The Unipolar Dilemma: Bandwagons, the Balkans, and Baghdad.

As scholars of international politics, we have spent much of the last 10 years arguing that the world will soon be multipolar (Layne, 1993; Schwarz and Layne, 2002). Relatively little scholarly effort has been devoted to understanding the current strange world of American hegemony. This is not entirely surprising: our most basic concepts and theories were based on a multipolar world; these were later supplemented by understanding bipolarity. This unipolar moment might not last, but it seems there may be some wishful thinking involved as well ? not policymakers and theorists alike may miss the Cold War, as the hegemony of learned theories tries to impose itself on reality. This paper confronts unipolarity directly by revisiting elements of Waltz’s Neorealism. Waltz was primarily fascinated with the effects of bipolarity, mentioning the possibility of unipolarity only briefly. This paper extends Waltz’s theory into the realm of unipolarity by considering the impact of a unipolar distribution of capabilities on international structure. In the context of this unipolar theoretical perspective, this paper applies concepts at the heart of Neorealism, chainganging and buckpassing, to the era of global terrorism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]