13

LOST IN TRANSITION

A critical analysis of power

transition theory

Richard Ned Lebow and Benjamin Valentino

Ken Waltz has grappled for his entire career with the causes of war. He made notable
contributions to our understanding of this phenomenon in two seminal books. In
Man, the State and Warhe made the case for war as a system-level phenomenon.
In Theory of International Politics,he developed a system-level theory to account for
hegemonic wars. In this paper, we address a related but distinct system-level
explanation for war: power transition theories.
Since the end of the Cold War, the debate about the future of Asian security
relations has been dominated by the question of a possible armed conflict between
the United States and a rising China. Power transition theory has become an accepted
framework for many thinking about this problem.^1 Former Assistant Secretary of
State Susan Shirk summed up this perspective: ‘History teaches us that rising powers
are likely to provoke war.’^2 Is such a claim justified? We identify and evaluate seven
assumptions or claims of power transition theories and find them all wanting. This
does not mean that conflict between the United States and China is improbable, only
that power transition theory provide no basis for expectations to the contrary.
Our chapter has two principal sections. We describe and evaluate the logic of
two dominant power transition theories: those of Organski and Kugler and of
Gilpin, and identify several key empirical implications of these theories. We then
evaluate these theories on the basis of a data set and case-specific evidence. We
conclude with observations about the causes of great power wars and the impli-
cations of our findings for current debates about the likelihood of war between the
United States and China.

Power transition theories

Organski and Kugler distinguish themselves from realists by asserting that the
international system is more ordered than anarchic.^3 This arises from the ability of