A Dangerous World? Threat Perception and U.S. National Security by Christopher A. Preble & John Mueller

Author:Christopher A. Preble & John Mueller [Preble, Christopher A. & Mueller, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, Public Affairs & Administration, Technology & Engineering, Military Science
ISBN: 9781939709400
Google: qcIajwEACAAJ
Goodreads: 21488407
Publisher: Cato Institute
Published: 2014-01-15T08:00:29+00:00

The Public Goods Benefits of Military Primacy

The other and most significant argument for how military primacy translates into economic benefits is that primacy facilitates the creation of global public goods. Beginning with Charles Kindleberger, a wide range of international relations theorists have posited that a liberal hegemon is a necessary and sufficient condition for the creation of an open global economic order.39 In a unipolar system, as John Ikenberry notes, the lone superpower “provides some array of public goods in exchange for the cooperation of other states.”40 The greater economic growth and dynamism produced by the free exchange of goods, services, and capital across borders reward all the actors in the system.

Hegemonic stability theorists stress that the hegemon can shape the rules of the economic game in its favor. Everyone gains from that arrangement, but the hegemon gains in particular.41 As the provider of the global reserve currency, for example, the United States can borrow at lower interest rates and can collect revenues from seigniorage.42 The Peterson Institute for International Economics estimates that the post-1945 opening of the global trading order adds approximately $1 trillion to U.S. GDP annually.43

The hegemonic stability argument focuses primarily on measures of economic power. Kindleberger, for example, emphasized the provision of liquidity and the provision of a large market for distressed goods. The role of military power is usually acknowledged as providing critical security goods, however.44 One example would be providing the ultimate means of enforcing the rules of the game.45 A more concrete example would be ensuring free navigation of the seas for international commerce. Ensuring the safety of cross-border exchange is a necessary component of boosting trade and investment. Former U.S. chief of naval operations Gary Roughead has said: “So much of what moves on the world today in trade and commerce and the resources that flow moves on the oceans. About 90 percent of everything that moves, moves on the oceans. So how we protect the sea-lanes, how confident we are that goods can move from one point to the other and not be interfered with is extremely important.”46 Because of the concentration of oil in zones of political instability, such as the Persian Gulf, protecting energy flows would seem to be an especially useful function of military power.

William Wohlforth has made the strongest theoretical argument for that position in the post–Cold War era. He argues, contrary to balance-of-power theorists, that unipolarity is the most stable and peaceful of all possible international systems: “Unipolarity favors the absence of war among the great powers and comparatively low levels of competition for prestige or security for two reasons: the leading state’s power advantage removes the problem of hegemonic rivalry from world politics, and it reduces the salience and stakes of balance of power politics among the major states.”47 Wohlforth has expanded on that argument in later work, applying social identity theory to explain the durability and peaceful nature of unipolarity.48 Regardless of the causal mechanism, once a military hegemon emerges, all of those international relations theories posit that the world should be much more secure, peaceful, and prosperous.

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