ABSTRACT
While The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers may be important as a work of international history, Paul Kennedy remains an active participant in the debate over how the United States will accommodate (or resist) the decline predicted in the book’s final chapters. Philip Bobbitt believes technology has altered the dynamics Kennedy analyzed in the late twentieth century. The capacity to do large-scale violence used to be the exclusive province of states. And in part, the robustness of the economy defined this capacity; such violence required too many resources for entities other than nations to consider it. Today, in Philip Bobbitt’s view, military might and the economy have become less important than cohesiveness among states and forward planning in the face of terror. Kennedy argues that strategy and economics are intimately bound. Kennedy measures this in industrial and agricultural production, the very basics of prosperity, rather than simple resource endowment.
