Like a sudden flash of diplomatic lightning, Kosovo has illuminated
much that was previously obscure in the landscape of international
politics. Not because of the victory over Milosevic--it would indeed
be a cold day if NATO could not vanquish a minor power--but because a
norm has been forcefully asserted, a Western norm with explosive
potentialities for many other sovereign states. And because NATO has
made its debut as the military arm of a concert of powers.

During the 1990s, the United States has mostly tiptoed through the
current unipolar structure of the society of states with a sort of
ponderous tact, like a benign Ferdinand-type bull making its way
delicately around a china shop of unknown value. That prudence has
been well justified: the situation is still quite new and of
uncertain import to all the world's policymakers. History is not much
help, for no equal degree of unipolarity has existed since the high
point of the Roman world, almost two millennia ago. The central
balance of power had set the main agenda of world politics for more
than five centuries: its "intermission", even for a time whose length
remains a matter of speculation, is a truly transformatory event, and
foreign affairs bureaucracies tend to be nervous of such upheavals.

The level or depth of that transformation must depend on the duration
of the unipolar "moment", as it was originally labeled by Charles
Krauthammer. If it had actually been just a "moment" (even one coming
up toward ten years, as it now is), any changes in world order might
have proved marginal or ephemeral. But I propose to argue that it
will last at least another four decades or so, and possibly a great
deal longer, though that will depend on Washington's choice of
strategies. Such a duration would be enough to set in concrete
changes that have already begun to modify some of the oldest and most
basic norms and conventions that previously governed the society of
states.

The Lingering "Moment"

Before assessing those changes, what are the arguments for expecting
so long a duration of this phase of diplomatic history? They turn
primarily on the economic, military and diplomatic "distance" that
the five or so assumed potential challengers to America's current
ascendancy--its prospective "peer competitors"--must travel before
they could have plausible grounds for making such a challenge. That
in turn means considering briefly the qualifications necessary for
membership in an eventual multipolar or bipolar balance, when and if
one replaces the present unipolar structure.

These qualifications are not very different from those possessed by
the members of past central balances, allowing the differences in
scale between the European society of states of the nineteenth
century and the global society of the twenty-first. The latter will
be a society of giants. Extensive territory, population and
resources; high economic and technological skills; adequate political
and social cohesion; advanced military muscle (especially power
projection capacity) and the willingness to use it; organizational
and administrative capacity for rapid decision-making in crisis; and
(most crucially) capacity to induce the behavior known as
"bandwagoning"--that is, joining what is calculated to be the winning
side--by other powers will all be necessary. And potential motivation
must be considered alongside potential capacity.

Almost every commentator has for some years been regarding China as
the likeliest of the usual suspects for future "peer competitor"
status. The interests of Washington and Beijing seem to be on a
possible collision course in East Asia and the China Seas, to a
degree not really paralleled by America's relationships with major
powers in its other spheres of interest. The survival of Taiwan, the
fate of the two Koreas, the U.S. alliance with Japan, the visibility
of U.S. troops in the area, the even greater visibility of U.S. naval
forces (as in the 1996 crisis in the Taiwan Strait), the prospects of
a Theatre Missile Defense system possibly covering Taiwan and Japan,
and the resented American pressures on human rights (concerning not
only China itself but, still more, Tibet) are all likely to continue
creating frictions and irritations.

On the "future capabilities" side, China seems prospectively more
formidable than other potential competitors. Its population,
territory and resources provide the foundation of that impression.
The spectacular rate of Chinese economic growth in the last few
decades has inevitably reinforced this. China's level of technical
and economic competence has also been impressive. And a party
autocracy like that in Beijing (assuming it survives) has an inherent
advantage in making rapid, ruthless decisions during crisis, as in
1989.

Conceding all that, China's shadow is often greater than even its
very real substance warrants. For some decades to come, its apparent
strengths will be offset by less apparent weaknesses. The rapidity of
its economic growth has often led analysts to pass over the immense
structural difficulties and imbalances of the Chinese economy: for
instance, the problem of restructuring loss-making state industries,
the great inequalities between the prosperous coastal zones and the
still bitterly poor interior, the weakness of the banking sector, the
inadequate development of commercial law, the rushed urbanization,
and the truly awesome fact of more than one hundred million
unemployed in the labor force. As well, the ability to sell into the
American market will remain vital to the foreign exchange reserves
that enable China to buy essential commodities, weapons and
technologies. Normal trading status, previously called most favored
nation status, will therefore remain a vulnerable asset. Most oil
supplies for China still come from the Middle East, and could at
present readily be interdicted. The political control the Beijing
regime wields over its territory and peripheral areas is potentially
fragile.

On the military side, though China has bought and/or copied some
advanced Russian platforms (aircraft and submarines) and perhaps
garnered a few American secrets, its defense establishment still has
a very long way to go before it will be able to look sideways at the
7th fleet, except perhaps very close to the Chinese coast. There are
clear signs that China's strategists are well aware of the limits of
their power projection capacity, even as against Taiwan. They have
made no effort in recent decades to retake the islands Qemoy and
Matsu, held by Taiwan since 1949. Official awareness of China's
current strategic weakness may even be seen in the interest that
young Chinese strategists are allowed to take in the "revolution in
military affairs" (RMA), the forward edge of advanced American
strategic thinking. If the Chinese defense establishment is conscious
of having no chance of catching up with the present generation of
American weapons systems, or even the next generation, it is clearly
logical for it to concentrate on a more distant strategic future,
which means the weaponry envisaged in the RMA. Since a weapons
generation these days lasts at least fifteen years, that would put
"peer competitor" status on hold until about forty-five years hence.

But there are a couple of other considerations that are perhaps even
more powerful. The first is what I would call the "Soviet warning."
The Soviet Union strove to compete militarily with the United States
for the whole forty-three years of the Cold War, channeling as much
as 20 percent of its GNP per annum into that effort. The result was
not only failure and almost irreparable economic damage, but the loss
of Communist Party control of the government. The party autocracy in
Beijing seems unlikely to risk that fate for itself. Defense
modernization may be getting rather more funds than it did earlier,
but it is still not at the top of the regime's priority list, and is
unlikely to get there any time soon.

The final consideration is China's restricted ability to induce
bandwagoning by other powers, a factor that becomes very relevant
when we consider the next two potential challengers to U.S. supremacy.
Russia must obviously still be regarded in that light, even though its
conventional forces (on the evidence in Chechnya and elsewhere) seem
to be in a terminal state of decline and its nuclear strike force is
dangerously ill-kept. How long will it be before it recovers from its
present disasters? Again, the answer seems to be at least three or
four decades.

The most puzzling question in recent history is why a loss of
ideological faith and confidence among the Soviet political elite
(not even the actual replacement of the elite, because most of the
current Russian oligarchy are old communist apparatchiks, from the
president down) seems to have produced ruin in almost every aspect of
Russian life, right down to the sewerage system. It is as if the
"achievements" of the Soviet period had suddenly proved to be nothing
more than a seventy year-long Potemkin village, whose collapsed
facade has left the Russia of Dostoyevsky's time visible again. For
it to pose a challenge, a modern economy has to be created out of the
current "robber capitalism", along with infrastructure, a workable
administration and a modernized defense establishment with
state-of-the-art weaponry. Not only is it difficult to see those
tasks being accomplished rapidly, it is difficult to believe they
will be accomplished at all.

But the new/old Russia, though far from able to fill the strategic
shoes of the vanished Soviet Union, possesses one asset from its past
that may prove relevant and valuable in the present unipolar
structure. Nineteenth-century Russia was a founding member of, and an
enthusiastic participant in, the old European concert of powers
(1815-1914). I believe that an understanding of that system in Moscow
(for which Russians need only consult their own diplomatic history)
will be useful again in due course, perhaps only to Russia, but
perhaps also to the West and the longer survival of unipolarity.

Japan would hardly warrant mentioning in this context were it not for
all those books and articles of a decade ago about "Japan as Number
One." Those prophecies seem now to have been based on nothing more
substantial than the assumptions that comparative rates of economic
growth were the only factor that needed to be taken into
consideration when assessing the future balance of power, and that
Japan would grow at 9 percent (and China at 10 percent) forever. In
reality, Japan has only had two of the requisites for "peer
competitor" status: technological and economic competence, and
political cohesion. Its territorial and resource endowments are
sparse, its population aging faster than most, and its capacity for
crisis decision-making unimpressive. Its armed forces have near
state-of-the-art weaponry, but national willingness to deploy them,
even in peacekeeping operations, remains low. Japan sits, non-nuclear
and without strategic depth, at the junction of the spheres of
interest of three nuclear powers--the United States, China and
Russia--and, in the form of a reunited Korea, a possible fourth. That
is a vulnerable situation, and more vulnerable now and prospectively
than it was during the Cold War.

Chinese forces, when they are eventually full-grown, will be deployed
in the general vicinity of Japan--the China Seas, the Chinese
coast--in a way that was never true of Soviet forces during the Cold
War. If push had ever come to shove in that struggle, it would have
been the Western allies who would have borne the first shock. All
that changed when China rather than Russia inherited the Soviet
mantle as the likeliest challenger to U.S. ascendancy. So it is not
at all surprising that Japan has clung more firmly to the U.S.
bandwagon since the end of the Cold War than it did during earlier
decades. The bilateral 1997 defense agreement commits Japan to more
active participation with the United States in East Asia than was
earlier the case. That is a mark of an increased sense of
vulnerability among the Japanese elite, and of reduced leverage
within the alliance.

The Most Likely Challenge

The European situation is quite different. Though the endemic Balkan
troubles are a source of anguish, and will probably go on being so,
no plausible major military threat seems to be impending on the
European horizon. Even if Russian military power revives at an
improbable rate, the strategic advantages that the Soviet Union
enjoyed in Eastern Europe for almost forty-five years cannot be
reasserted without hegemonic war. According to all informed reports,
Russia's nuclear capacity (once credited with being on a par with
that of the United States) is much impaired. The conventional forces
that once made Europe tremble are visibly in great disrepair. Despite
all this the Europeans (except sometimes the French) still cling,
almost as much as the Japanese, to the American bandwagon. They show
few signs of ever seeking to elevate themselves to the status of a
military "peer competitor" of the United States.

Nevertheless, in terms of most of the qualifications outlined
earlier, Europe is still the only feasible potential rival for the
United States in the next three or four decades. Its economy is about
the same size (and will grow larger with new members), its technology
almost as advanced, its diplomatic traditions longer. It includes two
nuclear powers with adequate stockpiles and sophisticated delivery
systems. It deploys large conventional forces with near
state-of-the-art equipment and with considerable experience in
working together. (Kosovo, however, vividly demonstrated the
difference between near and actual, in terms of power projection
capacity. Not only were more than 70 percent of the sorties American,
but just about all of them were dependent on U.S. surveillance and
location systems.)

Europe's only real deficit, when viewed as a potential rival to the
United States, is its low capacity for decision-making, particularly
in times of crisis. The evolution of events in Bosnia illustrated
that painfully well. Even at their most beleaguered, as during the
Clinton impeachment hearings, Washington's decision-making mechanisms
are infinitely more effective than those in Brussels. That might seem
like a temporary condition, easily and soon to be remedied. But it is
not: it is intrinsic not only to the present stage of the great
enterprise on which the Europeans are embarked, but to the most
probable outcome of that enterprise, the making of "Europe."

The original "Europe of the Six" might possibly have turned into a
convincing federation, a "United States of Europe." But the
prospective "Europe of the Twenty-plus" will surely be a
confederation, probably an economically powerful and prosperous one,
with the euro, despite its teething troubles, becoming the major
rival to the dollar. But confederations do not exactly have an
impressive record of joint decision-making in crisis. So in terms of
developing either the capacity or motivation to challenge U.S.
ascendancy, the new Europe seems likely to prove a non-starter. There
will of course be endemic frictions between the future economic
giants on either side of the Atlantic, and plenty of cultural
resentment at both the elite and grassroots levels. But when have
there not been? Ever since the rise of U.S. power at the end of the
nineteenth century, the "Johnny-come-lately" on the other side of the
Atlantic has been getting under the skin of the Europeans. But the
resentments were much greater in the early decades of this century
than after the beginning of the Cold War. European governments since
then have known well where their strategic bread is buttered. They
are not about to blow the advantages of transatlantic alliance
because of a trade row over bananas.

Kosovo showed that very well. Even the French went along with
Washington's strategies with hardly a murmur. There was of course a
wide spectrum of political and diplomatic opinion within the
alliance, with Britain at the "hawk" end, and Greece (an old ally of
Serbia) at the "dove" end. The arguments about whether to send in
ground forces in combat mode or merely in peace-enforcement mode may
have been real, but more probably were just an assiduous piece of
crisis-signaling to increase the psychological pressure on Belgrade.
The truth of that may not be known for some time, but despite the
last-ditch resistance of some army die-hards, "distance warfare" does
seem to have shown its capacities, and certainly confirmed the
indispensable role of U.S. advanced weaponry, even for Europe.

I would argue, then, that both the Europeans and the Japanese are
likely for the foreseeable future to remain on the American
bandwagon, valuing the benefits of the alliance with Washington above
any advantages they might secure by playing their own respective
diplomatic hands. And so long as that remains the case, a true
multipolar central balance, such as many analysts were envisaging
before the completeness of the Russian collapse became apparent, is
not on the cards.

The likeliest successor to the current unipolar structure, therefore,
is a new bipolar balance, with a recovered Russia and a militarily
and economically developed China reviving the old Moscow-Beijing
alliance of 1950 (despite its many difficulties) and probably
recruiting quite a few allies, mostly from the Islamic world. In
traditional terms, the "status quo" alliance (the United States,
Europe and Japan) will still command much greater economic and
military power than such a "revisionist" alliance. But the overall
situation will be uncomfortably like the early Cold War balance of
1949-62, the most dangerous phase in the tension-ridden four decades
of that conflict.

The Pretense of Concert

Most Westerners (though by no means everyone else) would agree that
such a phase should if possible be averted. And it can be, if
Washington formulates its diplomatic strategies well enough.
Fortunately, there is already visible a policy to that end, one that
is equally acceptable to the mainstream foreign policy elites in both
political parties, though perhaps not to their respective far-left
and far-right fringes.

It is the strategy that seems already to have been adopted by the
Clinton administration: the unipolar world should be run as if it
were a concert of powers. In a sense, the post-World War II
"institutionalization" of diplomacy--through the UN, NATO, the G-7,
the WTO, the World Bank, the IMF, the OSCE and so on--has more or
less imposed that strategy on policymakers. Resolutions must get
through the Security Council and consensus must be sought in the
other organizations to "legitimate" the policies that are deemed to
be in the U.S. national interest. Of course, the policies could be
followed without seeking their legitimation by "the international
community", but the advantages of securing it are worth the
diplomatic labor it takes. A resolution or consensus eases
consciences both in America and abroad, and helps protect U.S. allies
from their respective critics at home (though not in Washington, of
course).

What a viable, long-term concert of powers strategy requires first is
to strengthen and even widen existing alliances (as with the Clinton
defense agreement with Japan and the ongoing expansion of NATO), and
second, to draw the once and possible future adversary, Russia, into
the circle of the concert, exactly as France was recruited into the
original Concert of Europe only three years after the defeat of
Napoleon.

It will instantly be objected that one of the assumed desiderata, the
eastward expansion of NATO, is at odds with another aim-- securing
agreement from the Russian leadership that its national interest is
best forwarded by diplomatic identification with the Western powers.
That clash of objectives does exist at the moment, and may well
persist for at least as long as Yeltsin remains the effective though
erratic decisionmaker in Moscow. But one should also remember a
widely practiced though seldom acknowledged diplomatic maxim: "If you
can't beat them, join them." Russia has no God-given right to
determine the diplomatic, political or economic choices of the
Central European powers, as it did during the Cold War. If Moscow is
obliged to abandon all hope of reasserting that sphere of control or
influence, the option of securing the best deal it can through
membership of the Western concert becomes the more appealing.

As was mentioned earlier, the old Russia had a century's experience
of how to operate in a concert system. Its historians and probably
its policy planners will therefore be well aware of the advantages
that accrue to the "balancer" (the "swing voter") in such a system.
In the old European system those advantages were enjoyed by Britain,
but in the twenty-first century (though not until its later decades)
they would logically fall to Russia, as the ambivalent state between
two prospective coalitions. Washington's policies (economic,
diplomatic and strategic) will be major factors in deciding how
Moscow's ambivalences are resolved. It must be made clear that the
economic and even strategic advantages of being part of the
"Vancouver to Vladivostok" grouping (a phrase that James Baker used
to use) could be very real. They should eventually include both close
affiliation with the EU and membership in NATO.

Kosovo and the New Norms

But, it might be asked, what is in all this for America? Well,
primarily, the further extension of the phase of unipolarity beyond
the forty years or so that I have been assuming in this article. The
current U.S. alliance structure (the American bandwagon of its
European and Japanese allies, plus assorted others) is already an
immense concentration of power. If Russia can be recruited into it on
a reasonably long-term basis, the likelihood of any effective
challenge would retreat into the remote future. The Pax Americana, in
terms of its duration, might thus become more like the Pax Romana
than the Pax Britannica.

The stress on peace has a real relevance. The primary virtue of
unipolarity is that it inhibits capacity to make war at several
levels. At the widest level (hegemonic war, Armageddon-style war, or
what Sam Huntington calls "civilizational" war), the great
preponderance of power on the side of the status quo inhibits
challenge by any rational decisionmaker. On the most local level,
that same preponderance of power should in time (when all the
implications sink in) make it possible to convince others that
launching hostilities may not be a good idea, for their own societies
or for themselves personally. Of course, such a concert is not yet
fully established, and there will probably always remain some
regional autocrat like Saddam Hussein who will "chance his arms"
locally, and some powers like India and Pakistan that are too big to
bully. Nevertheless, the likelihood of war in a unipolar system is
much less than in either a bipolar or a multipolar balance. And it is
worth preserving on that basis alone.

There is, however, another factor with still more capacity to
transform the whole structure and future of the society of states.
Unipolarity promotes the rapid emergence, and even the prospective
enforcement, of a new set of norms governing the behavior of states.
In doing so, it undoubtedly erodes the traditional concept of state
sovereignty. The basic norm of the Westphalian society of states
(from 1648) was cuius regio, eius religio; that is (loosely
translated), "the ruler is entitled to make the rules in his own
domain." That concept of sovereignty has been gradually circumscribed
since the beginning of this century, and more rapidly in the past
fifty years. In the past ten years (i.e., in this phase of
unipolarity), it has been still more rapidly eroded.

The new norms are, in effect, Wilsonian rather than Westphalian.
Eighty years after his disastrous defeat in 1920, the ghost of
Woodrow Wilson bestrides the world. In particular, his maxim "Every
people is entitled to choose the sovereignty under which it shall
live" is the principle (whether they know it or not) behind every
separatist insurgency from the Kosovars and the Kurds to the East
Timorese and the Irian Jayans--even, in a more subdued way, behind
the aspirations of Scottish nationalists and Quebecois. The
assumption that any ethnic group with a territorial base of its own
is entitled to sovereignty is widespread and easily cultivated. It is
also, of course, the potential source of an infinity of trouble for
the future society of states.

Kosovo offers a useful example. In effect, what happened was that a
dissident province of Yugoslavia was able to enlist the sympathies of
the West to a degree that induced the NATO powers to mount a major
military campaign against the sovereignty under which the Kosovars
had lived (and often died). The current settlement gives Kosovo only
autonomy, not full independence or sovereignty. But the final outcome
is still in the lap of history, and it is unlikely that it will be
friendly to Belgrade.

Moscow and Beijing could hardly fail to notice the potential
application to their own problems (Chechnya, Tibet, Taiwan) of the
moralistic universalism inherent in Western policy. Neither could a
great many other countries, for the world is full of dissident
provinces that aspire to autonomy or even sovereignty. But for Moscow
and Beijing there was an extra turn of the screw in the case of
Kosovo, in that the Security Council veto was impotent to block
Western action. The concert of powers, whose diplomatic face is
sometimes but not necessarily the Security Council, went ahead
anyway. The military arm of the concert, which is NATO, proved equal
to the task, and its economic arm, which is the G-7, was a powerful
adjunct. Both Russia and China at present need the West profoundly,
China mostly for the American market, Russia for international aid.
So though both governments had very real reasons for anger and
resentment against Western policy in Kosovo, and quite a few other
grudges against the West as well, both acquiesced. Indeed, Russia
provided considerable help in pulling Western chestnuts out of the
fire.

All that must surely be seen as no end of a lesson in the
international politics of unipolarity--and in the potentialities of a
concert of powers, which is at present exclusively Western, but does
not necessarily have to remain so. As I said earlier, there is always
that useful old maxim, "If you can't beat them, join them." The
Clinton policymakers deserve more credit than they have got for
leaving that option visibly open, especially to Russia. For those who
listened carefully, the "soft answer that turneth away wrath" was
frequently audible during the crisis.

Kosovo has also been a powerful lesson in how the new norms (which
have originated in the international community rather than the
society of states) operate to erode the traditional concept of
sovereignty. So do many other recent episodes. For example, the
government of Chile, nowadays a fairly respectable democracy, does
not want General Pinochet to be put on trial for misdeeds committed
mostly in his own country. Yet Her Majesty's Lords of Appeal in
Ordinary (of all people) in Britain have at least ensured that he has
been confined under house arrest for some months, as a token of moral
reprobation by much of the world. A decade after the Gulf War, Iraqi
sovereignty is far more truncated (sanctions, no-fly zones, arms
inspectors) than Germany's was ten years after either the Kaiser's
war or Hitler's war.

To point these things out is not to disapprove of them. Rather, my
point is just how much they are at odds with the traditional norms
that had governed the society of states for centuries until this
decade, and how well they illustrate the workings of a concert of
powers, usually at present referred to as "the international
community." In other words, the new norms (especially the human
rights and environmental ones) legitimate Great Power intervention in
the crises of lesser powers to a degree seldom envisaged in previous
diplomatic history. The favorable way of interpreting this is as a
moralizing of international politics. The unfavorable way is as
"cultural imperialism" or even as "collective colonialism." Whichever
of those views one takes, it has to be recognized as a truly radical
change in the way the society of states works, and one inherent in
the structure of unipolarity. So Washington's current and immediate
future generations of diplomatic strategists have as large an
opportunity (and as complex a set of tactical choices) before them as
those of 1946-47. They will need to work as hard and as creatively.

Round Up the Usual Euphemisms

I am of course conscious that many Americans will regard the sort of
future I am forecasting for their country with alarm and revulsion,
from a mix of prudential and moral concerns admirably conveyed in a
recent Foreign Affairs discussion of "whether American hegemony is
working."

Unfortunately, the old concert of powers got a bad press in America
during the nineteenth century, and seems never to have recovered from
it in popular opinion. So one could not expect any official person to
use that term: the usual euphemism, "the international community",
will no doubt continue to be used even in a case like the NATO
operations in the Kosovo crisis, for which even the flimsy cloak of
"universality" provided by a Security Council resolution could not be
secured. Mere differences in semantic usage and historical upbringing
are at the root of many of the arguments in this field, and
undoubtedly in some cases the language obscures reality.

The word "unipolarity" is itself a case in point: it carries an unwanted baggage of triumphalism and solitude. Samuel Huntington suggests the coinage "uni-multipolar." That is, in substance, not much at odds with my image of a unipolar world that is and must be operated as if it were a concert of powers. Both underline the importance of Washington's ability to secure and maintain bandwagoning by the current major powers and those of the future. But the crucial point for understanding the potentialities and challenges of the current phase of international history remains the recognition that the central balance of power (that set the agenda of world politics for so many centuries) is at present in abeyance, and that the duration of this highly exceptional phase will be either lengthened or shortened by Washington's choices. The parallel implies another with 1946: the strategy of containment was more or less maintained for the next forty-three years and (despite some very painful errors along the way) produced in time a remarkable transformation in the society of states, to wit the present phase of unipolarity. A "concert" strategy, like the "containment" strategy, will need great tactical flexibility and lots of careful diplomatic judgment. But to those of us who can remember how dangerous the world looked in 1946, and how many obstacles the strategy then adopted had to face, the problems of the foreseeable future do not seem insurmountable.

That is never how it looks at the time, of course, and one is bound to feel a wry sympathy for Warren Christopher's remark, in a television interview just before he left office, "Everyone's crisis tends to become our crisis." But that degree of universalism is not inevitable. The cultivation of allies among regional as well as major powers can enable Washington to spread (and sometimes shed) the burden.

A Comfortable Habit

Reverting briefly to my earlier argument that the present degree of unipolarity has no equivalent more recent than the palmy days of the Roman world, that comparison actually understates the current level of U.S. advantage. For the Roman world coexisted with the great civilizations of China and India, which were hardly touched by it, and the rival empire of Parthia (roughly the contemporary area centered on Iran and Iraq), which was never subdued. The U.S. sphere of cultural influence has no predecessor in its global reach.

There is, however, one other notable point of comparison: the way in which the two paramount powers reached their respective degrees of ascendancy. The great Scottish philosopher David Hume, in his essay on the balance of power, points out the connection between the extension of Roman control and the absence of any countervailing balance of power strategy: