ABSTRACT
One of the more remarkable features of American intellectual life since the end of the Second World War has been its preoccupation with the issue of power and whether or not the United States continued to possess enough of this vital commodity to underwrite stability in the wider international system. This obsession should not particularly surprise us. After all, if Americans have been serious about anything since 1945, it has been about the uses of power on the not entirely unreasonable grounds that if international history taught anything it was that order was impossible without the deployment of a great deal of power by a single conscious hegemon. What history also revealed, these scholars argued, was that when great powers did not lead – as the British had been unable to do by 1914 and the United States manifestly failed to do after 1918 – then the inevitable outcome was chaos and disorder. The question of power, therefore, was not merely of academic interest but went to the heart of the central question in modern world politics: namely, under conditions of anarchy what policies would the United States have to pursue and what advantage of power would it have to possess in order to maintain the peace? Liberals no doubt might have found all this self-absorbed discussion about the capabilities of one particular state decidedly too realist for comfort, parochial even. A large number of Americans, not surprisingly, have not. Indeed, what could be more vital, they felt, than trying to measure how much power the country actually had, and whether or not it was exercising it with sufficient determination so as to deter enemies and reassure allies in a world where it remained (according to its own heady rhetoric) the truly indispensable nation?2
