Balance of power reconsidered

Much of what we say in this volume agrees with scholarly intuition about international stability, instability, and the nature of the balance of power. In particular, the idea that the pursuit of narrowly defined national interests can occasion a form of stability that ensures national sovereignty in anarchic systems has been shown to possess both theoretical and empirical foundation. These basic correspondences, however, between our analysis and the intuition the literature offers should not be surprising. We have endeavored to match our assumptions as closely as possible to what others before us identify as the building blocks of a theory of anarchic international systems. Indeed, our analysis matches in its most basic assumption what Waltz (1988, p. 616) cites as the critical component of neorealism: “Because power is a possibly useful means, sensible statesmen try to have an appropriate amount of it. In crucial situations, however, the ultimate concern of states is not for power but for security.” To this outline we have added some formalism and game-theoretic reasoning borrowed from the theory of cooperative games, so if we have done our job well then our conclusions should strike a chord of recognition and understanding. Because we have deliberately sought to uncover the circumstances in which stability emerges in anarchic systems populated by states pursuing a singular objective, our analysis stands forthrightly in the realist tradition, and it should be unsurprising that much of what we have done here parallels the thinking of those whose appreciation of world politics was shaped by such scholars as Claude, Morgenthau, and Taylor.