The World America Made (16 page)

More broadly, Americans also have an interest in whether the global trend is toward more democracies or
whether the world begins to experience that great “reverse wave” which has yet to arrive. They have a stake in the outcome of the Arab Spring, whether it produces a new crop of democracies in a part of the world that has known mostly autocracy or whether old autocratic ways, or new theocratic ways, triumph instead.

In their economic policies, Americans need to continue promoting and strengthening the international free-trade and free-market regime. This, of course, means setting their own economy back on a course of sustainable growth. It does mean, as Friedman and others suggest, doing a better job of educating and training Americans to compete with others in an increasingly competitive international economy. It means providing a healthy environment for technological innovation. But it also means resisting protectionist temptations and using American influence, along with that of other free-trading nations, to push back against some of the tendencies of state capitalism in China and elsewhere. Here and on other issues, the United States and Europe must not give up on each other. Together the United States and Europe have more than 50 percent of global GDP. They can wield significant global influence, even in the Asian century, if they can stop indulging in schadenfreude with respect to each other and focus on upholding a free-trade, free-market international system against rising internal and external challenges.

Finally, there is the matter of American hard power. In recent years, wise heads have argued that too much emphasis has been placed on military power and not enough on soft power or on something called smart power. This is understandable, given the bad experiences of both
Iraq and Afghanistan, which have pointed up clearly the limits and costs of military power. But it is worth recalling the limits of soft power, too. It is a most difficult kind of power to wield. No American president ever enjoyed more international popularity than Woodrow Wilson when he traveled to Paris to negotiate the treaty ending World War I. He was a hero to the world, but he found his ability to shape the peace, and to establish the new League of Nations, severely limited, in no small part by the refusal of his countrymen to commit American military power to the defense of the peace. John F. Kennedy, another globally admired president, found his popularity of no use in his confrontations with Khrushchev, who, by Kennedy’s own admission, “beat the hell out of me” and who may have been persuaded by his perception of Kennedy’s weakness that the United States would tolerate his placing Soviet missiles in Cuba.

Soft power exists, but its influence is hard to measure and easy to overstate. People and nations may enjoy American pop music and American movies and still dislike America. It is generally true of both people and nations that whether they find someone attractive or unattractive is not the determining factor in their economic, political, and strategic behavior, especially when their core interests are involved. They like you when you are doing something that benefits them, and they don’t like you when you are standing in their way. The United States, even at its most alluring, has seen its influence limited. And even at its most unattractive, it has accomplished some significant objectives, as when the Nixon administration cemented new ties with China.

What has made the United States most attractive to much of the world has not been its culture, its wisdom, or even its ideals alone. At times these have played a part; at times they have been irrelevant. More consistent has been the attraction of America’s power, the manner in which it uses it, and the ends for which it has been used. What has been true since the time of Rome remains true today: there can be no world order without power to preserve it, to shape its norms, uphold its institutions, defend the sinews of its economic system, and keep the peace. Military power can be abused, wielded unwisely and ineffectively. It can be deployed to answer problems that it cannot answer or that have no answer. But it is also essential. No nation or group of nations that renounced power could expect to maintain any kind of world order. If the United States begins to look like a less reliable defender of the present order, that order will begin to unravel. People might find Americans in this weaker state very attractive indeed, but if the United States cannot help them when and where they need help the most, they will have to make other arrangements.

So Americans once again need to choose what role they want to play in the world. They hate making such a choice. If the past is any guide, they will make it with hesitation, uncertainty, and misgivings. They might well decide that the role they have been playing is too expensive. But in weighing the costs, they need to ask themselves: Is the American world order worth preserving?

Not everything can be preserved, of course. The world is always changing. Science and technology, new means of communication, transportation, and calculation,
produce new patterns of human behavior and new economic configurations, as do changes in the physical environment. In the international realm, the distribution of power among nations, and between nations and non-state actors, is constantly in flux. Some nations grow richer and stronger, others grow poorer and weaker. Small groups of individuals today can do more damage to powerful nations than they could in the past. In the future new technologies may shift the balance once again against them. It is both foolish and futile to try to hold on to the past and to believe that old ways are always going to be sufficient to meet new circumstances. The world must adjust, and the United States must adjust, to the new.

We cannot be so entranced by change, however, that we fail to recognize some fundamental and enduring truths—about power, about human nature, and about the way beliefs and power interact to shape a world order. We need to be aware of history, not to cling to the past, but to understand what has been unique about our time. For all its flaws and its miseries, the world America made has been a remarkable anomaly in the history of humanity. Someday we may have no choice but to watch it drift away. Today we do have a choice.

1.
The United States and China fought each other in the Korean War, but whether poverty-stricken China, one year after emerging from civil war, qualified as a great power at that time is questionable. In 1950, when America’s per capita GDP was over $9,000, China’s was $614, below that of the Belgian Congo.
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/eco_gdp_per_cap_in_195-economy-gdp-per-capita-1950
.

2.
G. John Ikenberry, “The Future of the Liberal World Order,”
Foreign Affairs
, May/June 2011, p. 58.

3.
See, for instance, G. John Ikenberry,
Liberal Leviathan: The Origins, Crisis, and Transformation of the American World Order
(Princeton, N.J., 2011), chap. 1.

4.
The phrase “reluctant sheriff” was coined by Richard N. Haass; see his
Reluctant Sheriff: The United States After the Cold War
(New York, 1997). The quotation is from John Kerry’s acceptance speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention.

5.
Between 1898 and 1928, Americans intervened abroad with force more than two dozen times, mostly in the Western Hemisphere but once in Europe and twice in distant East Asia. Then, after a decade of relative repose, Americans fought three major wars between 1941 and 1965—World War II, the Korean War, and Vietnam—along with smaller interventions in Lebanon (1958) and the Dominican Republic (1965). The post-Vietnam hiatus lasted a little over a decade, but from 1989 to 2011 the United States deployed large numbers of combat troops or engaged in extended campaigns of aerial bombing and missile attacks on ten different occasions—Panama (1989), Somalia
(1992), Haiti (1994), Bosnia (1995–96), Kosovo (1999), Afghanistan (2001), Iraq (1991, 1998, 2003), and, most recently, Libya—an average of one significant military intervention roughly every two years.

6.
Almost 80 percent of Americans believe that “under some conditions, war is necessary to obtain justice,” compared with 20 percent in France, Germany, Italy, and Spain. See the polling done in recent years by Transatlantic Trends, a project sponsored by the German Marshall Fund of the United States.

7.
If Dean Acheson had told the American people in 1949, when NATO was born, that American troops would still be in Europe into the twenty-first century, he would have been hounded from office.

8.
Geir Lundestad,
The United States and Western Europe Since 1945: From “Empire” by Invitation to Transatlantic Drift
(Oxford, 2005), p. 35.

9.
Martin Gilbert,
Churchill and America
(New York, 2008), pp. 102, 399, 245.

10.
John Lewis Gaddis,
The Long Peace: Inquiries into the History of the Cold War
(Oxford, 1989), p. 65.

11.
See John Lewis Gaddis,
We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History
(Oxford, 1998), p. 49.

12.
Gaddis,
Long Peace
, pp. 70, 63.

13.
Gaddis,
We Now Know
, p. 43.

14.
Quoted in Samuel P. Huntington,
The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century
(Norman, Okla., 1993), p. 17.

15.
Quoted in John Keane,
The Life and Death of Democracy
(New York, 2009), p. 573.

16.
Ibid.

17.
Huntington,
Third Wave
, p. 40.

18.
Ibid., p. 21.

19.
Samuel P. Huntington, “Will More Countries Become Democratic?,”
Political Science Quarterly
99 (Summer 1984); quoted in Larry Diamond,
The Spirit of Democracy
(New York, 2009), p. 10.

20.
Huntington,
Third Wave
, p. 47.

21.
Odd Arne Westad,
The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times
(Cambridge, U.K., 2009), p. 196.

22.
Diamond,
Spirit of Democracy
, p. 5.

23.
Huntington,
Third Wave
, p. 98.

24.
Diamond,
Spirit of Democracy
, p. 13.

25.
Mike Rapport,
1848: Year of Revolution
(New York, 2009), p. 409.

26.
A. J. P. Taylor,
The Course of German History
(1945; London, 2001), p. 71.

27.
Rapport,
1848
, pp. 401, 402.

28.
As Huntington paraphrased the findings of Jonathan Sunshine: “External influences in Europe before 1830 were fundamentally antidemocratic and hence held up democratization. Between 1830 and 1930 … the external environment was neutral … hence democratization proceeded in different countries more or less at the pace set by economic and social development.” Huntington,
Third Wave
, p. 86.

29.
As Huntington observed, “The absence of the United States from the process would have meant fewer and later transitions to democracy.” Ibid., p. 98.

30.
Robert Gilpin,
U.S. Power and the Multinational Corporation: The Political Economy of Foreign Direct Investment
(New York, 1975), p. 85.

31.
Prior to the mid-nineteenth century, Britain, like other colonial powers, had preferred a mercantilist system of colonization and closed markets. The United States, from the late eighteenth to the early nineteenth century, was protectionist in an effort to nurture undeveloped industries.

32.
Robert Gilpin,
War and Change in World Politics
(Cambridge, U.K., 1983), p. 139.

33.
John Kenneth Galbraith,
The Affluent Society
(1958; New York, 1998), p. 1.

34.
Angus Maddison,
The World Economy
, vol. 1,
A Millennial Perspective
, and vol. 2,
Historical Statistics
(Paris, 2007), 1:262 (available online at
http://www.keepeek.com/Digital-Asset-Management/oecd/development/the-world-economy_9789264022621-en
; accessed December 2, 2011). The figures exclude Japan.

35.
Ian Bremmer,
The End of the Free Market: Who Wins the War Between States and Corporations?
(New York, 2010), p. 19.

36.
Paul Collier,
The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can Be Done About It
(Oxford, 2007), pp. 3–8.

37.
Gilpin,
U.S. Power
, pp. 85, 84.

38.
John Maynard Keynes,
The Economic Consequences of the Peace
(New York, 1920), pp. 10, 12.

39.
Steven Pinker, “Why Is There Peace?,”
Greater Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life
, April 1, 2009;
http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/why_is_there_peace/
. He cites the work on this subject of James Payne, Robert Wright, and Peter Singer.

40.
Robert Jervis, “Theories of War in an Era of Leading-Power Peace,”
American Political Science Review
96, no. 1 (March 2002).

41.
Robert Osgood,
Ideals and Self-Interest in America’s Foreign Relations: The Great Transformation of the Twentieth Century
(1953; Chicago, 1964), pp. 92–94.

42.
Norman Angell,
The Great Illusion: A Study of the Relation of Military Power in Nations to Their Economic and Social Advantage
(New York and London, 1910).

43.
Randolph S. Churchill,
Winston Churchill: Young Statesman, 1901–1914
(Boston, 1967), pp. 101, 494.

44.
Theodore Roosevelt, second annual message to Congress, December 2, 1902, quoted in Strobe Talbott,
The Great Experiment: The Story of Ancient Empires, Modern States, and the Quest for a Global Nation
(New York, 2008), p. 138; Theodore Roosevelt, first annual message to Congress, December 3, 1901, quoted in James R. Holmes,
Theodore Roosevelt and World Order: Police Power in International Relations
(Dulles, Va., 2006), p. 69.