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intermediate states. Regionalism and maintaining leadership within their immediateregions is another important means of limiting uncertainty. A third way to limituncertainty for emerging powers is to diversify commercial linkages so that financialcrisis in one part of the international market poses limited threat to the domesticeconomy.In recent accounts of the new post-Cold War multipolar order, scholars are dividedover the extent to which potential powers are balancing against or bandwagoningwith the United States, the sole superpower in the system. 173 Problems inconducting such an analysis include doubt over how balancing is measured,although Waltz allowed for both internal (domestic growth) and external balancing(alliance-formation). There too, it is doubtful whether the formation of negotiationscoalitions in the World Trade Organisation, for example, constitute the formationof an ‘alliance’ against US interests, as they are not military in nature. There are nodoubt shifts in the relative distribution of power globally, as the rapid economicgrowth of China, India and Brazil attest to. The extent to which they affect theirregions, let alone the system, is yet to be fully grasped.While the system is broadly conceived as anarchical, the consequences of anarchyare not predetermined, and individual states “may differ in their ability to controlthe policy agenda, select policy options, or mobilize resources to respond tosystemic incentives”. 1743.2.2 The differential between national power and state powerThe most important modification that neoclassical realism makes to neorealism isthe acknowledgement that “(u)nit-level variables constrain or facilitate the ability of all typesof states – great powers as well as lesser states – to respond to systemic imperatives”. 175173 See William C. Wohlforth and Stephen D. Brooks, “Hard Times for Soft Balancing”,International Security, 30, Issue 1 (2005); and for a contrary view, Pape, “Soft BalancingAgainst the US”. While Wohlforth and Brooks foresee difficulty for states attempting tobalance against the US’s preponderant power, Pape believes this to be a plausible pathfor second-tier states, although one complicated by collective action issues.174 Joe D. Hagan, “Does Decision Making Matter? Systemic Assumptions vs. HistoricalReality in International Relations Theory”, International Studies Review, 3, No.2 (2001):19.175 Taliaferro et al., “Introduction”, 4, emphasis added.91