I thank Uriel Abulof for his generous review of The Myth of International Order. In what follows, I address two issues he raises: first, about the prevalence and criterion of state weakness; second, about whether the state is better theorized as a sacrificial institution.

Abulof questions if most states are weak states, states that face difficulties monopolizing violence and providing services. He suggests that most citizens trust state institutions like the military more than they trust, say, businesses, and the relevant criterion for state strength should be legitimacy in the use of force. There are two points to clarify here. The first point is empirical. Abulof claims that I inappropriately liken India and Mexico to failed states like Libya, but the distinction I am making is between weak states like India, Mexico, and Libya, on the one hand, and strong states like the UK and Canada, on the other. The challenges India and Mexico face—armed actors controlling territory, difficulty collecting taxes, corruption in social spending—more closely resemble the challenges Libya faces than the challenges Canada faces. The latter may be challenged on the appropriate level of taxation and public services, but not in its capacity to collect taxes and provide services. Empirically, the challenges India or Mexico face are more common than the challenges Canada faces; hence, my claim that most states are weak states.

The second point is that state weakness is a protean category that resists ahistorical criteria like legitimacy in the use of force. While states, in some form or another, have existed for millennia, it is not the state per se but its post-1900 centralized form that is seen to be lacking in much of the world. This lack is not one of material capacity—most contemporary weak states tax more than Britain did in 1900—or legitimacy in the use of force. In Abulof’s example of a legitimate state, Haiti, the World Bank is actively working to “enhance government capacity to finance the provision of basic services.” State weakness is better understood as the inability of states to fulfill popular expectations. These expectations of state intervention are not fixed but have expanded over time to include realms like health care, which were almost entirely private concerns when Max Weber was trying to define the state a century ago.

Instead of my rationalist model, Abulof suggests theorizing the state as a sacrificial entity. A “sacrificial state” is more than a material exchange of protection and services for taxes. Rather, it is a collective project where the prospect of sacrifice binds individuals together, exemplified by Israel. Abulof is correct that rationalist models offer restricted, even impoverished, views of politics. But sacrificial states are even rarer than states where citizens exchange taxes for protection and services. This is because the historical conditions under which individuals have proved willing to sacrifice for the collective—costly wars—are now uncommon. Instead of war, the primary activities of contemporary states, most of which entered the system in a period of relative peace, are economic. These activities do not demand collective sacrifice like the “conscription of wealth” during the world wars. Yet contemporary states spend more on a steady-state level than predecessor states did during spikes of collective sacrifice. Until 1914, spikes in sacrifice, always for war, rarely exceeded 20% of GDP for great powers (e.g., during the Napoleonic wars, the British state spent around 15% of GDP). Those spikes approximate average state spending in India and Mexico, that is, in contemporary weak states. That is, the greatest collective sacrifices until the world wars were equal to or less than the level required to sustain contemporary weak states in the absence of war or a sense of collective sacrifice.

Unlike Israel, most contemporary states cannot compel collective sacrifice even as they are expected to provide more than historically strong states ever did. To believe otherwise, that strong states like Israel are the norm, is to subscribe to a myth. Let us dispel this “myth of international order” to see the world as it is, a world of weak states.