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Our hypothesis is that foreign patent environments offer inventors meaningful options influencing where they choose to innovate but not in the expected ways. We find that inventors are heterogeneous with contrasting preferences depending on their stage of innovation.22 Entrenched patent owners value stronger patent rights—reflected by sizeable royalty awards, treble damages, and equitable remedies—to deter and punish acts of infringement.23 Inventors during the innovation stage, on the other hand, have incentives to develop technology where patent rights are weaker. This is because the innovation process exposes the typical inventor to liability if the inventor’s R&D has unwittingly (or intentionally) incorporated another’s patented technology without permission.24 Increasing this issue’s saliency, there are both practicing and non-practicing entities that, in asserting meritless patent infringement claims, exploit the high costs of U.S. patent litigation; this strategy is typically meant to either extract rents from inventors or frustrate efforts to develop competing technology, which may lead early stage innovators to seek out foreign patent regimes.25 As a partner at an international law firm confirmed to us, patent litigation is a common strategy used against upstart companies who have “stepped on the toes” of dominant players.26 Another practitioner witnessed “egregious” examples of large companies “steamrolling” smaller inventors using patent litigation.27 Given the average cost to defend an infringement lawsuit in the United States is roughly $3.5 million28 and royalty awards have surpassed $2.5 billion29— which inventors can potentially mitigate by innovating almost anywhere but the United States—this may explain why the United States has reportedly lost innovation.

Our results generate novel empirical and theoretical insights into the way patent rights incentivize innovation. According to our quantitative analysis, some firms avoid the litigation risks of U.S. patent law by developing technology in countries that have lessened the costs and risks of patent enforcement (i.e., all the costs borne from the patent assertion and litigation processes).30 We deduce, then, that a critical and generally ignored element of patent law’s ability to promote innovation concerns where the resulting innovation takes place. It seems industry advocates and patent scholars overestimate how much innovation strong patent protection generates, while underestimating the deterrent effect of the high costs associated with patent enforcement. So, contrary to popular logic, recent congressional efforts, and industry advocates,31 our findings indicate that the increasingly common proposal to strengthen patent rights would have the opposite effect of diminishing innovation in the United States

It is well known that nuclear powers have and continue to base their targeting requirements of nuclear weapons on calculations that are restricted mostly to the major but immediate effects of nuclear explosions – blast, heat and radiation. According to General Lee Butler, the former United States, Strategic Forces Commander, during the cold war, the Standard Integrated Operation Plan (SIOP) had targeted Moscow with 400 nuclear weapons and Kiev with 40. Several scientific studies of the impact of nuclear explosions since the 1980s up to the present which utilises advanced computer models, confirm the effect of smoke injected into the stratosphere that would block sunlight from reaching the earth’s surface and is described as ‘Nuclear Winter’. In essence global temperatures would plunge below freezing point thus posing threats to life support systems especially food production. In short, it threatened human existence itself.

Later studies that focused on regional nuclear wars especially in the Indo-Pak context, have indicated that the impact of a nuclear exchange would have an immediate significant and catastrophic impact in terms of death and destruction. The latest Toon study, estimates that in a situation where around 350 warheads are used by India and Pakistan, the immediate casualties would vary between 50 to 125 million lives depending on the yields of the weapons used which could vary between 15-100 Kilotons. (a Kiloton being the explosive equivalent power of 1000 tons of TNT).

Will emerging technology cause nuclear war? For more than 70 years, the world has avoided major-power conflict, and many attribute this era of peace to nuclear weapons.1 In situations of mutually assured destruction, neither side has an incentive to launch a nuclear first strike because doing so will only result in self-annihilation. Maintaining secure, second-strike capabilities—the ability to absorb an enemy nuclear attack and respond with a devastating counterattack—is the key to deterrence.2 Recently, analysts have begun to worry, however, that new military technologies may call into question this model of global strategic stability.3

The world is experiencing a fourth industrial revolution (4IR) in which a wave of new and transformative technologies is being developed, including artificial intelligence (AI), additive manufacturing, quantum information technology, hypersonic missiles, biotechnology, and directed energy.4 While these technologies are expected to have profound implications for societies and economies, most are dual use and will also affect national security, including nuclear strategic stability.

VI. An Alternative Model for Patent Law at the 3A Era - Incentivizing Stakeholders Within the AI Multiplayer Model

A. Rethinking the Incentive Effect of the Current Patent Regime

Various scholars and institutions regard global social instability as the greatest threat facing this decade. The catalyst has been postulated to be a Second Great Depression which, in turn, will have profound implications for global security and national integrity. This paper, written from a broad systems perspective, illustrates how emerging risks are getting more complex and intertwined; blurring boundaries between the economic, environmental, geopolitical, societal and technological taxonomy used by the World Economic Forum for its annual global risk forecasts. Tight couplings in our global systems have also enabled risks accrued in one area to snowball into a full-blown crisis elsewhere. The COVID-19 pandemic and its socioeconomic fallouts exemplify this systemic chain-reaction. Onceinexorable forces of globalization are rupturing as the current global system can no longer be sustained due to poor governance and runaway wealth fractionation. The coronavirus pandemic is also enabling Big Tech to expropriate the levers of governments and mass communications worldwide. This paper concludes by highlighting how this development poses a dilemma for security professionals. Key Words: Global Systems, Emergence, VUCA, COVID-9, Social Instability, Big Tech, Great Reset INTRODUCTION The new decade is witnessing rising volatility across global systems. Pick any random “system” today and chart out its trajectory: Are our education systems becoming more robust and affordable? What about food security? Are our healthcare systems improving? Are our pension systems sound? Wherever one looks, there are dark clouds gathering on a global horizon marked by volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity (VUCA). But what exactly is a global system? Our planet itself is an autonomous and selfsustaining mega-system, marked by periodic cycles and elemental vagaries. Human activities within however are not system isolates as our banking, utility, farming, healthcare and retail sectors etc. are increasingly entwined. Risks accrued in one system may cascade into an unforeseen crisis within and/or without (Choo, Smith & McCusker, 2007). Scholars call this phenomenon “emergence”; one where the behaviour of intersecting systems is determined by complex and largely invisible interactions at the substratum (Goldstein, 1999; Holland, 1998). The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is a case in point. While experts remain divided over the source and morphology of the virus, the contagion has ramified into a global health crisis and supply chain nightmare. It is also tilting the geopolitical balance. China is the largest exporter of intermediate products, and had generated nearly 20% of global imports in 2015 alone (Cousin, 2020). The pharmaceutical sector is particularly vulnerable. Nearly “85% of medicines in the U.S. strategic national stockpile” sources components from China (Owens, 2020). An initial run on respiratory masks has now been eclipsed by rowdy queues at supermarkets and the bankruptcy of small businesses. The entire global population – save for major pockets such as Sweden, Belarus, Taiwan and Japan – have been subjected to cyclical lockdowns and quarantines. Never before in history have humans faced such a systemic, borderless calamity. COVID-19 represents a classic emergent crisis that necessitates real-time response and adaptivity in a real-time world, particularly since the global Just-in-Time (JIT) production and delivery system serves as both an enabler and vector for transboundary risks. From a systems thinking perspective, emerging risk management should therefore address a whole spectrum of activity across the economic, environmental, geopolitical, societal and technological (EEGST) taxonomy. Every emerging threat can be slotted into this taxonomy – a reason why it is used by the World Economic Forum (WEF) for its annual global risk exercises (Maavak, 2019a). As traditional forces of globalization unravel, security professionals should take cognizance of emerging threats through a systems thinking approach. METHODOLOGY An EEGST sectional breakdown was adopted to illustrate a sampling of extreme risks facing the world for the 2020-2030 decade. The transcendental quality of emerging risks, as outlined on Figure 1, below, was primarily informed by the following pillars of systems thinking (Rickards, 2020): • Diminishing diversity (or increasing homogeneity) of actors in the global system (Boli & Thomas, 1997; Meyer, 2000; Young et al, 2006); • Interconnections in the global system (Homer-Dixon et al, 2015; Lee & Preston, 2012); • Interactions of actors, events and components in the global system (Buldyrev et al, 2010; Bashan et al, 2013; Homer-Dixon et al, 2015); and • Adaptive qualities in particular systems (Bodin & Norberg, 2005; Scheffer et al, 2012) Since scholastic material on this topic remains somewhat inchoate, this paper buttresses many of its contentions through secondary (i.e. news/institutional) sources. ECONOMY According to Professor Stanislaw Drozdz (2018) of the Polish Academy of Sciences, “a global financial crash of a previously unprecedented scale is highly probable” by the mid- 2020s. This will lead to a trickle-down meltdown, impacting all areas of human activity. The economist John Mauldin (2018) similarly warns that the “2020s might be the worst decade in US history” and may lead to a Second Great Depression. Other forecasts are equally alarming. According to the International Institute of Finance, global debt may have surpassed $255 trillion by 2020 (IIF, 2019). Yet another study revealed that global debts and liabilities amounted to a staggering $2.5 quadrillion (Ausman, 2018). The reader should note that these figures were tabulated before the COVID-19 outbreak. The IMF singles out widening income inequality as the trigger for the next Great Depression (Georgieva, 2020). The wealthiest 1% now own more than twice as much wealth as 6.9 billion people (Coffey et al, 2020) and this chasm is widening with each passing month. COVID-19 had, in fact, boosted global billionaire wealth to an unprecedented $10.2 trillion by July 2020 (UBS-PWC, 2020). Global GDP, worth $88 trillion in 2019, may have contracted by 5.2% in 2020 (World Bank, 2020). As the Greek historian Plutarch warned in the 1st century AD: “An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics” (Mauldin, 2014). The stability of a society, as Aristotle argued even earlier, depends on a robust middle element or middle class. At the rate the global middle class is facing catastrophic debt and unemployment levels, widespread social disaffection may morph into outright anarchy (Maavak, 2012; DCDC, 2007). Economic stressors, in transcendent VUCA fashion, may also induce radical geopolitical realignments. Bullions now carry more weight than NATO’s security guarantees in Eastern Europe. After Poland repatriated 100 tons of gold from the Bank of England in 2019, Slovakia, Serbia and Hungary quickly followed suit. According to former Slovak Premier Robert Fico, this erosion in regional trust was based on historical precedents – in particular the 1938 Munich Agreement which ceded Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland to Nazi Germany. As Fico reiterated (Dudik & Tomek, 2019): “You can hardly trust even the closest allies after the Munich Agreement… I guarantee that if something happens, we won’t see a single gram of this (offshore-held) gold. Let’s do it (repatriation) as quickly as possible.” (Parenthesis added by author). President Aleksandar Vucic of Serbia (a non-NATO nation) justified his central bank’s gold-repatriation program by hinting at economic headwinds ahead: “We see in which direction the crisis in the world is moving” (Dudik & Tomek, 2019). Indeed, with two global Titanics – the United States and China – set on a collision course with a quadrillions-denominated iceberg in the middle, and a viral outbreak on its tip, the seismic ripples will be felt far, wide and for a considerable period. A reality check is nonetheless needed here: Can additional bullions realistically circumvallate the economies of 80 million plus peoples in these Eastern European nations, worth a collective $1.8 trillion by purchasing power parity? Gold however is a potent psychological symbol as it represents national sovereignty and economic reassurance in a potentially hyperinflationary world. The portents are clear: The current global economic system will be weakened by rising nationalism and autarkic demands. Much uncertainty remains ahead. Mauldin (2018) proposes the introduction of Old Testament-style debt jubilees to facilitate gradual national recoveries. The World Economic Forum, on the other hand, has long proposed a “Great Reset” by 2030; a socialist utopia where “you’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy” (WEF, 2016). In the final analysis, COVID-19 is not the root cause of the current global economic turmoil; it is merely an accelerant to a burning house of cards that was left smouldering since the 2008 Great Recession (Maavak, 2020a). We also see how the four main pillars of systems thinking (diversity, interconnectivity, interactivity and “adaptivity”) form the mise en scene in a VUCA decade. ENVIRONMENTAL What happens to the environment when our economies implode? Think of a debt-laden workforce at sensitive nuclear and chemical plants, along with a concomitant surge in industrial accidents? Economic stressors, workforce demoralization and rampant profiteering – rather than manmade climate change – arguably pose the biggest threats to the environment. In a WEF report, Buehler et al (2017) made the following pre-COVID-19 observation: The ILO estimates that the annual cost to the global economy from accidents and work-related diseases alone is a staggering $3 trillion. Moreover, a recent report suggests the world’s 3.2 billion workers are increasingly unwell, with the vast majority facing significant economic insecurity: 77% work in part-time, temporary, “vulnerable” or unpaid jobs. Shouldn’t this phenomenon be better categorized as a societal or economic risk rather than an environmental one? In line with the systems thinking approach, however, global risks can no longer be boxed into a taxonomical silo. Frazzled workforces may precipitate another Bhopal (1984), Chernobyl (1986), Deepwater Horizon (2010) or Flint water crisis (2014). These disasters were notably not the result of manmade climate change. Neither was the Fukushima nuclear disaster (2011) nor the Indian Ocean tsunami (2004). Indeed, the combustion of a long-overlooked cargo of 2,750 tonnes of ammonium nitrate had nearly levelled the city of Beirut, Lebanon, on Aug 4 2020. The explosion left 204 dead; 7,500 injured; US$15 billion in property damages; and an estimated 300,000 people homeless (Urbina, 2020). The environmental costs have yet to be adequately tabulated. Environmental disasters are more attributable to Black Swan events, systems breakdowns and corporate greed rather than to mundane human activity. Our JIT world aggravates the cascading potential of risks (Korowicz, 2012). Production and delivery delays, caused by the COVID-19 outbreak, will eventually require industrial overcompensation. This will further stress senior executives, workers, machines and a variety of computerized systems. The trickle-down effects will likely include substandard products, contaminated food and a general lowering in health and safety standards (Maavak, 2019a). Unpaid or demoralized sanitation workers may also resort to indiscriminate waste dumping. Many cities across the United States (and elsewhere in the world) are no longer recycling wastes due to prohibitive costs in the global corona-economy (Liacko, 2021). Even in good times, strict protocols on waste disposals were routinely ignored. While Sweden championed the global climate change narrative, its clothing flagship H&M was busy covering up toxic effluences disgorged by vendors along the Citarum River in Java, Indonesia. As a result, countless children among 14 million Indonesians straddling the “world’s most polluted river” began to suffer from dermatitis, intestinal problems, developmental disorders, renal failure, chronic bronchitis and cancer (DW, 2020). It is also in cauldrons like the Citarum River where pathogens may mutate with emergent ramifications. On an equally alarming note, depressed economic conditions have traditionally provided a waste disposal boon for organized crime elements. Throughout 1980s, the Calabriabased ‘Ndrangheta mafia – in collusion with governments in Europe and North America – began to dump radioactive wastes along the coast of Somalia. Reeling from pollution and revenue loss, Somali fisherman eventually resorted to mass piracy (Knaup, 2008). The coast of Somalia is now a maritime hotspot, and exemplifies an entwined form of economic-environmental-geopolitical-societal emergence. In a VUCA world, indiscriminate waste dumping can unexpectedly morph into a Black Hawk Down incident. The laws of unintended consequences are governed by actors, interconnections, interactions and adaptations in a system under study – as outlined in the methodology section. Environmentally-devastating industrial sabotages – whether by disgruntled workers, industrial competitors, ideological maniacs or terrorist groups – cannot be discounted in a VUCA world. Immiserated societies, in stark defiance of climate change diktats, may resort to dirty coal plants and wood stoves for survival. Interlinked ecosystems, particularly water resources, may be hijacked by nationalist sentiments. The environmental fallouts of critical infrastructure (CI) breakdowns loom like a Sword of Damocles over this decade. GEOPOLITICAL The primary catalyst behind WWII was the Great Depression. Since history often repeats itself, expect familiar bogeymen to reappear in societies roiling with impoverishment and ideological clefts. Anti-Semitism – a societal risk on its own – may reach alarming proportions in the West (Reuters, 2019), possibly forcing Israel to undertake reprisal operations inside allied nations. If that happens, how will affected nations react? Will security resources be reallocated to protect certain minorities (or the Top 1%) while larger segments of society are exposed to restive forces? Balloon effects like these present a classic VUCA problematic. Contemporary geopolitical risks include a possible Iran-Israel war; US-China military confrontation over Taiwan or the South China Sea; North Korean proliferation of nuclear and missile technologies; an India-Pakistan nuclear war; an Iranian closure of the Straits of Hormuz; fundamentalist-driven implosion in the Islamic world; or a nuclear confrontation between NATO and Russia. Fears that the Jan 3 2020 assassination of Iranian Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani might lead to WWIII were grossly overblown. From a systems perspective, the killing of Soleimani did not fundamentally change the actor-interconnection-interaction adaptivity equation in the Middle East. Soleimani was simply a cog who got replaced.

Our hypothesis is that foreign patent environments offer inventors meaningful options influencing where they choose to innovate but not in the expected ways. We find that inventors are heterogeneous with contrasting preferences depending on their stage of innovation.22 Entrenched patent owners value stronger patent rights—reflected by sizeable royalty awards, treble damages, and equitable remedies—to deter and punish acts of infringement.23 Inventors during the innovation stage, on the other hand, have incentives to develop technology where patent rights are weaker. This is because the innovation process exposes the typical inventor to liability if the inventor’s R&D has unwittingly (or intentionally) incorporated another’s patented technology without permission.24 Increasing this issue’s saliency, there are both practicing and non-practicing entities that, in asserting meritless patent infringement claims, exploit the high costs of U.S. patent litigation; this strategy is typically meant to either extract rents from inventors or frustrate efforts to develop competing technology, which may lead early stage innovators to seek out foreign patent regimes.25 As a partner at an international law firm confirmed to us, patent litigation is a common strategy used against upstart companies who have “stepped on the toes” of dominant players.26 Another practitioner witnessed “egregious” examples of large companies “steamrolling” smaller inventors using patent litigation.27 Given the average cost to defend an infringement lawsuit in the United States is roughly $3.5 million28 and royalty awards have surpassed $2.5 billion29— which inventors can potentially mitigate by innovating almost anywhere but the United States—this may explain why the United States has reportedly lost innovation.

Our results generate novel empirical and theoretical insights into the way patent rights incentivize innovation. According to our quantitative analysis, some firms avoid the litigation risks of U.S. patent law by developing technology in countries that have lessened the costs and risks of patent enforcement (i.e., all the costs borne from the patent assertion and litigation processes).30 We deduce, then, that a critical and generally ignored element of patent law’s ability to promote innovation concerns where the resulting innovation takes place. It seems industry advocates and patent scholars overestimate how much innovation strong patent protection generates, while underestimating the deterrent effect of the high costs associated with patent enforcement. So, contrary to popular logic, recent congressional efforts, and industry advocates,31 our findings indicate that the increasingly common proposal to strengthen patent rights would have the opposite effect of diminishing innovation in the United States

Despite the upheaval caused by the COVID-19 pandemic—and partly because of it—innovation and digitization have been happening at a record-breaking pace. A McKinsey survey of top executives around the world found that companies accelerated their digitization of customer, supply chain, and internal operations by an average of three years.

Indeed, over the past two years, countries around the world have set records for new business formation, new patents issued, venture capital invested, and more. The US Census Bureau’s seasonally adjusted business formation statistics data show that through 2021, a record 5.38 million applications had been filed to form new businesses—an increase of more than 50 percent over prepandemic 2019.1 The brisk pace meant there were roughly 409,000 more US filings in 2021 than at the same point in prepandemic 2019. The World Intellectual Property Indicators also showed that aggregate global filing activity across 150 authorities grew in 2020, even amid the global health crisis.2 Venture capital flows have also boomed: in 2021, global venture capital more than doubled from 2020, rising 111 percent.3

Alternatively, Carlin and Hecker’s analysis is far better suited to a more reasonable conclusion: that since 2019, Kim’s government has shifted its efforts, to court outside assistance in the pursuit of its security and economic objectives away from reaching agreements with the United States and South Korea and toward a closer partnership with the China/Russia Bloc. That conclusion implies continued tensions on the Korean Peninsula, but not a second Korean War.

Kim gave a lengthy speech to the DPRK legislature on January in which he elaborated about relations with South Korea. As widely reported, Kim said the DPRK will no longer work toward reunification, and will henceforth characterise the South as the “invariable principal enemy” rather than “consanguineous”. He called for revising the DPRK constitution to remove verbiage implying that North and South are parts of the same country and calling South Koreans “compatriots.”

norm to its former allies and enemies aftermath the second world war that led to the formation of the current liberal economic world order provides an explanation as to why in spite of US’ relative decline there is continuity for America’s liberal economic order. The rising challenger China can be considered to have been socialized – it has accepted US led international norms, and participates in various International Organizations. Thus, it makes less sense for China to wage war against the hegemon whose ideals it has internalized. According to this theory, a hegemon creates a stable international economic order characterized by market openness but its decline results in global instability. This hegemonic effect of open trade benefits all participants, especially, weaker states that do not have any burden of public goods. In this sense, global economic stability is born out of hegemony and provides provision of collective public goods and in doing so facilitates a stable international system. The motivation to create an economic openness lie in the interest of the hegemon – it has the largest economy and so benefits most from open markets. In addition, only hegemons have the material capability (political and military) to provide public goods and induce other states to embrace open trade. By virtue of the Hegemonic Stability Theory, the hegemon is an important element in creation and maintenance of the international system. As stated earlier, open trade benefits all participants, even the rising challengers that are accommodated in the system. In contemporary world politics, China is the fastest rising power and it is also reaping the benefits of the open economic order created by the US. By participating in the globalized economy, China has earned a comparative advantage in labor-market and its economy has been growing. On top of that China is an export-based economy and thus, it has very little incentive to jeopardize this benefit by engaging with the hegemon and thereby disrupting the order. In his article, Artur Stein has argued that decline in hegemony does not bring about a complete collapse of the trade regime as long as hegemonic power is committed to economic openness. Taking these two points in consideration, it can be argued that it is not in the interest of China to challenge US hegemony. On account, likelihood of war is averted.

Great power competition causes extinction – grad strategy is the only solution

Surely, the same principle applies in the realm of nations. Our world teems with violent regimes and vicious men. And something precious—our notion of peace, sovereignty, liberty, civilization itself—sits exposed to all that danger. In a world where might makes right, the only thing that keeps the peace, defends our sovereignty and liberty, and upholds civilization is the willingness to use our resources to keep the dangers at bay. Yet too many policymakers disregard the wisdom of military deterrence, and too many people of faith forget that the aim of deterrence is, by definition, to prevent wars, not start them. Some people of faith oppose the threat of military force, let alone the use of military force, because of Christ’s message of peace. This is understandable in the abstract, but we must keep in mind two truths. First, governments are held to a different standard than individuals, and hence are expected to do certain things individuals aren’t expected to do—and arguably shouldn’t do certain things individuals should do. For example, a government that turned the other cheek when attacked would be conquered by its foes, leaving countless innocents defenseless. A government that put away the sword—that neglected its defenses—would invite aggression, thus jeopardizing its people. Second, all uses of force are not the same. The sheriff who uses force to apprehend a murderer is decidedly different from the criminal who uses force to commit a murder. The policemen posted outside a sporting event to deter violence are decidedly different from those who plot violence. Moral relativism is anything but a virtue. Some lament the fact that we live in such a violent world, but that’s precisely the point. Because we live in a violent world, governments must take steps to deter those who can be deterred—and neutralize those who cannot. In this regard, it pays to recall that Jesus had sterner words for scholars and scribes than He did for soldiers. In fact, when a centurion asked Jesus for help, He didn’t admonish the military commander to put down his sword. Instead, He commended him for his faith.[i] “Even in the Gospels,” soldier-scholar Ralph Peters reminds us, “it is assumed that soldiers are, however regrettably, necessary.”[ii] They are necessary not only for waging war but, preferably, for maintaining peace. It’s a paradoxical truth that military readiness can keep the peace. The Romans had a phrase for it: Si vis pacem, para bellum. “If you wish for peace, prepare for war.” President George Washington put it more genteelly: “There is nothing so likely to produce peace as to be well prepared to meet an enemy.” Or, in the same way, “We infinitely desire peace,” President Theodore Roosevelt declared. “And the surest way of obtaining it is to show that we are not afraid of war.” After the West gambled civilization’s very existence in the 1920s and 1930s on hopes that war could somehow be outlawed, the men who crafted the blueprint for waging the Cold War returned to peace through strength. Winston Churchill proposed “defense through deterrents.” President Harry Truman called NATO “an integrated international force whose object is to maintain peace through strength…we devoutly pray that our present course of action will succeed and maintain peace without war.”[iii] President Dwight Eisenhower explained, “Our arms must be mighty, ready for instant action, so that no potential aggressor may be tempted to risk its own destruction.” President John Kennedy vowed to “strengthen our military power to the point where no aggressor will dare attack.” And President Ronald Reagan steered the Cold War to a peaceful end by noting, “None of the four wars in my lifetime came about because we were too strong.” Reagan also argued, “Our military strength is a prerequisite for peace.”[iv] Even so, arms alone aren’t enough to deter war. After all, the great powers were armed to the teeth in 1914. But since they weren’t clear about their intentions and treaty commitments, a small crisis on the fringes of Europe mushroomed into a global war. Neither is clarity alone enough to deter war. After all, President Woodrow Wilson’s admonitions to the Kaiser were clear, but America lacked the military strength at the onset of war to make those words matter and thus deter German aggression. In other words, America was unable to deter. “The purpose of a deterrence force is to create a set of conditions that would cause an adversary to conclude that the cost of any particular act against the United States of America or her allies is far higher than the potential benefit of that act,” explains Gen. Kevin Chilton, former commander of U.S. Strategic Command. It is a “cost-benefit calculus.”[v] So, given the anemic state of America’s military before 1917, the Kaiser calculated that the benefits of attacking U.S. ships and trying to lure Mexico into an alliance outweighed the costs. That proved to be a grave miscalculation. In order for the adversary not to miscalculate, a few factors must hold. First, consequences must be clear, which was not the case on the eve of World War I. Critics of deterrence often cite World War I to argue that arms races trigger wars. But if it were that simple, then a) there wouldn’t have been a World War II, since the Allies allowed their arsenals to atrophy after 1918, and b) there would have been a World War III, since Washington and Moscow engaged in an unprecedented arms race. The reality is that miscalculation lit the fuse of World War I. The antidote, as alluded to above, is strength plus clarity. A second important factor to avoid miscalculation: The adversary must be rational, which means it can grasp and fear consequences. Fear is an essential ingredient of deterrence. It pays to recall that deterrence comes from the Latin dēterreō: “to frighten off.”[vi] Of course, as Churchill conceded, “The deterrent does not cover the case of lunatics.”[vii] Mass-murderers masquerading as holy men and death-wish dictators may be immune from deterrence. (The secondary benefit of the peace-through-strength model is that it equips those who embrace it with the capacity to defeat these sorts of enemies rapidly and return to the status quo ante.) Third, the consequences of military confrontation must be credible and tangible, which was the case during most of the Cold War. Not only did Washington and Moscow construct vast military arsenals to deter one another; they were clear about their treaty commitments and about the consequences of any threat to those commitments. Recall how Eisenhower answered Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev’s boast about the Red Army’s overwhelming conventional advantage in Germany: “If you attack us in Germany,” the steely American commander-in-chief fired back, “there will be nothing conventional about our response.”[viii] Eisenhower’s words were unambiguously clear, and unlike Wilson, he wielded the military strength to give them credibility. Discussing military deterrence in the context of Christianity may seem incongruent to some readers. But for a pair of reasons it is not. First, deterrence is not just a matter of GDPs and geopolitics. In fact, scripture often uses the language of deterrence and preparedness. For example, in the first chapter of Numbers the Lord directs Moses and Aaron to count “all the men in Israel who are twenty years old or more and able to serve in the army.” This ancient selective-service system is a form of military readiness. Similarly, I Chronicles 27 provides detail about the Israelites’ massive standing army: twelve divisions of 24,000 men each. II Chronicles 17 explains the military preparations made by King Jehoshaphat of Judah, a king highly revered for his piety, who built forts, maintained armories in strategically located cities “with large supplies” and fielded an army of more than a million men “armed for battle.” Not surprisingly, “the fear of the Lord fell on all the kingdoms of the lands surrounding Judah, so that they did not go to war against Jehoshaphat.” In the New Testament, Paul writes in Romans 13 that “Rulers hold no terror for those who do right, but for those who do wrong…Rulers do not bear the sword for no reason.” Again, this is the language of deterrence. Those who follow the law within a country and who respect codes of conduct between countries have nothing to fear. Those who don’t have much to fear. Likewise, to explain the importance of calculating the costs of following Him, Jesus asks in Luke 14, “What king would go to war against another king without first sitting down to consider whether his 10,000 soldiers could go up against the 20,000 coming against him? And if he didn’t think he could win, he would send a representative to discuss terms of peace while his enemy was still a long way off.” In a sense, both kings are wise—one because he recognizes that he’s outnumbered; the other because he makes sure that he’s not. Put another way, both kings subscribe to peace through strength. Again, as with the Centurion earlier, Jesus could have rebuked the martial character of these kings, but he did not. This is not just description but commendation. We ignore their example at our peril. Secondly, it is not incongruent if we understand military deterrence as a means to prevent great-power war—the kind that kills by the millions, the kind humanity has not endured for seven decades. We know we will not experience the biblical notion of peace—of shalom, peace with harmony and justice—until Christ returns to make all things new. In the interim, in a broken world, the alternatives to peace through strength leave much to be desired: peace through hope, peace through violence, or peace through submission. But these options are inadequate. The sheer destructiveness and totality of great-power war testify that crossing our fingers and hoping for peace is not a Christian option. Wishful thinking, romanticizing reality, is the surest way to invite what Churchill called “temptations to a trial of strength.” Moreover, the likelihood that the next great-power war would involve multiple nuclear-weapons states means that it could end civilization. Therefore, a posture that leaves peer adversaries doubting the West’s capabilities and resolve—thus inviting miscalculation—is not only unsound, but immoral and inhumane—unchristian. “Deterrence of war is more humanitarian than anything,” Gen. Park Yong Ok, a longtime South Korean military official, argues. “If we fail to deter war, a tremendous number of civilians will be killed.”[ix] Peace through violence has been tried throughout history. Pharaoh, Caesar and Genghis Khan, Lenin, Hitler, Stalin and Mao, all attained a kind of peace by employing brutal forms of violence. However, this is not the kind of “peace” under which God’s crowning creation can flourish; neither would the world long tolerate such a scorched-earth “peace.” This option, too, the Christian rejects. Finally, the civilized world could bring about peace simply by not resisting the enemies of civilization—by not blunting the Islamic State’s blitzkrieg of Iraq; by not defending the 38th Parallel; by not standing up to Beijing’s land-grab in the South China Sea or Moscow’s bullying of the Baltics or al-Qaeda’s death creed; by not having armies or, for that matter, police. As Reagan said, “There’s only one guaranteed way you can have peace—and you can have it in the next second—surrender.”[x] The world has tried these alternatives to peace through strength, and the outcomes have been disastrous. After World War I, Western powers disarmed and convinced themselves they had waged the war to end all wars. By 1938, as Churchill concluded after Munich, the Allies had been “reduced…from a position of security so overwhelming and so unchallengeable that we never cared to think about it.”[xi] Like predators in the wilderness, the Axis powers sensed weakness and attacked. In October 1945—not three months after the Missouri steamed into Tokyo Bay—Gen. George Marshall decried the “disintegration not only of the Armed Forces, but apparently…all conception of world responsibility,” warily asking, “Are we already, at this early date, inviting that same international disrespect that prevailed before this war?”[xii] Stalin answered Marshall’s question by gobbling up half of Europe, blockading Berlin, and arming Kim Il-Sung in patient preparation for the invasion of South Korea.[xiii] The U.S. military had taken up positions in Korea in 1945, but withdrew all combat forces in 1949.[xiv] Then, in 1950, Secretary of State Dean Acheson announced that Japan, Alaska and the Philippines fell within America’s “defensive perimeter.”[xv] Korea didn’t. Stalin noticed. Without a U.S. deterrent in place, Stalin gave Kim a green light to invade. Washington then reversed course and rushed American forces back into Korea, and the Korean peninsula plunged into one of the most ferocious wars in history. The cost of miscalculation in Washington and Moscow: 38,000 Americans, 103,250 South Korean troops, 316,000 North Korean troops, 422,000 Chinese troops and 2 million civilian casualties.[xvi] The North Korean tyranny— now under command of Kim’s grandson—still dreams of conquering South Korea. The difference between 2015 and 1950 is that tens of thousands of battle-ready U.S. and ROK troops are stationed on the border. They’ve been there every day since 1953. The lesson of history is that waging war is far more costly than maintaining a military capable of deterring war. As Washington observed, “Timely disbursements to prepare for danger frequently prevent much greater disbursements to repel it.” Just compare military allocations, as a percentage of GDP, during times of war and times of peace: In the eight years before entering World War I, the United States devoted an average of 0.7 percent of GDP to defense; during the war, U.S. defense spending spiked to 16.1 percent of GDP. In the decade before entering World War II, the United States spent an average of 1.1 percent of GDP on defense; during the war, the U.S. diverted an average of 27 percent of GDP to the military annually. During the Cold War, Washington spent an average of 7 percent of GDP on defense to deter Moscow; it worked. Yet it seems we have forgotten those hard-learned lessons. In his book The World America Made, Robert Kagan explains how “America’s most important role has been to dampen and deter the normal tendencies of other great powers to compete and jostle with one another in ways that historically have led to war.” This role has depended on America’s military might. “There is no better recipe for great-power peace,” Kagan concludes, “than certainty about who holds the upper hand.”[xvii]

Let us begin with power politics. We are entering a more multipolar world. To be sure, the United States is still the world’s leading power, according to nearly all objective measures, but China has risen to occupy a strong second-place position in military and economic might. Europe is an economic and regulatory superpower in its own right. A more aggressive Russia maintains the largest nuclear weapons stockpile on Earth. And major powers in the developing world—such as India, Indonesia, South Africa, and Brazil—are choosing a nonaligned path. Realists argue that multipolar systems are unstable and prone to major wars of miscalculation. World War I is a classic example. Multipolar systems are unstable in part because each country must worry about multiple potential adversaries. Indeed, at present, the U.S. Defense Department frets about possible simultaneous conflicts with Russia in Europe and China in the Indo-Pacific. Moreover, U.S. President Joe Biden has stated that the use of military force remains on the table as a last resort to deal with Iran’s nuclear program. A three-front war is not out of the question. Wars of miscalculation often result when states underestimate their adversary. States doubt their opponent’s power or resolve to fight, so they test them. Sometimes, the enemy is bluffing, and the challenge pays off. If the enemy is determined to defend its interests, however, major war can result. Russian President Vladimir Putin likely miscalculated in launching an invasion of Ukraine, incorrectly assuming that war would be easy. Some realist scholars warned for some time that a Russian invasion of Ukraine was coming, and there is still the possibility that the war in Ukraine could spill across NATO’s borders, turning this conflict into a direct U.S.-Russia conflagration. In addition, there is the danger that Chinese President Xi Jinping might miscalculate over Taiwan. Washington’s confusing “strategic ambiguity” policy as to whether it would defend the island only adds to the instability. Biden has said he would defend Taiwan, but his own White House contradicted him. Many leaders are confused, including possibly Xi. He might mistakenly believe he could get away with an attack on Taiwan—only to have the United States intervene violently to stop him. Moreover, after several U.S. presidents have threatened “all options on the table” for the Iranian nuclear program without backing it up, Tehran might assume that it can make a dash for the bomb without a U.S. response. If Iran is mistaken in doubting Biden’s resolve, war could result. [[IMAGE OMITTED]] Realists also focus on shifts in the balance of power and worry about the rise of China and the relative decline of the United States. Power transition theory says that the fall of a dominant great power and the rise of an ascendant challenger often results in war. Some experts worry that Washington and Beijing may be falling into this “Thucydides Trap.” Their dysfunctional autocratic systems make it unlikely that Beijing or Moscow will usurp global leadership from the United States anytime soon, but a closer look at the historical record shows that challengers sometimes start wars of aggression when their expansive ambitions are thwarted. Like Germany in World War I and Japan in World War II, Russia may be lashing out to reverse its decline, and China may also be weak and dangerous. Some people might argue that nuclear deterrence will still work, but military technology is changing. The world is experiencing a “Fourth Industrial Revolution” as new technologies—such as artificial intelligence, quantum computing and communications, additive manufacturing, robotics, hypersonic missiles, directed energy, and others—promise to transform the global economy, societies, and the battlefield. Many defense experts believe we are on the eve of a new revolution in military affairs. It is possible that these new technologies could, like tanks and aircraft on the eve of World War II, give an advantage to militaries that go on the offense, making war more likely. At a minimum, these new weapons systems could confuse assessments of the balance of power, contributing to the above risks of miscalculation. China, for example, is leading in several of these technologies, including hypersonic missiles, certain applications for artificial intelligence, and quantum computing. These advantages—or even the false perception in Beijing that these advantages might exist—could tempt China to invade Taiwan. [[IMAGE OMITTED]] Even liberalism, a more optimistic theory in general, provides a reason for pessimism. To be sure, liberals are right that institutions, economic interdependence, and democracy have facilitated cooperation within the liberal world order. The United States and its democratic allies in North America, Europe, and East Asia are more united than ever before. But these same factors are increasingly sparking conflict on the fault lines between the liberal and illiberal world orders. In the new Cold War, international institutions have simply become new arenas for competition. Russia and China are infiltrating these institutions and turning them against their intended purposes. Who can forget Russia chairing a meeting of the United Nations Security Council as its armies invaded Ukraine in February? Similarly, China used its influence in the World Health Organization to stymie an effective investigation into COVID-19’s origins. And dictators vie for seats on the U.N. Human Rights Council to ensure their egregious human rights abuses escape scrutiny. Instead of facilitating cooperation, international institutions are increasingly exacerbating conflict. Liberal scholars also argue that economic interdependence mitigates conflict. But this theory always had a chicken-and-egg problem. Is trade driving good relations, or are good relations driving trade? We are seeing the answer play out in real time. The free world is recognizing that it is too economically dependent on its enemies in Moscow and Beijing, and it is decoupling as fast as it can. Western corporations pulled out of Russia overnight. New legislation and regulations in the United States, Europe, and Japan are restricting trade and investment in China. It is simply irrational for Wall Street to invest in Chinese technology companies that are working with China’s People’s Liberation Army to develop weapons intended to kill Americans. But China is also decoupling from the free world. Xi is prohibiting Chinese tech firms from listing on Wall Street, for example, because he doesn’t want to share proprietary information with Western powers. The economic interdependence between the liberal and illiberal worlds that has served as a ballast against conflict is now eroding. Democratic peace theory says democracies cooperate with other democracies. But the central fault line in the international system today, as Biden explains, is “the battle between democracy and autocracy.” To be sure, the United States still maintains cordial relations with some nondemocracies, such as Saudi Arabia. But the world order is increasingly divided with the United States and its status quo-oriented democratic allies in NATO, Japan, South Korea, and Australia on one side and the revisionist autocracies of China, Russia, and Iran on the other. One does not need a stethoscope to detect the echoes of the free world’s conflict against Nazi Germany, fascist Italy, and imperial Japan. Finally, constructivist arguments about the pacifying effects of global norms were always plagued with doubts about whether these norms were truly universal. As China engages in genocide in Xinjiang and Russia issues bloodcurdling nuclear threats and castrates prisoners of war in Ukraine, we now have our gruesome answer. Moreover, constructivists might note that the democracy versus autocracy cleavage in international politics is not simply an issue of governance but of ways of life. The speeches and writings of Xi and Putin are often ideological rants about the superiority of autocratic systems and the failings of democracy. Like it or not—we are back in a 20th-century contest over whether democratic or autocratic governments can better deliver for their people, adding a more dangerous ideological element to this competition. Fortunately, there is some good news. The best understanding of international politics may be found in a combination of theories. Much of humanity prefers a liberal international order, and this order is only made possible by the realist military power of the United States and its democratic allies. Moreover, 2,500 years of theory and history suggest that democracies tend to win these hard-power competitions and autocracies flame out disastrously in the end. Unfortunately, the clarifying moments that bend history in an arc toward justice often only emerge after major-power wars. Let’s hope that today’s incoming students are not reminiscing at their graduation ceremonies about where they were when World War III began. But IR theory gives us plenty of reasons to be concerned.

This aspect of hegemonic wars is alarmingly overlooked in the traditional theories around rising states and causes of war. However, it may have even more of a place in today’s era, where the extreme stratification of states due to the structure of unipolarity, causes inherent hierarchy for the international community. The U.S is undeniably at the top for better or for worse and due to its position, its high status is guaranteed. Yet unlike bipolarity or multipolarity, the incentives for states to compete for elevation of their status is somewhat moot. It is costly to challenge the superpower and thus the incentives for direct competition are especially weak. However, as U.S power continues to weaken and the international hierarchy becomes more ambiguous, this is where Wohforth argues great war could occur over positional competition. ““Dissatisfaction arises not from dominance itself but from a dominance that appears to rest on ambiguous foundations. Thus, status competition is unlikely in cases of clear hierarchies in which the relevant comparison out-groups for each actor are unambiguously dominant materially. Applied to international politics, this begins to suggest conditions conducive to status competition. For conflict to occur, one state must select another state as a relevant comparison that leaves it dissatisfied with its status; it must then choose an identity-maintenance strategy in response that brings it into conflict with another state that is also willing to fight for its position” (Wohlforth, 45). Status competition and the need to fight over positional status in an unambiguous unipolar system for other states does not exist. However, what should be of great concern to policy makers should the U.S find itself slipping back towards a situation of bipolar competition with China is that observation from Wohlforth. As U.S power becomes less concrete and finds itself becoming similar to China in capabilities, the chance of China assessing the U.S as a comparatively similar state may occur. In turn China may begin looking to overtake it positionally due to an increased desire for status, such as the case of Sparta and Athens. The U.S of course would then be forced to perform the aforementioned identity-maintenance strategy Wohlforth mentions, seeing as it is coming from a place of high status for so long, and will be willing to fight China over something so seemingly artificial as position. This state psychology should not be underestimated, and especially as scholars make calls for the U.S to accept a return to multipolarity, it should be kept in mind the impact a return to these different systems will have on positional competition and status for states. The triggers for great power war will not be so removed as the once were under the current unipolarity. Additionally it should be noted that China has constantly also favored a narrative of flat hierarchy over single state dominance for many years now. Despite the fact that as Wohlforth has established, a more stratified hierarchical system is helping to keep the need for great competition and conflict over status at bay, China continues to be driven by a desire for great power status after it’s “century of shame”. This notion of what is driving China’s desire to rise has been long discussed by Western scholars. As Wohlforth mentions, “[China’s] preference for multipolarity and periodic resentment at what it sees as the United States’ assertion of special rights and privileges is also well established. Chinese analyses of multipolarity explicitly reflect the predicted preference for a flat hierarchy over one in what a single state has primacy…while many Chinese have convinced themselves that U.S power predominance cannot last, they do grudgingly acknowledge the world’s current unipolar nature…as a result Beijing adopted a ‘peaceful’ rise strategy that downplays the prospect of direct competition for global parity with the United States” (Wohlforth, 64).

The US will try to defend it inevitably – decline causes war

The end of 2021 couldn’t come fast enough. A year that started with January’s insurrectionist storming of the Capitol is ending with Omicron’s December surge, threatening a tentative economic recovery. And plenty of bad news happened in-between. Social strife, rising inflation, a disastrous U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan, and political gridlock in Washington makes it seem like America is an empire in decline. Except that the data doesn’t back up this catchy political punchline. Rather than another year highlighting the inevitable end of U.S. economic and political influence as authoritarian governments rise around the world, 2021 showed an American renaissance in the offing. The U.S. economy is poised for a strong 2022. That’s making the world’s authoritarian leaders nervous. Driven by the recovery, U.S. international influence is growing again after years of retrenchment. From Moscow to Beijing to Istanbul, excessive state control is causing economic pain for the people in the grip of authoritarianism. Their international political isolation is growing. It’s easy to take a negative view on U.S. prospects. At first glance, perceptions of U.S. democracy around the world are strikingly low among other advanced democracies, such stalwart proponents as the UK, Germany, and Japan. According to an early 2021 Pew research poll, 57% agreed that the U.S. political system “used to be a good example” for others, but only 17% felt that it still is. That seems ominous, but look closer. Another Pew survey of these same countries, also in early 2021, found 61% had an overall positive view of the U.S., compared to the 27% who viewed China favorably. This preference extended to economic relations as well. When asked which country was more important for “strong economic ties,” 64% preferred the U.S. versus 21% choosing China, despite many viewing China as the dominant global economic power. Part of these favorable views may have to do with the U.S. re-engaging with allies. As Russia cuts back on natural gas sales to Europe just as winter bites, the U.S. is increasing exports of liquified natural gas to these countries. Russian troops are on Ukraine’s borders, and Putin is attempting to wring security guarantees out of Washington. But the White House is refusing to be split off from NATO in a joint approach to Moscow. China has amped up military threats to Taiwan. Record numbers of military fly-bys near Taiwan prompted Washington and Tokyo to state their support for the island. Chinese flights dropped dramatically shortly after. China has also sustained its militarization of the South China Sea, despite losing its case under the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea. In response, the U.S. has strengthened military ties with Australia and India in an actual pivot to an Indo-Pacific strategy. These are not the moves of a country in decline, but rather one that puts alliances first in lieu of unilateral action. As the U.S. economy begins to thrive again, it is helping consolidate global influence chipped away by a more insular approach. The domestic economy has remained remarkably robust, even with the trifecta of supply chain bottlenecks, rising prices, and a Covid slowdown that for several months earlier this year devastated the services industries (restaurants, movie theaters, hotels). Consumer spending rose a solid 8.5% from the beginning of November through late December over the same period a year ago. Holiday-specific sales rose 10.7% over prepandemic 2019 spending levels. This can be partly attributed to forced Covid-induced savings and the Federal Reserve’s seemingly insatiable desire to print money. People have been feeling so flush with cash that they’ve been quitting their jobs in droves. Economic resilience is behind yet another positive trend: Countries around the world are making longer-term bets on U.S. growth with increased foreign direct investment. After several years of declines, inbound FDI soared. For the third quarter of 2021, $74.5 billion flowed into the country, a 68% increase over the same period a year ago. Second quarter figures were 144% higher than the year ago period. And both were significantly higher even compared with 2019 prepandemic levels. How are the leading authoritarian countries faring? According to the OECD, while the U.S. economy expanded by 0.6% in the third quarter over the second, China grew only 0.2%, and Russia declined by 0.8%. The challenges of continued U.S. growth and sustained global influence are hardly insignificant. Threats to a free and fair 2022 midterm election cannot be taken lightly. Failure to pass legislation to stem climate change, bridge the enormous wealth gap, and improve education would certainly degrade U.S. competitiveness. But these would be entirely self-inflicted wounds. And they are largely within Washington’s power to overcome. For countries like China and Russia, their problems are systemic and unlikely to improve because the efforts needed to reverse these trends threaten the authoritarian systems that caused them in the first place—namely, centralized economic control and a rogue’s list of political-military relationships with countries like North Korea, Syria, and Iran. Every new year brings with it hopes for change. As 2022 dawns, signs are good that the U.S. will muster the will to keep this political and economic revival going. That in turn will help reassert a positive influence around the globe when the world needs it the most.

For years, many believed that a world of global economic networks and interdependence — countries intimately connected via supply chains and finances — made war obsolete. That is part of the reason Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was so shocking. But the international economy itself has turned into a battlefield. The conventional war in Ukraine has unleashed a swift and staggering economic conflict, led by the United States and its allies against Russia. And that war is being waged with new weapons, forged in the post-Cold War age of global networks. As much as we talk about multipolar politics, when it comes to global networks, there is just one superpower: the United States. Many global networks have centralized economic chokepoints, and the United States is able to seize these, turning them into tools of coercion. No other country can match this ability. America can now redeploy global networks to entangle and suffocate oligarchs, banks and even entire countries, as Russia has painfully discovered. It is now up to the United States to determine how to steward this enormous power. If it overreaches, it might provoke a military response or create the incentive for its adversaries to create and foster their own alternative networks. The Ukraine war may be a turning point. Will we end up with a fragmented world economy where military and economic conflict become two sides of the same coin? Or will we figure out ways to contain economic conflicts and stop them from spiraling into further military confrontations?

Ukraine is a case in point. In going to war, Russia showed a willingness to test its revisionist potential. But the very fact that Russian President Vladimir Putin felt the need to invade is itself a sign of weakness. In the 1990s, if you had told his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, that in 2023, Russia would be fighting a war to sustain its sphere of influence over Ukraine, which Russian officials back then assumed would end up as a reliable ally, he would scarcely have believed that Moscow could sink so low. It is ironic that now, when unipolarity’s end is so frequently declared, Russia is struggling to try to get something it thought it already had when U.S. primacy was at its peak. And if you had told Yeltsin that Russia would not be winning that war against a country with an economy one-tenth the size of Russia’s, he would have been all the more incredulous. The misadventure in Ukraine, moreover, has greatly undermined Russia’s long-term economic prospects, thanks to the massive wave of sanctions the West has unleashed.

But even if Russia had swiftly captured Kyiv and installed a pro-Russian government, as Putin expected, that would have had little bearing on the global distribution of power. There is no denying that the outcome of the war in Ukraine matters greatly for the future of that country’s sovereignty and the strength of the global norm against forceful land grabs. But in the narrow, cold-hearted calculus of global material power, Ukraine’s small economy—about the same size as that of Kansas—means that it ultimately matters little whether Ukraine is aligned with NATO, Russia, or neither side. Further, Ukraine is not in fact a U.S. ally. Russia would be very unlikely to dare attack one of those. Given how the United States has reacted when Russia attacked a country that is not a U.S. ally—funneling arms, aid, and intelligence to the Ukrainians and imposing stiff sanctions—the Kremlin surely knows that the Americans would do much more to protect an actual ally.

CHAPTER 6 The Unipolar Era “If Sparta and Rome perished,” the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau asked, “what State can hope to endure forever?”1 The resounding answer given by history is “no state.” In time, perhaps in another century or so, the American empire will crumble and new powers will rise. But we are not there yet, nor will we be for many decades. We are living in the unipolar era, and it will probably outlive us. So what? The United States might be the most powerful country in his- tory, but it has a limited presence in many corners of the globe, and weaker nations routinely trample on U.S. interests.2 The United States failed to pre- vent the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the rise of the Islamic State, the Russian inva- sion of Crimea, Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, North Korean nuclear proliferation, and Chinese island-building in the South China Sea. Unipolarity, bipolarity, multipolarity: What difference does it make? In this final chapter, I explain why this view is wrong by highlighting several ways that unipolarity transforms world politics. The good news is that unipolarity dramatically reduces the likelihood of great power war. The bad news is that it may increase the likelihood of asymmetric conflict and undermine American national unity and the liberal world order. No Hegemonic Rivalry The story of world politics is often told as a game of thrones in which a rotating cast of great powers battles for top-dog status. According to researchers led by Graham Allison at Harvard, there have been sixteen cases in the past five hundred years when a rising power challenged a rul- ing power.3 Twelve of these cases ended in carnage. One can quibble with Allison’s case selection, but the basic pattern is clear: hegemonic rivalry has sparked a catastrophic war every forty years on average for the past half millennium. The emergence of unipolarity in 1991 has put this cycle of hegemonic competition on hold. Obviously wars and security competition still occur in today’s unipolar world—in fact, as I explain later, unipolarity has made certain types of asymmetric conflict more likely—but none of these con- flicts have the global scope or generational length of a hegemonic rivalry. To appreciate this point, just consider the Cold War—one of the four “peaceful” cases of hegemonic rivalry identified by Allison’s study. Although the two superpowers never went to war, they divided the world into rival camps, waged proxy wars that killed millions of people, and pushed each other to the brink of nuclear Armageddon. For forty-five years, World War III and human extinction were nontrivial possibilities. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, by contrast, the United States has not faced a hegemonic rival, and the world, though far from perfect, has been more peaceful and prosperous than ever before. Just look at the numbers. From 1400 to 1991, the rate of war deaths world- wide hovered between 5 and 10 deaths per 100,000 people and spiked to 200 deaths per 100,000 during major wars.4 After 1991, however, war death rates dropped to 0.5 deaths per 100,000 people and have stayed there ever since. Interstate wars have disappeared almost entirely, and the number of civil wars has declined by more than 30 percent.5 Meanwhile, the global economy has quadrupled in size, creating more wealth between 1991 and 2018 than in all prior human history combined.6 What explains this unprecedented outbreak of peace and prosperity? Some scholars attribute it to advances in communications technology, from the printing press to the telegraph to the Internet, which supposedly spread empathy around the globe and caused entire nations to place a higher value on human life.7 Such explanations are appealing, because they play on our natural desire to believe in human progress, but are they convincing? Did humans sud- denly become 10 to 20 times less violent and cruel in 1991? Are we orders of magnitude more noble and kind than our grandparents? Has social media made us more empathetic? Of course not, which is why the dra- matic decline in warfare after 1991 is better explained by geopolitics than sociology.8 The collapse of the Soviet Union not only ended the Cold War and related proxy fighting, it also opened up large swathes of the world to democracy, international commerce, and peacekeeping forces—all of which surged after 1991 and further dampened conflict.9 Faced with overwhelming U.S. economic and military might, most countries have decided to work within the American-led liberal order rather than fight to overturn it.10 As of 2018, nearly seventy countries have joined the U.S. alliance network—a Kantian community in which war is unthinkable—and even the two main challeng- ers to this community, China and Russia, begrudgingly participate in the institutions of the liberal order (e.g., the UN, the WTO, the IMF, World Bank, and the G-20), engage in commerce with the United States and its allies, and contribute to international peacekeeping missions.11 History may not have ended in 1991, but it clearly changed in profound ways—and mostly for the better.

Most International Relations literature suggests that when power becomes imbalanced, such a situation will be corrected – hegemony cannot persist over time. However, history offers us several examples of hegemonies lasting over a century, e.g., Ancient Rome, Ming China. So far scholars have offered four explanations for such enduring hegemony (Coercive Hegemony, Cooperative Hegemony, Cultural Hegemony, and Opportunist Hegemony), with a common mechanism: ineffective balancing. Namely, the hegemon has the capacity to put balancing at bay using different strategies flowing from the nature and fundamental principles of its hegemony. Hence, the hegemon uses coercion, institutional leverage, ideological indoctrination, or buyout, in order to assure its hegemony can endure. Yet, through time and through crisis the capacities of the hegemon to make the balancing ineffective diminishes. As such, these theories all share a similar assumption – imbalance is transitory and thus hegemony will breakdown. But what if that common assumption is incorrect. What if under certain conditions, imbalance is not resisted, but rather serves interests of non-hegemonic states as well as the hegemon? Twentieth and twenty-first century US hegemony suggests such conditions may exist. This American imbalance displays a different nature and fundamental mechanism behind its functioning. Although US relative power is declining, its global monetary network centrality is not. Moreover, even in times of severe crisis, such as the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system, or the Global Financial Crisis in 2008, we have not witnessed US monetary centrality decline. In fact, quite the opposite is true. The dynamics associated with an imbalance of power in favor of the United States runs against the expectations of existing theories. Therefore, we need a different theory to make sense of these particularities and make better policy recommendations. Thus, I have developed a Pervasive Hegemony Theory, which is based on a ‘buy-in’ behavior, that better explains US hegemony compared to existing alternatives. The ‘buy-in’ behavior relates to non-hegemonic states as well as the hegemon, in which all countries continue to use hegemon’s monetary unit in their monetary relations, even in times of severe economic crisis. This reinforces the hegemony. Even though non-hegemonic states may not prefer the imbalance of power, they prefer conducting their economic relations within the hegemon’s monetary unit and thus perpetuate the imbalance. Subsequently, they can only maximize their selfish interests and autonomy by buying-in to the hegemony and reproducing the imbalance of power. Conversely, the hegemon may not like the current rules and norms of the international system, but it can change those and obtain the support of the non-hegemonic states if it accepts to provide its monetary unit as the central currency of the system. In pursuing this argument, I use both quantitative (Network Analysis and Time Series) and qualitative methods (Process Tracing). I use the former on available economic data to establish the claim of US economic centrality, and that it is something different than what we have seen in the past. Second, I process trace the mechanisms of hegemonic and non-hegemonic state behavior in two international monetary systems (Bretton Woods and post-Bretton Woods) in order to isolate and identify the buy-in mechanism and provide an explanation of enduring imbalance – ownership over the central monetary unit in global economy. The dissertation, thus, assesses existing theories and indicates their inadequacies in explaining an important international phenomenon and provides a more robust explanation of enduring hegemony with the economic centrality, namely the ownership of the central monetary unit.

Utilizing ideal points, we proposed cohesion, deviation, and adhesion measures to empirically explore security alliance cohesion, Member State deviations, and third state adhesions. Our findings suggest that security alliances such as NATO and the Warsaw Pact had higher cohesion than other UN members, that external threat increased security alliance cohesion, and that the United States turned out to be the most significant deviating member in NATO since 1980, while third countries such as Australia, South Korea, and Japan were more aligned with the NATO alliance whereas Israel was more aligned with the United States. By using our measures, one can study any alignment pattern among any state groups in the UN, even without a priori identifications of state groupings. Measures developed and tested in this study can provide researchers with strong diagnostic tools. The study contributes to the overall UNGA voting literature by providing statistical inferences about the validity of the data.

We believe that the approach and new measures presented here could be useful to investigate cohesion levels in other intergovernmental organizations such as the EU and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, as well as economic communities like BRICS, while pinpointing each state’s political distance vis-à-vis each other or to a defined group of states. Furthermore, using this approach and these new measures could help researchers to concentrate on specific questions (e.g., whether the foundation of BRICS really brought Member States together on the issues of high politics, or whether Brexit could have been predicted). In other words, while the approach offered here was utilized more for descriptive purposes, it presents a superior alternative to measure variance across time, increasing our predictive power for actual or potential dramatic policy shifts at Member State and at (any) group level by using the UNGA voting data.

Why Regional Hegemony Is (Nearly) Impossible to Achieve Regional hegemony may be desirable in theory, but history suggests that it is an elusive goal. As Jonathan Kirshner , several different great powers have launched bids for regional dominance in the modern era and all but one of these attempts ended in disaster. France failed under Louis XIV and Napoleon Bonaparte, Germany was beaten decisively in both world wars, and Japan’s attempt to establish a hegemonic order in Asia ended in total defeat as well. Only the United States managed to pull off becoming the sole great power in its region. In the modern world, in short, the success rate is less than 20 percent. Furthermore, the failures were not just minor setbacks: They were unmitigated disasters for the countries that made the attempt. Perhaps a million Frenchmen lost their lives in the Napoleonic Wars, and Bonaparte died in exile on a remote island in the South Atlantic. Germany suffered mightily in both world wars and ended up divided into separate states for more than 40 years. Japan was firebombed in World War II, had two cities destroyed by atomic bombs, and its political order was remade by a foreign occupier. Being a regional hegemon might be desirable, but trying to become one almost always makes a state less, rather than more, secure. Bids for hegemony fail for two main reasons. First, as defensive realists have long , there is a powerful tendency for major powers to balance against threats. When a powerful state is nearby, when its military forces seem tailored to project power against others, and when it seems to have revisionist ambitions, nearby powers typically band together to deter or defeat them. If a would-be hegemon reveals its aims by starting a war, balancing behavior becomes even more pronounced and effective. The second barrier to regional hegemony is nationalism. As Napoleon discovered when he invaded Spain, as the Soviet Union and United States both learned in Afghanistan, and as Moscow is now being reminded in Ukraine, local populations will make enormous sacrifices to repel invaders. Even nations that have been temporarily vanquished often remain restive and eager to throw off an aspiring hegemon’s yoke. The dissolution of the European colonial empires during the 20th century further illustrates how the spread of nationalist doctrines has strengthened resistance to foreign dominance.

Zhao, 18 – Suisheng Zhao is professor and director of the Center for China-US Cooperation at Josef Korbel School of International Studies, University of Denver (“A Revisionist Stakeholder: China and the Post-World War II World Order” Journal of Contemporary China, DOI: 10.1080/10670564.2018.1458029

But China is not ready. First, as one Chinese scholar admitted, ‘China does not have the comprehensive national strength to change the current global order led by the US and other Western countries for more than 70 years’.41 A fragile rising power much weaker than most outsiders think, China is a middle-income country, facing immense internal hurdles, such as the environmental destruction, rampant corruption, inequality, and huge local government debt, all of which have the potential to derail its rise. Preoccupied by mounting challenges, Chinese leaders have to fight an uphill battle to mobilize resources and internal support for the global leadership role. China is far from achieving the donor status of many OECD countries. For one prominent Chinese scholar, the most dangerous challenge is the extreme-leftist policy-line and ‘the false-large-empty’ (假大空) slogans, making international promises and setting strategic objectives beyond the reach of China’s national strength.42 China’s international initiatives do not play a critical role in China’s rise but are the consequences of its rise.