Unipolarity and American Exceptionalism

Christopher Layne’s work is to be viewed with great skepticism, but about this he is surely correct:

The strategy of preponderance aims at attaining a condition that approximates absolute security for the United States. In this respoect, it is another form of American exceptionalism. It is a transcendant strategy that seeks nothing less thatn the end of international politics. However, unwanted and unanticipated events happen all the time in international politics; in this respect, “instability is normal. War, the security dilemma, the rise and fall of great powers, the formation and dissolution of alliances, and great power rivalries are enduring features of international politics. The goal of a unipolar world in which the United States is unthreatened and able to shape the internationl environment is alluring but it is a chimera. No state can achieve absolute security because no state, not even the United States, can rise above the international political system’s structural constraints

Layne is an isolationist, one of the smarter of that ilk around today. His solution to the problem of preponderance is retreat, what he calls “offshore balancing”. This position is largely shared by John Mearsheimer, one of the premier realists working in political science today.

However much I like to think of myself as a realist, I’m really not. I can’t embrace the isolationism adopted by the most hard core realists, and I certainly can’t support the aggressive hegemony adopted by many who like to think of themselves as realists but don’t really understand what that means. I suppose that I’m really just a very cynical liberal internationalist.