Balance of power (international relations)

"[14] In 1953, Ernst B. Haas criticized balance of power theory, arguing that international relations works that used the concept were plagued with "philological, semantic, and theoretical confusion.

This translation was dedicated to Elizabeth I of England and claimed that "God has put into your hand the balance of power and justice, to poise and counterpoise at your will the actions and counsels of all the Christian kings of your time".

"[23] Statesman Richard Cobden labeled the balance of power "a chimera" due to its unclear meaning: "It is not a fallacy, a mistake, an imposture—it is an undescribed, indescribable, incomprehensible nothing."

Instead, for centuries "Europe has (with only just sufficient intervals to enable the combatants to recruit their wasted energies) been one vast and continued battle-field…"[24] He criticized Lord Bacon for his adherence to the balance of power as a universal rule:

There is no longer room in Europe today for those three or four important and strong countries whose more or less equal rivalries enabled Great Britain in the past to secure herself through the policy of the balance of power.

"[29] In fact, Churchill shortly adopted a similar view: Our Russian friends and Allies, he spoke in 1946, most admire strength and least respect military weakness.

If, however, "the population of the English-speaking Commonwealths be added to that of the United States with all that such co-operation implies in the air, on the sea, all over the globe and in science and in industry, and in moral force, there will be no quivering, precarious balance of power to offer its temptation to ambition or adventure.

"[30] A 2021 assessment by Morten Skumsrud Andersen and William C. Wohlforth concluded that balance of power is not a universal empirical law and that it does not merit explanatory precedence in international relations research.

[33]Wohlforth et al. state that systemic hegemony is likely under two historically common conditions: First when the rising hegemon develops the ability to incorporate and effectively administer conquered territories.

[32] The argument of universal reproduction of anarchy can be correct in the European context, "whereas a systematic survey of world history reveals that multipolarity has frequently given way to unipolarity or hegemony.

The predominance of the balance of power in the practice of statesmen for three centuries … should not obscure the fact that throughout world history periods dominated by the balance-of-power policies have not been the rule.

The balance of power scarcely existed anywhere as a conscious principle of international politics before 1500…[37]Evoking examples of the ancient Chinese and Roman civilizations, Quincy Wright added:

Lake, Campbell Craig, Fareed Zakaria, John M., Owen, Michael Mastanduno, Thomas S. Mowle, David H. Sacko and Terry Narramore:[46]

Most importantly, despite its continued predominance and political activism, and the first rumbling of international opposition in response to missteps in Kosovo, no coalition has emerged to balance against it … [T]he United States today defies the supposedly immutable laws of realpolitik".

One of the issues the discipline of political science "has been wrestling with recently is why there is still no anti-American coalition despite the overwhelming dominance of the United States since the end of the Cold War.

Due to the neorealist idea of anarchism as a result of the international system, states must ensure their survival through maintaining or increasing their power in a self-help world.

According to Kenneth Waltz, founder of neorealism, "balance-of-power politics prevail wherever two, and only two requirements are met: that the order be anarchic and that it be populated by units wishing to survive".

[72] With bandwagoning, the threatened state abandons hope of preventing the aggressor from gaining power at its expense and instead joins forces with its dangerous foe to get at least some small portion of the spoils of war.

[74] According to Stephen Walt, states are more likely to balance in peacetime but if they are on the losing side of a war they may defect and bandwagon in the hopes that they will "share the fruits of victory".

Proponents of the theory point to the Soviet Union's role in World War II whereby it passed the buck to the UK and France through the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact with Nazi Germany.

[86] Offensive realists believe that internal balancing measures such as increasing defense spending, implementing conscription, are only effective to a certain extent as there are usually significant limits on how many additional resources a threatened state can muster against an aggressor.

"[88] The theory acknowledges that power is an extremely important factor in the level of threat posed by a state, but also includes geographic proximity, offensive capabilities, and perceived intentions.

"[89] Campbell Craig explained the development of soft balancing theory on the Thomas Kuhn's three-stage model how scholarly communities respond to anomalies that seem clearly to defy their core theoretical predictions: 1.

The following year, the founder of the Paneuropean Union, Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi, also invoked the example of the two-centuries-long "Pax Romana" which, he suggested, could be repeated if based on the preponderant US air power and inter-regional organization:

"Preponderance's strategic imperatives are the same as they were during the post-World War II era: pacification and reassurance in Europe and East Asia, and protection of these regions from instability in the periphery.

[112] Overturning the scholarly conventional wisdom, however, the current preponderant power seems to render inoperative the counterbalancing long central to research in international relations.

Unipolarity is too central of a problem for neorealism to finesse, especially as confident predictions of its early demise have been proven wrong and the gap between the US and other rivals continues to grow.

The author of the Preponderance of Power… (1992), Melvyn Leffler, was puzzled: A balance of power is linked historically to the evolution of the Westphalian state system and "envisions equilibrium, while the Bush administration yearns for hegemony."

The clear intention actually was to be so strong that other countries had no choice but to rally to the side of the United States, concentrating all real power and freedom of action in the hands of America.

Russian President Vladimir Putin complained: "Instead of establishing a new balance of power … they [the United States] took steps that threw the [international] system into sharp and deep imbalance.