“The point is not to see England as an ally. The point is to see that the only reason the system is one of equilibrium, where no single continental hegemon emerges,”

Not so sure about this. Perhaps Delbrück saw if better than we do. Did Britain’s decision in 1914 maintain the European balance of power, or rather destroy it? Was Germany a rash hegemonic wannabe, or rather a status quo power in 1914? How exactly did Britain benefit from all this?

Svechin thought that the British argument for going to war to defend Belgian neutrality a joke, rather their intention was to destroy their main commercial rival. From the British perspective, there were great prospects for the blockade of Germany in 1914, who could have guessed that Fritz Haber would come up with a process to make synthetic nitrates . . .

George F Kennan of course wrote “The Faithful Alliance”, where his argument was that the Franco-Russian Alliance of 1894 set the stage for the unleashed militarism which led to the Great War. A great read btw.

“The question then is, can the USA play the same balancing role on a global scale perpetually? Or will the global system be one in which there is a hegemonic power? It seems that the global system will remain multipolar for a while to come.”

By “perpetually” you mean of course forever, which is highly unlikely. Prediction is mostly beyond the range of strategic theory, although the events of the past eight years should give us enough to start with.

The US imo needs to return to the values that we stood for in 1989 when all of the East Block looked to us with hope, that is the example we set in Europe up to that date. I remember those days, they were the most amazing of my life.

In East Asia, the natural order is to have China be the dominant power, with occasional challenges from the steppe, or internal dissolution, but the “order of nature” is one of a large, central, hegemonic power.

The question then is, can the USA play the same balancing role on a global scale perpetually? Or will the global system be one in which there is a hegemonic power? It seems that the global system will remain multipolar for a while to come.

Is it so surprising that a Prussian like Delbrück, or Weber, or Clausewitz would see England as a natural ally? Given their history before 1880? Don’t quite get the point there.

“My point is this: Does the balancing mechanism come into play “naturally”, or is it a unique feature of the European system? Does a “Global” system tend toward a balance, or toward a hegemonic arrangement?”

Ideal types . . .

I do not know how much he knew about other places. But, the tendency to have a system of states in balance was unique to Europe. Elsewhere, there tended to be a regional hegemon, and not a system of balancing states.

Clausewitz, at least in On War, does not seem to make much of the unique role of Britain as the “offshore balancer”. A good discussion of that role is in George Kennan’s first chapter in American Diplomacy:

Today, standing at the end rather than the beginning of this half-century, some of us see certain fundamental elements on which we suspect that American security has rested. We can see that our security has been dependent throughout much of our history on the position of Britain; that Canada, in particular, has been a useful and indispensable hostage to good relations between our country and British Empire; and that Britain’s position, in turn, has depended on the maintenance of a balance of power on the European Continent. Thus it was essential to us, as it was to Britain, that no single Continental land power should come to dominate the entire Eurasian land mass. Our interest has lain rather in the maintenance of some sort of stable balance among the powers of the interior, in order that none of them should effect the subjugation of the others, conquer the seafaring fringes of the land mass, become a great sea power as well as land power, shatter the position of England, and enter—as in these circumstances it certainly would—on an overseas expansion hostile to ourselves and supported by the immense resources of the interior of Europe and Asia. Seeing these things, we can understand that we have had a stake in the prosperity and independence of the peripheral powers of Europe and Asia: those countries whose gazes were oriented outward, across the seas, rather than inward to the conquest of power on land.

Kennan here also notes the importance of America as the successor “offshore balancer” — though he does not use that term — on a global scale.

Ludwig Dehio, in Ludwig Dehio, The Precarious Balance: Four Centuries of the European Power
Struggle (1948) gives a good discussion of the balance of power in Europe, and the key role of the island power.

My point is this: Does the balancing mechanism come into play “naturally”, or is it a unique feature of the European system? Does a “Global” system tend toward a balance, or toward a hegemonic arrangement?

Whatever the case may be on that question, it is absolutely correct that an existing hegemon, as the USA was on September 11, 2001, and as it to some degree remains to this day, should NOT embark on a revolutionary enterprise to overturn the status quo. Claiming to be embarking on a program of democratizing the Middle East, however half-baked and half-cocked those pronouncements turned out to actually be, was a really terrible idea.

As you put it, the “cohesion” of the system, once disrupted and set in motion, is unlikely to settle into a new pattern that is favorable to the currently most powerful player.

Kennan, Dehio or Clausewitz could all have told Mr. Bush and his coterie of advisors that the alarm and counter-reaction they would provoke would offset any potential gain — even if the goal in question had not been a fantasia to start off with.

Powerful states that benefit from a status quo that they built themselves, nonetheless seem to always want to push things too far. They take the favorable conditions that were carved out by the blood and guile and work of their predecessors as the order of nature, and think that even more should be available on demand.

This is, of course, tied in to the whole business of ends and means being aligned, and knowing what kind of war you are getting into and what you want to get out of it.