Ennui Becomes Us_Randall Schweller

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Number 105 bull Jan Feb 2010

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E983140983145983156983151983154 Justine A Rosenthal

S983141983150983145983151983154 E983140983145983156983151983154983155 Daniel W Drezner bull Nikolas K Gvosdev bull Jacob Heilbrunn bull Anatol Lieven

C983151983150983156983154983145983138983157983156983145983150983143 E983140983145983156983151983154983155 Andrew J Bacevich bull Ian Bremmer bull Ted Galen Carpenter

Bruce Hoffman bull Andrew Kohut bull Kenneth M Pollack



27 First Draft of History JanuaryFebruary 2010

First Draft of History

Ennui Becomes Us

By Randall L Schweller

Contemporary international rela-

tions is moving toward a state ofentropy Chaos and randomness

abound Now the story of world politicsunfolds without coherence unfettered byclassic balance-of-power politics a plotlesspostmodern work starring a menagerie of

wildly incongruent themes and protago-nists as if divinely plucked from differ-ent historical ages and placed in a timemachine set for the third millennium We

live in an era in which unprecedented glo-balization and economic interdependenceliberal-democratic hegemony nanotech-nology robotic warfare the ldquoinfosphererdquonuclear proliferation and geoengineeringsolutions to climate change coexist withthe return of powerful autocratic-capitaliststates of a new Great Game in Central

Asia of imperialism in the Middle Eastof piracy on the high seas of rivalry in

the Indian Ocean of a 1929-like marketcrash of 1914-style hypernationalism andethnic conflict in the Balkans of warlordsand failed states of genocides in BosniaRwanda and Darfur and of a new holy

war waged by radical Islamists complete

with caliphates and beheadings reminiscentof medieval times In short we live in aThomas Pynchon novel

The increasing disorder of our world willlead eventually to a sort of global ennuimixed with a disturbingly large dose of in-dividual extremism and dogmatic posturing

by states It is the result of the unstemmabletide of entropy A world subsumed by theinexorable forces of randomness tippedoff its axis swirling in a cloud of informa-tion overload Who would have thought amere half decade ago we would be turningto physics for the answers to internationalpolitics

R

ooted in the second law of thermody-

namics entropy measures the disorga-nization in a system It is essentially a com-monsense law of probability events witha high frequency occur more often thanevents with low frequency Systems proceedfrom initial states of low probability to endstates of highest probability or final equi-librium Once this equilibrium or maxi-mum state of entropy has been reached thesystem stays there forever never returning

to its initial configuration Imagine for ex-ample two separate containers of the colorsblue and yellow with a valve connectingthe two closed systems When the valve isopened molecules of each color advanceto the other side Over time the two colorsblend together to form a uniform greenOnce the system reaches an equilibrium ofgreenness there is no going back to the ini-tial states of separate yellow and blue

It is much the same when shuffling adeck of cards Even with a well-defined ini-

Randall L Schweller is a professor of political

science at Ohio State University He is the author

of Unanswered Threats Political Constraints on

the Balance of Power (Princeton University Press2006)



The National Interest 28 First Draft of History

tial sequence this ldquoclosed systemrdquo quicklybecomes disordered and confused For thesake of simplicity the act of shuffling con-sists of removing the top card and placing

it back in the deck at random After oneshuffle the deck has changed to one offifty-two alternatives each strongly resem-bling the original order After many repeti-tions however the original sequence willhave been completely destroyed In thismanner order is relentlessly replaced by in-creasing disorder as closed systems degradeto more probable less informative statesSimply put entropy is a measure of lost

information

Presumably the second law of thermo-dynamics is valid always and every-

where One might suppose therefore thatit must have been valid at the time of earlycivilizations at the time of the Roman Em-pire and Han dynasty in China and dur-ing the era preceding the First World War

when the British Empire reigned over the

globe and competed with other Europeangreat powers

So why should the theory of entropy beinvoked now to explain international poli-tics The reason is that the second law onlyapplies to closed systems (systems where no

new information is yet to be discovered where all actors are known and the space isclearly defined) International politics be-came a closed system susceptible to increas-ing entropy when it subsumed the entireearth such that nothing remained outsideof it This process began roughly one hun-dred years ago after the Age of Discoverythat witnessed European expansion acrossthe oceans to new lands It was then that

English geographer Sir Halford Mackinderproclaimed the birth of a ldquoclosed politicalsystemrdquo of ldquoworld-wide scoperdquo

The modern state system became fullydefined with the completion of decoloniza-tion in the mid-1960s It was then that the

worldmdashevery territorial inch of itmdashwascomposed of states and nothing but statesThe process of increasing entropy in inter-national politics therefore commenced a

mere forty years agomdasha relatively short timeperiod in the larger scheme of things



First Draft of History 29 JanuaryFebruary 2010

In international politics the fewer theconstraints on state behavior the greater

the level of entropy This is why much ofour current state of randomness can belaid at the doorstep of unipolarity whichhas shown itself to be an ldquoanything goesrdquointernational structure The United States

is king and the world beneath it does notbehave in the predictable ways of tradition-al multipolar or bipolar systems in whichclassic balance-of-power politics rule theday Consistent with increasing entropyunipolar dynamics are random because thestructure neither constrains the choices ofthe unipole nor anyone else No longeris it a world of the Cold War threat uumlberalles No longer must states scurry to find

patrons and allies for fear of war And withno great-power rivals the dominant statemakes choices relatively unfettered by theimperatives and constraints of its externalenvironment The United States enjoys theluxury of choosing with whom to alignbased on nonpower considerations ideo-logical affinity economic wants or the va-garies of domestic politics And when it sodesires the United States can simply go it

alone cobbling together ad hoc ldquocoalitionsof the willingrdquo when needed Boundlessfreedom breeds randomness The idiosyn-cratic beliefs and capricious choices of un-constrained American leaders tell us moreabout recent US foreign policy than doesinternational structure

Unipolar systems have less glue to holdthings together than other internationalstructures Under unipolarity capabili-

ties are concentrated threats and interestsdiffused1 Alliances the act of choosing

friends and enemies that defines not justinternational politics but all politics arebuilt on shared interests and threat percep-tions two things in short supply today

World politics matter most to the unipolarpower the sole actor with global reachFor everyone else all politics are local It is

not surprising therefore to find the USNational Intelligence Council assertingthat ldquoat no time since the formation of the

Western alliance system in 1949 have theshape and nature of international align-ments been in such a state of flux as theyhave during the past decaderdquo Stable andmeaningful geographic groupings are thestuff of multipolar and bipolar systems

where a small number of great powers in-

teract with each other in fairly predict-able ways balancing one another througharms and allies controlling regions throughspheres-of-influence arrangements and therest

In the new non-balance-of-power poli-tics of unipolarity traditional geographicgroupings have lost salience There is no Eastversus West anymore and it can scarcely beused as an intellectual justification for US

engagement in Europe or the creation of aLeague of Democracies to replace the United

1Under bipolarity in contrast powerful threats

were concentrated in the two poles whereas

damage was diffused throughout the system

Because bipolarity encouraged the superpowers

to view the world in zero-sum terms and compete

fiercely on a global scale roughly 20 million people

were killed on the periphery (damage was diffused)

in a titanic geostrategic and ideological struggleamong two poles over world supremacy

The increasing disorder of our world will lead eventually

to a sort of global ennui mixed with a disturbingly large dose

of individual extremism and dogmatic posturing by states




Nations2 The very idea of a like-mindedgroup of states known as the West is littlemore than a mythmdashone that gainsays thegrowing philosophic divisions between theUnited States and Western Europe over sov-ereignty multilateralism and the use of forceEven the traditional concept of a North-

South divide is of little utility as China andIndia continue to rise These archaic Cold War groupings have been replaced by an arcof instability ranging from Southeast Asia where the possibility exists of growing radicalIslam and terrorism to Central Asia wherethe future threat of failed states looms Andas technology turns the world into a ldquoglobalvillagerdquo that globe shrinks The digital revo-lution has brought about an entropy in the

information world as well

In spite of informationrsquos increased quan-tity and speed of transmission modern

people may feel as psychologist and phi-losopher William James did in 1899 thatan ldquoirremediable flatness is coming overthe worldrdquo Here I do not mean to suggestthat the world is becoming flat in ThomasFriedmanrsquos sense of greater connectivity and

a leveling of the global competitive playingfield Rather flatness refers to an increas-ing banality and loss of meaning in lifeSurprisingly information overload producesnot a heightened sense of stimulation andawareness but rather boredom and alien-ation A creeping sameness or at the otherextreme variation that approaches random-ness causes the brain to shut down This is

what is known as information entropy the

degradation of information through monot-onous repetition and meaningless variety

To illustrate how these opposites producethe same result consider the average lis-tenerrsquos response to the minimalism of PhilipGlass and the random dissonance of ArnoldSchoenberg Most people are put to sleepby the music of both composers but that isbecause in the case of Glass the repetition

and slow pace of new information losesour attention whereas the endless atonalvariety in Schoenbergrsquos compositions comesacross as simply random noise What wefind missing in both Glass and Schoenbergis significant variation or surprise Monoto-ny and boredom set in from too little or toomuch variety Entropy as loss of meaningand communication always lurks at bothends of the continuum

Just as energy and matter degrade overtime to more probable and less informativestates the greater the flow and amount ofinformation the more likely it will degradetoward noise or sterile uniformity People

2Notwithstanding the fallacy of a natural harmony

of interests among democracies we hear calls

from John McCain Hillary Clinton Madeleine

Albright and senior foreign-pol icy advisers to

President Obama Ivo Daalder and Anne-MarieSlaughter for the United States to create a League

of Democracies to replace the United Nations Not

only is this liberal-internationalist concept built on

an idealistic myth that democracies share important

foreign-policy preferences it would also result in an

irresponsible self-binding of US power By very

publicly bestowing the League of Democracies with

a stamp of legitimacy America would be foolishly

creating the only international institution that

could actually constrain its foreign-policy autonomyand the free exercise of its military power




deluged by a flood of meaningless varietyquickly reach a saturation point where asa means of self-defense they develop thecapacity to tune most everything out and

become extremely selective jaded blaseacuteand callous And people bombarded byredundant information come to view life as

banal colorless insipid boring and charac-terless

On an oddly positive side increasing in-formation entropy demands our attentionand distracts us from engaging in social andpolitical activities Americans watch an aver-age of six hours of television a daymdasha habitthat drains both their time and energy torespond to what they see Plugged into theinfosphere they have become an atomized

mass of self-conscious watchers who statis-tics show mostly watch alone As voyeur-

ism becomes an addiction the infospherersquospower to disconnect and deactivate increas-es When everything and its opposite areclaimed to be true most people stop trust-

ing what they hear andthe people from whomthey hear it They either

tune it all out or heav-ily discount the informa-tion This produces dis-interested cynical andsolipsistic citizensmdashpeo-ple who scarcely fit themold of potential war-riors for various politicalcauses Inasmuch as in-creasing information en-

tropy generates ambiva-lent paralysis the mainpolitical effect of the in-fosphere will be a joylesspeace rooted in apathyBut dangers lurk in thissea of ennui for increas-

ing information creates not only boredombut the possibility of extremism

Information entropy will polarize our pol-itics and decrease our ability to reconcile

our differing world views Even as it boressome it will energetically and dangerouslyradicalize others Wisdom does not simplycome from more and more information atour fingertips Thus as sociologist OrrinKlapp explains in Overload and Boredom

The more information is repeated and du-

plicated the larger the scale of diffusion thegreater the speed of processing the more opin-




ion leaders and gatekeepers and networks the

more filtering of messages the more kinds of

media through which information is passed

the more decoding and encoding and so onmdash

the more degraded information might be

Consider the effects of the new ldquomillion-

channel media universerdquo Talk radio cabletelevision and the Internet (YouTube andthe blogosphere) offer so many contradic-tory ldquofactsrdquo ldquotruthsrdquo and ldquoinformed opin-ionsrdquo that people everywhere can essentiallyselect and interpret facts in a way that ac-cords with their own personal idiosyncraticand often flat-wrong versions of reality Inthis modern ldquoinfosphererdquo knowledge nolonger rests on objective facts but instead on

ldquotrue enoughrdquo facts and arguments (StephenColbertrsquos ldquotruthinessrdquo) A truth pocked

with holes but one that is ldquotrue enoughrdquo will nonetheless hold sway over those whochoose to believe it for reasons politicalreligious or otherwise because it feels rightThink of the claims that the US govern-ment carried out the 911 attacks Republi-cans rigged the 2004 election and 983144983145983158 doesnot cause 983137983145983140983155 With so many competing

news outlets and opinions we can now seekout and find the kind of political views nomatter how absurd that please us newsthat tells us what we want to hear that in-dulges our political preconceptions and be-lief systems and that is told by people whothink exactly the same way we do3 Theresult is an increase in extremist views basedon irrational beliefs and sometimes utterlyinsane and delusional thinking

By producing various extremist groups with rigidly held competing beliefs infor-

mation entropy increases the likelihood ofsocietal conflict and polarization that can-not be adjudicated through reasoned publicdebate This is because dogmatic beliefs arelittle different than no beliefs As Thomas

Jefferson warned ldquo It is always better to haveno ideas than false ones to believe nothing

than to believe what is wrongrdquo Worse still isto dogmatically believe that which is wrong

Added to this polarization within nationalsocieties individuals will now be more dis-posed than in the past to hold cross-nation-al supranational and subnational loyaltiesidentities and attachments People will thinkof themselves as businessmen liberals orMuslims Yet while the proliferation of thesenew identities might facilitate bridge build-

ing across some groups there is little reasonto suspect that conflict-dampening links willarise among highly polarized fact-resistantpeople like members of the radicalized Greenmovement the global Salafi jihad or thegreedy and detached corporate-executiveclass whose financial terrorism in the formof credit-default swaps and other recklesspractices brought the world to the brink

It is as if we are entering a new social

landscape composed of personal worlds where each individual can construct his orher own unique intersubjective space Themystery of entropymdashwhat makes the con-cept so difficult to get onersquos head aroundmdashis that it divides us while making us morethe same it is a process of disorder andhomogenization Because it drives systems

3Farhad Manjoo True Enough Learning to Live

in a Post-Fact Society (Hoboken 983150983146 John Wiley ampSons Inc 2008)

Our creeping sameness hasnrsquot led to a mythical natural harmony

of global interests To the contrary itrsquos a jungle out there




to their least informative but most prob-able states entropy manufactures an acutesense of chaos randomness and uncertainty

while at the same time the system movesfrom differentiation to sameness In thisregard what is important about the digi-tal revolution is not only that it has em-

powered desktop freelancers and innovativestartups all over the world especially inIndia and China to compete and win butthat we are all playing the same game Can

we be far from the long-dreaded ldquoglobalmonoculturerdquomdashthat final state of samenesscaptured by the neologism ldquoWestoxifica-tionrdquo peppered with violent extremism as areaction to the unipolersquos dominance

But this increase in cross-national andsubnational loyalties associated with

entropy has effects beyond the world of anindividualrsquos mixed-up mind Entropy willresult in the breakdown of clear geographi-cal patterns demarcating friends and en-emies One important consequence of thisgeographic disorder from a state-level mili-tary standpoint is that selective targeting ofindividuals becomes more important than

the firepower of a given weapon or even ofonersquos entire arsenal The problem is that

when ideas define the enemy rather thanthe territory on which it lives it becomesextremely difficult to avoid excessive collat-eral damage while still fighting to win

Originating as a euphemism for the kill-ing of noncombatants during the Vietnam

War collateral damage relies for its moral justification on the Doctrine of Double Ef-

fect (983140983140983141) which was introduced by Thom-as Aquinas and has been used to show that

agents may permissibly bring about harmfuleffects provided that they are merely fore-seen side effects of promoting a good end(hence the double effect) With the civil-ian death toll in Iraq estimated at over sixhundred thousand the 983140983140983141 has become animportant justification for US war fight-

ing Much of the world however viewscollateral damage as nothing more than arhetorical contrivance for murder and inthis respect no different than terrorismThis creates a political problem for anystate combating terrorism (whether Israelireprisals against Hamas in Gaza Russianmilitary strikes against Chechens in Georgiaor US operations in Iraq) Greater selectiv-ity in targeting can only provide a partial

solution to the problem The bottom line isthat the decreased importance of geographicspace under conditions of high entropyneutralizes usable firepower while favoringguerrilla tactics sabotage terrorism andmore generally a movement from interstateto intrastate wars So in the end we are left

with a more level military playing field (but with its own hidden dangers) consistent with the process of increasing entropy

Taken further still information overloadand entropy suggest increased frag-

mentation policies and inferences of statesdriven by hard-core ideological and religiousbeliefs and rigid and uncompromising po-litical views that are fact resistant Nationaland international narratives now becomemore fractured and incoherent making pur-poseful national action especially policies

calling for costly and intrusive internationalcooperation far more difficult to achieve




Just as individuals are freer than ever be-fore to pick and choose ldquofactsrdquo to fit theirpersonal beliefs states are now able to en-gage in what is known as forum shopping selecting from among countless interna-tional institutions the specific venues mostlikely to elicit decisions that favor their par-

ticular interests Like the choice-enablinginfosphere with its unlimited facts thenumber and density of international orga-nizations has grown exponentially over thepast few decades creating a sea of nestedpartially overlapping parallel bodies andagreements

What some call global governance is lit-tle more than a spaghetti bowl of clashingagreements brokered within and among

thirty thousand or so international orga-nizations of varying significance from theInter-American Tropical Tuna Commissionto the United Nations One wonders howstates make decisions and forge long-runstrategies these days when it is virtuallyimpossible for them to figure out where in-ternational authority over any issue residesand which agreements interpretations andimplementations of rules and laws have sa-

lience and should come to dominateThe downside is that nobody wins and

nothing gets done The upside is that noone loses either Once a state or groupof states has been outmaneuvered in onevenue the ldquoloserrdquo merely shifts the nego-tiations to other parallel regimes with con-tradictory rules and alternative prioritiesThus when developing countries lost at the

983159983156983151 and World Intellectual Property Or-

ganization on the Trade-Related Aspects ofIntellectual Property Rights (983156983154983145983152s) agree-

ment they ldquoregime-shiftedrdquo to the friendlier 983159983144983151 Food and Agricultural Organization(983142983137983151) and Convention on Biological Diver-sity (983139983138983140) where they won They then wentback to the 983159983156983151 invoking these victoriesand renegotiated the 983156983154983145983152s agreement tohave the revisions drafted in parallel regimes

written into the global rulesThe messiness of this state of affairs con-

tradicts a rare consensus in the field ofinternational relations that concentratedpower in the hands of one dominant stateis essential to the establishment and main-tenance of international order Accordingto the theory the demand for interna-tional regimes is high but their supply islow because only the leadership of a hege-

monic state can overcome the collective-action problemsmdashmainly the huge start-upcostsmdashassociated with the creation of or-der-producing global institutions The cur-rent world has turned this logic on its headThe problem is the virtual absence of bar-riers to entry Most new treaty-making andglobal-governance institutions are beingspearheaded not by an elite club of greatpowers but rather by civil-society actors

and nongovernmental organizations work-ing with midlevel states Far from creatingmore order and predictability this explo-sion of so-called global-governance institu-tions has increased the chaos randomnessfragmentation ambiguity and impenetrablecomplexity of international politics In-deed the labyrinthine structure of globalgovernance is more complex than most ofthe problems it is supposed to be solving

And countriesrsquo views are more rigidly heldthan ever before




A las as entropy increases within a closedsystem available or ldquousefulrdquo energy dis-

sipates and diffuses to a state of equal en-ergy among particles The days of unipolar-ity are numbered We will witness insteada deconcentration of power that eventu-ally moves the system to multipolarity and

a restored balance It will not however be anormal global transition Great powers willnot build up arms and formalliances They will not use war to improve their positionsin the international peckingorder They will not seek rel-ative-power advantages Thatis because they no longer haveto obsess over how others are

doingmdashmuch less over theirown survival which is essen-tially assured in todayrsquos worldof unprecedented peace States will instead be primarily con-cerned with doing well forthemselves What they will dois engage in economic compe-tition

The law of uneven eco-

nomic growth among statesand the diffusion of technol-ogy will cause a deconcentration of glob-al power Global equilibrium in this newenvironment is a spontaneously generatedoutcome among states seeking to maximizetheir absolute wealth not military poweror political influence over others The paceof these diffusion processes has increasedduring the digital age because what distin-

guishes economies today is no longer capitaland labormdashnow mere commoditiesmdashbut

rather ideas and energyInformation entropy is creating fierce

corporate competition Our creeping same-ness hasnrsquot led us to the mythical naturalharmony of interests in the world thatinternational liberalism seems to take forgranted To the contrary itrsquos a jungle out

there Global communication networksand rapid technological innovation have

forced competitive firms to abandon theend-to-end vertical business model andadopt strategies of dynamic specializationconnectivity through outsourcing and pro-cess networks and leveraged capabilitybuilding across institutional boundariesThey have also caused public policies toconverge in the areas of deregulation trade

liberalization and market liberalization All of these trends have combined to cre-




ate relentlessly intensifying competitionon a global scale4 So while we may indeedbe looking more alike what precisely arethe traits that we share Sameness in theldquoflatrdquo world where the main business chal-lenge is not profitability but mere survivalbreeds cutthroat competitors no more like-

ly to live in harmony with each other thanthe unfortunate inhabitants of Hobbesrsquosstate of nature So instead of shooting

wars and arms buildups we will see intensecorporate competition with firms engagingin espionage information warfare (such asthe hiring of ldquobig gunrdquo hackers) and gue-rilla marketing strategies

I

n terms of the global balance of power

the rapid diffusion of knowledge andtechnology is driving down Americarsquos edgein productive capacity and as a conse-quence its overall power position Indeedthe transfer of global wealth and economicpower now under waymdashroughly from Westto Eastmdashis without precedent in modernhistory in terms of size speed and direc-tional flow If these were the only processesat work then the future of international

politics might well conform to the benignorthodox liberal vision of a cooperativepositive-sum game among states operat-ing within a system that places strict limitson the returns to power But this is notto be because in a break from old-worldgreat-power politics there will be no hege-monic war to wipe the international slateclean We will therefore be stuck with thebizarre mishmash of global-governance in-

stitutions that now creates an ineffectualforeign-policy space Trying to overhaul ex-

isting institutions to accommodate risingpowers and address todayrsquos complex issuesis an impossible task So while liberals arecorrect to point out that the boom in globaleconomic growth over the past two decadeshas allowed countries to move up the ladderof growth and prosperity this movement

combined with a moribund institutional su-perstructure creates a destabilizing disjunc-ture between power and prestige that willeventually make the world more confronta-tional The question arises with hegemonic war no longer in the cards how can a newinternational order that reflects these tec-tonic shifts be forged Aside from a naturaldisaster of massive proportions (a cure mostlikely worse than the disease itself) there is

no known force that can fix the problem

The primary cause of these tectonicshifts is American decline Hegemon-

ic decline is inevitable because uncheckedpower tends to overextend itself and suc-cumb to the vice of imperial overstretchbecause the hegemon overpays for interna-tional public goods such as security whileits free-riding competitors underpay for

them and because its once-hungry soci-ety becomes soft and decadent engagingin self-destructive hedonism and overcon-sumption In recent years the America-in-decline debate of the 1980s and early 1990shas reemerged with a vengeance Despite

4 John Hagel III and John Seely Brown The Only

Sustainable Edge Why Business Strategy Depends

on Productive Friction and Dynamic Specialization

(Cambridge 983149983137 Harvard Business School Press2005)




the fact that the United States is the lonesuperpower with unrivaled command ofair sea and space there is a growing chorusof observers proclaiming the end of Amer-ican primacy Joining the ranks of theseldquodeclinistsrdquo Robert Pape forcefully arguedin these pages that ldquoAmerica is in unprec-

edented declinerdquo having lost 30 percent ofits relative economic power since 20005 Tobe sure the macrostatistical picture of theUnited States is a bleak one Its savings rateis zero its currency is sliding to new depthsit runs huge current-account trade andbudget deficits its medium income is flatits entitlement commitments are unsustain-able and its once-unrivaled capital marketsare now struggling to compete with Hong

Kong and London The staggering costsof the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq com-bined with the financial bailout and stimu-lus packages doled out in response to thesubprime-mortgage and financial-credit cri-ses have battered the US economy open-ing the door for peer competitors to makesubstantial relative gains The current bearmarket ranks among the worst in history

with the Dow and S983078P down almost 50

percent from their 2007 peaks The majorcause of our troubles both in the shortand long term is debt the United Statesis borrowing massively to finance currentconsumption America continues to rununprecedented trade deficits with its onlyburgeoning peer competitor China whichbased on current trajectories is predictedto surpass the United States as the worldrsquos

leading economic power by 2040 As of July2009 Washington owed Beijing over $800billion meaning that every person in theldquorichrdquo United States has in effect borrowedabout $3000 from someone in the ldquopoorrdquoPeoplersquos Republic of China over the past de-cade6 But this devolution of Americarsquos sta-

tus is truly inevitable because of the forcesof entropy No action by US leaders canprove a viable counterweight

A nd as power devolves throughout theinternational system new actors will

emerge and develop to compete with statesas power centers Along these lines RichardHaass claims that we have entered an ldquoage ofnonpolarityrdquo in which states ldquoare being chal-

lenged from above by regional and globalorganizations from below by militias andfrom the side by a variety of nongovern-mental organizations (983150983143983151s) and corpora-tionsrdquo Of course there is nothing especiallynew about this observation cosmopolitanliberals have been pronouncing (premature-ly in my view) the demise of the nation-statemdashthe so-called ldquohollow staterdquo and a cri-sis of state powermdashand the rise of nonstate

actors for many decades What is new is thateven state-centric realists like Fareed Zakariaare now predicting a post-American worldin which international order is no longer amatter decided solely by the political andmilitary power held by a single hegemon oreven a group of leading states Instead thecoming world will be governed by messyad hoc arrangements composed of agrave la carte

5 Robert A Pape ldquoEmpire Fallsrdquo The NationalInterest (JanuaryFebruary 2009) p 21

6

James Fallows ldquoThe $14 Trillion Questionrdquo The Atlantic (JanuaryFebruary 2008)

The specter of international cooperation if

it was ever anything more than an

apparition will die a slow but sure death




multilateralism and networked interactionsamong state and nonstate actors One won-ders what order and concerted action meanin a world that lacks fixed and predictablestructures and relationships Given the hap-hazard and incomplete manner by which thevacuum of lost state power is being filled

why expect order at all

The macropicture that emerges fromthese global trends is one of histori-

cally unprecedented change in a directionconsistent with increasing entropy unprec-edented hegemonic decline an unprec-edented transfer of wealth knowledge andeconomic power from West to East un-precedented information flows and an un-

precedented rise in the number and kindsof important actors Thus the onset of thisextreme multipolarity or multi-multipolar-ity will not herald as some observers be-lieve a return to the past To the contraryit will signal that maximum entropy is set-ting in that the ultimate state of inert uni-formity and unavailable energy is comingthat time does have a direction in interna-tional politics and that there is no going

back because the initial conditions of thesystem have been lost forever If and when

we reach such a point intime much of internationalpolitics as we know it willhave ended Its deep struc-ture of anarchymdashthe lack ofa sovereign arbiter to makeand enforce agreements

among statesmdashwill remainBut increasing entropy willresult in a world full of fierce

international competition and corporate warfare continued extremism low levelsof trust the formation of nonstate identi-ties that frustrate purposeful and concertednational actions and new nongeographicpolitical spaces that bypass the state favorlow-intensity-warfare strategies and under-

mine traditional alliance groupingsMost important entropy will reduce and

diffuse usable power in the system dramati-cally reshaping the landscape of internation-al politics The United States will see its rel-ative power diminish while others will seetheir power rise To avoid crises and con-frontation these ongoing tectonic changesmust be reflected in the superstructure ofinternational authority Increasing entropy

however means that the antiquated globalarchitecture will only grow more and morecreaky and resistant to overhaul No one

will know where authority resides becauseit will not reside anywhere and without au-thority there can be no governance of anykind The already-overcrowded and chaoticlandscape will continue to be filled withmore meaningless stuff and the specterof international cooperation if it was ever

anything more than an apparition will die aslow but sure death n



27 First Draft of History JanuaryFebruary 2010

First Draft of History

Ennui Becomes Us

By Randall L Schweller

Contemporary international rela-

tions is moving toward a state ofentropy Chaos and randomness

abound Now the story of world politicsunfolds without coherence unfettered byclassic balance-of-power politics a plotlesspostmodern work starring a menagerie of

wildly incongruent themes and protago-nists as if divinely plucked from differ-ent historical ages and placed in a timemachine set for the third millennium We

live in an era in which unprecedented glo-balization and economic interdependenceliberal-democratic hegemony nanotech-nology robotic warfare the ldquoinfosphererdquonuclear proliferation and geoengineeringsolutions to climate change coexist withthe return of powerful autocratic-capitaliststates of a new Great Game in Central

Asia of imperialism in the Middle Eastof piracy on the high seas of rivalry in

the Indian Ocean of a 1929-like marketcrash of 1914-style hypernationalism andethnic conflict in the Balkans of warlordsand failed states of genocides in BosniaRwanda and Darfur and of a new holy

war waged by radical Islamists complete

with caliphates and beheadings reminiscentof medieval times In short we live in aThomas Pynchon novel

The increasing disorder of our world willlead eventually to a sort of global ennuimixed with a disturbingly large dose of in-dividual extremism and dogmatic posturing

by states It is the result of the unstemmabletide of entropy A world subsumed by theinexorable forces of randomness tippedoff its axis swirling in a cloud of informa-tion overload Who would have thought amere half decade ago we would be turningto physics for the answers to internationalpolitics

R

ooted in the second law of thermody-

namics entropy measures the disorga-nization in a system It is essentially a com-monsense law of probability events witha high frequency occur more often thanevents with low frequency Systems proceedfrom initial states of low probability to endstates of highest probability or final equi-librium Once this equilibrium or maxi-mum state of entropy has been reached thesystem stays there forever never returning

to its initial configuration Imagine for ex-ample two separate containers of the colorsblue and yellow with a valve connectingthe two closed systems When the valve isopened molecules of each color advanceto the other side Over time the two colorsblend together to form a uniform greenOnce the system reaches an equilibrium ofgreenness there is no going back to the ini-tial states of separate yellow and blue

It is much the same when shuffling adeck of cards Even with a well-defined ini-

Randall L Schweller is a professor of political

science at Ohio State University He is the author

of Unanswered Threats Political Constraints on

the Balance of Power (Princeton University Press2006)






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Ennui Becomes Us_Randall Schweller

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