William Z.Y. Wang responds to Stephen G. Brooks and William C. Wohlforth's winter 2015/16 article, "The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers in the Twenty-first Century: China’s Rise and the Fate of America’s Global Position."

Fears that China will soon displace the United States as the international system’s superpower are unwarranted. Unlike previous rising powers challenging leading states, China’s technological and military capabilities are much lower relative to those of the United States. Further, converting economic power into military might is far more difficult than it was in the past. Scholars and analysts need to go beyond the concepts of unipolarity and bipolarity and engage in fine-grained analysis of the distribution of power.

Campbell Craig and Benjamin H. Friedman, Brendan Rittenhouse Green, and Justin Logan respond to Stephen G. Brooks, G. John Ikenberry, and William C. Wohlforth's Winter 2012/2013 International Security article, "Don't Come Home, America: The Case against Retrenchment."

The United States' extended system of security commitments creates a set of institutional relationships that foster political communication. Alliance institutions are first about security protection, but they also bind states together and create institutional channels of communication. For example, NATO has facilitated ties and associated institutions that increase the ability of the United States and Europe to talk to each other and to do business. Likewise, the bilateral alliances in East Asia also play a communication role beyond narrow security issues. Consultations and exchanges spill over into other policy areas. This gives the United States the capacity to work across issue areas, using assets and bargaining chips in one area to make progress in another.

After sixty-five years of pursuing a grand strategy of global leadership—nearly a third of which transpired without a peer great power rival—has the time come for the United States to switch to a strategy of retrenchment? This analysis shows that advocates of retrenchment radically overestimate the costs of deep engagement and underestimate its benefits. We conclude that the fundamental choice to retain a grand strategy of deep engagement after the Cold War is just what the preponderance of international relations scholarship would expect a rational, self-interested leading power in America’s position to do.

Some scholars argue that the balance of power theory that explained the bipolar and multipolar systems of the past is irrelevant in a unipolar world. These letters debate the possibility of expanding the traditional definition of "balancing" to account for policies that states are pursuing today.

After correcting what the authors state is Robert English’s “misunderstanding of [their] research design,” the authors elaborate their article’s contribution on “how to assess the causal implications of widely accepted findings” and the significance of this practice for qualitative research.

The authors marshal evidence from recently released sources to argue that shifting material pressures resulting from changes in the structure of global production had a much greater influence on Soviet foreign policy in the 1980s than previously thought.

In this issue's correspondence section, Peter Feaver, Gunther Hellmann, Randall Schweller, Jeffrey Taliaferro, and William Wohlforth argue against points made in Jeffrey Legro and Andrew Moravcsik's fall 1999 article "Is Anybody Still a Realist?" Legro and Moravcsik respond to their critics.

Some have defined U.S. preponderance as "a unipolar moment"; others have suggested that the current structure is "uni-multipolar." Regardless of the characterization, the conventional wisdom maintains that unipolarity is unstable and conflict prone, and thus unlikely to prevail over the long term. In our lead article, the author challenges this logic.