The End of Power (27 page)

Today, more than a decade after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact by its members in July 1991, NATO stands triumphant. In fact, three former Soviet republics and a further seven former members of the Soviet bloc have joined the alliance. NATO and Russia remain rivals: Russia resists having more of its neighbors join the alliance and opposes the deployment of NATO missile defense in central Europe. But they have also proclaimed themselves partners, not enemies, and since 2002 have had a dedicated council to smooth out their relations and solve any disputes. Beyond Russia, NATO has no other obvious potential enemy—a novel situation for a major alliance, and one that has forced it to seek out new ways to remain relevant. The chief case in point is its mission in Afghanistan, in which all twenty-eight member-states plus another twenty-one countries have supplied troops.

But its apparent supremacy conceals mounting weaknesses that reflect both the absence of an existential threat and the dilution of power among its participants. The Afghanistan mission has been heavily dominated by the United States, with many countries making modest or symbolic contributions. Several countries have withdrawn. Domestic opposition to the continued presence of Dutch troops in the mission contributed to the fall of the Netherlands government in February 2010, presaging withdrawal. Participants such as France and Germany have demurred at American requests for additional troops. Moreover, each contingent in Afghanistan has operated under different rules imposed by its own national military command departments or even its country's legislature. A provision hammered out in parliament in Prague or The Hague might limit what actions a NATO soldier might take in the field fighting the Taliban, training Afghan soldiers, or combating the opium trade. Such restrictions have prompted some American soldiers to rechristen the so-called International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) as “I Saw Americans Fight.”
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While NATO strains under these contradictions, coordination among its members is rivaled by parallel structures. A long-standing defense organization, the Western European Union, overlaps with NATO. The European
Union has its own official defense policy apparatus, including the European Defense Agency and other bodies; it carries out its own overseas missions including peacekeeping, military assistance, and contributions to multinational forces. Of course, each EU member-country has retained its own military. Between NATO, national governments, and the many layers of EU bureaucracy, the Atlantic alliance is increasingly a hodgepodge of jurisdictions and forums with overlapping memberships, but with no decision-making hierarchy or clear lines of command.

The rise of the “coalition of the willing” as a new kind of multinational military enterprise testifies to the diminished force of alliances. The most notorious manifestation of this decline was the ad hoc group of countries who agreed to participate in or otherwise support the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. But it aptly describes the Afghanistan operation as well as security, peacekeeping, and humanitarian efforts from earthquake relief to patrolling the sea lanes off Somalia—where countries have pooled military forces despite no formal alliance having been triggered, and with no overarching authority forcing them to take part. Because the “willing” sign up on an ad hoc basis, their support is contingent on political developments in their respective countries, their continued willingness to pay the financial costs, and the side deals they can negotiate in exchange for taking part—in the case of several nations participating in the Iraq operation, for example, streamlined visa procedures for their citizens to enter the United States.

As for the actual new alliances that have sprung up in the world under Pax Americana, some are simply forums for military cooperation among members of a regional organization, similar to the EU. The African Union, for instance, has its own peacekeeping force to intervene in regional conflicts. A South American Defense Council is building military ties in Latin America. But these fall short of traditional alliances that are built on tight cooperation, sharing plans and technology, and the promise of mutual defense. One might have expected the rise of new alliances around a large rival power, such as China or Russia, in an effort to recreate a rival in place of the Warsaw Pact. Instead, the most active efforts—albeit largely unsuccessful—were those by Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez to form a military alliance with Cuba, Bolivia, and other sympathetic nations as a regional counter-power to the United States. The more representative “alliances” today are in fact between states and nonstate actors that they support—for instance, Iran's support of Hezbollah and Hamas, and Venezuela's reported role as intermediary between the Colombian FARC and organizations like the Basque militant group ETA.
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One military arena in which some of the traditional hierarchies remain intact is arms sales—at least of the traditional kind. The same dominant suppliers—the United States, Russia, China, France, Germany, Italy—still account for the overwhelming majority of arms deals, in a top tier that has held intact for decades. But official sales backed by government financing are only one part of the actual global arms business. As the UN secretary-general's April 2011 report puts it, “In recent decades, the arms trade has seen a shift from mostly direct contact between Government officials or agents to the ubiquitous use of private intermediaries, who operate in a particularly globalized environment, often from multiple locations.”
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This part of the arms trade, unregulated and often stateless, is out of control, and points to the diminished grasp of national defense ministries in the environment of armed conflict—yet another symptom of the decay of power.

Alongside military alliances, great powers have traditionally used economic inducements as a way to get other countries to support their interests. The most direct method is bilateral aid—that is, directly from one government to another—in the form of loans, grants, or preferential trade or resource deals. Economic diplomacy can be punitive as well, in the form of trade barriers against a targeted country, boycotts, embargoes, or sanctions against their economic institutions.

Here again the methods persist, but their effectiveness as a means of power projection has diminished. For starters, thanks to the integration of the world economy, the dependence of any one country on supplies, customers, or financing from any one other country has loosened enormously. Falling trade barriers and more open capital markets were long-held goals of the United States and other rich nations in international trade talks. Their victory—along with the widespread promotion of the “Washington consensus” as a condition for lending by the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and other institutions—has had the paradoxical effect of weakening the hold that the United States or former colonial powers like Britain and France once had over countries in their sphere of influence.

The imposition of sanctions against Iran in an effort to bring its nuclear program into compliance with international regimes is the exception that proves the rule. The United Nations, the United States, the European Union, and several other countries have imposed a widening array of restrictions
on commerce with Iran, including an embargo on Iranian oil, curtailment of transactions with its central bank, and restrictions on travel and tourism. But the United States has had to grant exemptions to several of its allies who depend on Iranian oil and has faced the difficult dilemma of whether to impose penalties on friendly countries such as South Korea and India, and on rivals with significant retaliatory capacity such as China, for their unwillingness to curtail purchases.

The targeted use of state power through the allocation of aid to favored countries has become enormously diffuse as well. At the end of World War II, only five or six national aid agencies existed. Today there are more than sixty. In the 1950s, an overwhelming 88 percent of aid disbursed came from three countries: the United States (58 percent), France (22 percent), and Britain (8 percent). The bilateral aid field saw its first major expansion in the 1960s when Japan, Canada, and several European countries set up overseas aid agencies. The Netherlands and the Scandinavian countries soon became major players, contributing a greater share relative to their national income than did the United States, Britain, or France. In the 1970s, the oil windfall allowed Arab countries to set up development assistance funds that they used to support projects in Muslim countries and throughout Africa. The landscape expanded again in the 1990s, with Eastern European countries becoming donors; large emerging nations like India and Brazil have also become major aid issuers in their own right.
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By 2009, the United States, France, and the UK accounted for only 40 percent of total official development assistance.
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And that is just the bilateral part of the picture, which accounts for 70 percent of aid flows. There are at least 263 multilateral aid agencies,
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from the World Health Organization to regional groupings like the Nordic Development Fund or specialty agencies like the World Fish Center or the International Council for Control of Iodine Deficiency Disorders. On top of all this is the vast expansion of private aid through nongovernmental organizations that follow their own agenda. In 2007, total official development assistance (bilateral and multilateral) was about $101 billion, and private aid was about $60 billion.
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The global private aid industry is estimated to employ more staff than the government and multilateral organizations with which it competes more and more effectively.

The proliferation of sources means that the typical recipient country is dealing with a great many partners, rather than a few that monopolize the scene and can exercise disproportionate influence on its government. In the 1960s, there were on average twelve donors channeling foreign government
funds into each recipient country; in 2001–2005, the number had almost tripled to thirty-three.
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The dispersion of economic power is even more pronounced when it comes to foreign investment. The days when the United Fruit Company acted as a transmission belt for US interests in the “banana republics” are well over. Multinational companies are no longer national champions for their home country, extending its interests and sometimes serving as more or less complicit agents in its foreign policy. Between the expansion of global markets, outsourcing and manufacturing facilities, the wave of mergers and acquisitions, and investment by individual tycoons, multinationals are as unmoored from the foreign policy of “home” countries as they have ever been. What specific national interest, for instance, would you attribute to the world's largest steel company, Arcelor Mittal, given that it is based in Europe, its shares are listed in the stock exchanges of six countries, and yet it is owned primarily by an Indian billionaire?

In fact, if any countries have seen their interests expand through foreign investment in recent years, it is emerging economies whose companies have become active international investors, especially in agriculture, natural resources, construction, and telecommunications. Brazil's Petrobras or China's CNOOC in oil, Malaysia's Sime Darby in rubber, Mexico's CEMEX in cement and Bimbo in food, South Africa's MTN or India's Bharti Airtel in mobile phone service are just a few of the many companies involved in the so-called South-South foreign direct investment (FDI) supported by increasingly strong investment promotion agencies, export-import banks, or political risk insurance. An estimated twenty-thousand multinational companies have their headquarters in emerging markets. Investments originating in developing countries are still a minority of global foreign investment, but they have skyrocketed from only $12 billion in 1991 to $384 billion in 2011. Of this, a growing proportion has gone to investments in other developing countries. In 2011, emerging-market investors accounted for more than 40 percent of global merger and acquisition activity. The ensuing distribution of executives, personnel, and brand-name visibility gives the lie to the antiquated idea of foreign investment as a political tool of rich nations.
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Economic diplomacy still has the best chances of translating to political clout in places where the needs are greatest and competition from other partners and the private sector is lowest. In recent years that has meant Africa, where China and the West are facing off in the closest thing we now have to an old-fashioned scramble for influence, against a background of promising oil reserves and political instability. Chinese influence in Africa
has grown in the last decade, as the country has built roads, hospitals, and other infrastructure, lavishly outbidding Western firms for oil concessions and turning projects around rapidly—with few or none of the onerous policy or management conditions imposed by Western funding agencies. One of China's most recent high-profile gifts was a $200 million headquarters for the African Union in Addis Ababa. This generosity combined with professions of support for the sovereignty of recipient countries and a blind eye to rebellions and political unrest have earned China credit among African political elites and created strong competition for French and US companies and agencies. But as fast as Chinese influence in Africa grows, it too is vulnerable to decay as other countries—notably India, South Africa, and the Arab countries—expand their investments on the continent.

If the military and economic clout of the great powers has become diluted, their soft power dominance has been equally affected, though this is difficult to measure. The Pew Global Attitudes project, which has polled in an increasing number of countries since 2002, confirms that the global image of the United States declined in most parts of the world during the George W. Bush administration, particularly after the invasion of Iraq, and appeared to have improved—sometimes returning or exceeding 2002 levels, sometimes not—after Barack Obama's election. In Germany, for instance, 60 percent of those polled in 2002 had a favorable view of the United States, compared to only 30 percent in 2007, and 64 percent in 2009. In Turkey, favorable views of the United States dropped from 30 percent in 2002 to 9 percent in 2007, and rose back to 14 percent in 2009. Measured this way, America's soft power is far from uniform: in 2009 American favor-ability was 78 percent in Nigeria, 69 percent in Britain, 47 percent in China, 38 percent in Argentina, and 25 percent in Jordan. Moreover, by 2012, the “Obama dividend” was declining in many countries.