ABSTRACT
The aim of Security Strategies and American World Order: Lost Power was to describe and explain the security strategies of the states that lost out as a result of the end of the Cold War.
We wanted to explain how and why they adapted their strategies to the unipolar world order. In order to explain how they adapted their strategies, we distinguished between hard balancing, soft balancing, hard bandwagoning and soft bandwagoning. This allowed us to draw on some of the most recent developments of realist IR theory in order to systematically characterize the strategies of the states under scrutiny. In order to explain why they adopted the strategies they did, we developed a theoretical model consistent with this type of theory. Our explanatory variables were relative power, relative security and relative ideology. Relative power was virtually constant throughout the period 1989-2007 and between the cases: all shared the same basic and constant condition of unipolarity. Relative security and relative ideology varied within and between the cases. The analysis revealed that relative security had the greatest explanatory value of these two variables, whereas relative ideology mainly played the role of an ‘amplifier’ of the effects of relative power and relative security.
