I

Western conceptions of world history during the hockey-stick were strongly conditioned by a thick reading of racial anthropology. World order was explained by ‘the natural hierarchy of the races’ not only through static causal maps from systematics to world order, ie from racial anthropology to ‘the orders of rank of the States’, or from racial anthropology to the social order, but also dynamically, via racial catastrophism; a philosophy of history which held that the rise and fall of civilizations and the rise and fall of great powers were explained by population history. The motor of world history was the struggle for survival between races: more vigorous races expanded their dominion at the expense of more primitive races. This was the iron law of history in the discourse of racial catastrophism. The weakest races from ‘the uttermost ends of the earth’ were expected to ‘vanish upon approach’ by the stronger. The once vigorous Asiatic races in decline were expected to come under the rule of the more vigorous races of Europe.

In a roomful of gentleman in New York, London, Paris, or Berlin any time in the period under study, it would prompt a murmur of agreement if one were to remark that the reason why the Anglo-Saxon, and not the Teuton, had ‘world control’ was because he had vigorously displaced the weaker races from the world’s prime temperate lands outside Europe — for, of course, the White race can’t help but eventually lose vigor in the tropics. The doctor in the armchair would wonder aloud whether the darker races — who were, of course, irrelevant to the world question — could be lifted up by the judicious application of scientific eugenics. The conversation would then turn to whether there were any scientific racial/world historic grounds for worrying about a threat (to the Anglo-Saxon world order) from the east. Was the Hindoo far too cross-bred with darker races to be redeemable? Could the Han regain his vigor? Could the evidently vigorous Japanese race organize the Mongoloid races of the Far East? Could Soviet Man defy the iron laws of racial history? These were all speculations for the future. The world question, in the Western discourse with the onset of the hockey-stick from the turn of the century onwards and particularly as it came to bear on grand-strategy at midcentury, was whether the Teuton could kick-out the Anglo-Saxon from the cockpit of history.

The world question was in this way rigidly framed within a paradigm of Germanic racial supremacism anchored on seemingly incontrovertible scientific evidence from physical anthropology, archaeology and linguistics. This discourse was not only central to the hegemonic ideology of the West, high racialism, it played an absolutely extraordinary causal role at midcentury. The Germans of course attempted to exterminate the Slav and reenact the Anglo-Saxon achievement in western Eurasia in a single act. Earlier, Chamberlain had vetoed a triple alliance that would’ve deterred Hitler because, as he explained in a letter to his sister, ‘I put as little value on Russian military capacity as I believe the Germans do.’ The catastrophic failure of Western intelligence assessments in 1941 attests to the rigidity of this discourse. For there was in fact no disagreement between Hitler, Churchill, and FDR on the rank-ordering of the races or the iron laws of racial history. That the Slav could defeat the Teuton was practically unthinkable. We cannot interrogate midcentury perceptions in the aftermath of the World War without understanding the hold of racial catastrophism on the Western mind.

The cobwebs of racial catastrophism would be dispelled in the American intelligence community by Boasian antiracists working for the Office of Strategic Services — the greatest community of scholars ever assembled; it was all hands on deck at midcentury. Robinson, a Columbia History Professor who led the Eastern European Division, would tell the President and Churchill at Quebec in 1943 that ‘considering the measure of Russia’s power revealed in this war,’ there was no doubt as to whether she had to be given ‘a coordinate place in a three power scheme of world control.’ More urgently, a western front was necessary not because of German strength but because of Soviet strength.

Robinson was relying on the insights of Max Werner, a now-forgotten member of the rare species of the transnational democratic socialist defense intellectual who alone in the West predicted the outcome of the Soviet-German War. As the New York Times noted in his obituary, he briefly became quite famous for his insight. Werner was robbed of a chance to puncture the monoculture of the ‘Megadeath intellectuals’ that would emerge later in the decade for his heart failed him in 1951. But before his death he made a sustained and highly-effective critique of the Anglo-Saxon overreliance on the air weapon, and later the air-atomic weapon that was then being contemplated.

II

Long before the world question emerged at the turn of the century, in 1848, Retzius had constructed the cephalic index to explain the European Order and the rise of European civilization. The logic was seductive: Physical anthropology could help you track people, pots were people, so you could “show” that higher levels of civilization were achieved with the arrival of more vigorous races. Jon Røyne Kyllingstad explains in Measuring the Master Race: Physical Anthropology in Norway, 1890-1945,

Retzius and Nilsson’s migration theory was not only an account of the origin of the Swedes, it was also a grand theory about the rise of European civilisation. They proposed that the Sami and the Basques were the descendants of inferior Stone Age peoples that had originally inhabited all of Europe. These short-skulled autochthones had later been overrun by successive waves of Indo-European invaders who brought increased levels of civilisation to Europe: the Celts introduced the Bronze Age, and the Germanics the Iron Age. Thus, the growth of European civilisation was explained by the successive invasion of races with increasingly advanced brains. Retzius’ views were extraordinarily influential (see Fig. 2 [reproduced as Figure 1]). The racial-succession scheme shaped linguistic, archaeological and ethnological debates on European prehistory from the 1840s to the 1860s, and the system of classifying skulls and human races into dolichocephalics and brachycephalics had an even greater and more long-lasting impact. Indeed, the cephalic index became a key factor in most of the numerous racial typologies that were put forward by European scientists over the next 100 years.

This was well before 1859 when ‘the theory of the antiquity of man burst upon the scientific world with an irresistible force’ (Thompson 1877) and the races were inferred to have great time-depth; even longer before the mid-1890s, when Massin (1996) [quoted in Glick (2007)] tells us, ‘the fundamental question of the ‘hierarchy of races’ and ‘existence of superior and inferior races’ acquired again a central position in anthropology’. For it is no surprise to find Ripley resurrect the discourse of ‘the races of Europe’ in 1899. Well beyond anthropology, we find geopoliticians in Europe and America marry cartography and racial anthropology from the turn of the century onwards to triangulate and quantify world power. Mackinder’s philosophy of history is a cartographic version of racial catastrophism — the deep order of history is the repeated invasions of the civilized societies of the Eurasian rim by vigorous barbarians from the steppe. Racial geopolitics would be turned into a fine art by Karl Haushofer, whose influence on Hitler can be read off the Second Book. What Mahan had been to the Kaiser, Haushofer was to Hitler. We have to wait until Spykman in 1942 to see the severing of racial anthropology from the logic of strategic cartography.

Figure 1. Ripley, The Races of Europe, 1899. Source: Kyllingstad (2014).

III

The discourse of racial anthropology did not come to an end in 1942. Neither did the specific discourse of racial catastrophism. For as late as 1969, we find the doyen of evolutionary biology, Sewall Wright, reproducing the logic:

There is also no question, however, that populations that have long inhabited widely separated parts of the world should, in general, be considered to be of different subspecies by the usual criteria that most individuals of such populations can be allocated correctly by inspection (Wright, 1969, vol. 4, p. 439). The initiation of agriculture and livestock breeding was a revolutionary advance from the hunting and gathering way of life, which could hardly occur until the genetic basis for intelligence had reached an advanced grade. It is fair to assume that the regions in which these appeared first were at the peaks in the genetic basis for intelligence (p. 456). … If any appreciable advance has occurred since, it has probably consisted more in the worldwide diffusion of the level attained by the most advanced peoples than in the further progress of the latter (p. 454). … The success of the tribes thus probably depended to a greater extent on capabilities, determined by their genes, than on the possession of techniques not known to their neighbors (p. 455). … The state of culture has been to a considerable extent an index of the rank of populations genetically in the distinctive human line of evolutionary advance in its later stages. Aspects of culture are continually being borrowed, but whether such borrowings are effectively integrated into the existent culture to form new peaks (as most conspicuously in the recent period in Japan), or are adopted only superficially and to the detriment of the previous culture, is also an index of genetic capability (p. 455).

Indeed, even in post-racial anthropology, under the onslaught of the molecular anthropology revolution, it has been resurrected as ‘demic diffusion’. The issue seems to be that since physical anthropology can only track population history, it (together with the paleoclimate) has to do all the explanatory work in paleoanthropology and prehistory. In forthcoming work, I will show that racial anthropology was not abandoned in paleoanthropology until the mid-1980s, whereupon racial catastrophism morphed into demic diffusion for populations classified as Sapiens, while outright racial catastrophism, now disguised as interspecific catastrophism, was projected onto the Neanderthal question.

Structures don’t live out there in the wild; they are explanatory schemas that live in the discourse and in men’s minds as mental maps. Temporal structure is made of diachronic patterns (roughly, time-variation) as opposed to synchronic patterns (roughly, cross-sectional variation). An example of the former would be the relative decline of Britain in 1895-1905. An instance of the latter would be the pattern of diplomacy during the July Crisis. What historians in the tradition of Braudel are interested is slow-moving temporal structure. Synchronic pattern are of concern to historians interested in the history of events, that Braudel characterized as mere ‘surface disturbances’ that ‘the tides of history carry on their strong backs.’

Koselleck says every concept has its own “internal temporal structure.” I think, let’s try this at home. Here I locate the variable that’s doing most of the work in explaining the diachronic pattern of international politics in some IR theories I find interesting, and find a representation as an internal temporal structure inherited from the logic of the theory. It turns out to be surprisingly useful in thinking about the Chinese question.

In the discourse of realist IR, the explanandum is the historical pattern of relations among great powers at the center of the world-system beginning in Europe c. 1494 or c. 1648 depending on the scholar. Waltz’ main achievement was to isolate the systemic security interaction of great powers as a separate level of analysis and successfully claim disciplinary autonomy for international relations within political science. He did that by importing the trick from microeconomics where the market interaction of firms had been isolated as an independent disciplinary domain of enquiry within economics. In neorealism, systemic security interaction between homogenous units differentiated solely by a scale parameter called power is posited as a theoretical model of an international system. Waltz identified the structure of an international system with the distribution of power among the units. In the familiar metaphor, great powers are considered to be like billiard balls differentiated only by size. Time has no place in Waltz’ admissible class of abstract international systems. The result, predictably, is ‘rigor mortis’ (Walt, 1999).

Kenneth Waltz (1924-2013)

But Waltz was not done yet in painting himself into a corner. No sir, he proceeds to throw out almost all the information in the distribution of power, that he had identified as the structure of the system. Polarity, the number of great powers in the system, is, Waltz argued, an efficient explanation of the stability properties of the international system in that bipolar systems are stable whereas multipolar systems are unstable. The de facto structure in Waltz’ theory then is not what he had declared to be the structure of the international system, the distribution of power. It is not even polarity per se. In his main arguments about system stability, all the work is done by a Boolean variable. Systems are either bipolar or multipolar. Moreover, the record of great power relations from c. 1648, is a single sample path; according to Waltz only two system structures have ever existed. Waltz thus cornered himself into an explanatory impasse that proved impossible to escape, which would be impressive if getting stuck in degenerate paradigms were uncommon.

Waltz withdrew into a sullen silence as the bipolar world, whose stability he had explained with great authority, evaporated into thin air on account of the unanticipated capitulation of the weaker party. With great conviction, he then proceeded to pronounce the unipolar world to be so unstable as to be not worthy of the attention of a serious student of world politics. But the unipolar world simply refused to lay down and die. It was 24 years old and going strong when Waltz passed away in 2013. Poor fellow must have been painfully conscious of his lost wagers with world history.

In contrast to Waltz one-dimensional explanatory scheme or structure, Gilpin’s is two-dimensional. The distribution of power is projected onto a time-axis and allowed to evolve. This decisive discursive move reveals a cyclic, punctuated equilibrium-type pattern in world politics. Hegemonic wars punctuate long periods of system stability. These periods of system stability exhibit stable patterns of international politics that are reenacted over and over again, and tend to change very slowly. For example, the identity of the maritime hegemon (a natural monopoly); the identity of the dominant politico-military actors in different regions; the territorial order; the diplomatic rank ordering; national questions (eg, the Kurdish question); and, with apologies to WG Sebald, no doubt the cabinet of zombie curiosities: dead treaties, agreements, multilateral coordinating bodies, aid programs, and peace processes et cetera; they stand frozen in the instant they came to grief, waiting to be toppled over by strong winds and consigned to the storage rooms of museums and libraries. The reproduction of world order is founded on the absence of a reconsideration of the world question rather than just the military position of the dominant power. To be precise, the stability of world order rests on the fear of world war. It rests on the unwillingness of potential insurgents to reopen the world question.

Robert Gilpin (1930-2018)

Gilpin’s motor of world history, the law of uneven growth, is a particular instance of the Second Law which states that the entropy of any system increases over time. For international systems, entropy is defined as the dispersion of power. Hegemonic war eliminates some great powers, weakens others, and strengthens only a few, so that when world time resets to zero at the close of the hegemonic war, power in the system is highly concentrated, ie entropy is low. The system deconcentrates over time in accordance with the Second Law. The expected dispersion of power in the system is thus maximal on the eve of a hegemonic war. The Second Law in the form of the law of uneven growth thus endows the system with a temporal structure. We define world time in terms of this temporal structure. More precisely, world time can be identified with the entropy of the international system.

Victorious powers forge a world order from scratch. But underneath the stable patterns of world order, pace Foucault, world time continues its relentless march. World time can be thought of as the clock of the rise and fall of the great powers. World time measures the erosion of the dominant power’s relative power and influence. World time enters world history at two levels of causation, at the level of the discourse and in extradiscoursive reality. Great power statesman are in effect trying to read world time when they try to ascertain the changing balance of world power. World time also enters history through brute facts about the relative distribution of war potential. The tick-tock echoes between the steel factories and the minds of statesmen. The motor of hegemonic war in Gilpin is identical to the one identified by Thucydides 2400 years ago. Under the tick-tock of world time, the declining hegemon discovers merit in the logic of preventive war. Perhaps it is best to reach a decision while time is still on one’s side. Knowing that the dominant power might succumb to the seduction of preventive war, the rising power too is alarmed by the tick-tock of world time. Rising powers know that they must accumulate power fast or they will be crushed.

In Gilpin’s theory, world time is cyclical. The tick-tock of world time announces the approach of the time of the great reckoning when the fates of great civilizations will once again be determined. World time is then quite literally set to zero, and starts afresh with the creation of a new world order forged by the victors from the smoking ruins of the hegemonic war. Until, of course, world time signals autumn. The fundamental problem with cyclical time is the temporality of world systems. Sequential world orders cannot be assumed to be independent. Hegemonic wars are fought precisely over the terms of the world order. World orders are forged in the shadow of hegemonic war from the ruins of the previous world order. They are often consciously constructed in light of the lessons of the failure of the previous attempt at world order. In any event, they are informed by what went before even if the old hegemon is eliminated from the roster of great powers. So the reset of world time is quite problematic from a historical point of view.

Ashley Tellis introduced the theory of hard realism in his doctoral dissertation, where we find a very different temporal structure. Tellis starts with the observation that the first-best solution to the threat posed by a great power rival is to eliminate it. Starting with a given roster of great powers, Tellis reasons that repeated struggles between the great powers would eliminate the weakest in each round thereby introducing a temporal structure in great power history that we can call system time. Put simply, the roster of great powers would feature a larger number of great powers earlier in system time compared to later. With each subsequent round the number of great powers would dwindle until it is reduced to a singleton.

Ashley Tellis (1961-)

System time here can thus be operationalized as the polarity of the system over the very long run. Whereas world time is cyclical, curling round like a Riemann surface, system time is linear but finite. It begins with the emergence of an international system and culminates in a unipolar world once all but a single power have been eliminated from the roster of great powers. The temporal pattern suggested by system time not only captures the deep temporal structure of Western history and the contemporary world-system, it is also consistent with the evidence of other international systems across time and space, as Kaufman, Little, and Wohlforth document.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=38074912

While system time and world time are ahistorical but not teleological since they are derived from the logic of the theory. Both operate simultaneously under the surface of international relations, the first even more slowly than the second. Yet another temporal structure, a third arrow of history, is associated to the hockey-stick, that we may call exponential time. Put simply, the hockey-stick introduces a temporal logic of escalation in world politics. World struggles that take place later do so at levels of destruction and power potential an order of magnitude higher than the previous tournament. Exponential time is the temporal representation of the hockey-stick. It is nonlinear but bounded from above. What happens is that the destructive power eventually becomes so great that a world struggle spells the final and irrevocable coda of human history.

World time, system time, and exponential time exist in every instant of world politics. But they are not symmetrically situated. System time continues to unfold even as world time is reset with each hegemonic war. Even as system time increases linearly, exponential time increases exponentially. In the end exponential time catches up with both world time and system time. For when exponential time hits the upper bound, the iron logic of mutually-assured destruction frustrates the historical logic of both world time and system time by eliminating the very possibility of world war. For the dominant power can no longer eliminate the rising power through preventive war for fear of nuclear annihilation so the temporal logic of world time is frustrated. And since no first-rank power can be eliminated in a world struggle, the logic of system-time is frustrated as well.

Should the United States follow world time and launch a cold war against China? Should the US obey system time and eliminate China with a splendid first-strike while it still can? Or should the United States buy into the notion that the iron logic of mutually assured destruction has repealed the laws associated with world time and system time, and seek a modus vivendi with China in the secure knowledge that neither can be eliminated from first-rank? If we are guaranteed to end up in the impasse of strategic stalemate then why not skip the security competition and go straight to détente?

The issue of nuclear deterrence in the Korean peninsula is usually posed in terms of how reliably the United States and its key regional allies can deter an attack by North Korea. That has it exactly the wrong way around. The question is not whether the US can deter North Korea; that’s a triviality. The real question is whether North Korea can deter the United States.

As I’ve explained at length before, strategic nuclear deterrence is extraordinarily stable when both sides enjoy an assured second-strike capability, ie the ability to retaliate with a devastating counterblow after having absorbed a massive first-strike. Under highly asymmetric conditions, nuclear deterrence is much less stable. If the stronger party can expect a splendid first-strike to destroy the deterrent of the weaker party with certainty, it is hard to see how the latter can deter the former. Of course, certainty is unachievable in practice. The question is just how certain the stronger party has to be for deterrence to fail. Of all the asymmetric deterrence scenarios, the confrontation between the unipole and North Korea is arguably the most one-sided. If North Korea can deter the United States, then deterrence is unlikely to fail anywhere else as well.

So does the United States enjoy nuclear primacy over North Korea? Concretely, if President Trump demanded a military solution to the “problem”, will the generals be able to put forward a viable operational plan to disarm North Korea without exposing the United States and its allies to catastrophic risk? Can the US take out the entire North Korean arsenal in counterforce strike before they have a chance to retaliate?? As usual, the devil is in the details.

The United States would enjoy nuclear primacy over North Korea if it could be near-certain of destroying North Korea’s nuclear capabilities in a splendid first-strike, or if it could be near-certain that it will be able to intercept North Korean missiles before they stuck populous cities and strategic bases of the United States and its regional allies. So we need to evaluate the capabilities of the both the United States and North Korea. Moreover, in order to assess the likelihood of deterrence failure, we also need to assess the balance of resolve. Having a first-strike capability is one thing; having the willingness to carry out a splendid first-strike quite another—much more is involved than simply hard power capabilities.

According to US intelligence, North Korea has an arsenal of some 60 odd nuclear warheads. More importantly, in the assessment of the intelligence community, North Korea has achieved miniaturization, ie they have figured out how to make the warheads small enough to mount them on an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM). The beleaguered state’s gains in missile knowhow have also crossed a critical threshold. In the assessment of analysts at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, the July 4 test launch suggested that the missile had a range of 10,000km, putting the US west coast and midwest within reach. On July 28, North Korea fired a second test missile in a near-vertical trajectory that reached an altitude of 3,500km before falling harmlessly in the Sea of Japan. Analysts reckon that even New York, Boston and DC are now within operational reach of North Korean missiles. It’s still not clear whether they have figured out how to ensure that the warhead doesn’t burn up upon reentry into the dense lower atmosphere. It shouldn’t take long for them to achieve that capability. In any case, US strategists must assume that the North Koreans have the capability to strike the most populous US cities and, a fortori, US military bases in the region and the cities of its regional allies.

Can the United States be near-certain that its theater and intercontinental missile defense systems will be able to intercept North Korean missiles? The short answer is no. Of the last 5 tests of the ICBM ballistic missile defense system, 3 have failed. Theater missile defense (TMD) may perform better under test conditions, but is likely to fare even worse under actual warfighting conditions because North Korea has many more short-range platforms to strike Japan and especially South Korea (where it can even use artillery to deliver nuclear payloads) and they can deploy many more decoys to distract the systems. North Korea also has electronic warfare capabilities that can potentially interfere with TMD systems.

On the other hand the United States has a formidable repertoire of counterforce capabilities. The United States can use low-orbit platforms like satellites, air-breathing unmanned platforms (ie surveillance drones), and manned fixed-wing aircraft to generate near-continuous targeting solutions. The US can utilize a full-spectrum of air-, land- and sea-based launch platforms to take out North Korean targets. Lieber and Press (2017) have shown that North Korea would find it hard to ensure the survivability of its nuclear deterrent against the United States since the US can substitute seamlessly between multiple platforms for cueing, targeting, and strike solutions (“fire-control solutions”). In other words, the United States enjoys nuclear primacy over North Korea in the sense that the US can carry out a splendid first-strike against the North Korean arsenal with near-certainty.

Lieber and Press (2017)

Lieber and Press (2017)

But the problem is that the balance of resolve favors North Korea. No conceivable interest of the United States or its regional allies can be served by exposing themselves to North Korean nuclear strikes even an iota. Even though the US could take it out on demand, the very existence of the North Korean deterrent means that Japan and South Korea would resist a preemptive strike against North Korea. US assurances that the risk is small are quite unlikely to satisfy Seoul and Tokyo. Both allies would expect compelling reasons why they must run even a small risk of a nuclear attack.

Put another way, the United States is deterred because North Korea hasn’t raised the stakes enough to threaten a vital interest of South Korea and Japan. It is in the US interest to prevent a North Korean deterrent capable of striking US cities. But the US would find it impossible to convince Seoul and Tokyo that they need to run the risks necessary to achieve that goal. The United States cannot find a persuasive reason because there isn’t one. So much for nuclear primacy.

War-making capabilities of states are very hard to measure. Even sophisticated metrics of national material capabilities are wildly insufficient to predict the outcome of wars. Some states punch far above their weight, while others routinely underperform expectations based on national material capabilities.

Prussia and later Germany in the classical European balance of power, and Israel in the post-colonial Middle East are in the first category. Surrounded by hostile states and with neither the resources nor the manpower to win long, drawn-out wars of attrition, the militaries of both states cultivated an art of war that sought to front-load conflicts and seek the decisive victory. At the geostrategic level, both sought the patronage of wealthy maritime powers—Great Britain for Prussia and the United States for Israel—who bankrolled their arsenals and provided economic and diplomatic support. These comprehensive strategies for survival allowed these modern day Spartas to prevail against gangs of larger and more populous neighbors.

States that punch below their weight include Spain in the seventeenth century and Russia in the late nineteenth. Imperial Spain made it a habit of losing to ostensibly weaker powers after a much smaller English fleet sunk the Spanish Armada in 1588. In 1905, Russia lost the first great power war of the century to Japan, a state with a vastly smaller material endowment. In the present day, all concerned agree that, if it ever came to blows with Iran, Saudi Arabia would lose hands down, despite its almost 2-to-1 advantage in economic size.

Despite these anomalies, it is still largely true that states with greater war potential can expect to prevail against states that are relatively less well-endowed. By war potential, I mean the size and sophistication of the economy, size and skill-set of the population, and national endowments of arable land, iron ore, rubber, coal, oil and gas et cetera.

In the Second World War, once Hitler failed to capitalize on the July results of Operation Barbarossa and the US emerged as an ally of the Soviet Union, the outcome was overdetermined by the Allies’ crushing advantage in material capabilities. The United States and the Soviet Union could field many more rifles, tanks, field guns, warplanes and fighters than the Germans. On the Pacific front, Japan had no choice but to surrender, precisely because of its material inferiority. Similarly, in World War I, the Americans’ credible promise to land a million troops on the continent directly led to the November Crisis of 1918 and with it the capitulation of Germany. The Germans simply did not have the wherewithal to mount another Spring Offensive.

But let me not belabor the point. Material advantage matters. The question is how to measure it. Organski has argued that GDP is an excellent metric. The reason is that it captures a number of things that are relevant to the war-making capabilities of a state. Unless a state has well-functioning institutions, large material endowments, and a large, skilled populace, it is unlikely to have a very large economy. Obviously, this doesn’t work at every level. For instance, a middle power with a very large GDP due to a especially large endowment of crude oil is unlikely to be very powerful—think Saudi Arabia.

But GDP is unlikely to catapult a state to the top ranks of global power unless it is broadly representative of national capabilties. Indeed, there are no counter-examples to be found in the modern period. And because the global balance of power is a game played by only the chosen few, it doesn’t matter much if our metric doesn’t apply to every state. Moreover, it can be shown that more complicated metrics do not materially alter our findings.

Many metrics include standing armies and military spending. For instance, the COW Index is a simple average of normalized indices for GDP, military personnel and military spending. Such metrics are good for capturing the military balance in the short run but are at best irrelevant, and at worst misleading, for the medium and long run. If you live in a tough neighborhood, a powerful standing army is certainly a must. But if you are offshore or if you are ‘hiding your strength and biding your time,’ you can afford to keep your power latent and call it forth as needed.[1] For instance, in 1939, the United States had the smallest standing army among the major powers. Yet every great power statesmen was well aware that the US was the strongest power in the system and that its weight would decisively alter the course of the war. What truly matters for the balance of global power is war potential, not extant military power.

We are used to thinking in terms of polarity—the number of great powers in the system, i.e., the number of states that can that can put up a fight with the strongest state in the system. With some quibbling, most realists would accept the usual characterization of the post-Soviet world as unipolar, the Cold War era as bipolar, and the European-dominated era before the end of the Second World War as multipolar.

In what follows, I will contest this characterization. I will argue that the world since the close of the nineteenth century has been near-unipolar; that if one studies the distribution of global power with a finer tool than counting the number of states that can put up a fight with the top-ranked power, one can discern continuity and change to an extraordinary degree; and that the near-unipolar world is coming to an end.

By near-unipolar, I mean something weaker than the statement that there is only one great power in the system. More precisely, by near-unipolar I mean that there is one especially strong state in the system so that there is absolutely no doubt about the identity of the top-ranked power.[2] And that the gap between the strongest state and others is so great that no state can hope to prevail against it in a war or an extended rivalry. Importantly, unlike the definition of unipolarity, near-unipolarity does not require the absence of other great powers. Lesser great powers can and do exist in a near-unipolar world—they just have to worry a great deal about what the unipole has to say before they decide on any matter that has a bearing on the world situation. A near-unipolar world is a heliocentric system—the international system is centered on a single power.

The tool that I have in mind is the Ray-Singer Index.[3] It is effectively a normalized version of the Herfindahl–Hirschman Index that is used to measure concentration in a system (such as an industry or a balance of power system). The Herfindahl–Hirschman Index is the sum of squared percentage shares of the units in the system. The Ray-Singer Index normalizes it such that it takes a value between 0 and 1. It attains the value 0 if every unit has an equal share, and the value 1 if a single unit accounts for 100%. It has the property that any upward redistribution of shares from lower-ranked to higher-ranked units increases the value of the Index. And it depends continuously on the share of very unit and treats them symmetrically. Formally, it is given by

where N is the number of units in the system, which for us will be the number of major powers. The numerator corresponds to the observed deviation from equality and the denominator corresponds to the maximum possible standard deviation from equality.

For a system with just two units, a little bit of algebra shows that the Index equals the difference of the shares of the two units. That is, RSI = s – (1-s), where s is the share of the larger unit. Note also that, for two power systems, the Index is a linear function of the share of the larger state. Figure 1 shows a schematic typology for two-power systems.

Figure 1: Ray-Singer Indices for Two Power Systems.

Figure 2 shows the evolution of the Index during the Cold War. According to our typology, the Cold War-era was decisively near-unipolar: The Index averaged 44% during 1948-1989. Equivalently, the United States accounted for 72% of total great power GDP. The lowest value reached by the Index was 39%, equivalent to a US share of 69% of total great power GDP. We can see that the tide began to turn against the Soviet Union in the late-1970s. By 1989, the United States had reattained the primacy it lost in the mid-1950s.

Figure 2: Ray-Singer Index, US and USSR (1948-1989).

How does Schweller’s tripolar interwar system fare by our measure? Figure 3 shows a schematic typology for three power systems. We see that the index is not enough to identify the polarity. But if the broad contours are known, then the evolution of the system may be examined by charting the Index.

Figure 3: Ray-Singer Indices for Three Power Systems.

Figure 4 shows the evolution of the Index for Schweller’s three power system during the leadup to the Second World War. Where Schweller sees tripolarity, the Index shows unambiguous near-unipolarity.

Figure 4: Ray-Singer Index for the Interwar Three Power System.

Figure 5 shows the Index for world powers (US, UK, USSR, Germany, Japan and France) and Eurasian powers (UK, USSR, Germany, Japan and France) in 1928-1940. We see that Eurasia was by itself quite competitive. But the inclusion of the United States dramatically increases our measure of concentration for the world system as a whole. That is, during the 1930s, the world as a whole was considerably more concentrated than Eurasia. In other words, it was a near-unipolar world.

Figure 5: Ray-Singer Index for 1928-1940.

What about the classical world? Surely, the world was decidedly multipolar before World War I? Not quite. The Index reveals that the world was indeed very competitive in the 1870s. But starting in the 1880s, the United States reshaped the structure of the international system. Even as Europe remained decidely balanced, the world itself became more and more imbalanced. By 1910, global power potential was twice as concentrated at the world level as at the European level.[4] And the reason was clear: A continental-sized superstate of hitherto unimaginable power potential had suddenly arrived on the world stage. The world was already near-unipolar before the collective suicide of Europe began on the fields of Flanders.

Figure 6: Ray-Singer Index for 1870-1927.

In the throes of the Belle Époque, Europeans marveled at the astounding scale of American wealth but were generally sanguine about the geopolitical threat from across the Atlantic. Once they had slaughtered each other’s young at sufficient scale, they finally awoke to the dawn of a new order—Adam Tooze shows how dramatically European attitudes changed in 1916.[5] Europe, for centuries the unabashed master of the planet, had finally been provincialized. Victor and vanquished alike marched to Washington to take orders. Henceforth, Washington would be calling the shots.

Examining the entire postwar period through this lens and considering a broader set of major powers—US, UK, France, Germany, Italy, Russia, India, China and Japan—we see that the US share of major power GDP tracked the Index closely until 1990. (See Figure 7.) Concurrently, the Index for the rest of the major powers was essentially flat until then—Eurasia was very competitive even as the world remained tightly centered. Then, in 1990, the Eurasian Index took off dramatically and kept climbing, taking over the World Index in 2006. After 125 years, Eurasia had finally become more concentrated than the world.

Figure 7: Ray-Singer Index for 1950-2008.

In order to see what’s going on after 1990, we decompose the Eurasian Index. Figure 8 displays three Ray-Singer Indices. The blue one is for the seven major powers (US, UK, France, Germany, Russia, India, China and Japan). The orange one excludes the US. And the yellow one excludes both the US and China.

Figure 8: Ray-Singer Indices for 1950-2008.

We’ve seen this film before. It’s the same pattern we saw a hundred years ago and for the same reason: The rise of a continental-sized superstate that dramatically changes the distribution of global power. But this time, instead of a multipolar world giving way to a near-unipolar one, a near-unipolar world is giving way to a bipolar one. Perhaps this essay should’ve been titled The Rise and Fall of the Near-Unipolar World.

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[1] The Chinese like to strategize with pithy slogans. As far as they can go, ‘hide your strength and bide your time’ was better than most.

[2] In multipolar systems on the other hand, there is often disagreement as to which power is the dominant one. This is because states differ along different capabilities. In the classical era (1871-1914), Britain was the dominant maritime power but Germany had the most powerful land army on the continent.

[3] Ray, James Lee, and J. David Singer. “Measuring the concentration of power in the international system.” Sociological Methods & Research 1.4 (1973): 403-437.

[4] Unfortunately, Russian GDP data is only available from 1948 onwards.

[5] Tooze, Adam. The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916-1931. Penguin, 2014.