With Great Power Comes Great Insecurity |
A basic premise unites most foreign policy thinking: power begets security. Because no global police force can respond in times of trouble, states must accumulate power to ensure their safety. They must build strong militaries to protect their homelands and defend vital international interests. They need to nurture robust economies to fund those militaries and withstand financial pressure. These notions have motivated strategy for centuries, including the policies of the world’s two most powerful countries today. U.S. President Donald Trump is pursuing a military buildup and economic self-sufficiency to deter adversaries, a policy his advisers call “peace through strength.” Chinese leader Xi Jinping, meanwhile, is plowing money into the People’s Liberation Army and the manufacturing sector to make his country “self-reliant and strong.”
It is true that power can bolster security in purely material terms. But security is a psychological phenomenon, too. Leaders and citizens alike want large militaries in order to feel safe, not simply for their own sakes. Yet almost no psychological research supports the idea that feelings of safety align with objective statistics about material power. In fact, the evidence shows the contrary: power makes people more skeptical of others’ intentions and thus heightens anxiety. The strong, it turns out, are far more likely than the weak to skip careful, reasoned analysis when making decisions. Instead, they assess threats from the gut and shoot from the hip. While the weak know they must think critically to navigate their surroundings, the strong imagine they can rely on stereotypes and other mental shortcuts to get by. As a result, the powerful view the world in bleak and oversimplified terms, breeding suspicion and anxiety.
To see whether this psychological finding applies to international relations, I examined how both foreign policy elites and ordinary people think about state power and threat perception. I looked specifically at the thinking of American decision-makers during the Cold War, Russian policymakers before Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and contemporary Chinese and American publics. My findings were unambiguous. Stronger countries, like more powerful people, tend to be more insecure than weaker ones. Their leaders and citizens imagine or exaggerate threats. They think impulsively. And they are easy to trigger. As a result, they are more likely to support starting and escalating wars than individuals who feel their state is feeble.
This finding has unfortunate implications. Today, the world is characterized by renewed great-power competition, particularly between the United States and China. Each side is trying to acquire more power than the other, in large part to feel safer. But this strategy is likely to have the opposite of its intended effect. Should Washington grow stronger, it will become more convinced that Beijing is a menace. If Beijing becomes more powerful, it will view Washington’s actions in its neighborhood as more threatening. The result could be a vicious cycle: as each country becomes more capable, it will feel more insecure, prompting further military buildups that drive each side’s anxiety higher still.
To avoid this outcome, officials in both the United States and China—and, indeed, in any strong country—should try to neutralize the psychological effects of power. That means they should pause before making decisions. They should carefully evaluate all available evidence regarding a potential threat rather than jumping to conclusions. In other words, they should reason as if they run weak governments, not strong ones.
One of the oldest and most dominant ideas in international relations is that power leads to security and weakness to insecurity. This premise anchored Thucydides’s analysis of the Peloponnesian War: “The growth of the power of Athens, and the alarm it inspired in Sparta, made war inevitable.” But students of individual psychology have long understood that power may not generate rational views and behaviors. Or as Shakespeare’s Henry IV observes, “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.”
Psychologists directly studied the effects of strength in the aftermath of World War II in an effort to understand how supposedly normal individuals could commit acts of great cruelty when they felt powerful. In the infamous 1971 Stanford prison experiment, for example, psychologists assigned study participants to serve either as a hypothetical guard or as a hypothetical prisoner and found that the guards quickly turned abusive. A decade earlier, Stanley Milgram conducted notorious obedience experiments in which participants were instructed to administer electric shocks to another participant. (In reality, that other participant was an actor, simply pretending to get shocked.) Milgram’s subjects continued to administer the supposed shocks when told to do so, even in doses that would have been lethal. These controversial studies provided........