Papers by William C. Wohlforth
Social status is one of the most important motivators of human behavior, yet for over a generatio... more Social status is one of the most important motivators of human behavior, yet for over a generation international relations scholars largely ignored it. Over the past 35 years, no more than half dozen articles have appeared in top U.S. political science journals building on the proposition that the quest for status will affect patterns of inter-state behavior. As Lebow has noted, scholarly research in IR has been framed by overarching grand theories that foreground other motivations, primarily fear (security) and appetite (wealth). No middle range theory, no major research program, no major substantive debate has centered on issues of status. Over the same interval, however, research in all other social science disciplines and a variety of other sciences has continued to yield findings that lend compelling support to the importance of status in human affairs.
The pursuit of status on the international stage through participation in the Crimean War was cri... more The pursuit of status on the international stage through participation in the Crimean War was critical to Italy’s drive toward unification. Piedmont’s Prime Minster Count Camillo di Cavour’s entry into the wartime alliance with France and Great Britain was a major component in his nation-building project, which Italy’s enhanced status after the war brought to fruition. Primary sources highlight the nexus between status competition at the international level and domestic political outcomes. Similar processes can explain the success and failure of other nation-building enterprises.
The Oxford Handbook of Grand Strategy
This chapter demonstrates that evaluating grand strategy is central to the study of international... more This chapter demonstrates that evaluating grand strategy is central to the study of international relations, establishes just how big a challenge it is, and proposes principles for meeting that challenge in a rigorous manner. A grand strategy is a sustained, major intervention in a mind-bogglingly complex social world that aims to advance an actor’s interests over the long term. Evaluating such a strategy requires ruthless discipline in defining the actor’s interests, assessing its strategic environment, identifying plausible alternative strategies, and deploying theory and evidence to run grand counterfactual experiments to determine whether those strategies would better realize the actor’s interests. The chapter takes the reader through these steps, illustrating each with examples of best and worst practices from historical and contemporary grand strategy debates.
International Security, 2016
Unipolarity is arguably the most popular concept used to analyze the U.S. global position that em... more Unipolarity is arguably the most popular concept used to analyze the U.S. global position that emerged in 1991, but the concept is totally inadequate for assessing how that position has changed in the years since. A new framework that avoids unipolarity's conceptual pitfalls and provides a systematic approach to measuring how the distribution of capabilities is changing in twenty-first-century global politics demonstrates that the United States will long remain the only state with the capability to be a superpower. In addition, China is in a class by itself, one that the unipolarity concept cannot explain. To assess the speed with which China's rise might transform this into something other than a one-superpower system, analogies from past power transitions are misleading. Unlike past rising powers, China is at a much lower technological level than the leading state, and the gap separating Chinese and U.S. military capabilities is much larger than it was in the past. In addi...
World Politics
THE PERCEPTION OF POWER: Russia in the Pre-1914 Balance By WILLIAM С WOHLFORTH* Introduction INTE... more THE PERCEPTION OF POWER: Russia in the Pre-1914 Balance By WILLIAM С WOHLFORTH* Introduction INTERNATIONAL relations scholars do not agree on the connection between the balance of power and war. They question whether or not an equal ...
International Security, 2001
War has become a case study of major importance for scholars of international relations for numer... more War has become a case study of major importance for scholars of international relations for numerous reasons. Not least among these is that it helped spark a renaissance in the study of ideas in the ªeld and contributed to the rise of constructivism as a major theoretical school in the 1990s.
So far, scholars of international politics have displayed relatively little inclination to use ne... more So far, scholars of international politics have displayed relatively little inclination to use new evidence from Cold War-era archives to test their theories and generalizations. This indifference is unfortunate. The new archival evidence and memoirs canand shouldprovide a reality check for theoretical debates. It is time for students of international relations to recognize the crucial link between historical explanation and theoretical propositions.
International Politics
In the original article, the first author name has been published incorrectly as "Andrey A. Sushe... more In the original article, the first author name has been published incorrectly as "Andrey A. Sushenstov". The correct name is "Andrey A. Sushentsov". The original article has been corrected. Publisher's Note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
International Politics
We contribute to the debate on NATO expansion in two ways that depart from standard practice: we ... more We contribute to the debate on NATO expansion in two ways that depart from standard practice: we make explicit the theoretical models that this debate demands; and we carefully trace Russian discourse and behavior through time. We show that NATO centrality rather than simply NATO expansion is the root issue. It best captures the historical origins of the problem and is most consistent with the Russian evidence. We demonstrate that Russia's cooperative moves vis-à-vis NATO were premised upon Moscow's strongly revisionist preferences regarding the European security architecture. We argue that the US-NATO-Russia spiral is best understood as an offensive-realist tragedy as opposed to a security dilemma or a standoff between one pure security-seeking state and one greedy expansionist. The key protagonists were both revisionists whose preferences and grand strategies brought them into conflict. Central to the whole story is not classical territorial security threats, but much broader conceptions of security. Keywords Security dilemma • Realism • US-Russia relations • US grand strategy • Russian foreign policy Barely had I been seated before Vladimir Putin told me that NATO-the organization that I then headed-no longer had any purpose and should be disbanded. 'After the end of the Cold War, we dissolved the Warsaw Pact', he said. 'Similarly, you should dissolve NATO. That is a relic from the Cold War'. (Rasmussen 2016, 73) This article joins others in this issue in assessing the US choice after the Cold War's end to continue to base its grand strategy on maintaining NATO as the core
MGIMO Review of International Relations
The article examines the major events of the two previous centuries of international relations th... more The article examines the major events of the two previous centuries of international relations through main concepts of political realism. The author argues that in order to understand the present dilemmas and challenges of international politics, we need to know the past. Every current major global problem has historical antecedents. History from the late 19th century constitutes the empirical foundation of much theoretical scholarship on international politics. The breakdown of the Concert of Europe and the outbreak of the devastating global conflagration of World War I are the events that sparked the modern study of international relations. The great war of 1914 to 1918 underlined the tragic wastefulness of the institution of war. It caused scholars to confront one of the most enduring puzzles of the study of international relations, why humans continue to resort to this self-destructive method of conflict resolution? The article shows that the main explanation is the anarchical ...
International Security, 2005
Russian opposition to the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 brought to the fore a question that has bee... more Russian opposition to the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 brought to the fore a question that has been a staple of scholarly and policy debate since the 1991 fall of the Soviet Union: Is the international system on the cusp of a new bal- ancing order? In the early-to-mid-1990s, the issue in ...
International Politics
Europe's security environment is critically dependent on nature of the relationship between Russi... more Europe's security environment is critically dependent on nature of the relationship between Russia and the broader west. What are the obstacles in the way of a stable partnership? Against the conventional wisdom that foregrounds domestic politics, we establish the importance of an abiding clash of definitions of national interest on both sides. The US and Russian strategic perspectives draw on the modern historical experience of both sides, are consistent with well-established international relations theories and are independent of particular personalities such as Putin's. We demonstrate that though personalities, ideas, and contingency played their roles, these basic clashing perspectives existed even during the euphoric days of the Cold War's end. Success in negotiating an improvement of US-Russian relations will require a pragmatic compromise between deeply divergent interests. Stable economic and political relations may be possible, but the first step in attaining it is recognizing the scale of the challenge. A stable partnership with Russia would do wonders for Europe's security. How to attain it? Much of the action centres on domestic politics. Policymakers and commentators in Europe highlight Russia's illiberal and corrupt domestic politics as the root challenge. Russian analysts look to the Trump Presidency as an opening for change. Throughout Europe, different political parties promise new approaches, suggesting that all it takes is governmental change to transform the West-Russia relationship. Without challenging the crucial role domestic politics can play, this paper establishes the importance of an underappreciated barrier to partnership: the clash of deeply embedded definitions of national interest on both sides. The way the west and Russia each seek security in an anarchic world is consistent over time and rooted in each side's historical experience, but the two approaches are hard to reconcile. These approaches are broadly 'rational', moreover, when viewed from the perspective of major theories of international relations. The fact that major theories can easily account for these policies undermines arguments that each side's (and particularly Russia's) approach is patently "irrational," "malevolent," or wholly the product of idiosyncratic domestic political incentives. We proceed in three stages. We begin with the seemingly familiar US-led (and
European Journal of International Relations, 2007
The balance of power is one of the most influential theoretical ideas in international relations,... more The balance of power is one of the most influential theoretical ideas in international relations, but it has not yet been tested systematically in international systems other than modern Europe and its global successor. This article is the product of a collective and multidisciplinary research effort to redress this deficiency. We report findings from eight new case studies on balancing and balancing failure in different international systems that comprise over 2000 years of international politics. Our findings are inconsistent with any theory that predicts a tendency of international systems toward balance. The factors that best account for variation between balance and hegemony within and across international systems lie outside all recent renditions of balance-of-power theory and indeed, international relations scholarship more generally. Our findings suggest a potentially productive way to reframe research on both the European and contemporary international systems. KEY WORDS ♦ ancient history ♦ balance-of-power theory ♦ systems theory ♦ unipolarity The balance of power has attracted more scholarly effort than any other single proposition about international politics. Its role in today's scholarship is arguably as central as it has been at any time since the Enlightenment, when Rousseau and Hume transformed familiar lore about balancing diplomacy into
When and under what conditions does hegemony pay? The fate of any hegemonic order hinges on the a... more When and under what conditions does hegemony pay? The fate of any hegemonic order hinges on the answer to this question. Notwithstanding major relevant research traditions, international relations scholarship remains poorly equipped to answer it. We fill this gap with a theoretical framework for understanding the costs and benefits of hegemony that identifies the conditions that affect potential complementarity between military protection and economic production. We show how this relationship varies in different international systems in ways that confounded previous research. Contrary to widely held views in US domestic politics and in the security studies research community, we argue that under current conditions complementarity between protection and production means the maintenance of hegemonic order remains beneficial to the United States.
European Journal of International Relations, 2009
... Wohlforth et al.: The Comedy of Errors? ... Amit, M. (1973) Great and Small Poleis: A Study i... more ... Wohlforth et al.: The Comedy of Errors? ... Amit, M. (1973) Great and Small Poleis: A Study in the Relations between the Great Powers and the Small Cities in Ancient ... of a Liberal Idea or Why Liberals Can Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Balance of Power', Perspectives on ...
Harvard International Review, Mar 22, 2007
Ending the Cold War, 2004
The Routledge Handbook of Security Studies, 2008
Uploads
Papers by William C. Wohlforth