The Profitability of Primacy

To the Editors (Richard W. Maass writes):

Daniel Drezner deserves credit for addressing arguments that link military primacy to economic benefits, which are typically considered only indirectly in the security studies subfield.¹ Any plan for future U.S. military spending would profit from a thorough understanding of (1) whether primacy provides economic benefits that offset its costs, and if not, (2) whether other benefits that it provides may be worth those costs. Drezner does not adequately establish the former argument, however, and he tries to dismiss the latter despite acknowledging the significant security benefits of primacy. Drezner advocates “deeper cuts” in U.S. military spending (p. 79), but ultimately provides little in his article to help readers determine whether making such cuts would be a good decision.

My critique proceeds in three sections. The first lays out four core flaws that undermine Drezner’s analysis: (1) stretching the concept of military primacy, (2) drifting across several distinct research questions, (3) selectively isolating economics from military matters, and (4) avoiding the key alternative logic he claims to undermine. The second section identifies the five ways primacy might pay that Drezner targets in his article—an open trading order, foreign investment, the global reserve currency, bargaining leverage, and direct contributions to the hegemon—and evaluates his counterarguments to each. The third section examines the security benefits of primacy (which are worth a net cost greater than zero), critiques their dismissal by Drezner, and observes how he overstates the definitiveness of his conclusions.

Analytical flaws

Four core flaws in Drezner’s approach persistently recur and undermine his analysis. First, despite accurately defining primacy as “a distribution of military capabilities in which one country faces no current or emergent peers on any significant battlefield” (p. 54), he regularly conflates that characteristic of the international system with expensive and reckless foreign policy behavior by the hegemon. For example, he argues that a forward military presence is costly because the United States pays for most of its military bases (pp. 65–66), that trade and capital flows before World War I did not conform to alliance patterns (p. 64), that foreign investment concerned with risk will flee a hegemon that pursues risky wars (p. 60), and that high defense spending does not raise employment (p. 58). Drezner asserts that “[i]n practice, primacy always seems to lead to … deep engagement” (p. 55). Yet “deep engagement” can mean many things, not all of which are reckless or expensive as Drezner implies (e.g., preserving freedom of the seas, providing international organization leadership, maintaining overseas bases subsidized by host countries, and “leading from behind”).

Moreover, foreign policy may be strongly influenced by the distribution of power, but it remains a choice; unipolarity is not the cause of recklessness nor is multipolarity its cure. Napoleon’s and Hitler’s invasions of Russia were far bolder than any recent U.S. war, and international relations theory provides good reason for expecting riskier policies under multipolarity than unipolarity given that (1) similar levels of power encourage competition, and (2) in a system with many moving pieces, states look to convert temporary advantages into long–term gains (e.g., territorial conquests).² Primacy, in contrast, gives a hegemon the option to be reckless or restrained with minimal fear for its survival. This may loosen “constraints on the state to refrain from military adventurism,” as Drezner claims (p. 62), but it does not necessitate adventurism. As Nuno Monteiro recently observed, “Unipolarity minimizes structural constraints on grand strategy”; it does not dictate grand strategy.³ Indeed, the debate over U.S. grand strategy since the end of the Cold War has focused explicitly on the numerous policy choices available to the United States as a result of its primacy.⁴

The second core flaw in Drezner’s article is that it drifts from his admirably clear initial research question—Does military primacy pay?—to a variety of distinct questions. Rather than comparing the costs of maintaining a predominant military versus the economic benefits of doing so, Drezner compares (1) the economic benefits of unipolarity...