ABSTRACT
Realists, whether they are traditional realists or structural neorealists, agree that great powers balance the military strength of rising powers. But there is less agreement regarding secondary state responses to rising powers. Neorealist scholars and traditional realist scholars argue that secondary states’ preferences are situationally determined. Their behavior depends on great power responses to a rising power.1 Other scholars, however, argue that anarchic structures lead even secondary states to balance with a status quo power in opposition to rising power.2
An influential body of work also challenges the realist convention that states balance against capabilities. This literature argues that state alignment decisions reflect perceptions of a state’s intentions as well as of its capabilities, so that a superior great power’s capabilities combine with its foreign policy behavior to determine whether states will balance its power. This perspective argues that state alignment can reflect the effect of ideology, multilateral institutions, and common cultural influences on threat perception and balance-of-power politics.3 Some scholars further challenge structural realism’s argument that balance-of-politics is an intrinsic result of anarchy. Rather, they argue that because of the particular characteristics of post-cold war U.S. foreign policy and its impact on other countries’ perception of the U.S. threat, balance-of-power politics has not taken place in the era of U.S. unipolarity, with corresponding arguments regarding secondary state accommodation of American power.4
