Two well-known political scientists, David Rapkin and William Thompson, have attempted to delineate a set of five “transition scenarios” regarding the nature of relations between China and the United States in the twenty-first century. Underlying their analysis is a group of assumptions about international relations that is held in common by the power-transition, hegemonic-stability, and leadership long-cycle perspectives on “structural transitions.” And, contrary to their claims, the authors' preferred “challenger-transition” version of the leadership long-cycle perspective is a distinction without a difference. For what is essential here is that they all share the view that a single “dominant” state (hegemon) towers over all other states and exercises “control” over the system under the guise of “leadership.” They all assume, moreover, that world politics is always the resultant of dyadic interaction between a rising state (the “challenger”) and a declining state (the hegemon). They all assert that periods of “hegemonic dominance” are peaceful, and that periods of near equality between challenger and hegemon (equivalently, periods of de-concentration) are periods of warfare. In terms of that understanding of world order, other governments do not count for much, largely because they cannot influence either of these larger two states decisively. Indeed, if they did, the system would collapse structurally into a balance-of-power system that neither the hegemon nor the challenger could by themselves control.

Analysis in international relations hinges delicately on the proper relationship between theory, history, and policy.Footnote ² By claiming that the type of system determined the degree of stability, for instance, and that hard power could be employed to the exclusion of soft power, Kenneth Waltz and the neo-realists evoked from Stanley Hoffman the cryptic verdict, “reductionism.” All theory, of course, involves a type of reductionism or simplification of reality. But theory must simplify without distorting. The problem with the hegemonic interpretations of world order is that they distort and mislead. Historical systems have never been dominated by single hegemons. No single state “dominated” any of these systems or unilaterally wrote the rules; no single state was a true hegemon that successfully imposed its power on the system by either military or nonmilitary means. Any “hegemony” in the sense of preponderance always involved only a degree of dominance. Power has always been pluralistic and shared.

How do the authors get around this? First, they escape confronting the issue by collapsing all other theories into some “more generic power-transition category”—including my own theory of the “power cycle,” which at its core has always vigorously and completely rejected all aspects of the “transition” categorization. Whether intended or not, collapsing of theoretical difference is obfuscation, and it prevented the authors from actually confronting the theoretical and historical problems within their “preferred model” of reality. Second, and relatedly, having chosen Organski's latest power-transition model and Merscheimer's offensive realism as sole contenders for their critical attention, they turned to the broader international relations literature to find conflict “constraints” and “inducements”—stemming largely from the work of Bruce Russett—to append to their preferred “challenger-transition” model in constructing the scenarios. The conflict inducement versus conflict constraint framework is logical and clear, but the authors do not show any essential linkage to their model of reality versus any other model. The resultant thus lacks theoretical integration, so that the “transition scenarios” have something of the flavor of unanchored amalgams.

The five “transition scenarios” are purportedly the result of interactions between “conflict constraints” on the one hand, and “conflict inducements” on the other. Depending upon whether the constraints and inducements are “strong” or “weak,” the following scenarios result. In the case of “weak conflict constraints and weak conflict inducements,” the scenario can be either “More of the Same” or “Pax Americana II,” depending primarily on whether the United States declines slowly (the former case) or enjoys a resurgence of power due to an unspecified but robust set of technological innovations that boost its relative power. The combination “weak constraints and strong inducements” yields the “Transition War” scenario. The scenario “Pax Sinica” results from “strong constraints and strong inducements” while the scenario “Liberal Peace” results from “strong constraints and weak inducements.”

Why am I concerned? As I argued at the recent ISA meeting in Toronto, the hegemonic-challenger framework distorts and rigidifies world politics beyond recognition, dangerously misguides, and can only lead to wrong policy conclusions. The great fallacy intrinsic to hegemonic interpretation regarding “leadership” and “legitimacy” is its false promise that one or more rising powers will inherit the capacity for unqualified leadership and will be able to set the rules of the game in the future. This false promise is likely to mislead governments into role expectations that cannot possibly be fulfilled and that in the extreme can become a precipitant of major war. Is this what American scholarship ought to be teaching our friends in Beijing?