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Article Excerpt
America today arguably has greater ability to shape the future of world politics than any other power in history. The military, economic, technological, and cultural dominance of the United States is unprecedented. The opportunity that America has before it also stems from the geopolitical opening afforded by the cold war's end. Postwar periods are moments of extraordinary prospect, usually accompanied by searching debate and institutional innovation. It is no accident that the Concert of Europe was erected after the end of the Napoleonic Wars, that the League of Nations came into being at the close of World War I, and that the founding of the United Nations followed the end of World War II.
Despite the opportunities afforded by its dominance and by the end of the cold war, America is squandering the moment. From the fall of the Berlin Wall until September 11, 2001, the United States had no grand strategy, no design to guide the ship of state. The first Bush administration did an admirable job of presiding over the end of the cold war but did little to shape what came next. The Clinton team managed reasonably well the international challenges that it faced but never articulated a conceptual foundation or overarching set of guiding principles. The early months of the George W. Bush administration were characterized primarily by inconsistency, with the ambitious unilateralism of the neoconservatives clashing head-on with the neoisolationist instincts of the president and his fellow heartland conservatives.
Since September 11, the United States has had a grand strategy--one based on the principles of preeminence and preemption. But it is a manifestly inappropriate grand strategy. Washington's swaggering brand of global leadership and its dismissive attitude toward international institutions have succeeded in alienating much of the world and straining to the breaking point many of America's key partnerships.
Rather than rallying behind the United States, countries around the world are distancing themselves from Washington and locking arms to resist a wayward America. France, Germany, and Russia did their best to block America's rush to war against Iraq; the Western alliance is unlikely to survive the transatlantic rift that has opened. After North Korea restarted its nuclear weapons program, South Korea, China, and Japan all made clear they would not back Washington's refusal to negotiate bilaterally with Pyongyang. Anti-American sentiment has been on the rise in just about every quarter of the globe. (1) Even in countries that have for decades been close U.S. allies--such as Germany and South Korea--politicians are winning office by running on platforms calling for independence from Washington. America seems well on its way to compromising perhaps its most precious asset--its international legitimacy.
The failure of the United States to manage more successfully the post-cold war international order is a direct by-product of Washington's misperception of the world's geopolitical landscape. Backed up by repeated scholarly pronouncements about the longevity of unipolarity, successive administrations have operated under the assumption that U.S. primacy is here to stay. As William Wohlforth sums up the prevailing wisdom, "the current unipolarity is not only peaceful but durable.... For many decades, no state is likely to be in a position to take on the United States in any of the underlying elements of power." (2) Such confidence in the durability of U.S. preponderance bred the complacency of the 1990s. Washington believed that order would devolve naturally from hierarchy; there was no pressing need for institutional innovation. The blustery policies of the Bush administration have similarly been based on the presumption that a combination of preeminence and uncompromising leadership will induce the rest of the world to get in line.
This confidence about the longevity of the American era is not only misplaced but also dangerous. America appears to be committing the same error as most other great nations that have come before it--mistaking for a more permanent peace the temporary great-power quiescence that usually follows resolution of a major geopolitical divide. The decade that followed the cold war's end was admittedly one of bounty and peace for America. The current dominance of the United States is no illusion; by any measure, America is in a class by itself. The events of September 11 certainly left the United States with a new-found vulnerability, but they also fostered confidence that the threat of terrorism would further unite the world's major players.
The international system, however, is fickle and fragile, and can come apart with remarkable speed. In 1910, Europeans were confident of the peace-causing benefits of economic interdependence and the irrationality of armed conflict. By the late summer of 1914, Europe's great powers were at war. The United States enjoyed prosperity and optimism during the second half of the 1920s. By 1933, the world was well into a painful depression, Hitler was in control of Germany, and the century was fast headed toward its darkest moments. In early 1945, the United States was busy building a postwar partnership with the Soviet Union, U.S. forces were rapidly demobilizing, and the American people were looking to the United Nations to preserve world peace. Within a few short years, the cold war was under way, and the United States and Soviet Union were threatening each other with nuclear annihilation.
The reemergence of rivalry and conflict among the world's major states is by no means foreordained. But there is no better way to ensure its return than for America to set its sights on terrorism and presume that great-power peace is here to stay. Instead, America should realize that its preponderance and the stability it breeds are already beginning to slip away. Europe is in the midst of a revolutionary process of political and economic integration that is gradually eliminating the importance of its internal borders and centralizing authority in Brussels. The European Union's collective wealth will soon rival that of the United States. As the diplomatic standoff over Iraq made clear, the continent's main powers are increasingly ready to act as a collective counterweight to U.S. power. Russia, which joined France and Germany in trying to prevent the war, will ultimately rebound and may well take its place in an integrating Europe. Asia is not far behind. China is already a regional presence, and its economy is growing apace. And Japan, the world's second-largest economy, will eventually climb out of recession and gradually expand its political and military influence.
At the same time that challengers to its dominance are on the rise, the United States is fast abandoning its embrace of a liberal brand of internationalism--one committed to multilateral action and international institutions. Instead, America is veering toward unilateralist and neoisolationist extremes, a change of course that will both alienate rising centers of power and encourage their autonomy. President George W. Bush early on made known his unilateralist proclivities. Within six months of taking office, Bush had pulled out of the Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change, made clear his intention to withdraw from the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, stated his opposition to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and the pact establishing the International Criminal Court, backed away from establishing a body to verify the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention, and watered down a UN agreement aimed at controlling the proliferation of small arms. Bush also revealed his neoisolationist instincts, making clear that he intended to rein in the country's commitments, back away from mediating peace efforts in troubled regions, and focus on matters closer to home.
For many, the events of September 2001 arrested this trend, convincing the Bush administration and the American public of the need for wide-ranging, multilateral engagement. As Andrew Sullivan, the former editor of The New Republic, wrote only a few days after the attack, "We have been put on notice that every major Western city is now vulnerable.... For the United States itself," Sullivan continued, "this means one central thing. Isolationism is dead." (3) Others asserted that the attack would encourage Washington to rediscover multilateralism. G. John Ikenberry claimed that terrorism would push the United States "back toward a more centrist foreign policy" that "stresses alliances [and] multilateral cooperation," thereby providing "new sinews of cohesion among the great powers." (4)
It is by no means clear, however, that terrorism inoculates the United States against the allure of either isolationism or unilateralism. In the long run, America's leaders may well find the country's security better served by reducing its overseas commitments and raising protective barriers than by chasing terrorists through the mountains of Afghanistan or toppling Saddam Hussein. The United States has a strong tradition dating back to the Founding Fathers of seeking to cordon itself off from foreign troubles, an impulse that could well be reawakened by the rising costs of global engagement. America's initial response to the attacks of September 11, after all, was to close its borders with Mexico and Canada, ground the nation's air traffic, and patrol the country's coasts with warships and jet fighters. And when the United States does act, it may well do so without the support of the international community--as in Iraq--undermining both the spirit and the form of multilateral engagement.
The American era is alive and well, but the rise of alternative centers of power and a difficult and diffident U.S. internationalism will ensure that it comes undone as this new century progresses--with profound geopolitical consequences. The stability and order that devolve from American preponderance will gradually be replaced by renewed competition for primacy. The unstoppable locomotive of globalization will run off its tracks as soon as Washington is no longer behind the controls. Pax Americana is poised to give way to a much more unpredictable and dangerous global environment. And the chief threat will come not from the likes of Osama bin Laden, but from the return of traditional geopolitical rivalry.
As a matter of urgency, America needs to begin to prepare itself and the rest of the world for this more uncertain future. To wait until American preponderance is already gone would be to squander the enormous opportunity that comes with primacy. America must devise a grand strategy for the transition to a world of multiple power centers now, while it still has the luxury of doing so. This is the central challenge of this article.
THE WANING OF UNIPOLARITY
Most scholars of international politics trace change in the distribution of power to two sources: the secular diffusion over time and space of productive capabilities and material resources; and balancing against concentrations of power motivated by fear of exploitation. Today's great powers will become tomorrow's has-beens as nodes of innovation and efficiency move from the core to the periphery of the international system. In addition, reigning hegemons threaten secondary states, causing them to form countervailing coalitions and take other steps to offset their material disadvantage. Taken together, these dynamics drive the cyclical pattern of the rise and fall of great powers. (5)
The contemporary era departs from this historical pattern; neither the diffusion of power nor traditional military balancing against the United States will be decisive factors driving the coming transition in the international system. It will be decades before any single state can match the United States in terms of either military or economic capability. Nor is explicit balancing against American power likely to provoke a countervailing coalition. The United States is separated from both Europe and Asia by large expanses of water, making American power less threatening. Anti-American sentiment may be on the rise in many parts of the world. But it is hard to imagine that the United States would engage in behavior sufficiently aggressive to provoke an opposing alliance of industrialized countries. Europeans, South Koreans, and others may not welcome U.S. troops in their neighborhoods as they have for decades, but there are no signs that countries in Europe or Asia are contemplating balancing against the United States in military terms.
In contrast to the past, the waning of today's unipolarity will be driven by two unusual suspects: regional amalgamation in Europe and the erosion of liberal internationalism in the United States. Europe is gradually emerging as a counterweight to the United States. It will not challenge America militarily, but it will increasingly constitute an alternative center of power in economic and political terms. At the same time, America's changing internationalism will compromise the international...
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