Article Review: William C. Wohlforth, The Stability Of Unipolar World

Wohlforth offer three propositions in this article. First, the post cold war international system is unipolar. Second, the unipolarity is prone to peace. Third, the unipolarity isn’t only peaceful but durable.

But, on this paper I only want to review on Wohlforth’s thought that the unipolar system is prone to peace because of that hypothesis is premature. There are two reason is argued by Wohlfort for his hypothesis of unipolarity is prone to peace. First, in unipolar system, the leading state’s power advantage removes the problem of hegemonic rivalry from world politics. Second, it also reduces the salience and stakes of balance of power politics among the major states.

Wohlfort’s argument is based on his examination on hegemonic theory and balance of power theory. Wohlfort claims that both theories predict that unipolar system will be peaceful than others.

Wohlforth’s reasons are true, but we also need to consider that the nature of our international system is anarchy that always needs balancer to stabilize system from states’ actions that can lead international system to war. On the other words, balancer is an important thing in anarchy system. Balancer(s) or balancing state(s) has function to oversight and limiting other state(s) to take actions that can lead system to war.

In contrary, unipolarity dismisses the balancing system because there is only one leading state in the system. Hence, the unipolar system doesn’t have mechanism to prevent the single-leading state to take any action that can unstabilize the international system. Besides that, unipolarity also can lead international politics to a single leading-state authoritarian system.

For example, after the cold-war U.S become the only superpower in international politics, so it means post cold war the nature of international system is unipolarity. Nevertheless, war still happens in the world. Even, some wars were initiated by U.S such as, Iraq War and Afghanistan War.

I agree with Waltz that says bipolar system is less war prone than the others. In bipolar system, the system has balancing mechanism to prevent the leading state to take destructive actions because of there are two leading state in international system, so both states can play a role as counterpart of the other that can oversight and limiting their actions.