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America's power - By
invitation
The
new Rome meets the new
barbarians
Mar 21st 2002 | CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS
From The Economist print edition
The United States is likely to be the
world's top power for many years. This brings challenges that it should not
try to face alone, writes Joseph Nye
SHORTLY after
September 11th, President Bush's father observed that
just as Pearl Harbor
awakened this country from the notion that we could somehow avoid the call of
duty to defend freedom in Europe and Asia in World War Two, so, too, should
this most recent surprise attack erase the concept in some quarters that
America can somehow go it alone in the fight against terrorism or in anything
else for that matter.
But America's allies have begun
to wonder whether that is the lesson that has been learned—or whether the Afghanistan campaign's apparent
success shows that unilateralism works just fine. The United States, that argument
goes, is so dominant that it can largely afford to go it alone.
It is true that no
nation since Rome has loomed so large
above the others, but even Rome eventually
collapsed. Only a decade ago, the conventional wisdom lamented an America in decline.
Bestseller lists featured books that described America's fall. Japan would soon become
“Number One”. That view was wrong at the time, and when I wrote “Bound to
Lead” in 1989, I, like others, predicted the continuing rise of American
power. But the new conventional wisdom that America is invincible is
equally dangerous if it leads to a foreign policy that combines
unilateralism, arrogance and parochialism.
A number of
adherents of “realist” international-relations theory have also expressed
concern about America's staying-power.
Throughout history, coalitions of countries have arisen to balance dominant
powers, and the search for traditional shifts in the balance of power and new
state challengers is well under way. Some see China as the new enemy;
others envisage a Russia-China-India coalition as the threat. But even if China maintains high
growth rates of 6% while the United States achieves only 2%,
it will not equal the United States in income per head
(measured in purchasing-power parity) until the last half of the century.
Still others see a
uniting Europe as a potential federation that will
challenge the United States for primacy. But
this forecast depends on a high degree of European political unity, and a low
state of transatlantic relations. Although realists raise
an important point about the levelling of power in the international arena,
their quest for new cold-war-style challengers is largely barking up the
wrong tree. They are ignoring deeper changes in the distribution and nature
of power in the contemporary world.
Three kinds of power
At first glance, the
disparity between American power and that of the rest of the world looks
overwhelming. In terms of military power, the United States is the only country
with both nuclear weapons and conventional forces with global reach. American
military expenditures are greater than those of the next eight countries
combined, and it leads in the information-based “revolution in military
affairs”. In economic size, America's 31% share of
world product (at market prices) is equal to the next four countries combined
(Japan, Germany, Britain and France). In terms of
cultural prominence, the United States is far and away the
number-one film and television exporter in the world. It also attracts the
most foreign students each year to its colleges and universities.
After the collapse
of the Soviet Union, some analysts described the resulting
world as uni-polar, others as multi-polar. Both are wrong, because each
refers to a different dimension of power that can no longer be assumed to be
homogenised by military dominance. Uni-polarity exaggerates the degree to
which the United States is able to get the
results it wants in some dimensions of world politics, but multi-polarity
implies, wrongly, several roughly equal countries.
Instead, power in a
global information age is distributed among countries in a pattern that
resembles a complex three-dimensional chess game. On the top chessboard,
military power is largely uni-polar. To repeat, the United States is the only country
with both intercontinental nuclear weapons and large state-of-the-art air,
naval and ground forces capable of global deployment. But on the middle
chessboard, economic power is multi-polar, with the United States, Europe and Japan representing
two-thirds of world product, and with China's dramatic growth
likely to make it the fourth big player. On this economic board, the United States is not a hegemon,
and must often bargain as an equal with Europe.
The bottom
chessboard is the realm of transnational relations that cross borders outside
government control. This realm includes actors as diverse as bankers
electronically transferring sums larger than most national budgets at one
extreme, and terrorists transferring weapons or hackers disrupting Internet
operations at the other. On this bottom board, power is widely dispersed, and
it makes no sense to speak of uni-polarity, multi-polarity or hegemony. Those
who recommend a hegemonic American foreign policy based on such traditional
descriptions of American power are relying on woefully inadequate analysis.
When you are in a three-dimensional game, you will lose if you focus only on
the top board and fail to notice the other boards and the vertical
connections among them.
A shrinking and merging world
Because of its
leading position in the information revolution and its past investment in
traditional power resources, the United States will probably
remain the world's most powerful single country well into this new century.
While potential coalitions to check American power could be created, it is
unlikely that they would become firm alliances unless the United States handles its hard
coercive power in an overbearing unilateral manner that undermines its soft
or attractive power—the important ability to get others to want what you
want.
As Josef Joffe,
editor of Die Zeit,
has written, “Unlike centuries past, when war was the great arbiter, today
the most interesting types of power do not come out of the barrel of a gun.”
Today there is a much bigger payoff in “getting others to want what you want”, and that has to do with cultural attraction and
ideology, along with agenda-setting and economic incentives for co-operation.
Soft power is particularly important in dealing with issues arising from the
bottom chessboard of transnational relations.
The real challenges
to American power are coming on cat's feet in the night and, ironically, the
temptation to unilateralism may ultimately weaken the United States. The contemporary
information revolution and the globalisation that goes with it are
transforming and shrinking the world. At the beginning of this new century,
these two forces have combined to increase American power. But, with time,
technology will spread to other countries and peoples, and America's relative
pre-eminence will diminish.
For example, today
the American twentieth of the global population represents more than half the
Internet. In a decade or two, Chinese will probably be the dominant language
of the Internet. It will not dethrone English as a lingua franca, but
at some point in the future the Asian cyber-community and economy will loom
larger than the American.
Even more important,
the information revolution is creating virtual communities and networks that
cut across national borders. Transnational corporations and non-governmental
actors (terrorists included) will play larger roles. Many of these
organisations will have soft power of their own as they attract citizens into
coalitions that cut across national boundaries. It is worth noting that, in
the 1990s, a coalition based on NGOs created a landmines treaty against the
opposition of the strongest bureaucracy in the strongest country.
September 11th was a
terrible symptom of the deeper changes that were already occurring in the
world. Technology has been diffusing power away from governments, and
empowering individuals and groups to play roles in world politics—including
wreaking massive destruction—which were once reserved to governments.
Privatisation has been increasing, and terrorism is the privatisation of war.
Globalisation is shrinking distance, and events in faraway places, like Afghanistan, can have a great
impact on American lives.
At the end of the
cold war, many observers were haunted by the spectre of the return of
American isolationism. But in addition to the historic debate between
isolationists and internationalists, there was a split within the
internationalist camp between unilateralists and multilateralists. Some, like
the columnist Charles Krauthammer, urge a “new unilateralism” whereby the United States refuses to play the
role of “docile international citizen” and unashamedly pursues its own ends.
They speak of a uni-polar world because of America's unequalled
military power. But military power alone cannot produce the outcomes
Americans want on many of the issues that matter to their safety and
prosperity.
As an assistant
secretary of defence in 1994-95, I would be the last to deny the importance
of military security. It is like oxygen. Without it, all else pales. America's military power is
essential to global stability and an essential part of the response to
terrorism. But the metaphor of war should not blind us to the fact that
suppressing terrorism will take years of patient, unspectacular civilian
co-operation with other countries. The military success in Afghanistan dealt with the
easiest part of the problem, and al-Qaeda retains cells in some 50 countries.
Rather than proving the unilateralists' point, the partial nature of the
success in Afghanistan illustrates the
continuing need for co-operation.
The perils of going alone
The problem for
Americans in the 21st century is that more and more things fall outside the control
of even the most powerful state. Although the United States does well on the
traditional measures, there is increasingly more going on in the world that
those measures fail to capture. Under the influence
of the information revolution and globalisation, world politics is changing
in a way that means Americans cannot achieve all their international goals by
acting alone. For example, international financial stability is vital to the
prosperity of Americans, but the United States needs the
co-operation of others to ensure it. Global climate change too will affect
Americans' quality of life, but the United States cannot manage the
problem alone. And in a world where borders are becoming more porous to
everything from drugs to infectious diseases to terrorism, America must mobilise
international coalitions to address shared threats and challenges.
The barbarian threat
In light of these
new circumstances, how should the only superpower guide its foreign policy in
a global information age? Some Americans are tempted to believe that the United States could reduce its
vulnerability if it withdrew troops, curtailed alliances and followed a more
isolationist foreign policy. But isolationism would not remove the
vulnerability. The terrorists who struck on September 11th were not only
dedicated to reducing American power, but wanted to break down what America stands for. Even if
the United States had a weaker
foreign policy, such groups would resent the power of the American economy
which would still reach well beyond its shores. American corporations and
citizens represent global capitalism, which some see as anathema.
Moreover, American popular
culture has a global reach regardless of what the government does. There is
no escaping the influence of Hollywood, CNN and the
Internet. American films and television express freedom, individualism and
change, but also sex and violence. Generally, the global reach of American
culture helps to enhance America's soft power. But
not, of course, with everyone. Individualism and liberties are attractive to
many people but repulsive to some, particularly fundamentalists. American
feminism, open sexuality and individual choices are profoundly subversive of
patriarchal societies. But those hard nuggets of opposition are unlikely to
catalyse broad hatred unless the United States abandons its values
and pursues arrogant and overbearing policies that let the extremists appeal
to the majority in the middle.
On the other hand,
those who look at the American preponderance, see an empire, and urge
unilateralism, risk an arrogance that alienates America's friends. Granted,
there are few pure multilateralists in practice, and multilateralism can be
used by smaller states to tie the United States down like Gulliver
among the Lilliputians, but this does not mean that a multilateral approach
is not generally in America's interests. By
embedding its policies in a multilateral framework, the United States can make its
disproportionate power more legitimate and acceptable to others. No large
power can afford to be purely multilateralist, but that should be the
starting point for policy. And when that great power defines its national
interests broadly to include global interests, some degree of unilateralism
is more likely to be acceptable. Such an approach will be crucial to the
longevity of American power.
At the moment, the United States is unlikely to face
a challenge to its pre-eminence from other states unless it acts so
arrogantly that it helps the others to overcome their built-in limitations.
The greater challenge for the United States will be to learn
how to work with other countries to control more effectively the non-state
actors that will increasingly share the stage with nation-states. How to
control the bottom chessboard in a three-dimensional game, and how to make
hard and soft power reinforce each other are the key foreign policy
challenges. As Henry Kissinger has argued, the test of history for this
generation of American leaders will be whether they can turn the current
predominant power into an international consensus and widely-accepted norms
that will be consistent with American values and interests as America's dominance ebbs
later in the century. And that cannot be done unilaterally.
Rome succumbed not to
the rise of a new empire, but to internal decay and a death of a thousand
cuts from various barbarian groups. While internal decay is always possible,
none of the commonly cited trends seem to point strongly in that direction at
this time. Moreover, to the extent it pays attention, the American public is
often realistic about the limits of their country's power. Nearly two-thirds
of those polled oppose, in principle, the United States acting alone
overseas without the support of other countries. The American public seems to
have an intuitive sense for soft power, even if the term is unfamiliar.
On the other hand,
it is harder to exclude the barbarians. The dramatically decreased cost of
communication, the rise of transnational domains (including the Internet)
that cut across borders, and the “democratisation” of technology that puts
massive destructive power into the hands of groups and individuals, all suggest
dimensions that are historically new. In the last century, Hitler, Stalin and
Mao needed the power of the state to wreak great evil. As the Hart-Rudman
Commission on National Security observed last year, “Such men and women in
the 21st century will be less bound than those of the 20th by the limits of
the state, and less obliged to gain industrial capabilities in order to wreak
havoc...Clearly the threshold for small groups or even individuals to inflict
massive damage on those they take to be their enemies is falling
dramatically.”
Since this is so,
homeland defence takes on a new importance and a new meaning. If such groups
were to obtain nuclear materials and produce a series of events involving
great destruction or great disruption of society, American attitudes might
change dramatically, though the direction of the change is difficult to
predict. Faced with such a threat, a certain degree of unilateral action,
such as the war in Afghanistan, is justified if it
brings global benefits. After all, the British navy reduced the scourge of
piracy well before international conventions were signed in the middle of the
19th century.
Number one, but...
The United States is well placed to
remain the leading power in world politics well into the 21st century. This
prognosis depends upon assumptions that can be spelled out. For example, it
assumes that the American economy and society will remain robust and not
decay; that the United States will maintain its military strength, but not
become over-militarised; that Americans will not become so unilateral and
arrogant in their strength that they squander the nation's considerable fund
of soft power; that there will not be some catastrophic series of events that
profoundly transforms American attitudes in an isolationist direction; and
that Americans will define their national interest in a broad and far-sighted
way that incorporates global interests. Each of these assumptions can be
questioned, but they currently seem more plausible than their alternatives.
If the assumptions
hold, America will remain number
one. But number one “ain't gonna be what it used to be.” The information
revolution, technological change and globalisation will not replace the
nation-state but will continue to complicate the actors and issues in world
politics. The paradox of American power in the 21st century is that the
largest power since Rome cannot achieve its
objectives unilaterally in a global information age.
Joseph Nye is dean of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and author of “The Paradox of
American Power: Why the World's Only Superpower Can't Go It Alone”
(Oxford University Press, 2002).
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