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accept the premise that BOP is less applicable to unipolarity than to multipolarity and bipolarity, this hardly affects BOP’s relevance to today’s world. Though BOP gained much leverage during the Cold War which is considered a textbook case of bipolarity, a closer look at Waltz’s discussion of American dominance at the time reveals what really resembles a picture of American hegemony rather than bipolarity (Waltz 1979, 146-160). Most important, however, is the fact that concurrent to this widening gap between the U.S. and the USSR, a corresponding increase in the balance of power against the U.S. did not occur. Rather, we saw the opposite happen where Soviet satellite states started drifting away one after another. This greatly undermines BOP’s explanatory power even for bipolarity. Richard Lebow’s succinct summary of the years leading to the Soviet collapse illustrates that not only did the USSR productivity remain vastly inferior to that of the U.S., but also that its military (nuclear) capabilities never reached the level as to be a real challenger to the U.S. Hence, the actual period of strict bipolarity during the Cold War is much shorter than is conventionally believed (Lebow, 28-31). It is debatable as to what extent the Soviet “anomaly” was primarily the result of perception, preference or contingency (such as that discussed in Risse, 26), but major discordances between the balance of power and polarity lend further support to my argument that BOP is not determined by polarity itself, but by variables inherent in the international system, which may or may not lead to a concurrence of balance of power and certain types of polarity.
VVThe demarcation between the bipolar Cold War system and the unipolar post-Cold War system is therefore fuzzy at best. This has been further complicated by China’s rise in the most recent decades. To put things in perspective: At the peak of the Cold War, the U.S. enjoyed a GDP of US$5,200 billion – about twice of that of the USSR ($2,700 billion). As of last year, it was $16,000 – also about twice of that of China’s ($8,200 billion).[1] If we were to measure superpower status by nuclear capability (which many scholars use to pinpoint the start of Cold War), the picture is even more ambiguous, with as many as nine states currently having nuclear weapons, including North Korea.[2] Rather than questioning American hegemony today – which this paper does not intend to do, these facts simply serve to remind us of the continuity rather than discreteness of the recent stages of polarity. Because of this, the supposed unipolarity as of present has little bearing on the validity of the BOP theory in explaining state behavior. Hans Morgenthau reaffirms the balance of power as a “perennial element” in human history, regardless of the “contemporary conditions” that the international system operates under (Morgenthau, 9-10). The essence of the BOP theory cannot be reduced to the occurrence of balance of power. With the logic of anarchy and principality of state actors largely unchanged, we can therefore imagine a situation of balancing against the U.S. even in a unipolar system if the U.S. is no longer perceived as a benign hegemon and if states are more concerned with their military disadvantage as a result, especially when a combination of situational factors and diplomatic efforts further facilitates such a change in perception and preference.