resilience and the future balance of power

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Resilience and the Future Balance ofPowerDhruva JaishankarPublished online: 23 May 2014.

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Not long ago – in the 1980s, in fact – the US policy community was in the throes of a high-stakes debate about the nature and extent of Soviet power. On one side was a large group who believed that the United States was losing ground to an increasingly powerful and aggressive Soviet Union. Proponents of this view pointed to the shifting balance of conventional military power in favour of Moscow, particularly in Europe, and to Soviet aggression in places such as Afghanistan.1 As a consequence, many American policymakers advocated increases in military spending to balance against the Soviet Union, a position that was also supported by many in the US mili-tary establishment.2 Others who shared this perspective proposed a more conciliatory and accommodating approach towards their rival, one that was helped along by Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s move towards glas-nost, and which was eventually manifested in arms-control talks between Washington and Moscow.3

On the other side of this debate were those who saw the Soviet Union as in decline, particularly economically. Some scholars, notably Paul Kennedy, observed in the late 1980s that the Japanese economy had surpassed that of the Soviet Union in size, despite Japan having just a third of the federation’s population (this was during the same era that yielded the now risible book, The Coming War with Japan).4 Yet, even while noting the Soviet Union’s long-term and relative economic decline, Kennedy stopped short: ‘this does not

Resilience and the Future Balance of Power

Dhruva Jaishankar

Dhruva Jaishankar is a Transatlantic Fellow with the Asia Program of the German Marshall Fund of the United States in Washington DC. He was an IISS–SAIS Merrill Center Young Strategist in 2013.

Survival | vol. 56 no. 3 | June–July 2014 | pp. 217–232 DOI 10.1080/00396338.2014.920153

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218 | Dhruva Jaishankar

mean that the USSR is close to collapse’.5 By and large, the idea of a Soviet Union at risk of terminal decline or imminent dissolution remained on the fringes of US public and policy discourse.6

Without the benefit of hindsight, the case for continuing Soviet suprem-acy seemed convincing. In fact, in the early 1980s, using any traditional analytical approach, there was little reason to believe that the Soviet Union would collapse as suddenly and as utterly as it did just a decade later. The federation was governed by an established leader, Leonid Brezhnev, and had become embroiled in the ‘Second Cold War’, a period of intensified competition with the US. In 1980 the Soviet Union had the world’s second-largest economy, after that of the US. Many forget that, in addition to its massive standing army and air force, the Soviet Union rivalled the US as the pre-eminent naval power: it had 273 submarines to America’s 90, and a 184 to 149 advantage in major surface warships.7 The Soviets also retained enor-mous international influence, including in large swathes of Europe, Latin America, Africa and Asia. And the Soviet Union was universally acknowl-edged as a great power, and granted positions in international governing councils corresponding to that status.8

Most American analysts and observers were so accustomed to the federation’s superpower status that their belief in its continuing prepon-derance did not necessarily end with the Soviet retreat from Afghanistan and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Rather, it extended right up to the summer of 1991, when a failed coup against Gorbachev triggered a complete regime collapse. Robert Gates, then-director of the CIA and a Soviet specialist, was among those who viewed Russian President Boris Yeltsin with considerable distrust, believing that the growing signs that he would break with the Communist Party masked reactionary proclivi-ties.9 The belief that the Soviet Union would retain much of its power even factored into decisions such as that by US President George H.W. Bush to issue only a muted response to the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, as he deemed stable relations with Beijing to be crucial to balancing efforts directed at Moscow.10

But, as we now know, the Soviet Union in the 1980s was an empty shell. Its military spending, ruling oligarchy and international assertiveness masked

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Resilience and the Future Balance of Power | 219

a rotten economy, a demographic time bomb and a fragile political system. Political infighting and dissatisfaction, particularly outside the Russian republic, were rife. Declining birth rates and relatively low life expectancy, especially in Soviet Europe, were shifting the ethnic make-up of the union. And despite meagre attempts at economic reform by Gorbachev, the Soviet Union found it hard to kick scientific socialism. Nonetheless, a number of very intelligent political analysts in the West – and, indeed, across the devel-oping world – were caught off guard in their assessments of Soviet power. But all that was quickly forgotten as the US exulted in its victory in the Cold War, the international system rapidly transformed and the contours of a new political order took shape.

Today, about a quarter of a century on, the US finds itself in the midst of a very similar debate. US government and private economic projections overwhelmingly agree that, within 20 years, China’s economy will likely eclipse that of the US. Global Trends 2030, the latest in a series of long-term forecasts by the US National Intelligence Council, estimates that China’s economy will surpass that of the US by 2030.11 Private-sector assessments mirror such government projections. An influential 2001 Goldman Sachs report on the BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India and China) predicted that China had the potential to more than quadruple its share of global GDP within a decade.12 The near-achievement of that objective has added to the breath-less bullishness about China’s future growth prospects. More recently, PricewaterhouseCoopers estimated that China’s GDP will overtake that of the US by 2017 in terms of purchasing power parity, and by 2027 in terms of market exchange rate.13

Many academic experts and commentators from a variety of disciplines concur that China’s economic ascension is imminent. Arvind Subramanian – whose contributions to the literature on China’s economic rise and America’s economic decline are more quantitative than most in that crowded field – concludes that

the economic dominance of China relative to the United States is more

imminent (it may already have begun), will be more broad-based

(covering wealth, trade, external finance, and currency), and could be as

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large in magnitude in the next 20 years as that of the United Kingdom in

the halcyon days of empire or the United States in the aftermath of World

War II.14

Beyond Washington, Wall Street and academia, American public opinion seems to have internalised this trend. As early as 2008, the majority of Americans believed that China would be the world’s leading power in 20 years.15 The US, with its political logjams, high levels of debt, war weariness and weakened manufacturing sector is seen in many quarters as in rela-tive (perhaps terminal) decline, and is now contrasted unfavourably with China’s ostensibly efficient and meritocratic government, current-account surplus, purportedly shrewd foreign policy and dynamic industrial base.16 Many believe the twenty-first century is China’s for the taking.

This view could well turn out to be right. But in assessing the likelihood of Chinese ascendancy, its proponents, and even many sceptics, often fail to take into account key lessons from the end of US–Soviet bipolarity. In large part, this reflects a crucial analytical shortcoming in the field of international relations, namely a crude and imprecise conception of power. Although assessments of resources, influence and perceptions all clearly point to an imminent power transition or US–China bipolarity, another crucial aspect of power, resilience, is all too often overlooked.

Three dimensions of powerFor a notion so prevalent in, and central to, the study and practice of inter-national politics, power remains a remarkably loose concept. For classical realists in the tradition of Hans Morgenthau, the quest for power is inher-ent to human nature. Yet the animus dominandi, as Morgenthau termed it, is amorphous and immeasurable.17 Power is also defined in many contexts as the ability to achieve specific outcomes, but this definition applies only to demonstrations of power in the past or, less reliably, to counterfactual history and hypothetical scenarios in the future. As such, thinking of power in terms of specific outcomes is problematic for policymakers. More gener-ally, officials and scholars of international relations commonly use power in one of three interrelated, but distinct, ways.

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The first is what can be thought of as a state’s capabilities or resources. This is the easiest aspect of power to quantify, and one that is often used in comparisons between states. As academic and former US government official Joseph Nye notes, ‘defining power in terms of resources is a shortcut that policymakers find useful’.18 Such a definition of power might include natural resources, human resources, available capital, technological prowess and military capabilities.19

The criteria for assessing the importance of these capabilities and resources have changed over time, largely as a function of technological transformations and, to a lesser extent, normative evolutions.20 During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the size of standing armies was a key indicator of international power, particularly in Europe. An over-reliance on army size was frequently responsible for poor assessments of relative power, leading most notably to the failure to anticipate Prussia’s rise among Austrian and French leaders in the mid-nineteenth century. Despite their overwhelming force superiority, the Habsburgs lost decisively in the Seven Weeks’ War of 1866, due in no small part to Prussia’s development of more efficient rifles.21 Similarly, French numerical superiority was blunted by Prussian strategic innovations in the Franco-German War of 1870.22

In the interwar period, maritime capabilities – specifically, warship tonnage – became the key proxy of power. A notable early attempt at arms control by the great powers of the day was the 1921–22 Washington Naval Conference, in which the US, Britain, Japan, France and Italy agreed to fixed ratios of warship tonnage in an attempt at preserving a balance of power after the First World War.23 The limitations of this measure came to the fore in the build-up to, and early years of, the Second World War, when a combi-nation of new technologies and military innovations, such as the blitzkrieg and developments in naval aviation, enabled first Germany and then Japan to inflict setbacks on Allied forces that were, in theory, much more powerful.

The Cold War heralded the arrival of the atomic age, and the number of nuclear warheads immediately became the preferred measure, and currency, of power. It is no coincidence that the P5, the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, also became the N5, the five recognised nuclear-weapons states under the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). The two

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predominant powers of this era, the US and the Soviet Union, engaged in a bilateral arms race, but also made considerable effort to mitigate their com-petition through nuclear arms-control measures. The nuclear balance – or imbalance – coupled with lesser proxies, such as prowess in space explora-tion and conventional arms, once again exerted an inordinate influence on estimates of power in government assessments and the popular imagination.

Loose conceptions of economic power have also similarly evolved, along-side shifts in assessments of military might. In the nineteenth century and much of the twentieth century, criteria such as steel production and energy consumption were viewed as key measures of industrial strength.24 Today, however, the rise of service industries, the diversification of manufacturing and the globalisation of commerce have largely overturned the centrality of iron and steel production to national economic development. Energy con-sumption is now more often seen as a liability rather than an asset; indeed, energy efficiency and sustainability are quickly becoming critical arenas of international competition.25

A number of developments in the 1980s and 1990s – the collapse of the Russian economy, America’s achievement of economic supremacy, Japan’s rise and subsequent stagnation, and the effects of globalisation – gradually led to GDP becoming the preferred proxy of power. Like army size, warship tonnage and the size of nuclear arsenals before it, GDP holds an inordinate sway over how governments and publics assess power and influence today. And like those other measures, it also suffers from grave deficiencies. Some analysts have criticised the casual equation of GDP with economic size.26 Others note that GDP masks important indicators of economic well-being, such as levels of debt, economic volatility and growth prospects – an issue that has come to the fore in debates over controversial austerity measures in Europe.27 Yet another criticism is that GDP provides no indication of a country’s influence or willingness to act internationally.28

Measures of power such as army size, warship tonnage, quantity of nuclear weapons and GDP do not just have an inordinate effect on public perceptions and government assessments in the eras in which they have been dominant. They have also influenced academic discourse. The Composite Index of National Capability compiled by the Correlates of War Project, the

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quantitative index of power perhaps most commonly used by academics, includes such measures as iron and steel consumption, as well as energy use, to measure national material capabilities, along with the size of a state’s military and economy.29 Although such data may have been useful for meas-uring the balance of power in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, its utility for assessments of national power today is questionable. Indeed, according to the index, China’s power surpassed that of the US before 2000.

There is, of course, more to power than simply resources. A second con-ception of power, one that is often used in attempts at formal definition, is the ability to harness resources and capabilities to achieve national objec-tives: influence. Nye has succinctly defined power as ‘the capacity to do things and … to affect others to get the outcomes we want’.30 For a number of reasons, countries with vast resources may have trouble converting that base into influence. A developing state with a relatively low GDP per capita will generally have a smaller revenue base than a developed state with a comparable GDP. Although influence as a conception of power is broadly understood by theorists, it has limited analytical value because it is difficult

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Source: IMF, World Economic Outlook Database

Figure 1. GDP of China, India, Japan and the United States

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to quantify. This has not stopped scholars from creating indices of power, employing such indicators as spending on militaries, research and develop-ment, and foreign aid.

A country’s resources and influence are not always closely correlated, and neither necessarily adheres to what can be thought of as a third concep-tion of power: perceptions. Perceptions of power are, in essence, subjective assessments that are reflected in institutional positions, international privi-leges and public opinion. Despite possessing a fraction of the resources held by other great powers of the period, Prussia was accorded all the privileges of a great power in the Concert of Europe after 1815.31 China, France and Britain were all devastated by the Second World War, but were nonetheless accorded permanent membership of the UN Security Council along with the two Cold War superpowers, largely as a function of their historical influ-ence and their allegiance to the victorious side in the former conflict. This privilege, in turn, facilitated their eventual recognition as nuclear-weapons states under the NPT, at the expense of defeated countries, such as Germany and Japan, and former colonies, such as India. Today, countries such as South Africa (with a GDP of $402 billion in 2011) and Turkey ($774bn) are members of the G20 as the largest economies in their immediate vicinities, while Spain ($1,480bn) and the Netherlands ($838bn) are not, in part because they are overshadowed by even larger European economies.32

As these examples suggest, the three dimensions of power – resources, influence and perceptions – are correlated, but not always closely. In very different ways, countries can punch above their weight, exerting influence disproportionate to their resources or being perceived as more powerful than their material capabilities might suggest. Qatar has employed its gas-fuelled riches to punch far above its weight in the Middle East, including through its development of the al-Jazeera media network.33 By becoming a hub of trade, finance and knowledge, tiny Singapore is able to exert influ-ence in Southeast Asia disproportionate to its size.34 Turkey’s embrace of Neo-Ottomanism, and Britain’s strengths in culture and the media, have allowed these countries to exercise outsized influence.35 Others – some have suggested India, Germany and Brazil – enjoy less influence than their resource bases or capabilities might suggest.36

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Historically, very few countries have enjoyed unquestionable great-power status in all three dimensions of power. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the leading colonial nations – Britain, France, Germany, Russia, the US and Japan – were arguably powerful in terms of their resources, how they employed those resources and how they were per-ceived by others. These states were major protagonists in the First World War and were all active competitors for trading privileges in China. The end of the Second World War – a conflict in which two of these states were defeated and two others, Britain and France, were severely weakened – resulted in the emergence of bipolarity.

But, unlike most previous power transitions, the shift that resulted in the end of both the Cold War and bipolarity was not marked by inter-state military conflict. Moreover, the Russia of 1992 enjoyed many of the same resources that were available to the Soviet Union in 1988, despite its sudden economic slump: a large, nuclear-armed military; immense natural resources; similarly vast human capital; and advanced technological capa-bilities. It had certainly lost international prestige, but preserved its status on the UN Security Council. Perhaps, then, there is more to power than most assessments of resources, influence and perceptions take into consideration.

Resilience: the fourth dimension?The sudden collapse of the Soviet Union, despite its military superiority and incredible capabilities, suggests that it lacked resilience; in other words, it was fragile. That resilience is rarely, if ever, conceived of as an aspect of international power appears to be an analytical shortcoming. Like other aspects of power, resilience can be assessed in several ways but is, at its core, a state’s ability to persevere in the face of economic, political and social adversity. Such adversity might include systemic shocks, such as financial crises, disputed leadership transitions and demographic shifts.

The US would appear to be, by most measures, an ideal example of a resilient great power. Financial crises, such as the 1929 crash that resulted in the Great Depression, did not result in separatism or violent regime change. The hotly disputed US presidential election of 2000 did not lead to political violence, let alone civil war. And radical demographic changes in

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many parts of the country over the past century have not resulted in ethnic cleansing. All this stands in welcome contrast to examples of less resilient states. The economic depression of the 1930s saw the Weimar Republic in Germany succumb to demagoguery and authoritarianism. Disputed elec-tions in Pakistan in 1970 led to civil war and the eventual bifurcation of that country. Demographic changes in the former Yugoslavia led to the ethnic cleansing of minorities, including Albanians in Kosovo, resulting in the state’s dissolution.

Another way of evaluating resilience is through the longevity of a system of governance. The US, although often thought of as a very young country, boasts what is possibly the oldest democratic constitution still in effect. At 223 years, the longevity of America’s current system of governance com-pares favourably to those of other major world powers: Japan (67 years), Germany (65), India (64), China (60), France (56), Brazil (26) and Russia (21). Only Britain, whose current system of governance builds upon a tradition dating back more than 300 years, can claim comparable resilience in this sense, although its political evolution has been far more gradual. Similarly, the last major constitutional crisis in the US resulted in the Civil War (1861–65), meaning that its present system of governance has survived largely unchallenged for almost a century and a half. Again, this compares favour-ably to other major powers. India’s democratic constitution was tested by a period of suspended civil liberties known as the Emergency (1975–77), while China’s system of government was threatened by the protests of 1989.

The issue of resilience ought to have come to the fore, once again, with the Arab Spring and its associated protests across the Middle East and North Africa. Egypt under Hosni Mubarak exhibited many of the outward signs of region-wide power, while Libya under Muammar Gadhafi argu-ably punched well above its weight. The sudden collapse of both regimes, however, indicated that each state had key weaknesses that were masked by conventional metrics of power.

Resilience has been implicitly understood by scholars of international relations and political economy, although rarely has it factored into calcu-lations of balance of power. The phenomenon of scapegoating, in which leaders of less resilient states provoke conflict abroad in an attempt to

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impose their will at home, is well documented. Edward Mansfield and Jack Snyder have considered resilience in the context of inter-state war, while Stephen Walt has included aggressive intentions in his characterisa-tion of the ‘balance of threat’.37 Others, such as Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, have analysed some of the same factors – specifically, the quality of institutions – in ensuring state success, often equated with economic growth and prosperity.38

Yet how might resilience be reliably factored into assessments of balance of power? Resilience is linked to a system’s political legitimacy, which in turn is correlated – if loosely, at times – with public participation in gov-ernment, the quality of governance, levels of security and the prosperity of the population. Thus, the level of political representation, the state’s monopoly on violence, the writ of the state, freedom of assembly and the social compact – captured in phenomena such as tax collection and the pro-vision of public goods and services – all contribute to a state’s resilience. By contrast, disputed leaderships, separatist movements, external military interventions, lack of recourse to justice, media censorship and government opacity all detract from resilience and contribute to fragility.

China, India and the future balance of powerAlthough there are considerable differences of opinion as to how power will be distributed over coming decades, it is widely believed that the US will retain much of its international influence; Europe, Russia and Japan will decline in relative terms; and China, India and Brazil will rise.39 Based on their populations and medium-term growth prospects, an assess-ment of future great powers can be limited to the five permanent members of the UN Security Council and the G4 aspirants: the US, China, Russia, France, the United Kingdom, Japan, Germany, India and Brazil.

Among these states, the fastest and deepest transformation since the end of the Cold War has involved the rise of China. Since 1988, China’s GDP has gone from 8% of America’s to 56%, higher than the Soviet Union’s share of American GDP during the Cold War. China’s military is the only one that comes close to rivalling that of the US. Its manpower is one-and-a-half times the size of that of the United States, but with about one-fifth of the resources,

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although it is quickly narrowing that gap, with double-digit percentage increases in its annual military spending. The People’s Republic of China has also been a permanent member of the UN Security Council since 1971, and is now a key member of the G20. By all three traditional conceptions of power, the state could already be considered a superpower.

India has enjoyed the second-fastest rise over the same period, and, largely by virtue of its immense population, is predicted to have one of the world’s three largest economies by 2050, along with the US and China.40 But India still has much farther to go than China (see Figure 1). Since 1988, its GDP has grown from 6% of America’s to 12%. By a similar measure, India has a military that is almost the same size as that of the United States, but with only about 6% of the budget (although that still makes it one of the world’s most capable forces). And although it has attained membership of several important multilateral bodies, including the G20, it has not yet been recognised as a permanent member of the UN Security Council, which is still perceived to be the apex body on matters of global governance.

However, most indicators point to India scoring higher than China in terms of resilience. Although India lags behind China on certain possible measures of resilience – notably, the size and extent of its tax base and the state’s monopoly on violence – it remains ahead in other respects, including political participation, freedom and transparency. Moreover, in some areas in which it fares poorly, such as levels of violence, it has made important strides over the past 20 years.41

This is not to underplay India’s fragility. Separatist and revolutionary movements have declined in intensity, but are nonetheless alive. Protests in 2011 and 2012 indicated widespread popular frustration with the coun-try’s democratic politics, possibly as a result of gerontocracy, the electoral system and intra-party politics. Furthermore, a youth bulge could just as easily contribute to social disharmony as to economic growth. And yet India has also exhibited a remarkable ability to self-correct. The suspension of liberties associated with the Emergency was overturned at the ballot box with the overwhelming victory of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s oppo-nents. Separatist movements in the states of Punjab and Mizoram have been absorbed peacefully into mainstream national politics. And, despite wide-

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spread frustrations with day-to-day politics, there are no real attempts at major constitutional overhaul, as the current political dispensation manages to accommodate a remarkably wide spectrum of ideologies, ranging from religious nationalism and ethno-linguistic regionalism to casteism and communism.

The contrasting profiles of China and India may yet have important implications for the future balance of power. Although the growth pros-pects for a country such as India might appear far less impressive than those of China in the near term, the former state seems far more likely to prove resilient. That in turn suggests that traditional indicators of power, such as resources, influence and perceptions, understate India’s ability to evolve into a great power over the course of the twenty-first century. Meanwhile, China’s ability to withstand shocks to its system, whether from internal factionalism, economic downturns or demographic reversals, remains very uncertain. At a conceptual level, considering resilience to be another dimen-sion of power may enable both practitioners and analysts of international politics to produce more meaningful assessments of the future distribution of power.

Notes

1 Eliot A. Cohen, ‘Toward a Better Net Assessment: Rethinking the European Conventional Balance’, International Security, vol. 13, no. 1, Summer 1988, pp. 50–89; Strobe Talbott, ‘U.S.–Soviet Relations: From Bad to Worse’, Foreign Affairs, vol. 58, no. 3, 1979, pp. 515–39, http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/33340/strobe-talbott/us-soviet-relations-from-bad-to-worse.

2 John J. Mearsheimer, Barry R. Posen and Eliot A. Cohen, ‘Reassessing Net Assessment’, International Security, vol. 13, no. 4, Spring 1989, pp. 128–44.

3 Talbott, ‘U.S.–Soviet Relations’; Beth A. Fischer, The Reagan Reversal: Foreign Policy and the End of the Cold

War (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1997).

4 George Friedman and Meredith Lebard, The Coming War with Japan (New York: St. Martins Press, 1991).

5 Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500–2000 (New York: Random House, 1988), pp. 513–14.

6 David Arbel and Ran Edelist, Western Intelligence and the Collapse of the Soviet Union, 1980–1990: Ten Years that Did Not Shake the World (London: Frank Cass, 2003).

7 Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, pp. 436, 511.

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8 For a description of the Soviet Union joining the UN Security Council as a permanent member, see Mark Mazower, Governing the World: The History of an Idea (New York: Penguin, 2012), pp. 204–8.

9 Christopher Andrew, For the President’s Eyes Only: Secret Intelligence and the American Presidency from Washington to Bush (New York: HarperCollins, 1995), pp. 510–16, 526–31.

10 David M. Lampton, Same Bed, Different Dreams: Managing U.S.–China Relations, 1989–2000 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001), p. 17.

11 US National Intelligence Council, ‘Global Trends 2030: Alternative Worlds’, December 2012, p. 15, http://www.dni.gov/files/documents/GlobalTrends_2030.pdf.

12 Jim O’Neill, ‘Building Better Global Economic BRICs’, Goldman Sachs, November 2001, http://www. goldmansachs.com/our-thinking/archive/archive-pdfs/build-better-brics.pdf.

13 PricewaterhouseCoopers, ‘World in 2050: The BRICs and Beyond – Prospects, Challenges and Opportunities’, January 2013, http://www.pwc.com/en_GX/gx/world-2050/assets/pwc-world-in-2050-report- january-2013.pdf.

14 Arvind Subramanian, Eclipse: Living in the Shadow of China’s Economic Dominance (Washington DC: Peter G. Peterson Institute for International Economics, 2011), p. 4.

15 Jeffrey M. Jones, ‘Americans Still View China as World’s Leading Economic Power’, Gallup, 10 February 2012,

http://www.gallup.com/poll/152600/americans-view-china-world-leading-economic-power.aspx.

16 Martin Jacques, When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order (New York: Penguin, 2012); Thomas L. Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum, That Used to Be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011).

17 Hans J. Morgenthau, Scientific Man Versus Power Politics (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1965), pp. 192–8.

18 Joseph S. Nye, Jr, The Future of Power (New York: PublicAffairs, 2011), p. 8.

19 Gregory F. Treverton and Seth G. Jones, ‘Measuring National Power’, RAND Corporation, 2005, http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/conf_proceedings/2005/RAND_CF215.pdf.

20 For an excellent defence of norma-tive evolutions in international relations, see Martha Finnemore, The Purpose of Intervention: Changing Beliefs About the Use of Force (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003). For a succinct history of changing military technologies’ influence on the balance of power, see Andrew F. Krepinevich, ‘Cavalry to Computer: The Pattern of Military Revolutions’, National Interest, no. 37, Autumn 1994, http://nationalinterest.org/article/cavalry-to-computer-the-pattern-of-military-revolutions-848, pp. 30–42.

21 Steven T. Ross, From Flintlock to Rifle: Infantry Tactics, 1740–1866 (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1979), pp. 161–2.

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22 Gunther E. Rothenberg, ‘Moltke, Schlieffen, and the Doctrine of Strategic Envelopment’, in Peter Paret (ed.), Makers of Modern Strategy from Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univerity Press, 1986), pp. 299–301.

23 Erik Goldstein and John Maurer, The Washington Conference, 1921–22: Naval Rivalry, East Asian Stability and the Road to Pearl Harbor (Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 1994).

24 J. David Singer, ‘Reconstructing the Correlates of War Dataset on Material Capabilities of States, 1816–1985’, International Interactions, vol. 14, no. 2, 1988, pp. 115–32.

25 Keith Bradsher, ‘China Leading Global Race to Make Clean Energy’, New York Times, 30 January 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/31/business/energy-environment/31renew.html.

26 Derek Scissors, ‘GDP: I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means’, Heritage Foundation, 13 June 2013, http://blog.heritage.org/2013/06/13/gdp-i-do-not-think-it-means-what-you-think-it-means/.

27 Lawrence Summers, ‘The Buck Does Not Stop with Reinhart and Rogoff’, Financial Times, 5 May 2013, http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/41d14954-b317-11e2-b5a5-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2gxhWXUZL.

28 Kelly Kadera and Gerald Sorokin, ‘Measuring National Power’, International Interactions, vol. 30, no. 3, 2004, p. 226. For GDP and all other economic data, unless otherwise noted, see IMF, World Economic Outlook Database, http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/weo/2013/01/weodata/index.aspx.

29 Singer, ‘Reconstructing the Correlates of War Dataset on Material Capabilities of States’.

30 Nye, The Future of Power, p. 6.31 Finnemore, The Purpose of Intervention,

pp. 163–7. 32 IMF, World Economic Outlook

Database.33 Rime Allaf, ‘Qatar’s Influence

Increases in the Middle East’, Guardian, 15 December 2011, http://www.the-guardian.com/commentisfree/2011/dec/15/qatar-influence-middle-east.

34 Tommy Koh and Chang Li Lin (eds), The Little Red Dot: Reflections by Singapore’s Diplomats – Volume II (Singapore: World Scientific, 2009).

35 Sinan Ülgen, ‘Testing Turkey’s Influence’, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 28 September 2011, http://carnegieendowment.org/2011/09/28/testing-turkey-s-influence/5d7o; James Maiki (ed.), ‘Soft Power Survey – 2012’, Monocle, http://monocle.com/film/affairs/soft-power-survey-2012/.

36 Stephen M. Walt, ‘Over-achievers and Under-achievers’, Foreign Policy, 21 April 2009, http://walt.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/04/21/over_achievers_and_under_achievers.

37 Stephen M. Walt, The Origins of Alliances (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987), pp. 147, 167–79; Edward Mansfield and Jack Snyder, ‘Democratization and War’, Foreign Affairs, vol. 74, no. 3, May–June 1995, pp. 79–97, http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/50974/edward-mansfield-and-jack-snyder/democratization-and-war.

38 James A. Robinson and Daron Acemoglu, Why Nations Fail: The

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Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty (London: Profile Books, 2012).

39 US National Intelligence Council, ‘Global Trends 2030’. See also Leslie H. Gelb, Power Rules: How Common Sense Can Rescue American Foreign Policy (New York: HarperCollins, 2009). For an argument in favour of American pre-eminence, see Robert Kagan, The World America Made (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013). For an argument for constrained American hegemony, see Fareed Zakaria, The Post-American World (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2008), pp. 43–4. For a contrarian view, posit-ing a tripolar world dominated by the US, China and the EU, see Parag Khanna, The Second World: Empires and

Influence in the New Global Order (New York: Allen Lane, 2008), pp. xxiii–xix. For a long-term, non-American esti-mate positing many trends similar to those identified by the US National Intelligence Council, see Raja Menon and Rajiv Kumar, The Long View from Delhi: To Define the Indian Grand Strategy for Foreign Policy (New Delhi: Academic Foundation, 2010), pp. 174–82.

40 US National Intelligence Council, ‘Global Trends 2030’.

41 Devesh Kapur, ‘And Now, (Modestly) Good News’, Business Standard, 9 April 2012, http://www.business-standard.com/article/opinion/devesh-kapur-and-now-modestly-good-news-112040900038_1.html.

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resilience and the future balance of power

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