“Kenneth Waltz’s rigorous recasting of traditional balance-of-power theory has provided the intellectual foundation for much of the most fruitful recent work in the fields of international politics and national security. But there is a tension between Waltz’s theory and those who apply it in their practical research agendas. Waltz’s is a theory of international politics; it addresses properties of the international system, such as the recurrence of war and the recurrent formation of balances of power. Those who have applied Waltz’s ideas, however, have normally used them as a theory of foreign policy to make predictions about or prescriptions for the strategic choices of states” (137-8).
“In a nutshell, we argue that given Europe’s multipolar checkerboard geographically, the perception of offensive military advantages gave rise to alliance chain-ganging before 1914, whereas the perception of defensive advantages gave rise to buck-passing before 1939. These perceptions of the international conditions constraining strategic choice were, however, misperceptions, rooted in patterns of civil-military relations and the engrained lessons of formative experiences” (139).
“In multipolarity, the approximate equality of alliance partners leads to a high degree of security interdependence within an alliance. Given the anarchic setting and this relative equality, each state feels its own security is integrally intertwined with the security of its alliance partners. As a result, any nation that marches to war inexorably drags its alliance partners with it. No state can restrain a reckless ally by threatening to sit out the conflict, since the demise of its reckless ally would decisively cripple its own security” (140). See WWI, for example.
“To turn Waltz’s ideas into a theory of foreign policy that accurately explains alliance behavior before World Wars I and II, two complications must be introduced. First, the variable elements of international structure must be broadened to include not only polarity but also the security dilemma variables: technology and geography. Second, perception of the strategic incentives inherent in the systemic structure must be introduced as a potentially autonomous factor” (144).
Figure 1 (147)
