Rise and Fall of Great Powers in 21st Century Week 3 PDF

Great Powers in the 21st Century The Rise and Fall of Stephen G. Brooks and the Great Powers in William C. Wohlforth...

Great Powers in the 21st Century The Rise and Fall of Stephen G. Brooks and the Great Powers in William C. Wohlforth the Twenty-ªrst Century China’s Rise and the Fate of America’s Global Position U Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/isec/article-pdf/40/3/7/1843648/isec_a_00225.pdf by University of Toronto user on 06 October 2024 nipolarity is argu- ably the most popular concept analysts use to assess the U.S. position in the in- ternational system that emerged in the wake of the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991.1 The concept’s origins lie in a major academic literature devoted to ex- plaining large-scale patterns of behavior in international systems. The basic in- sight is that the number of powerful states or “poles” at the top signiªcantly inºuences how international politics works. In recent years, however, the concept has been more likely to serve a rather different purpose: to gauge change in today’s international system. In response to the ªnancial crisis of 2008 and the continued economic ascent of China, pundits, policymakers, gov- ernment analysts, and scholars frequently and prominently argue that the United States has tumbled from its dominant position and that a fundamental, system-altering power shift away from unipolarity is occurring. “Unipolarity is ending, has ended, or will soon end,” goes the gist of much commentary, “and the system is reverting to multipolarity or bipolarity or apolarity” or whatever neologism the analyst wishes to propound.2 Stephen G. Brooks is Associate Professor of Government at Dartmouth College. William C. Wohlforth is Daniel Webster Professor of Government also at Dartmouth. This article draws upon their forthcoming book America Abroad: The United States’ Global Role in the 21st Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press). The authors acknowledge with thanks written comments from Jeff Friedman, Andrea Gilli, Mauro Gilli, Gardiner Kreglow, Alexander Lanoszka, Jonathan Markowitz, Joseph Singh, and the anony- mous reviewers, as well as feedback from participants in seminars at Aberystwyth University, the Brookings Institution, Brown University, the Cato Institute, Columbia University, Dartmouth Col- lege, George Washington University, Georgetown University, Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab- oratory, the London School of Economics, Moscow State Institute of International Relations, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Lincoln Laboratory, Northeastern University, Ohio State University, the Tobin Project, the University of Cambridge, the University of Ottawa, the Univer- sity of Oxford, and the U.S. Naval War College. They are also grateful to Michael Beckley, Tai Ming Cheung, Thomas Culora, Allan Dafoe, Andrew Erickson, Taylor Fravel, Eugene Gholz, Charles Glaser, Lyle Goldstein, Jim Holmes, Adam Liff, Jon Lindsay, Austin Long, Stephen Macekura, Mi- chael Mastanduno, James Mattis, Evan Montgomery, William Murray, Keshav Poddar, Barry Posen, Daryl Press, Jeremy Shapiro, Andrew Winner, Thomas Wright, and Riqiang Wu for their help at various stages of this project, and to Joanne Hyun, Holly Jeong, Ming Koh, Gardiner Kreglow, Yerin Yang, and Yannick Yu for their excellent research assistance. 1. Notable initial contributions include Charles Krauthammer, “The Unipolar Moment,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 70, No. 1 (Winter 1990/91), pp. 23–33; Ethan B. Kapstein and Michael Mastanduno, eds., Unipolar Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999); and William C. Wohlforth, “The Stability of a Unipolar World,” International Security, Vol. 24, No. 1 (Summer 1999), pp. 5–41. 2. The approach of a post-U.S., multipolar world is envisioned in best-sellers by the likes of International Security, Vol. 40, No. 3 (Winter 2015/16), pp. 7–53, doi:10.1162/ISEC_a_00225 © 2016 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 7  International Security 40:3 8 In this article, we show that this approach to assessing changing power rela- tions in today’s international system is irreparably ºawed, and we develop an alternative. The very qualities that make the concept of polarity helpful for capturing some key differences in how international systems work render it Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/isec/article-pdf/40/3/7/1843648/isec_a_00225.pdf by University of Toronto user on 06 October 2024 unhelpful for assessing changes within a given system. Use of the concept helps analysts understand why a world with one superpower is different in important ways from one with two superpowers or none, but it is too blunt an instrument to track change from one kind of system to another. On glaring dis- play as the Cold War neared its end in the late 1980s, this pitfall of polarity is an even bigger problem today. Because China is unlike past rising powers and because the world in which it is ascending is also different in important ways from previous eras, careful thinking about how today’s one-superpower world might change into something else is at a premium. Using a set of concepts and measures geared precisely to this challenge, we show that the United States will long remain the only state with the capability to be a superpower. Still, China’s rise is real and change is afoot, and the arguments we develop herein will help analysts assess and classify this change without either downplaying or exaggerating its systemic signiªcance. We begin by demonstrating the ways in which the concept of unipolarity leads analysts astray when assessing changes in the distribution of capabilities in the international system. Three analytical pitfalls stand out: (1) use of the concept of polarity encourages dichotomous thinking—the world is either unipolar or multipolar (or bipolar)—and thereby feeds an artiªcial debate about whether everything is changing or nothing is changing;3 (2) it demands Fareed Zakaria and Parag Khanna, as well as in forecasts by the National Intelligence Council and numerous prominent private sector analysts from Goldman Sachs to the Eurasia Group. See Zakaria, The Post-American World (New York: W.W. Norton, 2009); Khanna, The Second World: How Emerging Powers Are Redeªning Global Competition in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Random House, 2009); National Intelligence Council, Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Ofªce, 2008); and Ian Bremmer, Every Nation for Itself: Winners and Losers in a G-Zero World (New York: Penguin, 2012). Prominent scholarly treatments include Chris- topher Layne, “This Time It’s Real: The End of Unipolarity and the Pax Americana,” International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 56, No. 1 (March 2012), pp. 203–213; Amitav Acharya, The End of American World Order (New York: Polity, 2014); and Barry R. Posen, “From Unipolarity to Multipolarity: Transition in Sight?” in G. John Ikenberry, Michael Mastanduno, and William C. Wohlforth, eds., International Relations Theory and the Consequences of Unipolarity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 317–341. 3. For studies that come closest to adopting the contrarian “nothing is changing” position, see Mi- chael Beckley, “China’s Century? Why America’s Edge Will Endure,” International Security, Vol. 36, No. 3 (Winter 2011/12), pp. 41–78; Michael Beckley, “The Unipolar Era: Why American Power Per- sists and China’s Rise Is Limited,” Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 2012; Stephen G. Brooks and William C. Wohlforth, World Out of Balance: International Relations and the Challenge of American Primacy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2008); Stephen G. Brooks and Wil- liam C. Wohlforth, “Assessing the Balance,” Cambridge Review of International Affairs, Vol. 20, No. 2 (June 2011), pp. 201–219; Robert J. Lieber, Power and Willpower in the American Future: Why the United States Is Not Destined to Decline (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Robert  Great Powers in the 21st Century 9 broad, transhistorical measures of the distribution of capabilities that in- evitably fail to capture crucial shifts in the wellsprings of state power across time; and (3) the concept is ill equipped to capture the relationship between structure and agency—namely, how likely it is that state action can alter Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/isec/article-pdf/40/3/7/1843648/isec_a_00225.pdf by University of Toronto user on 06 October 2024 the system. The second section presents a systematic examination of the distribution of capabilities tailored to twenty-ªrst-century global politics and the requisites of superpower status. We ªnd that the United States will long remain the world’s sole superpower, but that China’s economic ascent is a major change that deserves the intense focus it has attracted. It has put China in a class by it- self, one that the polarity concept cannot capture: greater than other major powers such as Germany, Japan, and Russia but nowhere near a peer of the United States. Third, we assess the speed with which China might transform the current one-superpower system into a different kind of system. We delineate three key differences from previous eras that invalidate analogies to the power transi- tions chronicled in Paul Kennedy’s classic The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers.4 First, unlike past rising powers, China is at a much lower technological level than the leading state. Second, the distance China must travel is extraordi- narily large because the size of the U.S. military advantage is much bigger than the analogous gaps in previous eras. Third, the very nature of power has changed: the greatly enhanced difªculty of converting economic capacity into military capacity makes the transition from a great power to a superpower much harder now than it was in the past. This analysis yields a new frame- work for categorizing and assessing the stages China must traverse to rise from a great power to a superpower. The ªnal section extracts the most impor- tant implications of our argument for international relations theory, debates on U.S. grand strategy, and the United States’ military options for adjusting to China’s rise. How (Not) to Think About the Changing U.S. Global Position For millennia, observers and practitioners have thought of states as occupying different positions or ranks in the international system.5 By far the most atten- tion has been directed toward the highest ranks: Which actors are at the Kagan, The World America Made (New York: Vintage, 2012); and Josef Joffe, The Myth of America’s Decline: Politics, Economics, and a Half Century of False Prophecies (New York: Liveright, 2014). 4. Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (New York: Vintage, 1989). 5. Adam Watson, The Evolution of International Society: A Comparative Historical Analysis (New York: Routledge, 1992); and Stuart J. Kaufman, Richard Little, and William C. Wohlforth, eds., The Bal- ance of Power in World History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).  International Security 40:3 10 top and how many states are close to them? In the mid-twentieth century, this line of thought led to the concept of polarity, best exempliªed by Kenneth Waltz’s inºuential Theory of International Politics. For polarity scholars, the key to analyzing any international system is determining how many poles there Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/isec/article-pdf/40/3/7/1843648/isec_a_00225.pdf by University of Toronto user on 06 October 2024 are.6 Does one state stand alone at the top (unipolarity)? Do two roughly com- parable states stand signiªcantly above all of the others (bipolarity)? Or do three or more roughly comparable states occupy the highest rung in the sys- tem (multipolarity)? Notwithstanding the oft-lamented disdain that practitioners are said to have for political science concepts and decades of intense scholarly criticism of the real explanatory power of polarity, the concept has never been more popular both in academe and beyond.7 Since 1990, articles about unipolarity have ap- peared at four times the rate that papers written on bipolarity during the Cold War era did. And although there are at least nine books wholly devoted to unipolarity, none has been written solely about bipolarity.8 Pundits and gov- ernment analysts routinely advance assertions about polarity, such as the National Intelligence Council’s widely noted 2012 assessment that the “‘unipo- lar moment’ is over.”9 And unlike their Cold War predecessors, the highest- level policymakers in some of the world’s most important countries do so as well. Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin are just two leaders who periodically put forward assessments about the polarity of the system: In May 2014, Putin argued ºatly that “[t]he model of a unipolar 6. In addition to Kenneth N. Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Reading, Mass.: Addison- Wesley, 1979), see especially Morton A. Kaplan, System and Process in International Politics (New York: ECPR, 1957); Karl W. Deutsch and J. David Singer, “Multipolar Power Systems and Interna- tional Stability,” World Politics, Vol. 16, No. 3 (April 1964), pp. 390–406; Randall L. Schweller, “Tripolarity and the Second World War,” International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 37, No. 1 (March 1993), pp. 73–103; Edward D. Mansªeld, “Concentration, Polarity, and the Distribution of Power,” International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 37, No.1 (March 1993), pp. 105–128; and Ted Hopf, “Polarity, the Offense Defense Balance, and War,” American Political Science Review, Vol. 85, No. 2 (June 1991), pp. 475–493. For a comprehensive discussion of the polarity literature, see Barry Buzan, The United States and the Great Powers: World Politics in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge: Polity, 2004). 7. Related theories of hegemony, power transition, and systemic leadership as applied to China’s rise and the problem of systemic change have been critiqued and developed elsewhere. They avoid some, but not all, of the pitfalls of the polarity framework. See, for example, William R. Thompson and David P. Rapkin, Transition Scenarios: China and the United States in the Twenty-First Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013); Steve Chan, China, the U.S., and the Power- Transition Theory: A Critique (New York: Routledge, 2008); and William C. Wohlforth, “Gilpinian Realism and International Relations,” International Relations, Vol. 25, No. 4 (December 2011), pp. 499–511. 8. Article data are taken from Thomson Reuters Web of Science, http://wokinfo.com/; book count is authors’ estimate. 9. National Intelligence Council, Global Trends 2030: Alternate Worlds (Washington, D.C.: Ofªce of the Director of National Intelligence, 2012), p. x, http://globaltrends2030.ªles.wordpress.com/ 2012/11/global-trends-2030-november2012.pdf.  Great Powers in the 21st Century 11 world has failed.... The world is multipolar.”10 And in November 2014, Xi noted that there is a “growing trend toward a multipolar world.”11 Barry Buzan’s observation that the concept of “[p]olarity has been hugely inºuential in public debates about international relations” thus applies much Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/isec/article-pdf/40/3/7/1843648/isec_a_00225.pdf by University of Toronto user on 06 October 2024 more strongly to the era of unipolarity than to bipolarity’s heyday.12 Yet, in an ironic twist, the concept is routinely used to discuss the very subject for which it is particularly ill suited: change in the international system. Indeed, Waltz himself could not have been clearer on this point: “[R]ealist theory is better at saying what will happen than in saying when it will happen.”13 That state- ment followed the embarrassing experience of the 1980s, when no one seemed to grasp that the bipolar era was drawing to a close. The concept of polarity could not substitute for—and indeed often drew analysts away from—the ªne-grained analysis of the distribution of power needed to estimate how close the system was to structural change.14 Few engaged in today’s debate about whether unipolarity is about to end think back to the latter Cold War and ask whether scholars might be making the same mistakes again. Then the issue was Soviet decline: How far did the Soviet Union have to fall for the sys- tem to cease being bipolar? Now the issue is China’s rise: How high does China need to climb before the system changes? what’s wrong with (uni)polarity? The context is new, but three interrelated analytical perils of polarity on dis- play in the latter Cold War persist today. First is the bluntness of measures. The concept of polarity invites an exercise in comparative statics: measuring how capabilities are distributed in multipolar versus bipolar versus unipolar set- tings. That kind of analysis requires metrics that can be used over long spans of time, such as economic size, military spending or personnel, or composite indicators that aggregate a number of different measures. Use of these metrics 10. “Vladimir Putin Warns Sanctions on Russia Will Backªre on West,” Telegraph, May 23, 2014, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/russia/10851908/Vladimir-Putin-warns- sanctions-on-Russia-will-backªre-on-West.html. 11. Jane Perlez, “Leader Asserts China’s Growing Importance on Global Stage,” New York Times, November 30, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/01/world/asia/leader-asserts-chinas- growing-role-on-global-stage.html?_r⫽0. 12. Buzan, The United States and the Great Powers, p. 45. 13. Kenneth N. Waltz, “Structural Realism after the Cold War,” International Security, Vol. 25, No. 1 (Summer 2000), p. 27. See also Kenneth N. Waltz, “Reºections on Theory of International Politics: A Response to My Critics,” in Robert O. Keohane, ed., Neorealism and Its Critics (New York: Colum- bia University Press, 1986), p. 343. 14. Stephen G. Brooks and William C. Wohlforth, “Power, Globalization, and the End of the Cold War: Reevaluating a Landmark Case for Ideas,” International Security, Vol. 25, No. 3 (Winter 2000/ 01), pp. 5–53.  International Security 40:3 12 requires making strong “all else being equal” assumptions. The wellsprings of national power change over time, however, complicating the use of such mea- sures for any but the most broadly conceived inquiry.15 Although it is possible to address such objections by adding measures that account for historical con- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/isec/article-pdf/40/3/7/1843648/isec_a_00225.pdf by University of Toronto user on 06 October 2024 text, as long as one is thinking in terms of polarity there are limits to how much one can ªne-tune the measures to the military, technological, and geopolitical realities of a given setting. As we demonstrate in detail elsewhere, in the latter Cold War widely used capabilities indexes did not take into ac- count the rising importance and complexity of technology in military capabili- ties as well as implications of economic globalization for state power. As a result, they overlooked crucial changes that were undermining Soviet power and thus bipolarity.16 The second analytical problem concerns the interaction between structure and agency. As Waltz stressed, polarity theory “cannot say when ‘tomorrow’ will come because international political theory deals with the pressures of structure on states and not with how states will respond to the pressures.”17 Yet as the 1980s experience clearly showed, assessing the robustness or longev- ity of any structure demands answers to questions about how sensitive that structure is to policy choice.18 Determining the likely longevity of bipolarity in the latter Cold War required an assessment of the nature and scale of the sys- temic challenge the Soviet Union faced. The polarity concept was of little help because it could not distinguish between the challenges of the mid-twentieth century, which could be met with massive increases in raw industrial inputs, and those of the century’s end, which could not.19 To be sure, no international relations theory could be expected to predict the brittleness of the Soviet sys- tem and thus the dramatic effects of Mikhail Gorbachev’s agency, but the fact that Gorbachev did not have readily available policy options to sustain the Soviet Union’s global position was hugely important.20 Similarly, international relations theory cannot answer questions about the robustness of the Chinese political or economic system. But to assess the longevity of a one-superpower world, we need know whether the Chinese leadership is now or is likely soon 15. Ashley J. Tellis et al., Measuring National Power in the Postindustrial Age (Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND Corporation, 2000). 16. Brooks and Wohlforth, “Power, Globalization, and the End of the Cold War”; and Stephen G. Brooks, Producing Security: Multinational Corporations, Globalization, and the Changing Calculus of Conºict (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005). 17. Waltz, “Structural Realism after the Cold War,” p. 27. 18. Robert Jervis, System Effects: Complexity in Political and Social Life (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999). 19. See the analysis in Brooks and Wohlforth, “Power, Globalization, and the End of the Cold War”; and Brooks, Producing Security, pp. 112–125. 20. Brooks and Wohlforth, “Power, Globalization, and the End of the Cold War.”  Great Powers in the 21st Century 13 to be in a position to match or negate the United States’ global power position simply by allocating more resources to the generation of global power capabil- ities.21 The polarity concept is not equipped to make this assessment. Third, polarity focuses the mind on the major thresholds that deªne differ- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/isec/article-pdf/40/3/7/1843648/isec_a_00225.pdf by University of Toronto user on 06 October 2024 ent system structures and so fosters dichotomous thinking. In 1989 Waltz in- sisted that “the Cold War is rooted in the postwar structure of international politics and will last as long as that structure endures.”22 The system was either bipolar or multipolar. In Theory of International Politics, Waltz grappled with the issue of Soviet decline, but the concepts he developed provided no guidelines for determining the stages states must traverse to become—or cease being—poles. The problem is even more salient now. Much has changed since the mid-1990s as a result of the increase in China’s power. So is the current sys- tem bipolar? Almost no one thinks so. Is it multipolar? Most scholars, at least, are not ready to afªrm that. So, is everything the same as it was in 1995 or 2000? The answer is also clearly no. It follows that any conceptual framework for addressing change in an international system dominated by one state should not force dichotomous thinking. As we show in greater detail elsewhere, contemporary conceptualizations of unipolarity are little better at overcoming these analytical perils than their pre- decessors of thirty years ago.23 Approaches to unipolarity are now legion, and they often lead to radically different answers to the question of whether the world still is (or ever was) unipolar. But if they hew to the structural premises of the theory, they all suffer from all or most of the three analytical perils we have identiªed. Nuno Monteiro deªnes unipolarity as a system with only one great power that can “engage unaided in sustained politico-military opera- 21. We focus on China’s agency because implicit assumptions about how rapidly Beijing might transform latent into actual capabilities are widespread. The next most signiªcant potential agency effect arguably might be a U.S. choice to cease maintaining the capabilities of a superpower. Yet this is a remote possibility: even the most ardent proponents of grand strategic retrenchment do not advocate such a course. For example, Benjamin H. Friedman, Brendan Rittenhouse Green, and Justin Logan describe a U.S. post-retrenchment defense posture as sustaining “a U.S. military with global reach far exceeding any rival.” See Friedman, Green, and Logan, “Debating American En- gagement: The Future of U.S. Grand Strategy,” International Security, Vol. 38, No. 2 (Fall 2013), p. 189. Barry R. Posen’s preferred grand strategy calls for a military posture that preserves U.S. global “command of the commons,” and “retains the capability to reengage on the Eurasian land- mass in a timely fashion and to organize coalitions against expansionist states” if need be, as well as to “retaliate quickly and effectively against direct attacks on the United States.” See Posen, Re- straint: A New Foundation for U.S. Grand Strategy (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2014), p. 162. 22. Kenneth N. Waltz, “The Origins of War in Neorealist Theory,” in Robert I. Rotberg and Theo- dore K. Rabb, eds., The Origin and Prevention of Major Wars (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 52. 23. See Stephen G. Brooks and William C. Wohlforth, America Abroad: The United States’ Global Role in the 21st Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming), chap. 3.  International Security 40:3 14 tions in at least one region of the globe beyond its own.”24 John Mearsheimer agrees that unipolarity is a system with only one great power, but he argues that to be a great power a state need only be able to put up a “serious ªght” against the leading state.25 Other scholars treat unipolarity as a system with Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/isec/article-pdf/40/3/7/1843648/isec_a_00225.pdf by University of Toronto user on 06 October 2024 one great power that has amassed more than half of the system’s capabilities and therefore is impossible to counterbalance.26 In previous work, we argued that “an international system is unipolar if it contains one state whose share of capabilities places it in a class by itself compared to all other states.”27 These (and other) approaches have utility for answering some questions, but when used to assess change in and robustness of the system, they hamstring today’s analysts in the same ways as bipolarity led their predecessors astray in the 1980s. Their broad sweep tends to compel the use of blunt measures of power, and they lack the conceptual apparatus to distinguish a structure easily affected by agency from one resistant to such inºuence. Of necessity, they set thresholds, have little to say about changes within the bounds of those thresh- olds, and therefore induce dichotomous thinking. By Monteiro’s conceptual- ization, the system will remain unipolar so long as the United States remains the only state with very substantial global power projection capacity. China could grow to have an economy twice the size of the United States’—or even ªve or ten times as large—and possess a comparable scientiªc-technological capacity, but as long as Beijing chooses not to use those resources to develop a superpower’s military capability, the world will remain unipolar. Monteiro’s theory thus cannot capture the difference between a world in which no state has a realistic chance of matching or negating U.S. global power and a world in which a rising state could potentially be in a position to bring about struc- tural change. For Mearsheimer, the threshold for being a great power is so low that the polarity concept can shed no light on any question having to do with changes in international politics since 1991: the world was multipolar then, in his view, and remains so today. The same is true for the 50-percent-of- capabilities threshold: given that no state has ever achieved this, uniplolarity 24. Nuno P. Monteiro, Theory of Unipolar Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), p. 48. 25. John J. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (New York: W.W. Norton, 2001), pp. 4, 404. 26. See the discussion in James Lebovic, “The Unipolar Elusion: The Neglected Limits to U.S. Global Military Capability,” paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Studies Association, San Francisco, California, March 26–29, 2008. For related arguments, see also R. Harri- son Wagner, “What Was Bipolarity?” International Organization, Vol. 47, No. 1 (Winter 1993), pp. 77–106; and David P. Rapkin, William R. Thompson, and Jon A. Christopherson, “Bipolarity and Bipolarization in the Cold War Era: Conceptualization, Measurement, and Validation,” Journal of Conºict Resolution, Vol. 23, No. 2 (June 1979), pp. 261–295. 27. Brooks and Wohlforth, World Out of Balance, p. 13.  Great Powers in the 21st Century 15 remains irrelevant to ongoing changes in international politics. China’s rise re- veals the main shortcoming of our previous approach: it does not specify how much of a shift away from a lopsided concentration of power must occur be- fore it is no longer reasonable to view the system as unipolar. Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/isec/article-pdf/40/3/7/1843648/isec_a_00225.pdf by University of Toronto user on 06 October 2024 the solution: 1⫹y⫹x We seek to capture the structural nature of debates about the current interna- tional system. At the same time, however, we want to avoid the three pitfalls of polarity for assessing change. Barry Buzan’s “1⫹X” terminology for describing system structure helps in this regard. On the basis of his formulation, his conclusion (as of 2004) was that the United States was the “only superpower and there are no other plausi- ble candidates on the horizon for that status for at least a couple of decades” and that there were four great powers.28 Key for Buzan, as for us, is the distinc- tion between superpowers and great powers, which reduces to the formers’ “broad-spectrum capabilities exercised across the whole of the international system.”29 Great powers, by contrast, lack such capabilities, although they may aspire to achieve them. The very notion of an “X” term for the great powers means that the speciªc number does not alter the system’s basic properties. The rise of, say, India to great power status could increase the X term, and the decline of an existing great power could decrease it—without altering the fun- damental nature of the system. To do that, the number of superpowers has to change. The 1⫹X framework needs modiªcation, however. In part because the gap in capabilities between great power and superpower is so large in today’s sys- tem, it is necessary to carefully differentiate between great powers that are not in a position to bid for superpower status and those that are. We need to be open to the possibility of a 1⫹Y⫹X system, in which one or more Y powers 28. Buzan, The United States and the Great Powers, p. 69. Buzan coded Russia, China, Japan, and the European Union (EU) as great powers. Although there are understandable reasons to take issue with his coding, the overall usefulness of his 1 ⫹ X framework does not depend on it. 29. Buzan, The United States and the Great Powers, p. 69. We borrow the term but not the other parts of Buzan’s framework, which melds behavior and capabilities and also adopts an overly blunt ap- proach to measuring capabilities. Attempts to eschew the superpower category create a number of conundrums. Thus, Monteiro’s superpower-like deªnition of a great power compels him to lump states such as Russia, India, Israel, Pakistan, and North Korea into an unwieldy “major power” category. In turn, Mearsheimer’s low bar for achieving great power status places, for example, Cold War–era Britain and Belize in the same rank. Mearsheimer also recognizes that the United States today is no normal great power. According to the terms of his theory, the difference is that the United States is the one great power that has attained regional hegemony, has the capability to project power into other key regions, and pursues a grand strategy of preventing any other great power from following suit. We prefer the term “superpower.”  International Security 40:3 16 have the potential to rise to superpower status or are moving in this direction and thus need to be differentiated from the other great powers. Again, this dis- tinction is crucial because the main question is not the size of the X term, but whether the superpower term is 1, ⬎1, or ⬍1. With alarmist rhetoric about Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/isec/article-pdf/40/3/7/1843648/isec_a_00225.pdf by University of Toronto user on 06 October 2024 unipolarity’s end, observers are saying that China has risen and is no longer just another X power. Missing thus far is a proper understanding of the more germane questions: What position has China achieved and how quickly can it further ascend the ladder? Measuring the Distribution of Capabilities in the 21st Century What capabilities make a state a superpower and, more generally, how should the distribution of power in the system be measured today? We come to these questions after more than a decade of thinking and research in which we have employed a broad-based conception of measurement. Our previous efforts fo- cused on three core elements of material power: (1) military capacity, (2) eco- nomic capacity, and (3) technological capacity.30 Such a broad-based approach is imperative, in part because no single element of power can capture the full array of resources a state may bring to the pursuit of its goals in international politics. States with skewed portfolios of capabilities are less capable of acting in different arenas and more dependent on a limited policy toolkit. Moreover, each of the core elements of power interacts with the others in potent ways. Economic capacity is a necessary condition of military power, but it is insuf- ªcient; technological prowess is also vital, especially given the nature of mod- ern weaponry. Technological capacity also magniªes economic capability, and military capability also can have spinoffs in both the economic and technology arenas. Furthermore, military capability can have indirect but important impli- cations for furthering a leading state’s economic interests. To highlight any one element at the expense of others is to miss these key interactions. In the end, assessing change today calls for a Goldilocks approach to meas- urement: one conducted at a sufªcient level of generality to answer enduring 30. The literature on state power makes a basic distinction between power as material resources and power as the ability to realize ends. See, in particular, David A. Baldwin, Paradoxes of Power (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1989). Following the practice of many scholars, our measurement ef- forts use the term power in the former sense, to denote the resources on which a government can draw. When discussing power in the latter sense, we bracket undeniably important elements that are hard if not impossible to measure before they are used or tested (e.g., the unity or resolve of a population, or the overall organizational competence of a government). For more on our ap- proach, see Brooks and Wohlforth, World Out of Balance, pp. 12–13, 27–35, 40–44; Stephen G. Brooks and William C. Wohlforth, “American Primacy in Perspective,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 81, No. 4 (July/ August 2002), pp. 21–23; and Wohlforth, “The Stability of a Unipolar World,” pp. 10–18.  Great Powers in the 21st Century 17 Table 1. Defense Expenditures for the Major Powers, 2014 Defense % Great Power % World Defense Defense R&D Expenditures Defense Defense Expenditures Expenditures Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/isec/article-pdf/40/3/7/1843648/isec_a_00225.pdf by University of Toronto user on 06 October 2024 ($billion) Expenditures Expenditures % of GDP ($billion) United States 610.0 50.5 34.0 3.5 78.6 China 216.0 17.9 12.0 2.1 n.a. Japan 45.8 3.8 2.6 1.0 1.0 Germany 46.5 3.9 2.6 1.2 1.2 Russia 84.5 7.0 4.8 4.5 n.a. France 62.3 5.2 3.5 2.2 1.3 Britain 60.5 5.0 3.4 2.2 2.1 India 50.0 4.1 2.8 2.4 n.a. Brazil 31.7 2.6 1.8 1.4 n.a. SOURCES: Sam Perlo-Friedman et al., “Trends in World Military Expenditure, 2014” (Stock- holm: Stockholm International Peace Research Institute), http://books.sipri.org/files/FS/ SIPRIFS1504.pdf; and Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, OECD Main Science and Technology Indicators, 2014 (Paris: OECD, 2014), pp. 76–77. NOTES: Data are estimated for China’s, Germany’s, and Russia’s defense expenditures for 2014 as well as for their defense expenditures as percentages of their gross domestic product (GDP). Research and development (R&D) expenditures are for 2012. questions about the nature of the international system, but much more de- tailed and attuned to the requisites of superpower status in the twenty-ªrst century than popular broad aggregates or single metrics. In particular, our ap- proach to measurement focuses not just on the size of the power gap, but also on the overriding question of the speed with which it might be overcome. In the subsections that follow, we assess the core components of state capability, moving beyond ªndings and measurements that are standard in the literature to highlight new measures with novel implications.31 military capacity The standard approach to measuring the distribution of military power is to compare defense expenditures, as in table 1.32 Studies relying on this ap- proach, however, have thus far failed to address an important objection: the 31. This section condenses the analysis in Brooks and Wohlforth, America Abroad, chap. 2. 32. This is an updated version of the chart in Brooks and Wohlforth, World Out of Balance, p. 29. Data on China’s military research and development (R&D) expenditures, which have also been rising, are not available. A recent estimate suggests, however, that China’s spending may ap- proach $6 billion per year, which would make China the second-highest-spending state in the world. Nevertheless, this spending would still only be around 7 percent of the United States’. See Richard Bitzinget et al., “Locating China’s Place in the Global Defense Economy,” in Tai Ming Cheung, ed., Forging China’s Military Might: A New Framework for Assessing Innovation (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), p. 202.  International Security 40:3 18 amount that a state decides to spend on its military is a choice, and it may be misleading to use such numbers to capture something that is supposed to be a constraint on choice.33 China’s military expenditures have increased rapidly since 2000, and U.S. military spending has taken a sharp downward turn since Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/isec/article-pdf/40/3/7/1843648/isec_a_00225.pdf by University of Toronto user on 06 October 2024 2010. Thus, the ease with which states can alter their military spending sug- gests that using this measure to assess how the international setting shapes states’ decisions over time has signiªcant limitations. The degree to which this is a problem depends on the time frame one is thinking about and the speed with which other resources can be converted into military capabilities. No matter what a state decides, its ability to create new military capabilities in the short term—say, a year or two—is very limited. As the time horizon stretches to decades and generations, more and more elements of military capability become matters of choice as long as the state has the requisite pool of resources from which to draw. The length of that horizon—the gap between a choice to attain some capability and the creation of that capability—is a function of the technology of production. Some goods are intrinsically harder to produce than others. Monteiro makes a useful anal- ogy to Alfred Marshall’s theory of production in which, “[i]n the short term, price adjustments depend entirely on demand, because supply is ªxed. In the medium term, price adjustments can be made by increasing supply, within the limits of ªrms’ productive capacity. Increases in supply beyond this limit require investments in additional productive assets and can therefore only be achieved in the long term.” Monteiro consequently stresses that “we must dis- tinguish between a state’s present military capabilities, its ability to convert other elements of power into additional military capabilities, and its ability to generate additional elements of power that can then be converted into military capabilities.”34 The latter two components are not matters of choice but are powerfully constrained. Analysts of international politics can treat military ca- pability just as economists treat supply in some of their models: as a relatively inºexible external constraint in the short term, and even in the medium and longer terms in some sectors. Military spending therefore does reºect something important: long-term investment in the capacity to generate military power. Cumulated over years and decades, military spending can yield capabilities that are very hard to 33. This critique is advanced in Charles L. Glaser, “Why Unipolarity Doesn’t Matter (Much),” Cambridge Review of International Affairs, Vol. 24, No. 2 (June 2011), p. 135 n. 4; and Posen, “From Unipolarity to Multipolarity,” p. 320. 34. This quotation is drawn from an early draft of Monteiro, “Theory of Unipolar Politics,” Yale University, January 2013, p. 41. Monteiro’s analysis of this issue on p. 38 of the published version of Theory of Unipolar Politics omits the sentences that discuss Alfred Marshall.  Great Powers in the 21st Century 19 match even for a state with a lot of money to spend. This is especially true today, given the dramatically increased complexity and difªculty of both producing and using advanced weaponry. In sum, annual military expenditures measure a ºow—but ºows over many years produce a stock of military capability. Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/isec/article-pdf/40/3/7/1843648/isec_a_00225.pdf by University of Toronto user on 06 October 2024 To capture this dynamic, it is useful to examine the key military capacity that allows the United States to act as a superpower. The ideal place to start is Barry Posen’s inºuential study of the “command of the commons,” argu- ably the best overall guide to understanding the nature of military power among the top tier of states today. The command of the global commons—that is, the sea (outside littoral regions), space, and air (above 15,000 feet)—is “the key military enabler of the U.S. global power position,” Posen stresses.35 He helpfully provides guidelines for measuring the United States’ command of the commons, identifying four components—command of the sea, command of space, command of the air, and the infrastructure of command—and notes the main elements of military capacity that are relevant for each. When Posen wrote his article in the early 2000s, U.S. command of the commons was so self- evident that it was essentially unnecessary to measure the different compo- nents of this index. Yet the rise of China has since so altered the conversation that it is important to take a close look at how the United States matches up with other states using Posen’s criteria. Figure 1 plots the full range of relevant indicators as a distribution, show- ing the share of each key component possessed by each of the six major powers. Regarding the United States’ command of the sea, in addition to the two indictors that Posen highlights—aircraft carriers and nuclear attack submarines—two other pertinent indicators of power projection capacity are amphibious ships and the number of cruisers and destroyers. Posen cites two indicators on command of the air: drones and military aircraft that allow for the use of precision-guided munitions. Regarding space, Posen zeroes in on ci- vilian and especially military satellites as providing vital sources of informa- tion for conducting military operations throughout the world.36 And regarding the infrastructure of command—a necessary condition of command of the commons—Posen highlights military installations in foreign countries, mili- tary transport ships, long-range airlift aircraft, and aerial tankers as basic 35. Barry R. Posen, “Command of the Commons: The Military Foundation of U.S. Hegemony,” International Security, Vol. 28, No. 1 (Summer 2003), p. 8. 36. Note that the United States “commands” space in the sense of having a commanding position in exploiting space for military purposes. In space, however, the United States is less able to deny entry to other states’ militaries, including Russian and Chinese antisatellite capabilities, than it is in the air and sea commons. U.S. command of the air is restricted to the air over the commons (it excludes airspace over the territory of the few states with top-end air defense). Figure 1. Command of the Commons, Distribution of Six Major Powers Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/isec/article-pdf/40/3/7/1843648/isec_a_00225.pdf by University of Toronto user on 06 October 2024 SOURCES: International Institute for Strategic Studies, The Military Balance, Vol. 113, No. 1 (London: IISS, 2013); and Union of Concerned Scientists, UCS Satellite Database, http://www.ucsusa.org/nuclear_weapons_and_global_security/solutions/space-weapons/ ucs-satellite-database.html (consulted on March 22, 2014). NOTES: Data for nuclear-powered submarines and cruisers and destroyers are from 2013. Air- craft carriers and principal amphibious ships are from 2014. Data for heavy unmanned ae- rial vehicles and attack helicopters are from 2014. Data on fourth- and fifth-generation tactical aircraft are from 2013. Satellite data include launches through January 31, 2014.  Great Powers in the 21st Century 21 Figure 2. Command of the Commons, the United States and China as Percentages of Six Major Powers Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/isec/article-pdf/40/3/7/1843648/isec_a_00225.pdf by University of Toronto user on 06 October 2024 NOTE: Calculated from data in Stephen G. Brooks and William C. Wohlforth, “Moving Beyond Unipolarity? China’s Rise and the Fate of America’s Global Position,” International Security, Vol. 40, No. 3 (Winter 2015/16), p. 20, fig. 1. building blocks of this infrastructure. The United States has a ramiªed net- work of military bases throughout the world and is peerless this regard. Fig- ure 1 shows the extent of the gap between the United States and other countries for the other indicators. The inset in ªgure 1 also shows the distribution for the X powers, suggesting how large Russia’s military power would loom in a hypothetical world with- out the United States. Figure 2 then breaks out the U.S.-China comparison. Note that the raw counts in these ªgures account for neither the United States’  International Security 40:3 22 overall qualitative advantage nor its qualitative and quantitative advantages in nuclear weaponry.37 The key takeaway is that compared to any previous era except the years be- tween 1991 and the early 2000s, the overall gap in the military realm remains Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/isec/article-pdf/40/3/7/1843648/isec_a_00225.pdf by University of Toronto user on 06 October 2024 unprecedented in modern international relations. Defense spending ªgures make this look obvious, but scholars caution that they may exaggerate the sig- niªcance of the gap because states with growing economies might decide to spend more to close it. Although Chinese military expenditures are rapidly increasing, our more ªnely grained measures show that, if anything, defense spending understates the global military gap. technological capacity Recent analyses by Michael Beckley and others have already undermined hy- perbole about the signiªcance of China’s technological rise.38 The implications of these analyses for the U.S.-China technological comparison are strength- ened when we foreground the key distinction between inputs and output. Inputs can be thought of as a country’s material investments in and infrastruc- ture for technological development as well as its stock of human capital (which reºects the education, skills, tacit knowledge, and health of its populace39). The ªrst two columns of table 2 below show gross expenditures on research and development (R&D) and R&D as a share of gross domestic product (GDP).40 The third column presents a broad information and communication technologies infrastructure index constructed by Cornell University, INSEAD, and the World Intellectual Property Organization (an agency of the United Nations). These numbers conªrm the United States’ unique combination of large-scale (massive gross expenditures) and highly developed infrastructure. China’s annual spending on R&D) is increasing rapidly, however, rocketing 37. A notable example in this regard concerns nuclear attack submarines (SSNs): Chinese SSNs are relatively noisy, whereas U.S. SSNs have “already reached absolute levels of silencing.” See Owen R. Coté, “Assessing the Undersea Balance between the U.S. and China,” working paper (Cam- bridge, Mass.: Security Studies Program, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, February 2011), p. 28, http://web.mit.edu/ssp/publications/working_papers/Undersea%20Balance%20WP11-1.pdf. See also the discussion in Ronald O’Rourke, “China Naval Modernization: Implications for U.S. Navy Capabilities—Background and Issues for Congress” (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Research Service, June 1, 2015), pp. 11–12. 38. Beckley, “China’s Century?” pp. 64–74. 39. United Nations University International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environ- mental Change (UNU-IHDP) and United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), Inclusive Wealth Report 2012: Measuring Progress toward Sustainability (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 16. 40. On the trade-offs among different R&D measures, see National Science Foundation, Science and Engineering Indicators 2012 (Arlington, Va.: National Science Foundation, 2012), p. 3, http:// www.nsf.gov/statistics/seind12/c4/c4s8.htm.  Great Powers in the 21st Century 23 Table 2. Technological Inputs Cornell/ Number of 2010 INSEAD/WIPO Scientific Human Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/isec/article-pdf/40/3/7/1843648/isec_a_00225.pdf by University of Toronto user on 06 October 2024 Gross Information & and Capital Gross Domestic Communication Engineering Level (in Expenditure Expenditures Technologies Doctoral billions of on R&D as on R&D 2014 Index Degrees constant a Share of (PPP, in Score Granted 2005 GDP (%) billions) (out of 100) per Year U.S.$) United States 2.85 429.1 83.0 32,649 99,641 China 1.84 208.2 36.1 31,410 13,447 Japan 3.39 146.5 78.1 7,396 33,645 Germany 2.88 93.1 74.3 11,989 25,576 Russia 1.09 35.0 60.6 15,714 6,391 France 2.24 51.9 72.7 8,220 19,118 Britain 1.77 39.6 86.5 11,055 19,079 India 0.76 24.3 25.9 7,982 9,355 Brazil 1.16 25.3 51.6 5,470 8,968 SOURCES: National Science Board, Science and Engineering Indicators, 2014 (Arlington, Va.: National Science Board, 2014), pp. 4–19; International Monetary Fund, World Eco- nomic Outlook Database, October 2013, http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/weo/2013/02/ weodata/index.aspx; Cornell University, INSEAD, and the World Intellectual Property Or- ganization (WIPO), The Global Innovation Index, 2014: The Human Factor in Innovation (Fontainebleau, Ithaca, and Geneva: Cornell University, INSEAD, and WIPO, 2014), pp. 135–282; and United Nations University—International Human Dimensions Program and United Nations Environment Program, Inclusive Wealth Report, 2014: Measuring Progress toward Sustainability (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). NOTES: GDP stands for gross domestic product. PPP stands for purchasing power parity. Gross expenditure on research and development (R&D) is for 2011, except for Brazil, which is for 2010. from $25 billion to more than $200 billion between 2000 and 2011, while the United States’ increased more gradually, from $260 billion to $425 billion.41 Beyond the magnitude of resources devoted to technological advancement, the skill levels of the people who use a country’s resources and infrastructure to generate technological innovation is another key input.42 The fourth column of table 2 shows China’s eye-catching annual number of science and engineer- ing doctoral degrees, a ªgure whose dramatic rise over the past decade has re- ceived much attention. At this point, however, China is still only at 13 percent 41. National Science Foundation, “National Patterns of R&D Resources: 2011–12 Data Update” (Arlington, Va.: National Science Foundation, December 2013), http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/ nsf14304/content.cfm?pub_id⫽4326&id⫽2. 42. See, for example, Paul M. Romer, “Endogenous Technological Change,” Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 94, No. 5 (1990), pp. 1002–1037.  International Security 40:3 24 of the U.S. overall level of human capital, as is shown in the last column of ta- ble 2 (which reports the UN’s comprehensive human capital measure).43 As in the case of defense spending, the signiªcance of any increase in tech- nological inputs by China depends on the size of the existing overall technol- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/isec/article-pdf/40/3/7/1843648/isec_a_00225.pdf by University of Toronto user on 06 October 2024 ogy gap and the speed with which increased inputs can be expected to yield sufªciently increased output to begin to place China in the same technology league as the United States. Where does China stand on technology output? “High-technology exports” are frequently mentioned in stories highlighting China’s rise.44 As Beckley correctly underscores, China’s technological capac- ity should not be measured using high-technology exports given the extent to which foreign companies drive Chinese exports.45 Half of all Chinese exports currently consist of “processing trade” (in which parts are imported into China for assembly into ªnished products and are then exported); the vast majority of these exports (84 percent in 2010) are not controlled by Chinese ªrms but by foreign companies (mostly afªliates of multinational corporations from highly developed countries).46 Figure 3 presents technological output and inºuence measures that are reli- ably national in origin for all the countries concerned. The number of triadic patent families (which measure a set of patents taken out in the United States, Europe, and Japan to protect an invention) is widely accepted as a measure of technological competitiveness. Even more probative are royalty and license fees, which show that China has barely begun to register as a source of innova- tive technologies. The recent geographic distribution of top-cited articles in sci- ence and engineering tells the same story, as does the recent distribution of Nobel Prizes in science. Taken together, these indicators underscore the technological dominance of the United States. Of all the ªgures noted above, this reality is arguably best captured by royalty and license fee data, which reveal that the United States is by far the leading source of innovative technologies (its $105 billion in receipts of royalty and license fees are four times higher than those of the next highest state, Japan), whereas China is a huge importer of these technologies and ex- ports almost nothing (less than $1 billion). As in the military realm, enough is 43. For a further discussion of the strategic signiªcance of this large gap in human capital, see Mi- chael Beckley, “The Unipolar Era: Why American Power Persists,” book manuscript, Tufts Univer- sity, September 2015, chap. 5. 44. See, for example, David Wertime, “It’s Ofªcial: China Is Becoming a New Innovation Power- house,” Foreign Policy, February 6, 2014, http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2014/02/06/ its_ofªcial_china_is_becoming_a_new_innovation_powerhouse. 45. See the discussion in Beckley, “China’s Century?” pp. 67–69. 46. Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), China in Focus: Lessons and Challenges (Paris: OECD, 2012), p. 73.  Great Powers in the 21st Century 25 Figure 3. Technological Output and Inºuence Indicators Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/isec/article-pdf/40/3/7/1843648/isec_a_00225.pdf by University of Toronto user on 06 October 2024 SOURCES: National Science Board, Science and Engineering Indicators (Arlington, Va.: National Science Foundation: 2014). Data for individual European Union countries supplied by the National Science Foundation; Russia data from Vladimir Pislyakov and Elena Shukshina, “Measuring Excellence in Russia: Highly Cited Papers, Leading Institutions, Patterns of Na- tional and International Collaboration,” Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, Vol. 65, No. 11 (November 2014), pp. 2321–2330; and Organization for Co-operation and Economic Development; Nobel Media AB, Lists of Nobel Prizes and Laure- ates, http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/ (consulted on March 24, 2014). NOTES: Science Nobel Prizes are for those awarded in physics, chemistry, and physiology or medicine; European Union and Russia data for cited articles are from 2008; U.S. data are from 2012.  International Security 40:3 26 changing to feed a narrative about China closing the technological gap. The key point, however, is that the core changes are on the input side—most nota- bly, China’s growing R&D expenditures—and not on the output side. Given that the overall technological gap between China and the United States is so Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/isec/article-pdf/40/3/7/1843648/isec_a_00225.pdf by University of Toronto user on 06 October 2024 massive, the process of closing it will be lengthy. The United States’ unique combination of massive scale and technological prowess will be a long-term feature of the distribution of capabilities. economic capacity Converting economic output into military power and technological capacity is a complex and time-consuming process, but to emphasize that undeniable re- ality is not to gainsay the importance of raw economic heft in the measurement of state power. The United States retains the world’s biggest, richest, and most productive economy, but China is rapidly approaching it in economic size by conventional measures and is entering the ranks of middle-income countries (see table 3).47 As ªgure 4 shows, China’s share of global GDP has grown dra- matically, from 4.5 percent in 2000 to 11.3 percent in 2014. Projecting economic growth is fraught with uncertainty, but analysts agree that China’s remarkable sprint to middle-income status is actually the easy step; moving from middle- income to high-income status is a much bigger challenge.48 Beyond the fact that China now faces a wide range of pressing internal challenges—including its polluted environment, corruption, absence of a social safety net, inefªcient state enterprises, rapidly aging population, and the rising demands of its middle class—the more general point is that most countries fail to escape the “middle-income trap,” and even those that do so then begin to grow much more slowly. Hence, the debate concerns not whether but by how much China’s growth rate will slow.49 47. Table 3 updates the chart in Brooks and Wohlforth, World Out of Balance, p. 29. On our choice of GDP estimators, see pp. 40–42. 48. See, for example, David Dollar, “China’s Rebalancing: Lessons from East Asian Economic His- tory,” working paper (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, October 2013), pp. 11–12, http:// www.brookings.edu/research/papers/2013/10/02-china-economic-lessons-dollar; Barry Eichen- green, Donghyun Park, and Kwanho Shin, “Growth Slowdowns Redux: New Evidence on the Middle-Income Trap,” No. 18673 (Cambridge, Mass.: National Bureau of Economic Research [NBER], January 2013), http://www.nber.org/papers/w18673; Barry Eichengreen, Donghyun Park, and Kwanho Shin, “When Fast-Growing Economies Slow Down: International Evidence and Implications for China,” Asian Economic Papers, Vol. 11, No. 1 (Winter/Spring 2012), pp. 42–87; and Homi Kharas and Harinder Kohli, “What Is the Middle Income Trap, Why Do Countries Fall into It, and How Can It Be Avoided?” Global Journal of Emerging Market Economies, Vol. 3, No. 3 (Sep- tember 2011), pp. 281–289. 49. A recent World Bank forecast of 6 percent average growth over the next ªfteen years probably captures the mean assessment. See World Bank and Development Research Center of the State Council, People’s Republic of China, China 2030: Building a Modern, Harmonious, and Creative Soci-  Great Powers in the 21st Century 27 Table 3. Economic Indicators for the Major Powers, 2014 % Great GDP GDP, Power % World Per Hours Productivity Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/isec/article-pdf/40/3/7/1843648/isec_a_00225.pdf by University of Toronto user on 06 October 2024 Current GDP, GDP, Capita, Public Worked (per ($ GDP per Prices Current Current Current Debt person in hour ($billion) Prices Prices Prices (% GDP) employment) worked) United States 17,418 36.0 22.5 54,596 71.2 1,789 67.4 China 10,380 21.5 13.4 7,588 15.1 n.a. n.a. Japan 4,616 9.6 6.0 36,331 231.9 1,729 41.5 Germany 3,859 8.0 5.0 47,589 74.7 1,371 62.3 Russia 1,857 3.8 2.4 12,925 13.4 1,985 25.9 France 2,846 5.9 3.7 44,538 95.3 1,489 62.7 Britain 2,945 6.1 3.8 45,653 79.1 1,677 50.5 India 2,049 4.2 2.7 1,626 51.3 n.a. n.a. Brazil 2,353 4.9 3.0 11,604 59.3 n.a. n.a. SOURCES: International Monetary Fund, World Economic Outlook Database (Washington, D.C.: International Monetary Fund, April 2015), http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/weo/ 2015/01/weodata/index.aspx; Central Intelligence Agency, CIA World Factbook, https:// www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/ (consulted August 8, 2015); Organi- zation for Co-operation and Economic Development, “OECD Employment Outlook, 2015, Statistical Annex” (Paris: OECD, 2015); and Organization for Co-operation and Economic Development, Level of GDP Per Capita and Productivity, http://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx ?DataSetCode⫽PDB_LV (consulted August 8, 2015). NOTES: Gross domestic product (GDP) figures for China, Germany, and Russia are Interna- tional Monetary Fund Staff staff estimates. GDP per capita figures for China, Germany, Russia, and India are International Monetary Fund staff estimates. Public debt is esti- mated for 2014. Hours worked are for total employment and are for 2014 except for France, which is for 2013. Productivity figures for the United States, Japan, Russia, and France are estimated. What the existing literature has not yet done, however, is to adequately scrutinize the validity of using GDP to assess the China-U.S. power gap on the global stage. This exercise is crucial given the degree to which this one measure drives the narrative of China’s rise. Yet as a way of gauging the role a country plays in the world economy—with all the implications for a state’s power that follow—using GDP is becoming increasingly problematic. As Diane Coyle emphasizes, GDP “is a measure of the economy best suited to an earlier era.”50 Developed in and for the era of mass production, GDP, Coyle ety (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 2013), p. 9. For a noteworthy lower-bound forecast (4 percent), see Lant Pritchett and Lawrence H. Summers, “Asiaphoria Meets Regression to the Mean,” No. 20573 (Cambridge, Mass.: NBER, October 2014), http://www.nber.org/papers/w20573. For a prominent example of the upper-bound forecast (7.5–8 percent), see Jamil Anderlini, “Justin Lin Criticizes China Growth Pessimists,” Financial Times, July 29, 2013, http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/ s/0/3e62c9de-f83e-11e2-b4c4-00144feabdc0.html#axzz3MkxsfC7j. 50. Diane Coyle, GDP: A Brief but Affectionate History (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2014), p. 121.  International Security 40:3 28 Figure 4. Real Historical Gross Domestic Product, 1969–2014 Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/isec/article-pdf/40/3/7/1843648/isec_a_00225.pdf by University of Toronto user on 06 October 2024 SOURCE: United States Department of Agriculture Economic Research Service, http://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/international-macroeconomic-data-set.aspx. argues, is increasingly misleading because it does not adequately capture the signiªcance of information, sustainability, and economic globalization.51 Coyle’s general argument echoes those made recently by numerous other economists.52 Regarding information, Michael Mandel argues that “ofªcial economic sta- tistics dramatically undercount the growth of data-driven activities.”53 The more knowledge based an economy is, the more that GDP underestimates its size. Mandel estimates that calculating GDP with information as a distinct category alongside goods and services would have added slightly more than 0.5 percent to real U.S. GDP growth in 2012.54 In turn, economic globalization creates a key statistical problem for GDP be- cause so many goods are no longer made in a single country but instead are constructed using global supply chains. Estimating China’s economic weight on the world stage is thus particularly difªcult because, as stressed above, the 51. Ibid., p. 122. 52. See, for example, UNU-IHDP and UNEP, Inclusive Wealth Report 2012; and Joseph E. Stiglitz, Amartya Sen, and Jean-Paul Fitoussi, Report by the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Per- formance and Social Progress, 2009 (Paris: Institut National de la Statistique et des Études Économiques, 2009), http://www.insee.fr/fr/publications-et-services/default.asp?page⫽dossiers _web/stiglitz/documents-commission.htm. 53. Michael Mandel, “Beyond Goods and Services: The (Unmeasured) Rise of the Data-Driven Economy” (Washington, D.C.: Progressive Policy Institute, October 2012), p. 2, http://www.progressivepolicy.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/10.2012-Mandel_Beyond-Goods-and-Services _The-Unmeasured-Rise-of-the-Data-Driven-Economy.pdf. 54. Ibid.  Great Powers in the 21st Century 29 huge presence of multinational corporations in China plays a signiªcant role in how it engages with the global economy.55 The more general point here is that there is a need to take into account the signiªcance of globalization when analyzing the relative economic power of the world’s most powerful countries. Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/isec/article-pdf/40/3/7/1843648/isec_a_00225.pdf by University of Toronto user on 06 October 2024 The premise of Sean Starrs 2013 study is indeed that a fundamental limita- tion of recent discussions about the changing distribution of power “is not taking globalization seriously.... We cannot rely on national accounts to meaningfully assess power in the global political economy.”56 Starrs shows that U.S. multinational corporations are at the forefront of geographically dis- persing their production activities and that “American corporations account for by far the most dominant proªt-shares across the most sectors than cor- porations for any other country, especially in sectors at the technological fron- tier.”57 He notes further that these proªt-share data signiªcantly underestimate the extent of U.S. dominance in the global economy, because they are based on the assumption that U.S. investors only own U.S. ªrms. Yet he shows that U.S. investors also own considerable amounts of the shares of corporations in other countries; as Starrs underscores, the fact that “American ªrms combined own 46 percent of all publicly listed shares of the top 500 corporations in the world... signiªes how globalized American economic power has be- come. Chinese capital, by contrast, is almost entirely nationally contained.... Chinese ownership of non-Chinese-domiciled ªrms in the top 500 is negli- 55. A telling, well-documented example in this regard is the value of Apple iPhone and iPad, both of which are assigned to China because they undergo ªnal assembly there. In their careful analysis of the iPhone’s and iPad’s global supply chain, Kenneth L. Kraemer, Greg Linden, and Jason Dedrick conclude: “While these products, including most of their components, are manufactured in China, the primary beneªts go to the U.S. economy as Apple continues to keep most of its prod- uct design, software development, product management, marketing and other high-wage func- tions in the U.S. China’s role is much smaller than most casual observers would think.... Only $10 or less in direct labor wages that go into an iPhone or iPad is paid to China workers. So although each unit sold in the United States adds from $229 to $275 to the U.S.-China trade deªcit (the esti- mated factory costs of an iPhone or iPad), the portion retained in China’s economy is a tiny frac- tion of that amount.” See Kraemer, Linden, and Dedrick, “Capturing Value in Global Networks: Apple’s iPad and iPhone,” University of California, Irvine, University of California, Berkeley, and Syracuse University, July 2011, pp. 2, 6, http://pcic.merage.uci.edu/papers/2011/value_ipad _iphone.pdf. 56. Sean Starrs, “American Economic Power Hasn’t Declined—It Globalized! Summoning the Data and Taking Globalization Seriously,” International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 57, No. 4 (December 2013), p. 817, 825. 57. Ibid., p. 820. A recent report underscores how China is in a fundamentally different competi- tive position: “Although China has indigenous technological capabilities to produce competitive products in labour intensive sectors such as apparel, this capability is still limited in high technol- ogy sectors where it relies heavily on imported inputs.... China’s competitiveness within GVCs [global value chains] is still concentrated in processing and assembling activities. Its role as the world’s assembler, however, allows China to generate only limited value added compared to other countries engaging in more technology and knowledge intensive activities within GVCs.” See OECD, China in Focus, pp. 76–77.  International Security 40:3 30 gible.”58 In turn, he ªnds that not only are U.S. shareholders by far the top owners of U.S. corporations, but that Americans are also top owners of the twenty largest European ªrms.59 Because American ªrms own such a large percentage of many of the world’s top corporations, and because American cit- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/isec/article-pdf/40/3/7/1843648/isec_a_00225.pdf by University of Toronto user on 06 October 2024 izens own the vast majority of the shares of American ªrms, Starrs ªnds that 41 percent of all global household assets are held by Americans—a fact that, he argues, further demonstrates the globalized nature of U.S. capital and eco- nomic power.60 Regarding sustainability, GDP statistics do not reliably reºect whether cur- rent economic growth occurs in ways that harm the environment and thereby comes at the expense of future growth. Although GDP does count the depreci- ation of man-made objects such as machines and roads, it does not count the depreciation of the physical environment. Decades ago, developed countries such as Japan and the United States were sufªciently prosperous to begin to address issues such as clean air, clean water, and the prevention of toxic waste dumping as the need became pressing. China is in a different situation: it “is more like a teenage smoker with emphysema. The costs of pollution have mounted well before it is ready to curtail economic development.”61 That China does far less to protect its local environment than more developed coun- tries is well acknowledged.62 What is less well acknowledged is that this lack of environmental protection leads to an overestimation of China’s economic growth rate. By how much would Chinese economic growth have to be adjusted down- ward if GDP better accounted for environmental damage? The Chinese gov- ernment itself answered with a “conservative” estimate in the mid-2000s, when it created a “Green GDP” measure that recalculated GDP to reºect the cost of pollution: “[The] ªrst report estimated that pollution in 2004 cost just over 3 percent of the gross domestic product, meaning that the pollution- adjusted growth rate that year would drop to about 7 percent from 10 per- cent.”63 Other estimates are much less conservative. In 2006 Zhu Guangyao, deputy chief of China’s State Environmental Protection Agency (SEPA), stated 58. Starrs, “American Economic Power Hasn’t Declined,” p. 824. 59. Ibid. 60. Ibid., p. 825. 61. Joseph Kahn and Jim Yardley, “As China Roars, Pollution Reaches Deadly Extremes,” New York Times, August 26, 2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/26/world/asia/26china.html ?pagewanted⫽all&_r⫽0. 62. China ranks 118th (out of 178 countries) on the comprehensive Environmental Performance Index and 176th on air quality. See “Country Rankings,” Environmental Performance Index (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University, 2014), www.epi.yale.edu/epi/country-rankings. 63. Kahn and Yardley, “As China Roars, Pollution Reaches Deadly Extremes.”  Great Powers in the 21st Century 31 that environmental damage was “roughly 10 percent of the country’s gross do- mestic product.”64 A 2001 World Bank study found that “pollution is costing China an annual 8–12% of its... GDP in direct damage, such as the impact on crops of acid rain, medical bills, lost work from illness, money spent on disas- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/isec/article-pdf/40/3/7/1843648/isec_a_00225.pdf by University of Toronto user on 06 October 2024 ter relief following ºoods and the implied costs of resource depletion.”65 And a 2007 study produced by the World Bank and SEPA found that the total cost of just two forms of pollution—air and water pollution—by themselves amounted to 5.8 percent of China’s GDP.66 Ultimately, China’s long-term sig- niªcance on the world stage will not be as great as its current GDP growth sta- tistics would seem to indicate because they do not properly account for the economic costs of its present method of environmentally harmful growth and the extent to which current growth comes at the expense of the country’s long-term economic growth potential. Thus, although China’s economic rise is important, measuring it with GDP underestimates the economic gap between the United States and China. This is partly because the costs of environmental damage are not properly factored into GDP. In turn, the more knowledge based and globalized a country’s pro- duction is, the more GDP underestimates its size; the more an economy resem- bles the mid-twentieth-century manufacturing model for which the GDP measure was originally developed, the fewer such distortions GDP entails. China’s economy is clearly of the latter type, while the U.S. economy is among the world’s most knowledge based and globalized.67 Given the signiªcance of these distortions associated with GDP, there would ideally be an alternative measure that could be used for making more appro- priate comparisons between states that are as divergent as the United States and China. A promising potential candidate that at least partially avoids some of these distortions is the UN’s newly inaugurated “inclusive wealth” meas- ure. Although not without its ºaws, this measure represents economists’ most systematic effort to date to create a rigorous and transparent measure of a state’s stock of wealth. Inclusive wealth measures a country’s stock of assets in three areas: “(1) manufactured capital (roads, buildings, machines, equip- 64. “Pollution Costs Equal 10% of China’s GDP,” China Daily, June 6, 2006, http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2006-06/06/content_609350.htm. 65. “A Great Wall of Waste,” Economist, August 19, 2004, http://www.economist.com/node/ 3104453. 66. World Bank and State Environmental Protection Administration of China, Cost of Pollution in China: Economic Estimates of Physical Damages (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 2007), p. xvii, http://siteresources.worldbank.org/INTEAPREGTOPENVIRONMENT/Resources/China_Cost_of _Pollution.pdf. 67. We develop additional arguments for why U.S. power on the world stage is augmented by its position in the global economy in Brooks and Wohlforth, America Abroad, chaps. 9–10.  International Security 40:3 32 ment), (2) human capital (skills, education, health), and (3) natural capital (sub-soil resources, ecosystems, the atmosphere).”68 Unlike GDP, which is a measure of the ºow of goods and services for a speciªed time period (typically a short one), inclusive wealth aims to provide information on the state Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/isec/article-pdf/40/3/7/1843648/isec_a_00225.pdf by University of Toronto user on 06 October 2024 of a country’s capital stock for generating wealth over the long term: “In- specting the stocks of produced capital, natural capital and human capital, it shows how much wealth a country can potentially create, not just how much is being made right now.... The index’s transition from measuring ºows to ac- counting stocks provides an intergenerational understanding of well-being and wealth.”69 Based on this inclusive measure, the United States’ wealth amounted to almost $144 trillion in 2010—a level 4.5 times higher than China’s level of inclusive wealth in 2010 ($32 trillion).70 Although economists did not create this inclusive wealth measure to capture what international relations scholars call “latent power”—that is, the key resources that exist within a state that a government can draw upon to build up military power and other- wise compete with other states geopolitically—it clearly captures this con- struct much better than GDP does.71 Why It Will Long Be a One-Superpower World Analysts are right to herald China’s rapid economic ascent as a harbinger of the country’s changing position in the international system. Superpowers are extremely uncommon, and only an exceedingly improbable combination of large-scale and rapid growth can put a state in a position such as China’s: moving in the direction of having the latent material capacity to match the su- perpower. There is no other candidate today. Indeed, after China the most 68. UNU-IHDP and UNEP, Inclusive Wealth Report 2014: Measuring Progress toward Sustainability (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), p. 15. 69. This quotation is drawn from a description of the merits of the inclusive wealth measure pre- sented in Inclusive Wealth Project, “The Better Indicator” (Bonn: International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change, n.d.), http://inclusivewealthindex.org/inclusive- wealth/#the-better-indicator. See also UNU-IHDP and UNEP, Inclusive Wealth Report 2014, p. xx. In discussing the inauguration of the inclusive wealth measure, the Economist usefully underscores in this regard that GDP “is a measure of income, not wealth. It values a ºow of goods and services, not a stock of assets. Gauging an economy by its GDP is like judging a company by its quarterly proªts, without ever peeking at its balance-sheet. Happily, the United Nations this month pub- lished balance-sheets for 20 nations [that] included... [the] stock of natural, human, and physical assets.... By putting a dollar value on everything from bauxite to brainpower, the UN’s exercise makes all three kinds of capital comparable and commensurable.” See “The Real Wealth of Na- tions: A New Report Comes Up with a Better Way to Size Up Wealth,” Economist, June 30, 2012, http://www.economist.com/node/21557732. 70. UNU-IHDP and UNEP, Inclusive Wealth Report 2014, pp. 220, 226. 71. We thank Jonathan Markowitz for a series of helpful conversations on this issue.  Great Powers in the 21st Century 33 plausible candidate would be the European Union, but it is far from being a state and its integration trajectory has stalled; moreover, its economic trajec- tory (like Japan’s and Russia’s) is moving in the wrong direction. At the same time, however, moving toward having the latent material capacity to Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/isec/article-pdf/40/3/7/1843648/isec_a_00225.pdf by University of Toronto user on 06 October 2024 match the superpower and actually attaining this status are two different things. Whereas one might presume that approaching the economic size of the United States would position China to be able to seek superpower status, we conclude that the gap between economic parity and a credible bid for superpower status should be measured over many decades.72 If the scales are to level out such that there are two or more roughly comparable states at the top—as was the norm for centuries—we thus expect it will be a long time coming. Determining the precise economic and technological levels that a state must attain to have sufªcient latent material capacity to bid for superpower status is not a straightforward process. If a rising state’s economy and its technological level match the leading state’s, then it will obviously be in a position to bid for superpower status. What if, however, the rising state is not equal to the lead- ing state in one or both dimensions? If the rising state is comparable to the leading state technologically but is around half of the latter’s economic size, then history would suggest that it could be in a position to bid for superpower status; this was basically the situation regarding the Soviet Union during the ªrst half of the Cold War (though Moscow required a totalitarian state to distill the needed resources and also challenged the United States in a very different military technological environment than the current one). We have shown, however, that the relevant question today is: What if the rising state has attained a signiªcant level of economic size relative to the leading state but is at a fundamentally lower level technologically? There is no modern historical precedent to help answer this question: the recent rising states of note—namely, the United States in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Germany in the early twentieth century, and the Soviet Union in the middle of the twentieth century—were not at dramati- cally different technological levels from that of the leading state. As a result, in assessments of the relative power of Germany or the United States vis-à- vis the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union vis-à-vis the United States, tech- nology essentially faded into the background: the crucial issues became the 72. Two prominent recent studies of the U.S.-China power relationship that also analyze multiple components of power reach overall assessments generally consistent with this conclusion. See Thomas J. Christensen, The China Challenge: Shaping the Choices of a Rising Power (New York: W.W. Norton, 2014); and David Shambaugh, China Goes Global: The Partial Power (Oxford: Oxford Uni- versity Press, 2013).  International Security 40:3 34 size of the economies of these rising states and how much they tried to distill their wealth into military power. But when the leading and rising states di- verge technologically to a dramatic degree, as is the case today, a critical ques- tion is whether the latter has the technological capacity to produce and ªeld a Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/isec/article-pdf/40/3/7/1843648/isec_a_00225.pdf by University of Toronto user on 06 October 2024 defense force that can effectively match up with the former’s. This question is relevant regardless of the era under examination; but for reasons that we discuss below, it is especially relevant now given the extraordinarily compli- cated nature of much modern weaponry. In this respect, Tai Ming Cheung underscores that China faces “an enormous task of remaking a defense estab- lishment that is still more suited to ªghting a Vietnam-era conºict than a 21st century engagement.”73 Posen’s analysis of the command of the commons again helps frame our as- sessment of the gap between China’s economic rise and its potential to attain the capabilities of a superpower. In his examination of the unique set of assets that the United States has developed to sustain this commanding position, he points to four central attributes: (1) a large scientiªc and industrial base; (2) the speciªc mix of military systems accumulated over the past few decades of pro- curement; (3) the ability acquired over decades to coordinate the production of needed weapons systems; and (4) the particular skills and associated techno- logical infrastructure the United States has painstakingly developed to be able to effectively employ these weapons in a coordinated manner.74 scientiªc and industrial base Posen stresses that the development of the “speciªc weapons needed to secure and exploit command of the commons... depend[s] on a huge scientiªc and industrial base.” Having a much larger scientiªc and industrial base than any other state has enabled the United States to “undertake larger projects than any other military in the world.”75 There is no reason to think that China will soon be able to develop anything comparable, mainly because it is at a funda- mentally different technological level from that of the United States. Although China is rapidly enhancing its technological inputs, it faces signiªcant limits on its ability to quickly translate them into a dramatic improvement in its overall technological capacity. Educating many more science and engineering students, for example, requires increasing the number of institutions that can provide appropriate and useful training far beyond the level that China has 73. Tai Ming Cheung, “Modernizing the People’s Liberation Army: Aims and Implications,” in Shaun Breslin, ed., Handbook of China’s International Relations (London: Routledge, 2010), p. 115. 74. Posen, “Command of the Commons,” p. 10. 75. Ibid.  Great Powers in the 21st Century 35 now. On this issue, the World Bank and Development Research Center of the State Council of China conclude bluntly that China’s “massive expansion of enrollment... has strained instructional capacity” and that “the quality of the training is weak, and many graduates are having difªculty ªnding employ- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/isec/article-pdf/40/3/7/1843648/isec_a_00225.pdf by University of Toronto user on 06 October 2024 ment.”76 In turn, rapidly augmenting spending on R&D is unlikely to produce dramatically improved technological capacity if it is not embedded within an institutional structure that fosters innovation—something that China is very far from having. As the World Bank and Development Research Center of the State Council of China report, “China has seen a sharp rise in scientiªc patents and published papers, but few have commercial relevance and even fewer have translated into new products or exports.... A better innovation policy in China will begin with a redeªnition of government’s role in the national inno- vation system, shifting away from targeted attempts at developing speciªc new technologies and moving toward institutional development and an en- abling environment that supports economy-wide innovation efforts.”77 mix of weapons accumulated through decades of procurement The particular mix of weapons the United States has accumulated to sustain command of the commons has taken a long time to develop and procure. The main reason is that the ever-growing complexity of many top-end weapon sys- tems has greatly increased their development time. For example, as the num- ber of parts and lines of code associated with the production of aerospace vehicles increased, the development time of these weapons concomitantly increased—from roughly 5 years in the 1960s to around 10 years in the 1990s. Today, “combat aircraft projects take between 15 and 20 years from research to production,” while “the current development cycle for military and intelli- gence satellites from the initiation of basic research to ªeld deployment is ap- proximately twenty years.”78 As a result, even if another state has the scientiªc and industrial base and the skills needed to produce these military systems, it will necessarily be a very long time before it possesses them given the time they take to produce. Consider that it is projected to take up to seventeen years for the United Kingdom to develop a nuclear submarine successor to its current Trident sys- tem. And the United Kingdom has some signiªcant advantages over China: 76. World Bank and Development Research Center of the State Council of China, China 2030, p. 176. 77. Ibid., pp. 35–36. 78. Tai Min Cheung, “Conclusions,” in Cheung, ed., Forging China’s Military Might, p. 276; and Tai Ming Cheung, Fortifying China: The Struggle to Build a Modern Defense Economy (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cor- nell University Press, 2009), p. 249  International Security 40:3 36 most notably, it has had a longer range of experience producing advanced sys- tems and it receives extensive, direct assistance from the United States in weapons production. In areas where China is far behind the United States in military technology and where the systems in question take a long time to Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/isec/article-pdf/40/3/7/1843648/isec_a_00225.pdf by University of Toronto user on 06 October 2024 develop, even if all goes well China will need many years of cumulative effort to be in a position to potentially close the gap created by the United States’ own cumulative effort over many decades. Nuclear attack submarines (SSNs) are a particularly telling case in point. China is now capable of producing SSNs that are roughly comparable to the kinds of SSNs the United States built in the 1950s; since then, however, the United States has invested hundreds of billions of dollars and six decades of effort to put itself in a position to design and manufacture its current generation of Virginia-class submarines, which have achieved absolute levels of silencing.79 “systems integration” in weapons systems’ design and production The third attribute Posen highlights is that the ability to supervise the produc- tion of the kinds of military systems that give the United States command of the commons requires “signiªcant skills in systems integration and the management of large-scale industrial projects.”80 Many top-end weapon sys- tems today demand an extraordinarily high level of precision in the design and production process—a requirement that has eluded China in many areas. As Richard Bitzinger and his colleagues conclude, “Aside from a few pockets of excellence, such as ballistic missiles, the Chinese military-industrial com- plex has appeared to demonstrate few capacities for designing and producing relatively advanced conventional weapons systems. Especially when it comes to combat aircraft, surface combatants, and ground equipment, the Chinese generally have confronted considerable difªculties in moving prototypes into production, which has resulted in long development phases, heavy program delays, and low production runs.”81 China’s successes in military modernization attract much more attention 79. Authors’ interview with William Murray, U.S. Naval War College, Newport, Rhode Island, July 9, 2015. For a thorough assessment of the large qualitative gap between U.S. and Chinese SSNs, see Coté, “Assessing the Undersea Balance between the U.S. and China.” See also the chart in O’Rourke, “China Naval Modernization” that systematically compares the acoustic quietness of current Chinese and Russian SSNs 80. Posen, “Command of the Commons,” p. 10. 81. Bitzinger et al., “Locating China’s Place in the Global Defense Economy,” p. 172. See also Tai Ming Cheung’s recent review of China’s defense production capacity, which concludes that “the Chinese defense industry presently lacks the necessary scientiªc and technological capabilities” to be able to “develop sophisticated... weapons that are able to match those of the United States and other advanced rivals.” See Cheung, “Conclusions,” in Cheung, Forging China’s Military Might, p. 277.  Great Powers in the 21st Century 37 than its failures—or its decisions not to attempt to compete. As a result, ana- lysts underestimate the difªculty of gaining the kind of system integration skill for managing the design and production of the range of top-end systems needed to project signiªcant military power globally. The actors involv