Shifrinson Contributes to H-Diplo Roundtable
Joshua Shifrinson, Assistant Professor of International Relations at the Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, recently contributed to a roundtable for H-Diplo on Michael Beckley’s book, Unrivaled: Why America Will Remain the World’s Sole Superpower. The Roundtable was published on February 21, 2020.
From the text of the review:
In Unrivaled, Michael Beckley tackles the age-old question of how one should measure the power of nations and, with it, the relative distribution of power in the international system (which is often treated as synonymous with system polarity). This is a question of no small importance. Analysts as eclectic as Niccolò Machiavelli, Quincy Wright, Nicholas Spykman, Hans Morgenthau, Kenneth Waltz, Robert Keohane, Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Nye, J. David Singer, Paul Kennedy, and John Mearsheimer have all struggled with these issues. Now, in Unrivaled, Beckley throws down the gauntlet in the context of assessing American power today. Power, in Beckley’s argument, is not about having a large and highly capitalized military or a vibrant economy. Rather, only “net stocks of resources”—significant national wealth and military assets accumulated over decades—allow countries to play the game of great power politics. And, at a time when many analysts fear that the United States’ “unipolar era” is over, or soon to be over, the implications of the argument are stark: the United States is not only not declining relative to states such as China, but “the United States will remain the world’s sole superpower for many decades”
This is an important book. Not only has Beckley offered a powerful critique of existing attempts to measure power, but his call to focus on resource stocks should serve as a clarion call for scholars who are inclined to turn to simpler metrics such as Gross Domestic Product (GDP) or the Correlates of War Composite Index of National Capabilities (CINC) when measuring power, to pause and reflect on the utility of the measure.
My principal objection to the book is that it is never clear what Beckley wants this project to accomplish. For all the effort at recasting how scholars are to measure power, the project elides the fact that some metrics, at some times, work better for explaining different phenomena than others. Relatedly, for a project focused on measuring power in international affairs and emphasizing the durability of American unipolarity, the book has little to say on how one knows a great power—central to judging both the distribution of power and unipolarity—when one sees it; moreover, what it does occasionally imply seems empirically wrong.
Read full text here.
H-Diplo is a network for diplomatic history, international affairs, foreign policy, international relations, peacekeeping studies, nuclear history and policy studies, and transnational studies.
Joshua R. Itzkowitz Shifrinson is an Assistant Professor at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, where his teaching and research interests focus on the intersection of international security and diplomatic history, particularly the rise and fall of great powers and the origins of grand strategy. He is author of Rising Titans, Falling Giants: How Great Powers Exploit Power Shifts (Cornell University Press, 2018) and his work has appeared with International Security, the Journal of Strategic Studies, Foreign Affairs, and other venues. Read more here.