H-Diplo | RJISSF Roundtable 15-35 on Gibbons, The Hegemon’s Tool Kit: Commentary by S.M. Amadae

Rebecca Davis Gibbons’s Hegemon’s Toolkit: US Leadership and the Politics of Nuclear Nonproliferation Regime represents a perspective on the United States’ role in promoting the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) that embraces the United States’ role in pursuing global military ascendance.[8] The author states that “[t]he term hegemon to refer to the United States in the nuclear age is purposively chosen and is defined as a state that uses its unparalleled material power to create order within an international system” (14/310). The book adds to a large literature on the causes and implications of proliferation and non-proliferation.[9] Gibbons presents two overarching arguments that impinge on both the role of a hegemon in international relations, and the evaluation of hegemonic stability theory. Gibbons treats NPT adherence (when and how states join the treaty) as the dependent variable, and US efforts to achieve NPT adherence as the independent variable. I largely agree with Gibbons’s findings that the United States played an important role in promoting and securing a global nuclear nonproliferation regime, and that the US, in the role of hegemon, secured asymmetric advantage contrary to hegemonic stability theory.