and hypersecuritization (p. 185). For Jervis, the proper response of the other Great Powers, most notably Europe and Japan, is to restrain the United States while keeping close ties with it (p. 32). For Buzan, the Great Powers must “save the United States from itself” (p. 187) by accepting U.S. leadership but rejecting its more imperial tendencies. Simply put, the Great Powers must play the role of loyal opposition and friendly critic (p. 9).

Valuable in their own right, both works reviewed here provide windows into two very different contemporary international politics concerns. The first concern is with the inner logic and practical relevance of balancing theory. As discussed in a recent issue of International Security (Summer 2005), the value of thinking about a new form of balancing, one that emphasizes “soft” balancing rather than balancing out of fear of war and invasion, is unsettled. A key issue is distinguishing between moves intended to balance the superpower and those that are simply at variance with its wishes. With their emphasis on the relationship between the United States and Great Powers and their analyses of strategic options and system dynamics, both Jervis and Buzan speak to this debate. The second concern is with the very relevance of focusing on Great Power relations as the driving force in international politics today. Both authors speak to the existence of a security community among the Great Powers. And they would both acknowledge that such a security community does not mean an end to international conflict, imperial temptations, or the spread of war. It would seem, then, that a vital question to ask is whether destabilizing wars and perhaps international system change might now have their roots not in Great Power conflict or rivalry but in peripheral wars that entrap states as a result of globalization or other factors, as has been suggested by Thomas Barnett in The Pentagon's New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century (2004). Neither author speaks to this possibility, and Buzan tends to be dismissive of the impact of globalization on international politics. While it runs counter to their analysis, it nonetheless is a logical next area of inquiry.