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Review Article: Warfare and the Rise and Fall of National Power

W has always been seen as central to the rise and fall of national power. Indeed, it is safe to say that is has been seen as the most important factor in determining the development of an individual nation’s place within the relative balance of power. This vision of warfare and of the rise and fall of national power, however, goes far beyond the results of battles and campaigns, which are usually not seen as decisive. The general thrust of historical scholarship for the last few centuries has instead dwelt upon the overall influence of war. Different thinkers have dwelt on the costs and benefits of preparing for war, the societal changes brought about by the waging of war, and the impact that winning and losing a war can exert on the future development of power. Almost exactly 20 years ago Paul Kennedy published a book that reemphasized the central role of all of these facets of warfare on the rise and fall of national power. The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, written as the Cold War was hitting its extraordinary crescendo, was an attempt to explain just how and why certain nations had become great regional and global powers and, perhaps more importantly, why they fell from their perches. Not limiting himself to the twentieth century, Kennedy went as far back as the Habsburgs of the sixteenth century to try to show that there was one major constant in determining the latter: the expenditure, or it should be said the mis-expenditure, of resources. Countries that became great powers tended to devote immense efforts to maintaining their relative position of superiority, usually by means of great military expenditure but also through constant involvement in unnecessary and debilitating wars, and thus overextended their resources so precipitating their own decline. This overextension, sometimes called ‘imperial overstretch’, puts the larger power at a competitive disadvantage when compared with certain smaller growing powers which, by spending less on the military, are able to devote a larger percentage of their national wealth to domestic growth. While trying to claim that he was not laying down a historical rule, Kennedy made it clear that he believed strongly in this historical pattern: