The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers

Kennedy examines the great powers from 1500 to the late twentieth century and argues that a power's international position is determined by its relative economic position, and that powers decline when their military and strategic commitments exceed what their economic base can support. He calls this imperial overstretch.

The historical work covers Habsburg Spain, the Netherlands, France, Britain, Germany, Russia, Japan and the United States, with detailed attention to the economics of war finance, industrial production, population and relative shares of world manufacturing output. He assembles comparative economic data across five centuries and shows the pattern repeating: a power's rise rests on economic growth, that growth funds military expansion and commitments, the commitments become permanent while the relative economic position erodes as other powers grow faster, and the resulting gap is closed either by retrenchment or by defeat.

The final chapter applied the argument to the United States in the 1980s and predicted relative decline, which is what made the book famous and what has been most criticised. The Soviet Union collapsed instead, and American relative economic position improved through the 1990s. Kennedy's defenders point out that he argued about relative shares over long periods rather than making a short-term prediction, and that the underlying data on American share of world output has in fact declined as he described. The book remains the standard reference on the relationship between economic base and strategic commitment, and its comparative data is its most durable contribution.