Randall L. Schweller

Bandwagoning for Profit: Bringing the Revisionist State Back In

often with the weaker or with the stronger side in Do states ally more a conflict? In the parlance of international relations theory: do states tend to balance against or bandwagon with a rising state or coalition? The answer to this question is critical to the formulation of grand strategy and the definition of vital interests. If states resist the gains of their neighbors by drawing together to redress the balance, then conquest does not pay’ and interventions to defend far-flung commitments are not only unnecessary, but often counterproductive in causing local states to unite against the meddling great power and its protege. Conversely, if states gravitate to expanding power, then bandwagons will roll, dominoes will fall, and great powers will find it wise, even at the cost of blood and treasure, to defend remote areas of little or no intrinsic value to their national interests.2 While international relations scholars have traditionally accepted the view that states balance against threatening increases of power, paradoxically, practitioners through the ages have held a bandwagoning image of international politics. As Jack Snyder remarks, “most imperial strategists defending far-flung commitments have feared falling dominoes, and most rising chal-

Neorealism's status‐quo bias: What security dilemma?

(1996). Neorealisms status‐quo bias: What security dilemma? Security Studies: Vol. 5, Realism: Restatements and Renewal, pp. 90-121.

Domestic Structure and Preventive War: Are Democracies More Pacific?

Realists have long viewed uneven rates of growth among states as a major cause of wars. According to strict logic of realpolitik, a declining dominant power should launch a preventive war against a rising challenger as a prudent long-term security strategy. But historically, power shifts have only sometimes resulted in war. Although preventive war has been the preferred response of declining authoritarian leaders, no democracy has ever initiated such a war. Instead, depending on the regime type of the rising challenger, democratic states have chosen accommodation, defensive alliances, or internal balancing to solve the problem of impending decline. In addition to establishing the correlation between preventive war and authoritarian regimes and explaining why democratic states forgo this option, this essay (1) develops a model based on the domestic structures of the leader and challenger that predicts which strategy will be employed by a declining dominant power and (2) tests the propositions against historical survey data and several in-depth case studies.

Unanswered Threats: A Neoclassical Realist Theory of Underbalancing

Charles I concentrated his energies on the construction of a new royal palace at Whitehall. Designed in the classical style by John Webb, the new Whitehall was to be the fulallment of the king’s lifelong dream to replace the sprawling and obsolete palace that he had inherited from the Tudors with one that would match the splendor and majesty of the Louvre or the Escorial. Charles I desired nothing else than that his surroundings should reoect the magniacence of his rule: “Here, at last, would be a seat of government appropriate to the system of ‘Personal Rule’ Charles I had established since dispensing with Parliament in 1629. At least until 1639, it was from here that Charles could expect to govern his realms, resplendent amid Webb’s Baroque courtyards and colonnades, during the next decade and beyond.”1 In making such ambitious plans, Charles I displayed supreme conadence that his regime would not only survive but thrive well into the future. Unfortunately for the king, his reign did not last out the 1630s. If the conventional historical wisdom that “the collapse of Charles I’s regime during the 1630s appeared ‘inevitable’” is correct, then Charles obviously suffered from selfdelusion—an unreality all too characteristic of remote and isolated rulers.2 International politics, too, has seen many instances of this type of folly, where threatened countries have failed to recognize a clear and present danger or, more typically, have simply not reacted to it or, more typically still, have responded in paltry and imprudent ways. This behavior, which I call “underbalancing,” runs directly contrary to the core prediction of structural realist

After Unipolarity: China's Visions of International Order in an Era of U.S. Decline

The emerging transition from unipolarity to a more multipolar distribution of global power presents a unique and unappreciated problem that largely explains why, contrary to the expectations of balance of power theory, a counterbalancing reaction to U.S. primacy has not yet taken place. The problem is that, under unipolarity and only unipolarity, balancing is a revisionist, not a status quo, behavior: its purpose is to replace the existing unbalanced unipolar structure with a balance of power system. Thus, any state that seeks to restore a global balance of power will be labeled a revisionist aggressor. To overcome this ideational hurdle to balancing behavior, a rising power must delegitimize the unipoles global authority and order through discursive and cost-imposing practices of resistance that pave the way for the next phase of full-fledged balancing and global contestation. The type of international order that emerges on the other side of the transition out of unipolarity depends on whether the emerging powers assume the role of supporters, spoilers, or shirkers. As the most viable peer competitor to U.S. power, China will play an especially important role in determining the future shape of international politics. At this relatively early stage in its development, however, China does not yet have a fixed blueprint for a new world order. Instead, competing Chinese visions of order map on to various delegitimation strategies and scenarios about how the transition from unipolarity to a restored global balance of power will develop.

A Tale of Two Realisms: Expanding the Institutions Debate

Recent developments in the study of international institutions have created a need and opportunity for restating the traditional realist view of the role of institutions in international relations. Advancing what he claimed was realism’s perspective on this issue, John Mearsheimer (1994/95) forcefully staked out an extreme position that institutions are essentially epiphenomenal. Mearsheimer’s arguments, however, derived from Waltzian neorealism, are inconsistent with traditional realism’s concern for the origins and influence of international institutions. Moreover, they do not reflect the views of the newest wave of modified structural realists who adopt many of the insights of neoliberal institutionalism. In an attempt to show that pre-Waltzian realists had much to say about institutions, this essay reviews the neorealist/neoliberal debate over institutions, clarifies the basic differences between traditional realism and neorealism, and resurfaces traditional realist arguments concerning the effects of state power and interests on international institutions and global order. Combining insights from both traditional realism and neorealism, a model is constructed that considers how the characteristics of states, their interactions, and the structure of the international system facilitate understanding the ways in which power will be exercised, the type of global order that will be produced, and the level of global institutionalization that can be expected.

New Realist Research on Alliances: Refining, Not Refuting, Waltz's Balancing Proposition

R ealism is both a scientific research program and, more traditionally, a politicalphilosophy. All realists share a pessimistic worldview that posits perpetual struggle among groups for security, prestige, and power and that denies the capacity of human reason to create a world of peace and harmony. Recent research by so-called neotraditional realists does not disconfirm Waltzs balancing proposition. Instead, these works have tended to add unit-level variables in order to transform Waltzs theory of international politics into one of foreign policy. The question is not whether states balance or bandwagonhistory clearly shows that they do both-but rather under what conditions states choose one strategy or the other.

Brother, Can You Spare a Paradigm?: (Or Was Anybody Ever a Realist?)

In “Is Anybody Still a Realist?” Jeffrey Legro and Andrew Moravcsik craft a curiously rigid doctrine for realism and then puzzle over why the aeld is crowded with apostates.1 The answer, I propose, is that the church of realism can be a bit more catholic than Legro and Moravcsik claim. Legro and Moravcsik have written out of the book of realism a crucial insight that informs most realist theories (at least implicitly) and have thereby inadvertently excommunicated too many of the faithful. But they are wrong in a productive way, and correcting their mistake points in the direction of a fruitful research agenda for scholars—realists and antirealists alike.

Tripolarity and the Second World War

This essay seeks to offer a new structural account of the outbreak of World War II and a more determinate balance-of-power theory based on two modifications of Kenneth Waltzs theory of international politics. First, the distribution of power in the international system is more precisely specified. Instead of simply counting the number of Great Powers to determine system polarity, units are divided into poles and middle powers and weighted according to their relative power capabilities. Second, states are coded as either status quo or revisionist. The revised theory more accurately reflects the twin foci of classical realist thought: the power and interests of states. Several deductions from the model, however, contradict basic tenets of balance-of-power theory. At the theoretical and empirical levels, the theory is used to examine the dynamics of tripolar systems and to explain the alliance strategies of the seven major powers (three of which were poles) shortly before and during the Second World War.

The Problem of International Order Revisited

The Problem of International Order Revisited The story of international change is typically told in terms of sharp breaks with the past that have occurred only after major wars, when the victors have had to decide whether and how to shape the postwar order. Until the 1900s these great moments of international order building arose only once a century: 1648, 1713, and 1815. The last century witnessed three such moments: 1919, 1945, and Christmas Day 1991, when the Soviet Union died from self-dismemberment. Ten years after the end of bipolarity, the problem of how the victors should manage the peace remains the principal issue at the heart of contemporary international politics. As in past postwar junctures, the immediate problem for the winners, aside from the inevitable disputes about how to divide the spoils, is to decide the fate of the vanquished. Should the terms of the peace settlement be severe or moderate? Should they be dictated to the loser(s) or, instead, fashioned in such a way that the defeated powers view them as legitimate? How the victors answer these questions will largely determine the future stability and conduct of world politics. Had ofacials in the arst Bush administration who were responsible for making these momentous decisions consulted theories of international relations for advice, they would have been gravely disappointed. Aside from a few brief remarks in the balance-of-power literature about treating defeated powers with moderation and not eliminating essential actors, the issue of prudence in victory has gone largely untheorized (indeed unmentioned) within