John Glenn, ‘The Flawed Logic of a MAD Man: Craig's contribution to Power Preponderance theory’

John Glenn criticises two aspects of my recent article, ‘American Power Preponderance and the Nuclear Revolution’. He reiterates the neo-realist case that Power Preponderance theory has not successfully shown that unipolarity constitutes something more than a transition between the bipolar Cold War and some future bi- or multipolar system. He also contends that a few key aspects of my argument about the relevance of the nuclear revolution to Power Preponderance theory are unproven or illogical. I am grateful to the editors of Review of International Studies for allowing me to respond to Glenn's critique.

I shall not spend too much time addressing the first criticism, because Power Preponderance theory is the handiwork of Stephen Brooks and William Wohlforth, not me. But a general response might briefly be made. The absence of traditional military balancing against the US since the end of the Cold War, a fact of international life that almost no one now denies, poses a major problem for balance-of-power Realists, who argue that major powers are destined to build up their own military forces, and/or create formal military alliances, in order to balance against a dominant state. Prominent structural realists have predicted such balancing behaviour since the early 1990s, but it hasn't happened yet.

Glenn maintains that the ongoing absence of balancing is a ‘blip’, a predictable transitional phase between balance-of-power systems. Yet as I pointed out in the article, and as Brooks and Wohlforth have insisted in many writings, balance-of-power Realists must show why major powers have not shown any indication of balancing so far over two decades, indisputably a long time in the context of modern international history, if they want to seriously refute it. Otherwise, Glenn and other balance-of-power Realists are forced to assert that a new polar system will emerge, someday, simply because that is how international politics operates. This, as any student of social science knows, is an unfalsifiable argument. The same claim could be made 50 years into a unipolar order, or 500 years, for that matter. Brooks and Wohlforth have compellingly shown that various attempts to show that balancing is indeed taking place (‘soft balancing’, ‘leash-slipping’, etc.) bear little resemblance to the kind of balancing that took place throughout modern European history. Nations simply are not trying to match the US in military capabilities or to form military alliances as they constantly did with respect to far less preponderant states over the past 300 years. Conventional Realists need to account for this: they need to show how balance-of-power theory can explain this absence. Responses that amount to a plea to ‘just wait’, or to describe behaviour as ‘balancing’ that never would have been called that before, do not fulfil this demand.

Let me turn now at some greater length to Glenn's criticisms of a couple central points I make about the effect of the nuclear revolution upon power preponderance. One of his first points is that Brooks and Wohlforth do identify the nuclear revolution as a factor in their theory, thereby putting into question the entire purpose of my article. This is easy to rebut. It is true that Brooks and Wohlforth do attribute some reinforcing importance to the nuclear factor, but they exclude it from their three explanations of unipolarity. To put it another way, the foundations of their theory would be essentially the same even if nuclear weapons did not exist. I believe that the nuclear revolution must play a central role in explaining the political logic of unipolarity; Wohlforth and Brooks do not. That's why I wrote the article.

Glenn's more substantial criticisms relate to the salience of the nuclear revolution in our unipolar environment. On one hand, he argues that America's possible acquisition of a first-strike nuclear capability undermines my claim that the US will be unable to coerce small states in possession of basic nuclear arsenals; on the other, he contends that I neglect to distinguish between basic balancing strategies designed to protect the survival of states, and secondary ones designed to protect national autonomy, an objective for which conventional forces are still suitable.

Both of these points speak directly to the question of how averse the US is to the risk of nuclear war. Keir Lieber and Daryl Press have suggested that the US may soon develop a powerful first-strike capability that would allow it to take out the retaliatory arsenals of major nuclear rivals, not to mention the basic ones of smaller states. Glenn writes that this development brings my thesis down ‘like a house of cards’. But as I spell out in greater detail in the article, it is difficult to see an American administration waging a pre-emptive nuclear strike against a small nuclear state that could not conceivably threaten America with defeat. Because things usually go wrong in war, the US could never be sure that if it attacked a nation like Iran that one or two weapons would not get through in retaliation, if not against American cities than against those of close allies. Recognising this fact, any American president would have to weigh these tremendous costs against the benefits of attacking a small state that posed no major threat to the US.

Glenn also points out that states balance against others not simply for reasons of rudimentary national survival, but also to maintain autonomy (and one might add prestige) in the international sphere. This is surely correct, and were I to expand upon my 2009 article I would address this question more specifically. But he adds that in ‘the arena of “secondary” security issues the usual logic of counterbalancing with conventional military forces still holds sway it is just that at this moment no country or coalition is quite up to the task’.

Why? Well, I provide an answer to that question in my article too. In my view, would-be rivals to the US – most evidently China – have shaped their security policies vis-à-vis the US by taking to heart basic lessons from the Cold War. To wit, a conventional war between nuclear powers is likely to escalate to nuclear war, and therefore is better avoided. Why did the US and the Soviet Union never once fight over anything during 45 years of bitter rivalry? There are several possible answers to this question, but every historian I know would put the fear of escalation to a nuclear conflagration at the top of the list. And if this fear still pertains, then the logic of conventional balancing diminishes. Before the Cold War, great powers could and often did fight limited wars (or wars they thought would be limited) with one another for reasons short of basic survival, because they knew that defeat in such a war would not be catastrophic. Now, however, the stakes are much higher. A war fought for secondary reasons of autonomy with a nuclear power raises the possibility of escalation to the nuclear level, which in turn raises the immediate spectre of national defeat, not the kind suffered, say, by Germany after World War Two but rather the incineration of one's cities, the extermination of most of one's population, the destruction of one's government, and the reduction of one's society to a stone age existence. It was the fear of such an outcome that led Cold War leaders such as Eisenhower, Kennedy and Khrushchev to reject the entire notion of waging conventional wars against their superpower rival. Leaders of would-be rivals to the US today can look back and see the sense of that.

No one can say for sure that the US will never deliberately attack a small nuclear stateFootnote ¹ (an inadvertent or accidental strike is another question entirely). The history of the Cold War, however, reveals to us that leaders behave with extraordinary caution when the possibility of nuclear war arises. I see no intrinsic reason to conclude that this will change, and Glenn does not provide one.

Finally: Glenn does not address the major argument I make in the conclusion to the article, even though it is here where I express my disagreements with Brooks and Wohlforth most decisively. I contend that the very existence of nuclear weapons may well make the era of American power preponderance more volatile and dangerous than they foresee, as states will discover that obtaining a small nuclear arsenal will allow them to defy US will, forcing American leaders to bribe an increasing number of states not to go nuclear, and to face grim showdowns with ones that build them anyway. This pessimistic forecast is in part based upon my view, most recently expressed in my book (co-authored with Fredrik Logevall) America's Cold War, that the American political system makes it very difficult for US leaders to behave with the kind of restraint and magnanimity that a successful policy of Power Preponderance would demand.

Glenn, however, seems to foresee a very different medium-term future: the interregnum between multipolar systems, he writes, will last for a ‘few decades’, whereupon international politics will ‘return to normalcy’. I suspect that I am not the only reader to have winced upon coming across that phrase. I'll leave aside the great question of whether the emergence of a multipolar order of several large nuclear-armed states could be described, in any historical sense, as ‘normal’. What I really found striking is Glenn's apparent vision of the next 40 years as an inert era, a kind of systemic time-out, in which nothing could conceivably happen to derail the inevitable restoration of balance-of-power politics as usual. Forty years! Let us think about the forty year period beginning exactly a century ago, in 1910. Or we could remind ourselves of Kenneth Waltz's insistence that Cold War bipolarity was the most stable international order imaginable, ten years before the Berlin Wall fell.