be justified on the grounds that only Germany, Britain, France and Japan were strong enough during this period to consider challenging the United States or attempting to thwart it in significant ways: they are the potential rivals against whom it is significant to measure U.S. resources. The measures have to be somewhat different for petroleum. The relevant resources here appear to be U.S. imports vs. excess production capacity(since in 1956-1957 and 1967 the United States helped to maintain the existing regime by shipping oil to Europe from its own wells), and oil imports as a percentage of energy supply, giving a measure of relative U.S. and European dependence on imports.
None of these measures of "economic power" is perfect; indeed, they are quite crude. Often the composition of exports, for instance, may be as important as the amount; and the balance of trade may in some cases weigh as heavily as the combinations of imports and exports. Probably most deficient is the monetary measure, since reserves are not necessarily an indicator of a country's net positions Measures of the U.S. net liquidity position however, would also show a sharp decline (U.S. GPO, 1971: 40: International Economic Report of the President, 1977: 16l).
The figures on economic resources provide prima facie support for the hegemonic stability thesis. The U.S. proportion of trade, for the top five market economy countries, fell only slightly between 1960 and 1975 much less than its proportion of gross domestic product, reflecting the rapid increases during these years in U.S trade as a proportion of total product. As we saw, the international trade regime already under pressure in 1967-changed less in the subsequent decade than the regimes for money and oil. U.S. financial resources in the form of reserves fell sharply, reflecting the shift from U.S. dominance in 1960 to the struggles over exchange rates of the 1970s. In view of the continued ability of the United States to finance its deficits with newly printed dollars and treasury bills rather than with reserves, Table 8.2, B should not over interpreted: it does not mean that Germany was "twice as powerful as the United States" in the monetary area by 1975. Yet it does, as indicated above, signal a very strong shift in the resource situation of the United States. Finally, the petroleum figures especially in Table 8.2, C-1-are dramatic: the United States went from a large positive position in 1956 and a small positive position in 1967 to a very large petroleum deficit by 1973. The hegemonic stability theory accurately predicts from this data that U power in the oil area and the stability of the old international oil regime would decline sharply during the 1970s.