ABSTRACT
Power in international politics is like the weather. Everyone talks about it, but few understand it. Just as farmers and meteorologists try to forecast storms, so do leaders and analysts try to understand the dynamics of major changes in the distribution of power among nations. Power transitions affect the fortunes of individual nations and are often associated with the cataclysmic storms of world war. But before we can examine theories of hegemonic transition – that is, some of the leading efforts to predict big changes in the international political weather – we first need to recognize some basic distinctions among the terms power, balance of power, and hegemony.
