power

Parallel Networks

/ Jim Sojourner / Leave a comment

China’s dual strategy to usurp the American-led order

China is a revisionist state of a hybrid sort, balanced between two webs.

Revisionists, John Ikenberry tells us, are states that challenge the global order made up of “settled rules and arrangements between states that define and guide their interactions.”[1] Powerful states create and maintain those rules and arrangements to “take advantage of their elite status and establish rules, institutions, and privileges that primarily benefit themselves.”[2] Once an order is established, the state at the top—the “status quo” power— does what it can to maintain the system it created. Great Britain, which established the system of rules and arrangements that tied together the world in the 18th and 19th centuries, was one such “status quo” state. The United States in the current day is another.

Revisionists like China, meanwhile, attempt to redraft the rules by which relations among nations function, especially as they rise through the global hierarchy. Revisionists do not have identical goals or identical methods, and most international relations scholars argue that revisionists come in two varieties: limited-aims revisionists and revolutionary revisionists.[3] Limited aims revisionists do not seek to overturn the entire established order but instead hope to alter the existing order in limited ways that improve their position in it. Revolutionary revisionists, on the other hand, challenge the system itself.[4] They do not merely attempt to revise the distribution of resources or power and prestige within the system, they try to create an entirely new order in which they author the rules and define the arrangements.

Since its inception in 1949, the People’s Republic of China has been revisionist state. It has waffled back and forth between revolutionary revision and limited-aims revision. During its first decades of existence, Red China sought to undermine the American-led, capitalist world order through revolutionary revision. It failed. Then, beginning with its Reform and Opening in the late 1970s, China shifted tack and became a limited-aims revisionist. Since, it has worked within existing international institutions to grow rich and improve its position in the global order. It has been hugely successful, rocketing up the ranks of the international hierarchy as it transformed from backwater to potential great power.

Still, China today has nowhere near enough economic or military hard power to directly challenge the American-led order.[5] It doesn’t have to. China is now both a limited-aims revisionist and a revolutionary revisionist. Rather than thinking of China as a rising red star, it is helpful to think it as a giant spider at the intersection of two webs. One of those webs, spun mostly by the United States which still sits near the center, links much of the world in a network of states and non-state actors tied together by trade and ideas. This web we call the liberal world order. The other web is newer, smaller, and weaker. It is a work in progress. China spins it parallel to the liberal world order, and it is largely tied off from American power. China—one of the few actors with strong ties to both webs—sits between these two parallel networks. It builds new ties and strengthens old ones in the liberal world order, while continuing simultaneously to build the new web of its own. In this way, China reaps the benefits of the liberal world order’s institutions and can edit the established system in ways that give it greater prestige and greater resources. At the same time, it builds an alternative, revolutionary world order, one in which it writes the rules and one with which, if the time comes, it might usurp the American-led order. By leveraging its position in two global networks, China is slowly remaking the future.

China’s Network Power

The international system is a network. Networks—the spiderwebs described above—are defined by their links (relationships) among nodes (actors).[6] In international relations, those nodes are predominantly states, but they might also include others such as corporations, militant groups, or multinational organizations. The links between actors allow the transmission of both material and nonmaterial goods, including money, guns, information, and ideas. These links “have both form and content: they include ‘real’ material transactions, such as alliances and trade transactions, as well as ideational relations, such as narratives and repertoires that define appropriate behavior, legitimate authority, and give meaning to behavior in world politics”[7] And more than just simply modes of organization, networks are “structures that can constrain and enable individual agents and influence international outcomes.” [8] In other words networks grant power.

The beliefs and actions of actors in the international system are never independent, and “structural relations are as important as, if not more important than, attributes of individual units.”[9] That is because the position of an actor in a network and the strength of its ties to other nodes can have a significant effect on both the power and prestige of an actor in an international order. Networks provide states with influence, affect their ability to mobilize alliances, augment or inhibit the resources they can muster, and provide or deny ideological and cultural capital to justify either maintaining or transforming the existing order.[10]

Network position, then, is of particular importance for would-be revisionists like China. Stacie Goddard defines two types of network position that shape a state’s revisionist tendencies: “access” positions and “brokerage” positions. Access is “the extent to which a revisionist is integrated into the dominant network. … With access, a state can leverage material and ideational ties to give it influence within the existing institutional system.”[11] Access to the dominant network provides China with social capital that allows it to demand changes to the existing order, especially through the multilateral organizations in which it participates. The greater access, the greater power a state has to frame agendas and debates and to push for edits to the rules of the international system. A brokerage position, on the other hand, allows an actor to fill gaps in the international framework or bridge divides between one network and another. A broker “might have ties with great powers in the dominant institutional order, but also hold exclusive ties with another cohesive subgroup in the international system.”[12] By sitting in a brokerage position in a Chinese-made subgroup, China can draw on significant resources that are excluded from the liberal world order, “mobilize new allies from outside dominant institutions,” and if China “faces sanctions from status quo actors, they can offset costs through closer economic ties with other states.” [13] Within its subgroups, China can also begin writing new rules, norms, and arrangements that circumvent or subvert the existing international order.

States invest in relationships that maximize their strategic interests and network positioning. Revisionists, especially, try to build ties that “increase their power and influence relative to status quo states. … They may seek alliances with other powers or attempt to wedge apart existing alliances. They may pursue economic ties that maximize wealth, and diplomatic relations that strengthen their spheres of influence.”[14] China pursues all of the above strategies from a position in the international networks that gives it both high access and brokerage. It is from this uniquely efficacious position that China seeks to both benefit from and challenge the America-led liberal world order.

China the Accessor

China’s access power has increased as it integrated into the liberal world order. It is more integrated than ever before. China holds a permanent seat on the UN security council and has been ever more involved in multilateral peacekeeping operations (especially near its investments in Africa). It ascended to the International Monetary Fund in the early 2000s and participates in the World Bank. Chinese officials increasingly fill spots in a variety of international organizations and have signed onto international pacts to deal with climate change, nuclear proliferation, laws of the sea, and more, taking a greater leadership role in setting global rules and norms.[15] From those involvements, it has gained prestige as a participant in global good governance and has reaped the benefits of its inclusion in the world’s trade and legal systems, which were built on liberal principles.

Those commitments demonstrate China’s top priority in the current world order: “a liberal economic order built on free trade.”[16] China’s rise from the 1980s on was powered by exports as Chinese manufacturing slowly climbed the value chain until its products (mobile technology, software, and artificial intelligence, especially) began to compete with the advanced industrial economies. “Now as then, these exports are the lifeblood of the Chinese economy: they ensure a consistent trade surplus, and the jobs they create are a vital engine of domestic social stability. There is no indication this will change in the coming decade.”[17]

China, then, has a critical vested interest in maintaining its access position in the international order. It has an interest in promoting multilateralism that keeps goods flowing across the world’s ocean highways. By participating in the international bodies responsible for setting the rules of trade, Beijing can ensure that it has access to the markets that make its export economy possible. Furthermore, because it “relies on a global network of trade ties,” China the limited-aims revisionist has no desire to risk confrontation with the United States, which might hamper or destroy its access to those trade networks and markets. This is also why China will continue to deepen its engagement in organizations that maintain the current order, assist in antipiracy and antiterrorism efforts, and otherwise maintaining the freedom of most global commons—whatever keeps global commerce running smoothly.

The more integrated into this system China becomes, the less likely it is to directly challenge it. “Access changes the costs and benefits of revisionist behavior … access may provide influence, but over time it can make revisionist behavior costly. Revisionists [like China] with access are likely to reap significant benefits from the existing international order. Challenging the system thus carries serious costs,” Goddard writes.[18] China, therefore, is pursuing a different strategy.

China the Broker

Instead of challenging the system, China is simply building a new, non-threatening one. Although the web of the liberal world order reaches into many corners of the world, it does not reach all of them. Some of that has been intentional, liberal states excluding certain authoritarians, sponsors of terrorism, communists, and other unsavory or illiberal regimes. Over time, the constraints of the established web have also left many of its nodes feeling used or discontented. It’s among these nodes—the alienated, the disgruntled, and the excluded—that China spins its new web.

China’s power increases when it “possesses exclusive ties to otherwise marginalized or weakly connected nodes or groups of nodes.”[19] China has many of these kinds of connections. Some of them are ideological holdovers from China’s original revolutionary days—Cuba, Cambodia, and North Korea come to mind—while others are longer term, strategic friendships like Pakistan and Myanmar. Most of them, however, are relatively new.

China came late to the globalization game and found few regions left for easy investment or resource exploitation. As a result, China at first had to turn to dangerous, unstable, or otherwise undesirable places for friendship and trade. Since the 1990s, China has been building its links to countries like Sudan, Zimbabwe, Venezuela, and Kazakhstan as it sought out alternative partners for development and friendship.[20] What began as a smattering of partnerships with the estranged has morphed into something new as more and more nodes joined China’s network. Chinese aid, investments, and workers have poured into these countries and materials have poured back into China. Unlike the liberal world order, Chinese money (or guns) doesn’t come with strings attached, and rather than an ideology of democracy and humanitarianism, China promises a world of mutual non-interference in internal affairs.[21] What you do in your border is your business, China says; let’s get richer together. By 2013, those partnerships and projects dotted across the world got a new brand: the One Belt, One Road project, now called the Belt and Road Initiative. Originally envisioned as a “new silk road” of railways, energy pipelines, and highways running from Southeast Asia and China, through the former Soviet Republics to Europe, BRI has grown and transformed over time. BRI now how infrastructure, trade, and investment links with 65 other countries that collectively account for 30 percent of global GDP, 65 percent of world population, and 75 percent of known energy reserves.[22] As China has demonstrated its willingness and ability to provide an alternative to the liberal world order, states, especially globalization’s “losers” in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, have eagerly wrapped themselves into China’s web.

Additionally, Beijing has begun to build parallel institutions to those in the liberal world order, including the New Development Bank (formerly the BRICS Development Bank), the proposed Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership Trade Agreement, and the Asian Infrastructure Development Bank, through which many of China’s BRI projects are financed.[23] It is also involved in building a series of ports linking China to East Africa and to the oil-producing Middle East. With those ports in can enhance its investments, protect its trade routes, and contest the very United States’ maritime preeminence under which China has risen to global power.[24]

The result is a growing, parallel, Chinese-dominated order from which China can mobilize resources, call upon allies, and within which it can restrict United States influence. The resources it draws from this parallel network will be even more important. If China’s bet pays off and African and Latin American countries take over from China as the next “factory of the world,”[25] they will produce cheap goods for China’s domestic consumption, provide attractive outlets for Chinese investment, and power not only China’s economy but also the economies of important partners throughout the Chinese-built international web. Everyone will get richer together, especially China. Because “brokerage positions decrease the cost of acting outside the system,” [26] if Chinese links to Africa and Latin America bear economic enough fruit, China will be able to challenge the liberal world order from both within and without.

A Bridging Revolutionary

With its unique position between the liberal world order network and its growing, parallel Chinese-led network, China is becoming what Goddard calls a “bridging revisionist,” a state with both high access power and high brokerage power. It is deeply embedded in the existing international order, while also developing strong and largely exclusive relations within its own network. As a limited-revisionist with high access power in the liberal world order, China can benefit from existing trade networks and draw on social capital to legitimate its challenges to existing international rules and arrangements. As a revolutionary revisionist, on the other hand, China can use its brokerage power in its alternative network to get “access to new allies, alternative economic ties, and diverse cultural resources, all of which the revisionist can mobilize in support of its revisionist goals.”[27]

The result will probably be a slow-moving “rule-based revolution.”[28] It will likely be decades, if not longer, before China has the hard power to directly challenge the United States in a hegemonic transition.[29] Instead, because of its bridging network position, China will be able to simultaneously edit and create global rules to pursue its revisionist aims. “Bridging positions lower the costs, and may even increase the benefits, of challenging the institutional order,” Goddard writes. “Bridging positions open up new opportunities for mobilization outside of the system.” As a bridge, China can pursue both limited-aims revisionism and revolutionary revisionism, whichever works best to achieve a given goal. The United States can no longer afford to exclude China from the world order because of its importance to the global economic system, so China’s limited-aims revisionism will continue rewrite the rules of the liberal world order to its own advantage. At the same time, the United States no longer has the power to tightly bind China to existing rules because China has a whole new network of ties to actors it can mobilize to “slip the leash” of the liberal world order. As that network grows and strengthens, it will empower China’s revolutionary revisionist aims and provide an increasingly attractive alternative—not only to marginalized states but even to key members of the liberal world order.[30] If a global calamity like the 2008 financial crisis shakes the liberal world order again, a solid, Chinese-built order might just take its place.

China is rising, to be sure. As importantly, it is branching out.

[1] John Ikenberry Liberal Leviathan: The Origins, Crisis, and Transformation of the American World Order (Princeton University Press, Princeton: 2011).
[2] David Rapkin and William R. Thompson “Power Transition, Challenge, and the (Re)Emergence of China” in International Interactions, 29:4 (2003), 317.
[3] Randall Schweller “Managing the Rise of Great Powers” in Engaging China: The Management of an Emerging Power edited by Alistair Ian Johnson and Robert S. Ross (Routledge: New York, 2003)
[4] Ibid.
[5] Stephen G. Brooks and William C. Wohlforth, “The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers in the Twenty-First Century: China’s Rise and the Fate of America’s Global Position,” International Security 40 (Winter 2015/16): 7-53
[6] Emilie M. Hafner-Burton, Miles Kahler, and Alexandra H. Montgomery, “Network Analysis for International Relations” International Organization 63 (Summer 2009), 561.
[7] Stacie Goddard, “Embedded Revisionism:  Networks, Institutions, and Challenges to World Order.”  International Organization 72 (Fall 2018):  767.
[8] Hafner-Burton, Kahler, and Montgomery, “Network Analysis for International Relations,” 574.
[9] Ibid, 561.
[10] Goddard, “Embedded Revisionism,” 768.
[11] Ibid, 769-772.
[12] Ibid, 771.
[13] Ibid, 771.
[14] Goddard, “Embedded Revisionism,” 768.
[15] John Ikenberry and Darren Lim, “China’s Emerging Institutional Statecraft: The Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and the prospects for counter-hegemony” (Brookings Institute, April 2017).
[16] Yan Xuetong, “The Age of Uneasy Peace: Chinese Power in a Divided World.” Foreign Affairs 98 (January/February 2019), 40-46.
[17] Ibid.
[18] Goddard, “Embedded Revisionism,” 770.
[19] Hafner-Burton, Kahler, and Montgomery, “Network Analysis for International Relations,” 574.
[20] The Diplomat, “Sudan: China’s Original Foothold in Africa,” (June 14, 2017).
[21] Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China, “China’s Initiation of the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence”, fmprc.gov.cn, (https://www.fmprc.gov.cn/mfa_eng/ziliao_665539/3602_665543/3604_665547/t18053.shtml, accessed March 27, 2019)
[22] The World Bank, “The Belt and Road Initiative” (https://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/regional-integration/brief/belt-and-road-initiative) accessed April 29, 2019.
[23] Ikenberry and Lim, “China’s Emerging Institutional Statecraft.”
[24] Li Jiachiang “Developing China’s Indian Ocean Strategy” in China Quarterly of International Strategic Studies, Vol. 3, No. 4 (2017), 481–497.
[25] Irene Yuan Sun, The Next Factory of the World: How Chinese Investment is Reshaping Africa (Harvard Business Review Press: Brighton, Massachusetts, 2017).
[26] Goddard, “Embedded Revisionism,” 771.
[27] Ibid, 773-774.
[28] Ibid, 765.
[29] Brooks and Wohlforth, “The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers in the Twenty-First Century,” 7-53.
[30] Goddard, “Embedded Revisionism” 774.

Oh… Canada?

/ Jim Sojourner / Leave a comment

America’s northern neighbor could be the next great power

The land is broad and open, riven and pocked with fresh water, studded by trees, and shot through with veins of oil, coal, and precious rocks. Today, Canada is comfortable and safe, a thriving but middling nation with long shores, often overlooked in the shadow of the United States. Internationally, it is seen as benign and mostly harmless. And yet, because of its natural features, Canada could someday soon be one of the world’s great powers.

Much these days is made about the rise of China and the potential of India, all of it set against the backdrop of diminishing American power. “China will rule the world!” some declare.[i] “Is this the Asian century?” others ponder.[ii] But given the realities of geography and climate, demographics and institutions, the truth is probably neither. The future of global power lies to the north. Given the condition of Canada today and the likelihoods of the world tomorrow, should it choose to do so, Canada could rise to become one of the world’s great powers. Canada owns excellent geography, abutting not two but three oceans and bordering on land one (currently) friendly, wealthy country. Canada has well-established and high-functioning institutions along with a rich, educated, and relatively small population, factors that will become even more significant as natural resources diminish worldwide. Perhaps most importantly, as those global resources deplete under the dual pressures of bloating population and soaring temperatures, Canada will have the vast natural resources other nations covet: petroleum, minerals, trees, space, and most critically, fresh water. With those resources, Canada can feed its people, rev its economic engine, and stoke the fires of a war machine to keep it all secure. Forget the Asian century. Unless a great power war or quantum leap in technology rewrites history in unforeseen ways, the future may very well belong to Canada.

Before the end of the 19th century, Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan gazed upon the ocean and saw a “great highway” and a “wide common.”[iii] Control over the watery lanes and fields, he realized, enables the rise of great powers. Great Britain rose to dominance with her mastery of the oceans. Insulated, unlike continental France or Holland, from the European continent and its wars, Britain developed its sea power. It built a roaring and revolutionary industrial economy on the trade enabled by maritime supremacy.[iv] Centuries later, the United States—like England separated by water from Eurasian conflict—rose out of its Civil War to do much the same. Americans poured agricultural and industrial products out along the Atlantic and Pacific “highways” to rule the global economy, the wide common, and then the world.[v] Canada could be next. At more than 200,000 kilometers, Canada’s total coastline far exceeds any other country. It runs 10 times longer than that of the United States and offers Canada easy and unblockable access to the ocean highways and commons. Isolated as it is by ice and water and bordered by the formidable but friendly United States, Canada should also remain relatively untangled from wars that might cripple other parts of the world. While Canada’s northern coastline currently hides under the arctic ice for much of the year, shrinking sea ice due to climate change is opening up arctic sea lanes and ports, giving Canada access not only to the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans but also to the north. Shorter travel distances and cheaper shipping on those northern routes will enable Canada to truly capitalize on its geographic advantages, especially given its dominant position over the Northwest Passage, which skirts through Canada’s northern islands and will link Canada to a thriving northern Europe.

But Geography alone can’t build a great power. Canada will need to cash in on its natural resources, exporting raw materials and industrial products at premium prices to resource-starved countries across the world. Canada has some of the most abundant natural resources on earth, including petroleum (third largest reserves in the world), coal (fifth largest), iron ore (seventh largest), potash for fertilizer (30 percent of world production), and timber (nine percent of the world’s forests).[vi] Extracting those resources and converting them into energy and industrial products won’t slow global climate change, but that won’t matter much for Canada, which is poised to benefit from a warming climate. According to one major study, in economic terms alone, by 2100 climate change will have added to 247 percent to Canada’s already top-10 gross domestic product; only Russia and some of the Nordic countries are poised to do better.[vii] As the Yangtze, Indus, and Mekong run dry and spark potentially catastrophic conflict among nuclear-armed powers in Asia, Canada’s rivers, lakes, and aquifers—making up some 20 percent of total global fresh water—will provide the lifeblood of Canada’s great power rise. While the drying world scorches under higher temperatures that reduce arable land to deserts, Canada’s frozen forests will transform (partly because of ferocious wildfires) into productive agricultural prairie just as its arctic ports open up. As it has throughout history, the pace of uneven economic growth enabled by these changes will have a large and positive long-term impact on Canada’s relative power. Furthermore, contrary to accepted wisdom, Canada’s diminutive population could also multiply its economic advantages. Small enough to not tax an already-stressed natural environment, Canada’s population size and open landscape also allow room to accommodate immigrants who can contribute to Canada’s economy and add their expertise to its intellectual and technological development. As a result, Canada should have much more than an abundance of resources; it will have the bountiful brainpower with which to engineer and manufacture the machines of industry, agriculture, trade, and war.

It will likely need those machines, too, not only to link its ports to the world and power its economic engine. Canada will need to fight off jealous, resource-hungry competitors. Canada currently spends only about 1 percent of its $1.65 trillion GDP on the military. But with practical experience in recent wars and some of the world’s most advanced equipment, observers still rank Canada’s military among the world’s top 20,[viii] despite the government spending much less on guns and much more on butter. The result is a serviceable military and a prosperous state managed by some of the least corrupt institutions on earth.[ix] Those functional institutions set up Canada to take maximum advantage of the future economic growth and allocate its cornucopia appropriately, balancing the needs of the population with the needs of the military. Although Canada’s armed forces don’t currently cause potential rivals to quake, history shows that the rise of great powers—and the outcome of great wars—depends less on current military power, and more on  potential productive capacity.[x] Just as Britain outdid France and Germany, and America outpaced Japan and the Soviet Union, Canada will have the resources, the productive capacity, the know-how, and the well-oiled institutions to rapidly transform its military into a potent force. The future distribution of military power will follow the shift in the productive balances. Canada, with greater productive capacity than its rivals because of its geography, natural endowment, and beneficial effects of climate change, should be able to win a great power war and survive the struggle for resources and power.

In a world of constantly shifting relative power, the future is never certain. Wars, catastrophes, and technological leaps reshape the world in unpredictable ways. But if the past is a guide and forecasts about the effects of climate change hold true, Canada will have the geography, resources, institutions, and productive capacity to leapfrog to great power status. It simply must have the chutzpah to do so. Global policymakers should take note: The future belongs to North America.

[i] Martin Jacques, When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order (Penguin Books: New York, New York, 2012).
[ii] Jong-Wha Lee, Is This the Asian Century? (World Scientific Publishing Company: Singapore, 2017).
[iii] A.T. Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power Upon History (Little, Brown and Company: Boston, 1890), 25.
[iv] England’s industrial output made up nearly 20 percent of the world total in 1860.
[v] American national income ($37 billion) was three times larger than its nearest competitors, Germany ($12 billion) and England ($11 billion), in 1914.
[vi] Government of Canada, “Natural Resources Canada”, https://www.nrcan.gc.ca/home.
[vii] Marshall Burke, Solomon M. Hsiang, and Edward Miguel, “Global, non-linear effect of temperature on economic production,” Nature (Oct. 15, 2015).
[viii] Global Firepower, “2019 Global Firepower Rankings,” https://www.globalfirepower.com/
[ix] Transparency International, “2018 Global Corruption Index”, https://www.transparency.org/cpi2018
[x] Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (Random House: New York, 1987).

Power: Outcomes Matter Most

/ Jim Sojourner / Leave a comment

What is power? To answer that question, we might first ask another: Why does anyone want power? The answer is plain: actors need power to get what they want.  Power is a means to an end. Whether that end is security, honor, wealth, all the above, or something else entirely, power is how actors achieve their aims. If we are to recognize who gets what they want and why, we need to define power and understand the ways one might attain it. We first need a clear definition of power, to consider other prominent definitions in light of that definition, and finally to find a way to adequately operationalize that definition to aid our understanding of power international relations.

The components of power in international relations are myriad. Material resources including military assets, natural resources, economic capital, demographics, and geography all contribute to national power, as do other less tangible aspects such as diplomatic skill, military effectiveness, culture, or national spirit. Together, these building blocks form a power base that actors can use to get what they want. Mere possession of the blocks, however, does not guarantee power. As Jeffery Hart puts it, “reasons for controlling resources or other actors arise of the desire to achieve certain outcomes.”[1] States must also, therefore, be able to convert their base resources into outcomes. Without the ability to do so, they squander resources, diminish their power, and fail to get what they want. Considering these facts, this is our definition of power: A’s ability to convert its capacity into getting what it wants.[2]

The two-part definition is essential to capture the key elements of power, each of which merit closer attention. Each part of the formula depends on the other. First, resources – capacity – are necessary for any exercise of power. As Joseph Nye argues, “Power is conveyed through resources, whether tangible or intangible.”[3] A country with more resources, be they tanks, bodies, dollars, or skills has a greater capacity, or potential, for power.

But as our definition implies, capacity is not enough to be powerful in a given situation. Nye again: “Power conversion—getting from resources to behavioral outcomes—is a crucial intervening variable. … because it is outcomes, not resources, that we care about we must pay more attention to contexts and strategies.” [4] In other words, actors must use effectively the resources they have to get what they want. This is often more difficult that it might seem. Nye points, for example, to America’s Vietnam War as a salient demonstration of that fact.[5] The United States, with a far greater total power capacity than North Vietnam, could not convert its tanks, planes, bombs, bodies, dollars, and influence into the outcome it wanted. The United States failed to achieve power. In such a case, A might have a greater total capacity for power than B, but A fails the second half of our power formula. A does not, or cannot, convert that capacity into getting what it wants. B, meanwhile, might successfully convert its lesser total capacity into getting what it wants. In this case, B has exercised power over A.

This broad, outcomes-based definition of power accounts for the different kinds of goals different kinds of actors have. Not all states seek primacy; some desire to simply maintain an acceptable economic and security environment. As Hart argues, outcomes provide the best approach to power because a power conceptualization based on outcomes is both more general than others and accounts for interdependence among actors.[6] In this way, it’s an improvement over Robert Dahl’s much-accepted definition that “A has power over B to the extent that he can get B to do something B would not otherwise do.”[7] While Dahlian power is one important aspect of power, as a concept, its scope is too specific and excludes too much. As discussed above, A getting B to do something does not mean A gets what it wants. Furthermore, a broad definition of power is better able accommodate states with less power or those looking to “exploit asymmetry”[8] like Vietnam, states that want to get B to not do something, and states trying to maintain their regional position or standing in an interconnected balance of power. Power may be relational,[9] but relationships are more diffuse and interconnected than Dahl admits, and a complex, multi-state environment makes Hart’s outcomes-based approach superior to Dahl’s.

Dahl’s definition is not without its uses, however. We should think of his narrow concept of power as one of those all-important strategies that complete the second half of our power formula: converting capacity into outcomes. Dahl’s is one conversion strategy and the first of Steven Lukes’s three faces of power. Each face, in fact, offers a different strategy for converting resources into outcomes and fits comfortably into our broad definition of power.

In the first face of power—Dahl’s kind of power—A demands B do what A wants, “your money or your life,” as Nye describes it.[10] Either by threats or inducements, A tries to get what it wants from B. Naked power carries a real risk of failure, and also requires using up resources, which might leave a state with less total capacity for power and nothing gained. Still, this power conversion strategy is the most basic and underpins the other strategies, even if just implicitly.

This narrow route to power is not the only one, it is only the most direct. There is a subtler method of converting capacity into outcomes. This is Peter Bachrach and Morton Baratz’s second face of power strategy, wherein actors “influence those community values and political institutions … which tend to limit the scope of actual decision making.”[11] As Nye explains, powerful actors can use their power to make sure other actors don’t get a seat at the table or, if they do, must abide by rules limiting their choices already implemented by the powerful actors.[12] A might spend its resources to build institutions or international orders that set agendas and constrain B’s choices so that A gets what it wants. If B accepts A’s order as legitimate, A can get what it wants with less risk and “save on carrots and sticks”.[13]

Lastly, Steven Lukes argues the best way actors can exercise power is by shaping the initial preferences of those around them.[14] If A can reshape a situation in a way that causes B to want what A wants, it is no longer necessary to override B’s initial preferences, either by constraining the agenda or by resorting to force.[15] A and B now desire the same outcome and can add their resources and conversion skills together to get what A wants. A can convert B’s own capacity into A’s own desired outcome. As Lukes says, what better way to exercise power?

Although an outcomes-based definition of power is the most accurate and encompassing, operationalizing to study international relations can be difficult. We may look backward through history at different actors, assess their capacities in terms of resources, and ask for any given situation: “What were their goals? To what degree did they achieve them? And how?” In this way, we might analyze the power of specific actors at various points in time by determining if they were able to convert their capacity into desired outcomes. By drawing careful and appropriate analogies from history, we might understand which resources are important in which situations, which conversions strategies work and when, and we might apply those lessons about power to the world before of us.

This operationalization, however, is too constrained to satisfy all international relations scholars. Here we must admit that an outcomes-based conceptualization of power is difficult to operationalize in a predictive manner because it is issue specific.[16] With it, we cannot draw up a hierarchy of power in the world today, for example. What we can do is estimate the total amount of capacity each state has at its disposal. To best operationalize our outcomes-based conception of power, then, we should turn to Michael Beckley. Beckley admits that a power-as-outcomes approach such as ours “measures power to a greater degree of granularity,”[17] but in order to predict power in the present or future, the best we can do is account for the net value of resources an actor has at its disposal.[18] By doing this (Beckley’s GDP method is a workable proxy[19]), we can at least understand a state’s approximate total power capacity and fill in the first part of our two-factor power formula.

In this way, practitioners of international relations can not only grasp the rough distribution of power capacity in the world, they can also combine that estimate of raw power with an understanding of historical power conversion strategies and apply that hybrid knowledge to specific ongoing or potential conflicts.  Still, it must remain obscured in the fog of the future whether the actors will successfully use one of Lukes’s faces of power to convert their resources into getting what they want. Power is never assured.

[1] Hart, Jeffery, “Three Approaches to the Measurement of Power in International Relations,” International Organizations, Vol. 30, No. 2 (Spring 1976), 296.
[2] This definition has its basis in Figure 1.1 in Joseph Nye’s The Future of Power (New York: PublicAffairs, 2011) 11.
[3] Nye, Joseph S. Jr, The Future of Power (New York: PublicAffairs, 2011), 8.
[4] Nye, The Future of Power, 11.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Hart, Jeffery, “Three Approaches to the Measurement of Power in International Relations,” International Organizations, Vol. 30, No. 2 (Spring 1976), 303.
[7] Dahl, Robert. “The Concept of Power,” Behavioral Science, 2:3 (July 1957), 202-203.
[8] Hart. “Three Approaches to the Measurement of Power in International Relations,” 292.
[9] Dahl, “The Concept of Power,” 202-203.
[10] Nye, The Future of Power,11.
[11] Bachrach, Peter, and Baratz,, Morton, “The Two Faces of Power,” American Political Science Review, Vol. 56, Issue 4 (December 1962), 952.
[12] Nye, The Future of Power, 14.
[13] Ibid, 16.
[14] Lukes, Steven, Power: A Radical View (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1974), 29.
[15] Nye, The Future of Power,
[16] Beckley, Michael. “The Power of Nations: Measuring What Matters.” International Security, Vol. 43, No. 2 (Fall 2018), 12.
[17] Ibid, 12.
[18] Ibid, 14-15.
[19] Ibid, 21. Beckley multiplies total GDP by per capita GDP to approximate the net resources at a state’s disposal. It’s not a true net, but it works well enough for our purposes.