Copyright 2002 Council on Foreign Relations, Inc.
Foreign Affairs
September 2002 - October 2002
SECTION: 9/11 ESSAY; Pg. 44
LENGTH: 6704 words
HEADLINE: America's Imperial Ambition
BYLINE: G. John Ikenberry
BODY:
America's Imperial Ambition
G. John Ikenberry
THE LURES OF PREEMPTION
In the shadows of the Bush administration's war on terrorism, sweeping new
ideas are circulating about U.S. grand strategy and the restructuring of
today's unipolar world. They call for American unilateral and preemptive,
even preventive, use of force, facilitated if possible by coalitions of the
willing -- but ultimately unconstrained by the rules and norms of the international
community. At the extreme, these notions form a neoimperial vision in which
the United States arrogates to itself the global role of setting standards,
determining threats, using force, and meting out justice. It is a vision
in which sovereignty becomes more absolute for America even as it becomes
more conditional for countries that challenge Washington's standards of internal
and external behavior. It is a vision made necessary -- at least in the eyes
of its advocates -- by the new and apocalyptic character of contemporary
terrorist threats and by America's unprecedented global dominance. These
radical strategic ideas and impulses could transform today's world order
in a way that the end of the Cold War, strangely enough, did not.
The exigencies of fighting terrorism in Afghanistan and the debate over intervening
in Iraq obscure the profundity of this geopolitical challenge. Blueprints
have not been produced, and Yalta-style summits have not been convened, but
actions are afoot to dramatically alter the political order that the United
States has built with its partners since the 1940s. The twin new realities
of our age -- catastrophic terrorism and American unipolar power -- do necessitate
a rethinking of the organizing principles of international order. America
and the other major states do need a new consensus on terrorist threats, weapons
of mass destruction (WMD), the use of force, and the global rules of the
game. This imperative requires a better appreciation of the ideas coming
out of the administration. But in turn, the administration should understand
the virtues of the old order that it wishes to displace.
America's nascent neoimperial grand strategy threatens to rend the fabric
of the international community and political partnerships precisely at a
time when that community and those partnerships are urgently needed. It is
an approach fraught with peril and likely to fail. It is not only politically
unsustainable but diplomatically harmful. And if history is a guide, it will
trigger antagonism and resistance that will leave America in a more hostile
and divided world.
PROVEN LEGACIES
The mainstream of American foreign policy has been defined since the 1940s
by two grand strategies that have built the modern international order. One
is realist in orientation, organized around containment, deterrence, and the
maintenance of the global balance of power. Facing a dangerous and expansive
Soviet Union after 1945, the United States stepped forward to fill the vacuum
left by a waning British Empire and a collapsing European order to provide
a counter-weight to Stalin and his Red Army.
The touchstone of this strategy was containment, which sought to deny the
Soviet Union the ability to expand its sphere of influence. Order was maintained
by managing the bipolar balance between the American and Soviet camps. Stability
was achieved through nuclear deterrence. For the first time, nuclear weapons
and the doctrine of mutual assured destruction made war between the great
powers irrational. But containment and global power-balancing ended with the
collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Nuclear deterrence is no longer the
defining logic of the existing order, although it remains a recessed feature
that continues to impart stability in relations among China, Russia, and
the West.
This strategy has yielded a bounty of institutions and partnerships for America.
The most important have been the NATO and U.S.-Japan alliances, American-led
security partnerships that have survived the end of the Cold War by providing
a bulwark for stability through commitment and reassurance. The United States
maintains a forward presence in Europe and East Asia; its alliance partners
gain security protection as well as a measure of regularity in their relationship
with the world's leading military power. But Cold War balancing has yielded
more than a utilitarian alliance structure; it has generated a political
order that has value in itself.
This grand strategy presupposes a loose framework of consultations and agreements
to resolve differences: the great powers extend to each other the respect
of equals, and they accommodate each other until vital interests come into
play. The domestic affairs of these states remain precisely that -- domestic.
The great powers compete with each other, and although war is not unthinkable,
sober statecraft and the balance of power offer the best hope for stability
and peace.
George W. Bush ran for president emphasizing some of these themes, describing
his approach to foreign policy as "new realism": the focus of American efforts
should shift away from Clinton-era preoccupations with nation building, international
social work, and the promiscuous use of force, and toward cultivating great-power
relations and rebuilding the nation's military. Bush's efforts to integrate
Russia into the Western security order have been the most important manifestation
of this realist grand strategy at work. The moderation in Washington's confrontational
rhetoric toward China also reflects this emphasis. If the major European and
Asian states play by the rules, the great-power order will remain stable.
(In a way, it is precisely because Europe is not a great power -- or at least
seems to eschew the logic of great-power politics -- that it is now generating
so much discord with the United States.)
The other grand strategy, forged during World War II as the United States
planned the reconstruction of the world economy, is liberal in orientation.
It seeks to build order around institutionalized political relations among
integrated market democracies, supported by an opening of economies. This
agenda was not simply an inspiration of American businessmen and economists,
however. There have always been geopolitical goals as well. Whereas America's
realist grand strategy was aimed at countering Soviet power, its liberal
grand strategy was aimed at avoiding a return to the 1930s, an era of regional
blocs, trade conflict, and strategic rivalry. Open trade, democracy, and
multilateral institutional relations went together. Underlying this strategy
was the view that a rule-based international order, especially one in which
the United States uses its political weight to derive congenial rules, will
most fully protect American interests, conserve its power, and extend its
influence.
This grand strategy has been pursued through an array of postwar initiatives
that look disarmingly like "low politics": the Bretton Woods institutions,
the World Trade Organization (WTO), and the Organization for Economic Cooperation
and Development are just a few examples. Together, they form a complex layer
cake of integrative initiatives that bind the democratic industrialized world
together. During the 1990s, the United States continued to pursue this liberal
grand strategy. Both the first Bush and the Clinton administrations attempted
to articulate a vision of world order that was not dependent on an external
threat or an explicit policy of balance of power. Bush the elder talked about
the importance of the transatlantic community and articulated ideas about
a more fully integrated Asia-Pacific region. In both cases, the strategy offered
a positive vision of alliance and partnership built around common values,
tradition, mutual self-interest, and the preservation of stability. The Clinton
administration likewise attempted to describe the post-Cold War order in
terms of the expansion of democracy and open markets. In this vision, democracy
provided the foundation for global and regional community, and trade and
capital flows were forces for political reform and integration.
The current Bush administration is not eager to brandish this Clinton-looking
grand strategy, but it still invokes that strategy's ideas in various ways.
Support for Chinese entry into the WTO is based on the liberal anticipation
that free markets and integration into the Western economic order will create
pressures for Chinese political reform and discourage a belligerent foreign
policy. Administration support for last year's multilateral trade-negotiating
round in Doha, Qatar, also was premised on the economic and political benefits
of freer trade. After September 11, U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick
even linked trade expansion authority to the fight against terrorism: trade,
growth, integration, and political stability go together. Richard Haass, policy
planning director at the State Department, argued recently that "the principal
aim of American foreign policy is to integrate other countries and organizations
into arrangements that will sustain a world consistent with U.S. interests
and values" -- again, an echo of the liberal grand strategy. The administration's
recent protectionist trade actions in steel and agriculture have triggered
such a loud outcry around the world precisely because governments are worried
that the United States might be retreating from this postwar liberal strategy.
AMERICA'S HISTORIC BARGAINS
These two grand strategies are rooted in divergent, even antagonistic, intellectual
traditions. But over the last 50 years they have worked remarkably well together.
The realist grand strategy created a political rationale for establishing
major security commitments around the world. The liberal strategy created
a positive agenda for American leadership. The United States could exercise
its power and achieve its national interests, but it did so in a way that
helped deepen the fabric of international community. American power did not
destabilize world order; it helped create it. The development of rule-based
agreements and political-security partnerships was good both for the United
States and for much of the world. By the end of the 1990s, the result was
an international political order of unprecedented size and success: a global
coalition of democratic states tied together through markets, institutions,
and security partnerships.
This international order was built on two historic bargains. One was the
U.S. commitment to provide its European and Asian partners with security
protection and access to American markets, technology, and supplies within
an open world economy. In return, these countries agreed to be reliable partners
providing diplomatic, economic, and logistical support for the United States
as it led the wider Western postwar order. The other is the liberal bargain
that addressed the uncertainties of American power. East Asian and European
states agreed to accept American leadership and operate within an agreed-upon
political-economic system. The United States, in response, opened itself
up and bound itself to its partners. In effect, the United States built an
institutionalized coalition of partners and reinforced the stability of these
mutually beneficial relations by making itself more "user-friendly" -- that
is, by playing by the rules and creating ongoing political processes that
facilitated consultation and joint decision-making. The United States made
its power safe for the world, and in return the world agreed to live within
the U.S. system. These bargains date from the 1940s, but they continue to
shore up the post-Cold War order. The result has been the most stable and
prosperous international system in world history. But new ideas within the
Bush administration -- crystallized by September 11 and U.S. dominance --
are unsettling this order and the political bargains behind it.
A NEW GRAND STRATEGY
For the first time since the dawn of the Cold War, a new grand strategy is
taking shape in Washington. It is advanced most directly as a response to
terrorism, but it also constitutes a broader view about how the United States
should wield power and organize world order. According to this new paradigm,
America is to be less bound to its partners and to global rules and institutions
while it steps forward to play a more unilateral and anticipatory role in
attacking terrorist threats and confronting rogue states seeking WMD. The
United States will use its unrivaled military power to manage the global order.
This new grand strategy has seven elements. It begins with a fundamental
commitment to maintaining a unipolar world in which the United States has
no peer competitor. No coalition of great powers without the United States
will be allowed to achieve hegemony. Bush made this point the centerpiece
of American security policy in his West Point commencement address in June:
"America has, and intends to keep, military strengths beyond challenges --
thereby making the destabilizing arms races of other eras pointless, and
limiting rivalries to trade and other pursuits of peace." The United States
will not seek security through the more modest realist strategy of operating
within a global system of power balancing, nor will it pursue a liberal strategy
in which institutions, democracy, and integrated markets reduce the importance
of power politics altogether. America will be so much more powerful than
other major states that strategic rivalries and security competition among
the great powers will disappear, leaving everyone -- not just the United
States -- better off.
This goal made an unsettling early appearance at the end of the first Bush
administration in a leaked Pentagon memorandum written by then Assistant
Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz. With the collapse of the Soviet Union,
he wrote, the United States must act to prevent the rise of peer competitors
in Europe and Asia. But the 1990s made this strategic aim moot. The United
States grew faster than the other major states during the decade, it reduced
military spending more slowly, and it dominated investment in the technological
advancement of its forces. Today, however, the new goal is to make these
advantages permanent -- a fait accompli that will prompt other states to
not even try to catch up. Some thinkers have described the strategy as "breakout,"
in which the United States moves so quickly to develop technological advantages
(in robotics, lasers, satellites, precision munitions, etc.) that no state
or coalition could ever challenge it as global leader, protector, and enforcer.
The second element is a dramatic new analysis of global threats and how they
must be attacked. The grim new reality is that small groups of terrorists
-- perhaps aided by outlaw states -- may soon acquire highly destructive nuclear,
chemical, and biological weapons that can inflict catastrophic destruction.
These terrorist groups cannot be appeased or deterred, the administration
believes, so they must be eliminated. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld
has articulated this frightening view with elegance: regarding the threats
that confront the United States, he said, "There are things we know that we
know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we
know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things
we don't know we don't know. ... Each year, we discover a few more of those
unknown unknowns." In other words, there could exist groups of terrorists
that no one knows about. They may have nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons
that the United States did not know they could get, and they might be willing
and able to attack without warning. In the age of terror, there is less room
for error. Small networks of angry people can inflict unimaginable harm on
the rest of the world. They are not nation-states, and they do not play by
the accepted rules of the game.
The third element of the new strategy maintains that the Cold War concept
of deterrence is outdated. Deterrence, sovereignty, and the balance of power
work together. When deterrence is no longer viable, the larger realist edifice
starts to crumble. The threat today is not other great powers that must be
managed through second-strike nuclear capacity but the transnational terrorist
networks that have no home address. They cannot be deterred because they
are either willing to die for their cause or able to escape retaliation.
The old defensive strategy of building missiles and other weapons that can
survive a first strike and be used in a retaliatory strike to punish the
attacker will no longer ensure security. The only option, then, is offense.
The use of force, this camp argues, will therefore need to be preemptive
and perhaps even preventive -- taking on potential threats before they can
present a major problem. But this premise plays havoc with the old international
rules of self-defense and United Nations norms about the proper use of force.
Rumsfeld has articulated the justification for preemptive action by stating
that the "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence of weapons of mass
destruction." But such an approach renders international norms of self-defense
-- enshrined by Article 51 of the UN Charter -- almost meaningless. The administration
should remember that when Israeli jets bombed the Iraqi nuclear reactor at
Osirak in 1981 in what Israel described as an act of self-defense, the world
condemned it as an act of aggression. Even British Prime Minister Margaret
Thatcher and the American ambassador to the un, Jeane Kirkpatrick, criticized
the action, and the United States joined in passing a UN resolution condemning
it.
The Bush administration's security doctrine takes this country down the same
slippery slope. Even without a clear threat, the United States now claims
a right to use preemptive or preventive military force. At West Point, Bush
put it succinctly when he stated that "the military must be ready to strike
at a moment's notice in any dark corner of the world. All nations that decide
for aggression and terror will pay a price." The administration defends this
new doctrine as a necessary adjustment to a more uncertain and shifting threat
environment. This policy of no regrets errs on the side of action -- but
it can also easily become national security by hunch or inference, leaving
the world without clear-cut norms for justifying force.
As a result, the fourth element of this emerging grand strategy involves
a recasting of the terms of sovereignty. Because these terrorist groups cannot
be deterred, the United States must be prepared to intervene anywhere, anytime
to preemptively destroy the threat. Terrorists do not respect borders, so
neither can the United States. Moreover, countries that harbor terrorists,
either by consent or because they are unable to enforce their laws within
their territory, effectively forfeit their rights of sovereignty. Haass recently
hinted at this notion in The New Yorker:
What you are seeing in this administration is the emergence of a new principle
or body of ideas ... about what you might call the limits of sovereignty.
Sovereignty entails obligations. One is not to massacre your own people. Another
is not to support terrorism in any way. If a government fails to meet these
obligations, then it forfeits some of the normal advantages of sovereignty,
including the right to be left alone inside your own territory. Other governments,
including the United States, gain the right to intervene. In the case of
terrorism, this can even lead to a right of preventive ... self-defense.
You essentially can act in anticipation if you have grounds to think it's
a question of when, and not if, you're going to be attacked.
Here the war on terrorism and the problem of the proliferation of WMD get
entangled. The worry is that a few despotic states -- Iraq in particular,
but also Iran and North Korea -- will develop capabilities to produce weapons
of mass destruction and put these weapons in the hands of terrorists. The
regimes themselves may be deterred from using such capabilities, but they
might pass along these weapons to terrorist networks that are not deterred.
Thus another emerging principle within the Bush administration: the possession
of WMD by unaccountable, unfriendly, despotic governments is itself a threat
that must be countered. In the old era, despotic regimes were to be lamented
but ultimately tolerated. With the rise of terrorism and weapons of mass
destruction, they are now unacceptable threats. Thus states that are not
technically in violation of any existing international laws could nevertheless
be targets of American force -- if Washington determines that they have a
prospective capacity to do harm.
The recasting of sovereignty is paradoxical. On the one hand, the new grand
strategy reaffirms the importance of the territorial nation-state. After
all, if all governments were accountable and capable of enforcing the rule
of law within their sovereign territory, terrorists would find it very difficult
to operate. The emerging Bush doctrine enshrines this idea: governments will
be held responsible for what goes on inside their borders. On the other hand,
sovereignty has been made newly conditional: governments that fail to act
like respectable, law-abiding states will lose their sovereignty.
In one sense, such conditional sovereignty is not new. Great powers have
willfully transgressed the norms of state sovereignty as far back as such
norms have existed, particularly within their traditional spheres of influence,
whenever the national interest dictated. The United States itself has done
this within the western hemisphere since the nineteenth century. What is
new and provocative in this notion today, however, is the Bush administration's
inclination to apply it on a global basis, leaving to itself the authority
to determine when sovereign rights have been forfeited, and doing so on an
anticipatory basis.
The fifth element of this new grand strategy is a general depreciation of
international rules, treaties, and security partnerships. This point relates
to the new threats themselves: if the stakes are rising and the margins of
error are shrinking in the war on terrorism, multilateral norms and agreements
that sanction and limit the use of force are just annoying distractions.
The critical task is to eliminate the threat. But the emerging unilateral
strategy is also informed by a deeper suspicion about the value of international
agreements themselves. Part of this view arises from a deeply felt and authentically
American
belief that the United States should not get entangled in the corrupting
and constraining world of multilateral rules and institutions. For some Americans,
the belief that American sovereignty is politically sacred leads to a preference
for isolationism. But the more influential view -- particularly after September
11 -- is not that the United States should withdraw from the world but that
it should operate in the world on its own terms. The Bush administration's
repudiation of a remarkable array of treaties and institutions -- from the
Kyoto Protocol on global warming to the International Criminal Court to the
Biological Weapons Convention -- reflects this new bias. Likewise, the United
States signed a formal agreement with Russia on the reduction of deployed
nuclear warheads only after Moscow's insistence; the Bush administration
wanted only a "gentlemen's agreement." In other words, the United States
has decided it is big enough, powerful enough, and remote enough to go it
alone.
Sixth, the new grand strategy argues that the United States will need to
play a direct and unconstrained role in responding to threats. This conviction
is partially based on a judgment that no other country or coalition -- even
the European Union -- has the force-projection capabilities to respond to
terrorist and rogue states around the world. A decade of U.S. defense spending
and modernization has left allies of the United States far behind. In combat
operations, alliance partners are increasingly finding it difficult to mesh
with U.S. forces. This view is also based on the judgment that joint operations
and the use of force through coalitions tend to hinder effective operations.
To some observers, this lesson became clear in the allied bombing campaign
over Kosovo. The sentiment was also expressed during the U.S. and allied military
actions in Afghanistan. Rumsfeld explained this point earlier this year,
when he said, "The mission must determine the coalition; the coalition must
not determine the mission. If it does, the mission will be dumbed down to
the lowest common denominator, and we can't afford that."
No one in the Bush administration argues that NATO or the U.S.-Japan alliance
should be dismantled. Rather, these alliances are now seen as less useful
to the United States as it confronts today's threats. Some officials argue
that it is not that the United States chooses to depreciate alliance partnerships,
but that the Europeans are unwilling to keep up. Whether that is true, the
upgrading of the American military, along with its sheer size relative to
the forces of the rest of the world, leaves the United States in a class by
itself. In these circumstances, it is increasingly difficult to maintain the
illusion of true alliance partnership. America's allies become merely strategic
assets that are useful depending on the circumstance. The United States still
finds attractive the logistical reach that its global alliance system provides,
but the pacts with countries in Asia and Europe become more contingent and
less premised on a vision of a common security community.
Finally, the new grand strategy attaches little value to international stability.
There is an unsentimental view in the unilateralist camp that the traditions
of the past must be shed. Whether it is withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic
Missile Treaty or the resistance to signing other formal arms-control treaties,
policymakers are convinced that the United States needs to move beyond outmoded
Cold War thinking. Administration officials have noted with some satisfaction
that America's withdrawal from the abm Treaty did not lead to a global arms
race but actually paved the way for a historic arms-reduction agreement between
the United States and Russia. This move is seen as a validation that moving
beyond the old paradigm of great-power relations will not bring the international
house down. The world can withstand radically new security approaches, and
it will accommodate American unilateralism as well. But stability is not an
end in itself. The administration's new hawkish policy toward North Korea,
for example, might be destabilizing to the region, but such instability might
be the necessary price for dislodging a dangerous and evil regime in Pyongyang.
In this brave new world, neoimperial thinkers contend that the older realist
and liberal grand strategies are not very helpful. American security will
not be ensured, as realist grand strategy assumes, by the preservation of
deterrence and stable relations among the major powers. In a world of asymmetrical
threats, the global balance of power is not the linchpin of war and peace.
Likewise, liberal strategies of building order around open trade and democratic
institutions might have some long-term impact on terrorism, but they do not
address the immediacy of the threats. Apocalyptic violence is at our doorstep,
so efforts at strengthening the rules and institutions of the international
community are of little practical value. If we accept the worst-case imagining
of "we don't know what we don't know," everything else is secondary: international
rules, traditions of partnership, and standards of legitimacy. It is a war.
And as Clausewitz famously remarked, "War is such a dangerous business that
the mistakes which come from kindness are the very worst."
IMPERIAL DANGERS
Pitfalls accompany this neoimperial grand strategy, however. Unchecked U.S.
power, shorn of legitimacy and disentangled from the postwar norms and institutions
of the international order, will usher in a more hostile international system,
making it far harder to achieve American interests. The secret of the United
States' long brilliant run as the world's leading state was its ability and
willingness to exercise power within alliance and multinational frameworks,
which made its power and agenda more acceptable to allies and other key states
around the world. This achievement has now been put at risk by the administration's
new thinking.
The most immediate problem is that the neoimperialist approach is unsustainable.
Going it alone might well succeed in removing Saddam Hussein from power,
but it is far less certain that a strategy of counterproliferation, based
on American willingness to use unilateral force to confront dangerous dictators,
can work over the long term. An American policy that leaves the United States
alone to decide which states are threats and how best to deny them weapons
of mass destruction will lead to a diminishment of multilateral mechanisms
-- most important of which is the nonproliferation regime.
The Bush administration has elevated the threat of WMD to the top of its
security agenda without investing its power or prestige in fostering, monitoring,
and enforcing nonproliferation commitments. The tragedy of September 11 has
given the Bush administration the authority and willingness to confront the
Iraqs of the world. But that will not be enough when even more complicated
cases come along -- when it is not the use of force that is needed but concerted
multilateral action to provide sanctions and inspections. Nor is it certain
that a preemptive or preventive military intervention will go well; it might
trigger a domestic political backlash to American-led and military-focused
interventionism. America's well-meaning imperial strategy could undermine
the principled multilateral agreements, institutional infrastructure, and
cooperative spirit needed for the long-term success of nonproliferation goals.
The specific doctrine of preemptive action poses a related problem: once
the United States feels it can take such a course, nothing will stop other
countries from doing the same. Does the United States want this doctrine
in the hands of Pakistan, or even China or Russia? After all, it would not
require the intervening state to first provide evidence for its actions.
The United States argues that to wait until all the evidence is in, or until
authoritative international bodies support action, is to wait too long. Yet
that approach is the only basis that the United States can use if it needs
to appeal for restraint in the actions of others. Moreover, and quite paradoxically,
overwhelming American conventional military might, combined with a policy
of preemptive strikes, could lead hostile states to accelerate programs to
acquire their only possible deterrent to the United States: WMD. This is
another version of the security dilemma, but one made worse by a neoimperial
grand strategy.
Another problem follows. The use of force to eliminate WMD capabilities or
overturn dangerous regimes is never simple, whether it is pursued unilaterally
or by a concert of major states. After the military intervention is over,
the target country has to be put back together. Peacekeeping and state building
are inevitably required, as are long-term strategies that bring the un, the
World Bank, and the major powers together to orchestrate aid and other forms
of assistance. This is not heroic work, but it is utterly necessary. Peacekeeping
troops may be required for many years, even after a new regime is built. Regional
conflicts inflamed by outside military intervention must also be calmed.
This is the "long tail" of burdens and commitments that comes with every
major military action.
When these costs and obligations are added to America's imperial military
role, it becomes even more doubtful that the neoimperial strategy can be
sustained at home over the long haul -- the classic problem of imperial overstretch.
The United States could keep its military predominance for decades if it
is supported by a growing and increasingly productive economy. But the indirect
burdens of cleaning up the political mess in terrorist-prone failed states
levy a hidden cost. Peacekeeping and state building will require coalitions
of states and multilateral agencies that can be brought into the process
only if the initial decisions about military intervention are hammered out
in consultation with other major states. America's older realist and liberal
grand strategies suddenly become relevant again.
A third problem with an imperial grand strategy is that it cannot generate
the cooperation needed to solve practical problems at the heart of the U.S.
foreign policy agenda. In the fight on terrorism, the United States needs
cooperation from European and Asian countries in intelligence, law enforcement,
and logistics. Outside the security sphere, realizing U.S. objectives depends
even more on a continuous stream of amicable working relations with major
states around the world. It needs partners for trade liberalization, global
financial stabilization, environmental protection, deterring transnational
organized crime, managing the rise of China, and a host of other thorny challenges.
But it is impossible to expect would-be partners to acquiesce to America's
self-appointed global security protectorate and then pursue business as usual
in all other domains.
The key policy tool for states confronting a unipolar and unilateral America
is to withhold cooperation in day-to-day relations with the United States.
One obvious means is trade policy; the European response to the recent American
decision to impose tariffs on imported steel is explicable in these terms.
This particular struggle concerns specific trade issues, but it is also a
struggle over how Washington exercises power. The United States may be a unipolar
military power, but economic and political power is more evenly distributed
across the globe. The major states may not have much leverage in directly
restraining American military policy, but they can make the United States
pay a price in other areas.
Finally, the neoimperial grand strategy poses a wider problem for the maintenance
of American unipolar power. It steps into the oldest trap of powerful imperial
states: self-encirclement. When the most powerful state in the world throws
its weight around, unconstrained by rules or norms of legitimacy, it risks
a backlash. Other countries will bridle at an international order in which
the United States plays only by its own rules. The proponents of the new grand
strategy have assumed that the United States can single-handedly deploy military
power abroad and not suffer untoward consequences; relations will be coarser
with friends and allies, they believe, but such are the costs of leadership.
But history shows that powerful states tend to trigger self-encirclement by
their own overestimation of their power. Charles V, Louis XIV, Napoleon, and
the leaders of post-Bismarck Germany sought to expand their imperial domains
and impose a coercive order on others. Their imperial orders were all brought
down when other countries decided they were not prepared to live in a world
dominated by an overweening coercive state. America's imperial goals and
modus operandi are much more limited and benign than were those of age-old
emperors. But a hard-line imperial grand strategy runs the risk that history
will repeat itself.
BRING IN THE OLD
Wars change world politics, and so too will America's war on terrorism. How
great states fight wars, how they define the stakes, how they make the peace
in its aftermath -- all give lasting shape to the international system that
emerges after the guns fall silent. In mobilizing their societies for battle,
wartime leaders have tended to describe the military struggle as more than
simply the defeat of an enemy. Woodrow Wilson sent U.S. troops to Europe not
only to stop the kaiser's army but to destroy militarism and usher in a worldwide
democratic revolution. Franklin Roosevelt saw the war with Germany and Japan
as a struggle to secure the "four great freedoms." The Atlantic Charter was
a statement of war aims that called not just for the defeat of fascism but
for a new dedication to social welfare and human rights within an open and
stable world system. To advance these visions, Wilson and Roosevelt proposed
new international rules and mechanisms of cooperation. Their message was
clear: If you bear the burdens of war, we, your leaders, will use this dreadful
conflict to usher in a more peaceful and decent order among states. Fighting
the war had as much to do with building global relations as it did with vanquishing
an enemy.
Bush has not fully articulated a vision of postwar international order, aside
from defining the struggle as one between freedom and evil. The world has
seen Washington take determined steps to fight terrorism, but it does not
yet have a sense of Bush's larger, positive agenda for a strengthened and
more decent international order.
This failure explains why the sympathy and goodwill generated around the
world for the United States after September 11 quickly disappeared. Newspapers
that once proclaimed, "We are all Americans," now express distrust toward
America. The prevailing view is that the United States seems prepared to
use its power to go after terrorists and evil regimes, but not to use it
to help build a more stable and peaceful world order. The United States appears
to be degrading the rules and institutions of international community, not
enhancing them. To the rest of the world, neoimperial thinking has more to
do with exercising power than with exercising leadership.
In contrast, America's older strategic orientations -- balance-of-power realism
and liberal multilateralism -- suggest a mature world power that seeks stability
and pursues its interests in ways that do not fundamentally threaten the positions
of other states. They are strategies of co-option and reassurance. The new
imperial grand strategy presents the United States very differently: a revisionist
state seeking to parlay its momentary power advantages into a world order
in which it runs the show. Unlike the hegemonic states of the past, the United
States does not seek territory or outright political domination in Europe
or Asia; "America has no empire to extend or utopia to establish," Bush noted
in his West Point address. But the sheer power advantages that the United
States possesses and the doctrines of preemption and counterterrorism that
it is articulating do unsettle governments and people around the world. The
costs could be high. The last thing the United States wants is for foreign
diplomats and government leaders to ask, How can we work around, undermine,
contain, and retaliate against U.S. power?
Rather than invent a new grand strategy, the United States should reinvigorate
its older strategies, those based on the view that America's security partnerships
are not simply instrumental tools but critical components of an American-led
world political order that should be preserved. U.S. power is both leveraged
and made more legitimate and user-friendly by these partnerships. The neoimperial
thinkers are haunted by the specter of catastrophic terrorism and seek a radical
reordering of America's role in the world. America's commanding unipolar power
and the advent of frightening new terrorist threats feed this imperial temptation.
But it is a grand strategic vision that, taken to the extreme, will leave
the world more dangerous and divided -- and the United States less secure.[para.]
G. John Ikenberry is Peter F. Krogh Professor of Geopolitics and Global Justice
at Georgetown University and a regular book reviewer for Foreign Affairs.
His most recent book is After Victory: Institutions, Strategic Restraint,
and the Rebuilding of Order After Major Wars.
LOAD-DATE: August 15, 2002