of: (1) the ability of the state to raise or maintain levels of taxation before the mobilization drive;
(2) the nature and immediacy of the international challenge and the expense of the leaders'
preferred policies in comparison with past responses to similar challenges; and (3) the novelty
and salient history of policy details within the preferred grand strategy.
Christensen presents a "two-level" domestic mobilization model to explain anomaly for
Waltz's balance-of-power theory: Sino-American enmity during the height of the cold war. The
United States and the People's Republic of China not only failed to balance against the Soviet
Union before the Nixon administration's opening to Beijing in 1972; they "were each other's most
active enemy in the years 1949-1972, fighting wars in Korea and Vietnam that claimed the vast
1950s, U.S. and Chinese leaders sought to mobilize domestic resources to balance against the
long-term Soviet threat, but lacked sufficient national political power to do as they pleased.
Therefore, the Truman administration and Mao Zedong used domestically popular, but overly
aggressive, policies in areas of secondary concern as a diversion for necessary, expensive, and
largely defensive policies in areas of primary concern.
Leaders often encounter difficulties convincing the public to make significant sacrifices
for national security, even if such efforts are in the public's own long-term interest. This is
especially true in liberal democracies, where the average citizen "does not have the time or
expertise to understand the subtleties of balance-of-power politics," tend to have a higher
discount rate regarding geographically distant and indirect external threats than foreign policy
elites, and have a further incentive to free ride on the sacrifices of others for national security
Mobilization hurdles are likely to be particularly high where states currently face low
levels of external vulnerability, but leaders nonetheless fear the emergence of new long-term
threats. In order to mobilize and maintain broad support for strategies that they consider essential
29
Convention