Davide Fiammenghi;  Sebastian Rosato and Joseph M. Parent; and Jeffrey W. Taliaferro, Steven E. Lobell, and Norrin M. Ripsman respond to Kevin Narizny's Fall 2017 article, “On Systemic Paradigms and Domestic Politics: A Critique of the Newest Realism.”

Charles L. Glaser, Andrew H. Kydd, Mark. L. Haas, and John M. Owen IV respond to Sebastian Rosato's winter 2014/15 article, "The Inscrutable Intentions of Great Powers."

Do great powers balance against each other, as neorealist theory predicts? Over the past two centuries, great powers have typically avoided external balancing via alliance formation, but they have consistently engaged in internal balancing by arming and imitating the military advances of their rivals.

Given the nature of intentions, there is little Washington and Beijing will be able to do or say to persuade the other side that it has and will always have peaceful intentions. In tomorrow's Asia, great power conflict is destiny.

Many scholars argue that great powers can reach confident conclusions about each other's intentions, but these claims are unpersuasive. Neither the domestic characteristics nor behavior of states offers a reliable basis on which to evaluate intentions. These limitations support the theoretical claims of structural realism: competition, not cooperation, will remain the norm among states.

Ulrich Krotz and Richard Maher, David M. McCourt and Andrew Glencross, Norrin M. Ripsman, Mark S. Sheetz and Jean-Yves Haine respond to Sebastian Rosato's spring 2011 article, "Europe’s Troubles: Power Politics and the State of the European Project."

"...[A]bsent an overwhelming threat, the Europeans have had little reason to maintain their economic union. This is not to argue that the demise of the Soviet Union has given them a reason to dismantle the EU—only that it has removed their incentive to preserve it. Consequently, the EU has started to fray as member states have put national interests ahead of those of the union."

The 1990s were years of great optimism in Europe. As the Europeans were putting the finishing touches on their economic community, observers pre­dicted that political and military integration would soon follow. Optimism has turned to pessimism since the turn of the century, however. Most analysts believe that the economic community is in crisis, and hardly anyone predicts the creation of a political or military counterpart to it. Why has the European project run into trouble and what does the future hold? The answers to these questions are largely to be found in the distribution of power. It was the over­whelming power of the Soviet Union that drove the Western Europeans to consider a variety of integration initiatives and to build and maintain the European Community (EC) during the Cold War. In 1991 the collapse of the Soviet Union deprived them of a compelling geostrategic reason to pursue further integration or even to preserve their economic community. As a result, the Europeans have made no real effort to establish a political or military com­munity over the past two decades, and the EC has slowly started to fray. As long as there are no significant changes in the balance of power going forward, worse times lie ahead.

Many believe that the Bush administration's emphasis on unilateralism, preventive war, and forcible democratization represents nothing less than a revolution in the way the United States thinks about and conducts its foreign policy.

This chapter was originally published as "The Flawed Logic of Democratic Peace Theory", American Political Science Review, 97, no. 4, November 2003, pp. 585–602. It is also available as part of AmongNations: Readings in International Relations (Foreign Affairs, Pearson Custom Publication, 2006).