Unipolar politics as usual

This short comment seeks to clarify what unipolar politics as usual is, and how it differs from politics as usual under alternative systemic conditions, especially bipolarity. This is an assessment ‘from within’, accepting Brooks and Wohlforth's description of unipolar politics as well as their central premises that America's lonely superpower status faces no immediate threat and that there is little evidence that powerful states are actively seeking to overthrow the current unipolar system. I suggest that a comparative assessment of how alternative distributions of power create different incentive structures for states yields different conclusions and policy prescriptions than those advanced by Brooks and Wohlforth. Most notably, Brooks and Wohlforth do not fully appreciate how the ‘unipolar politics as usual’ that they describe provides states with few incentives to cooperate with their policy prescription that the US reshape the world's institutional architecture.