The theory explains the ordinary weather of politics, not its decisive moments

The argument

The objection here is not that interdependence is imaginary. It is that the explanatory power of the theory is concentrated in exactly the periods that need least explaining, and collapses in the ones that define the system. Critics of the theory argue that dense economic linkage does predict behaviour while the stakes are moderate. When what is in dispute is a tariff schedule, a licensing rule or a market access question, the cost of rupture is plainly larger than the prize, and states behave as the theory says they will. But a geopolitical system is characterised by its ruptures rather than by its calm stretches, and the record of states choosing to bear enormous economic cost once they judge a core interest to be at stake is, on this view, the central fact the theory has to accommodate and cannot. Governments have accepted the loss of their most valuable commercial relationships rather than concede on territory, on alliance membership, or on the composition of their own regime. The linkage did not restrain them; it was the price they paid. The deeper complaint is methodological. Because the theory predicts restraint wherever linkage is thick, and the system is in fact mostly calm, it accumulates apparent confirmations cheaply while its failures cluster in the small number of episodes that actually set the structure of international politics for decades afterwards. Proponents of this position argue that an explanation which performs well on the routine and poorly on the consequential has the balance exactly inverted, and that whatever interdependence theory is describing, it is not the thing that makes the system what it is.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Defenders reply that this sets a standard no social theory meets. Explaining the ordinary run of behaviour is a substantial achievement, and the fact that a framework does not predict every rupture is an argument for supplementing it rather than discarding it. They also contest the inversion: if linkage raises the threshold at which states are willing to fight, then the quiet stretches are not a trivial background but the main effect of the theory, and counting only the breakdowns measures the one thing it says should be rare. An account of what makes war costly is not refuted by the wars that happen anyway.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P2] Treating the calm as something that needs little explaining assumes the conclusion; if linkage is what makes rupture rare, then the quiet is the phenomenon and not the background against which the phenomenon is measured. [Rejecting P3] States that bore enormous cost rather than concede are not counterexamples unless they were as densely linked as the theory requires, and the theory predicts that the thickest relationships are the ones least likely to be sacrificed. [Rejecting C] No theory of international politics predicts every rupture, so a standard that discards any framework failing on the decisive cases would leave nothing standing at all.