The rise of China, the passing of US primacy, and the endurance of the current international order have pushed scholars and policy practitioners to reassess the dynamics of global power politics. Although the fighting of major wars at the highest level of intensity is not an everyday event, the risk associated with the reemergence of great power competition provides ample reason for attentive study. What scholarship should inform our understanding of how to deal with rising powers?

When Right Makes Might: Rising Powers and World Order is a wide-ranging and penetrating treatment of the onset of great power conflict. Stacie Goddard is particularly interested in the question of why great powers decide to accommodate some rising powers but contain or confront others even at the risk of war. To address this question, Goddard develops a novel legitimacy-based theory. According to this constructivist perspective, whether a power transition is a threat is not only a material but also a social fact: a rising challenger has greater incentive to shape defenders’ interpretation of its intention when it seeks international and domestic legitimacy consistent with existing norms and rules. Accordingly, the consequence of power transition rests as much on subjective rhetoric as objective structure: it depends on how successfully a rising power can legitimate its claims through dialogues about what the state wants, why it wants it, and what it will want in the future.

Goddard adeptly operates from within the constructivist tradition that has recently been energized by a number of scholars, such as Alexander Wendt and Christian Reus-Smit, who attempt to make some significant modifications to mainstream rationalist theory. Although rationalists, in general, argue that the private information mechanism is a central cause of costly conflict, Goddard finds existing rationalist theories to be less than adequate to the task of explaining the outbreak of major wars. For example, the self-interest model of rational choice relies on the rigid assumptions of a given and fixed desire for material payoffs. According to its standard form, states calculate which strategies will best serve those goals, and it will often be impractical or even risky to alter such incentives in the competitive environment of international relations. In such a setup, signaling is often understood as a simple problem of information transfer, which does not govern the interactions of power or interests at the fundamental level. The only remaining question is whether a message is decipherable.

Goddard, by contrast, attempts to overcome the weakness and incorporate the strengths of the ideas mentioned earlier into an alternative “social constructivist approach to strategic signaling.” The key independent variable that she introduces is legitimation: by elucidating a rising power’s aims with the resonant rhetoric that is used to justify its policies, the signal between adversaries becomes credible “not because this information is costly, but [because] the legitimation strategy makes sense of the rising power’s actions to a great power audience” (p. 15). At the core of power politics, then, lies the legitimation problem, as embodied in various forms of strategic interaction.

After discussing her theory, Goddard carefully applies her model to four periods of history that witnessed major power transitions; these cases make up the bulk of the book. For example, she offers a good case study of Britain’s perception of the rise of the United States as a legitimate partner while interpreting Hitler as an illegitimate challenger, one that the British had to fight against, regardless of the cost.

Although Goddard’s model offers much food for thought, one may disagree with her incomplete synthesis of other theories of war that could have strengthened her argument’s applicability and versatility. First, is it reasonable to consider the role of the legitimate signal as a sufficient reason to explain the variation across cases? From a pure rationalist perspective, such as applications of the costly-to-fake principle in the signaling game or the revelation principle in mechanism design, it is a relatively common practice to distinguish communications that transpire between states with common goals from those between rivals whose interests are potentially in conflict. The US–Britain relationship falls into the former category and the Anglo–German rivalry into the latter. Seen in this light, the United States may be forced to reveal correct information about its intentions simply because it would be costly to fake and pretend to be a revolutionary state, which would involve undesirable risks of confrontation. It further implies that Britain is reasonably safe in assuming that the United States is a benign challenger that is subject to the cost of dishonesty. Of course, the proposition that Hitler may have had rational reasons for mispresenting his intention is not new.

Second, it is somewhat surprising that little attention is given to the previous arguments from power transition theory led by A. F. K. Organski and Jacek Kugler, which have been the basis of recent discussions about the continued rise of China and its consequences for the international system. Power transition theorists speak of (dis)satisfaction with the status quo, not (il)legitimacy, but for analytical purposes the two play seemingly parallel roles. Thus, a rising power that is satisfied with the rule of the global hierarchy may be equivalently described as a legitimate challenger whose aims are consistent with the norms of international politics. I suggest that combining the constructivism-based theory of legitimation strategy with the structural arguments of power transition theory could lead to the formulation of a better lens through which to view the fuller range of international politics.

Still, to Goddard’s credit, the theoretically guided and empirically grounded thesis of this erudite work must be taken seriously. On the whole, When Right Makes Might succeeds in raising important issues and pointing us in the direction of “legitimate” answers by transcending disciplinary lines. The scholarly purpose of this book—to explore how and when existing great powers cope with rising powers, as well as the closely related policy objective of mitigating the challenges that contribute to the great power dilemma—makes Goddard’s elegant theory a welcome addition to the literature. It will be of interest to a wide range of intellectuals and practitioners. There is still much to learn about this subject, but I expect this volume will be a helpful benchmark for future studies on social constructivist approaches to power transitions.