Desperate Times, Desperate Measures

This chapter reviews the literature and lays out the debate on decline. It divides the rival views into two main camps: preventive war and domestic dysfunction. For preventive war theorists, who include power transition and hegemonic stability theorists, there are strong international incentives for falling states to stave off their declines through aggressive or inflexible policies that culminate in war. For scholars of domestic dysfunction, decentralization, paralysis, or hijacking by special interests are likely to block prompt and proportionate strategic adjustment. This chapter questions the logic and evidence of each.

Conclusion

This chapter sums the arguments and findings of the book, and relates them to the debate on decline, especially the implications for preventive war and domestic dysfunction theories. It then pivots to apply these findings to discussions about how fast the United States is falling, how it is responding to decline, and what the consequences are likely to be.

Tsar Power

This chapter analyzes Russia's ambivalent responses to decline at the turn of the century. Overall, Russian pursued retrenchment policies that helped lay the foundations for its resurgence after World War I, but retrenchment was accelerated by blundering into the Russo-Japanese War and undermined by the Bosnian crisis. Structural conditions, such as the belief that the conquest calculus rewarded attack, help explain why retrenchment was hard to maintain, but many of the errors were self-inflicted by a recalcitrant tsar, who was at odds with much of mass and elite opinion.

A Hegemon Wakes Up

This chapter argues that British elites coalesced behind a policy of retrenchment after the Boer War. Yet retrenchment was a sustained and coherent policy to deal with Britain's changing position in the system, not a focused reaction to rising German power. Balancing against Germany was a late and specific manifestation of British retrenchment, but British domestic and foreign policies were a much broader and continuous effort to make the country more competitive despite decreasing relative capabilities.

Introduction

This chapter asks the central question, outlines the three main arguments, and explains the value added of the work. It underscores why the question matters to theories of international politics and policy debates on the rise of China and the decline of the United States. It also defines decline and retrenchment,relates retrenchment to a spectrum of grand strategies, and provides a map of the rest of the book.