Like the two books at the center of this critical dialogue, science and technology are complementary. My claim that the goods are complementary in an economic sense means that the United States cannot maintain its hegemony by pursuing, for example, science at the exclusion of technology. Rather, an international power, particularly a democratic one, hurts its cause if it dedicates itself to resolving the mysteries of nature while neglecting the potential for competing states to make it “about conquest” and acquire “the technological capability to do so” (quotes from this dialogue).

Courting Science used case studies (i.e., analytic narratives) to illustrate how the United States today struggles with a similar problem though in an opposite sense: it clumsily chases international influence wearing two left shoes, as it were, with ever greater devotion to technology without science. That “science can play a role in hegemony” and that America tends to “overemphasize technology at the expense of science” is precisely where I marshalled the circumstantial evidence. Complementarity does not imply that “science is more powerful than technology as a vehicle for hegemony” any more than a right shoe is more powerful than a left shoe. At the margins, however, if all a hegemon has is technology, a little science comes in handy because “science leads to hegemony in ways…different from…technology.”

While civilizational pathways connecting science and hegemony do not need to be “stronger,” for complementary goods to work, science paths do need to be distinct from the technological ones Robert Gilpin had when he wrote presciently about the United States as a Scientific State and, prematurely, as an eternal hegemon in the 1960s. Among many notables mentioned in my Chapter 1 to tie S&T to International Relations, there was Immanuel Kant, by virtue of his classic 1795 essay on Perpetual Peace. Kant discussed three interlocking levels of institutions, or constitutions, for fixing independent, self-seeking states in a peace equilibrium. Under perpetual peace, no competitor, not one bad apple, had rational incentive to break free from the system and initiate major power war.

This centuries-old peace bargain, founded on democratic civic constitutions, Westphalian rules of international conduct, and Hellenic hospitality at the transnational level, remains a leading contender for how to sustain a just peace in a world of autonomous states and constantly shifting balance of power. Science pathways as distinct from technology pathways toward international leadership work from this Kantian foundation, which in terms of IR theory coheres more with Robert Keohane’s neoliberal institutionalism than Robert Gilpin’s realism or Alexander Wendt’s constructivism (my Chapter 7). State preferences for domestic tranquility, efficient diplomacy, and commercial comity are already real as those for technological military and economic dominance—the diplomat and realist thinker E.H. Carr included them all.

Institutionalists argue, though, that the first three objectives, central to the Kantian bargain, belong to enlightened self-interest, and formal institutional structures can help states plan for the long term. Science as described here runs closer to the more malleable institutionalist concept of regime than a form of world government or modern international organization. Yet, in my case studies, at each of the Kantian levels of analysis, science not technology played a role similar to Keohane’s institutions, pointing the way toward bargains within and beyond the state that provide relief from the wages of hegemony.

Science may do this without compromising technological prowess. Different pathways to a second American century are indeed complementary—not unlike the push of domestic social peace and the pull of external challenge that together constitute Zak Taylor’s political variable, “creative insecurity,” shown through his case studies to inspire S&T innovation. Whether patented technology so inspired leads to international influence and rule setting for our evolving global order hinges on whether statesmen can recognize the current imbalance in government portfolios between technology racing and underserved science.