The World America Made (8 page)

The unusual combination of vast power and remarkable global acceptance of that power is the main factor that has deterred great-power war. We are dazzled by democratization, globalization, and interdependence, and believe these are the new developments that have made our world so different. But these trends have been ebbing and flowing for more than a century, and they have not prevented catastrophic wars in the past and cannot be relied upon in the future. The much-vaunted democratic peace theory would be more persuasive if the great powers were, in fact, all democracies. It could explain why Germany and France have not gone to war, but it does not explain why China and Russia, two great-power autocracies, have yet to become involved in conflicts with other great powers. Economic interdependence did not prevent two world wars in the twentieth century, and even today great powers cannot be relied upon to base all decisions of peace and war on economic considerations. One could imagine China attacking an independence-minded Taiwan despite the possible economic consequences. The American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have not exactly been a boon to the American economy. Neither men nor nations live by bread alone. Nationalism, honor, fear, and other human emotions, as well as calculations of power, shape the behavior of nations just as they shape the behavior of the people who inhabit nations.

The common view that there can be no wars for territory, because territory no longer matters in this digitalized age of economic interdependence, is also questionable. One only has to look at the military deployments of nations like China, Russia, India, and Pakistan to see that,
to them, territory matters very much indeed. China insists that restoring and preserving its “territorial integrity”—including Tibet, Hong Kong, and Taiwan—are a “core interest,” as is control of the mineral resources and shipping lanes of the South China Sea. Wars have been fought, and could be fought again, over the disputed border between India and China at Arunachal Pradesh, between India and Pakistan in Kashmir, and over the territorial boundaries of Georgia. Russian claims to the Crimea in Ukraine and in the Arctic will likely be subjects of dispute in the future. The question of an independent Kurdistan embroils Iraq, Turkey, and Syria in territorial disputes. And of course there is the territorial dispute between Israel and Palestine, which has led to four wars in the past and may do so again.

Can we place our faith in nuclear weapons to keep the peace among great powers? There are those who think so, and some have even suggested arming all nations in the world with nuclear weapons as a way of guaranteeing world peace. But the “nuclear peace” would seem even less reliable than the “democratic peace.” It is possible to imagine two nuclear powers fighting a strictly conventional war. In fact, it is precisely such a war that both China and the United States are spending hundreds of billions of dollars preparing for. India and Pakistan daily prepare for conventional war over Kashmir, despite their nuclear arsenals. In the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, great powers fought many limited wars for limited ends without seeking each other’s annihilation. Nor is the horror of nuclear weapons a sufficiently reliable guarantee against their use. During the Cold War
world leaders spoke more often about the possibility of nuclear war than we may care to remember. The revered George C. Marshall spoke of how important it was that the Soviets understand “that the United States would really use the atomic bomb against them in the event of war.”
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Near the end of the Korean War, Dwight Eisenhower explicitly warned the Chinese that he would not be “limited by any world-wide gentleman’s agreement” regarding the use of nuclear weapons, and he commented to his own advisers that a large concentration of Chinese troops made “a good target for this type of weapon.”
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Kennedy contemplated the prospect of nuclear war during the Berlin crisis of 1961 and in the Cuban missile crisis the following year. And these were just the American leaders. Khrushchev and Mao often spoke of nuclear war as but a more extreme version of conventional war.

The point is not that these factors are irrelevant to peace. They all contribute in some way to hindering the great powers from going to war. But would they be reliable in the absence of American predominance, or would they prove just as helpless in preventing war as they were in 1914? The best way of measuring whether we have reached a new era of peace is the behavior of nations. If it were really the case that nations and peoples had become “socialized” to love peace and hate war, then the nations of the world would be systematically disarming. But they are not. Only Europe is disarming. The United States, China, India, Russia, and Japan, as well as numerous lesser powers, including Brazil, Iran, and Turkey, are still willing to pay large amounts of money to prepare themselves for war. What deters them from using those weapons
against one another is not conscience or commerce but a distribution of power in the world that makes success highly unlikely. Were that distribution of power to change, were there to be a genuine shift in the balance of power toward greater equality, then these great and rising powers might pursue more ambitious policies because war would be a more viable option.

The period of peace we have enjoyed is only two decades longer than that which lasted from 1871 to 1914. The extra twenty years is not enough for us to conclude that we have departed from human history into a new era of permanent peace. Instead, we must look to the special circumstances that make peace possible, factors that might easily change and produce a breakdown of peace, as has happened so frequently throughout history.

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MERICAN POWER WERE
to decline, what would that mean for the international order? The answer depends on what configuration of power is likely to follow American decline. Probably no single power would replace the United States as a sole superpower; the world has known only two unipolar eras in more than two thousand years. There is a somewhat greater probability of a return to a bipolar world, but it seems unlikely in the near term. The leading candidate to catch up with the United States and become a second superpower is China. Already there are Americans and Chinese who speak of a “G-2” world in
which Washington and Beijing together call the shots for everyone else. The vast size of the Chinese economy will give it increasing weight in the world; some analysts predict it will dominate the world economy in the next couple of decades. But it will be more problematic for China to become a superpower in a geostrategic sense. That would require something like the collapse of all the other powers in Asia, including India and Japan, and their subservience to Beijing. This would be the equivalent of Moscow’s domination of eastern Europe, but much harder to achieve. The Soviet Union wound up dominating eastern Europe because its troops were already in place following the defeat of Germany. China would have to bend its neighbors to its will either without force or through costly war. If it does not, and remains surrounded by these wary great powers, it is hard to see China wielding the kind of global power the Soviet Union did. Even the Soviet Union was not a global superpower in the way the United States was and is, partly because unlike the United States it was surrounded by other great powers.

That is why when most people think of a post-American world, they think of a return to multipolarity—an international configuration of power where several powers exist in rough parity. The United States might remain the strongest, a first among equals, but in a genuinely multipolar world its power and influence would not be dramatically greater than those of, say, China or India, while in a second tier the European Union, Russia, Japan, Brazil, and Turkey would round out the great-power club. This would be a world much like nineteenth-century Europe,
where Britain was the strongest power in some respects, but other nations—Germany, France, and Russia—were also powerful and in some areas were more powerful.

What would be the effect of this shift away from American predominance to a world of rough equality among great powers? Foreign policy intellectuals who herald a “post-American” world, whether it is multipolar or, as some argue, “nonpolar,” imagine that the liberal world order would still persist in roughly its current form. Many assume that a different configuration of power in the international system need not produce a less liberal and open order than the one fashioned during the era of American predominance. The world would remain largely democratic. The free-trade, free-market economic order would survive. And great-power peace would persist. The United States would have to get used to a more equal partnership with other great powers, but there is no reason why the world could not move to a new arrangement—a new “Concert of Powers,” much like the Concert of Europe that kept the peace in the decades following the Napoleonic Wars. Wouldn’t all the great powers have a stake in preserving the present order?

This is a very optimistic set of assumptions. For one thing, as a purely historical matter, the transition from one configuration of power to another has rarely gone smoothly and peacefully. The most recent example is the transition from the European-dominated order of the nineteenth century, which collapsed in two world wars. A more hopeful example was the peaceful end of the Cold War, but which power wants to play the role of the
Soviet Union in that scenario? The Soviet decline was not smooth but, from Moscow’s point of view, catastrophic. Whatever there was of a Soviet world order was completely obliterated.

As for the assumption that all the great powers in a post-American world would share a stake in preserving the present order, that seems both questionable and, in one respect, beside the point. There are significant aspects of the present international order that some of the great powers would not be committed to preserving. And even on those aspects they did wish to preserve, the question is, could they?

One element of the triad of the present liberal international order that the great powers would not all support is democracy. Two of the great powers, China and Russia, are ruled by autocrats who show no interest in relinquishing power or opening their systems to the point of allowing free selection of leadership. Vladimir Putin has made his views on democracy clear, and all experts on China agree that the present regime’s survival is the highest priority of the rulers in Beijing. While that survival may require greater economic openness, they are determined to prevent a political opening that could lead to their ouster. For both Russia and China, as for all nations, these domestic concerns shape their foreign policy. When dictatorships fell in Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan between 2003 and 2006, in the so-called Color Revolutions, the democratic West hailed the triumph of liberalism. But there were no cheers in Moscow and Beijing, only concern that they might be the next victims of democratic pressure. More recently, while the democratic world celebrated
the Jasmine Revolution in Tunisia and the Arab Spring that followed throughout the Middle East, a panicky Chinese leadership blocked the words “Jasmine” and “Arab Spring” from China’s Internet. The Russian government drafted a United Nations convention prohibiting the use of the Internet for “psychological campaigns” aimed at “destabilizing society.” For the past decade both autocracies have done their best to block or at least slow down efforts by the United States and Europe to put pressure on dictatorships in Sudan, Zimbabwe, Libya, Syria, Iran, Venezuela, Burma, and North Korea—and in some cases successfully.

This is hardly surprising: autocracies aren’t in the business of helping democracies overthrow other autocracies. But we should be clear about what this would mean for a genuinely “post-American” world in which autocracies and democracies wielded roughly equal power. Instead of a balance of international power that favors democracy, as has existed for several decades, there would be a more even balance, with inevitable implications for smaller nations in political transition around the world. As Larry Diamond observes, “Support from an external authoritarian power can insulate a dictatorship that might otherwise be susceptible to Western leverage, as with China’s role in sustaining dictatorships in Burma and North Korea against extensive Western sanctions and Russia’s obstruction of democratic pressures on regimes in Belarus, Armenia, and Central Asia.”
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This is true even today, in a world dominated by democracies. So imagine a world in which the autocratic powers were stronger and the democratic
powers weaker. The shift in the rough balance of power between autocracies and democracies might be enough to tip the world into a “reverse wave,” which, based on past experience, has arguably been overdue.

The balance in a new, multipolar world might be more favorable to democracy if some of the rising democratic powers—Brazil, India, Turkey, South Africa—picked up the slack from a declining United States. Yet not all of them have the desire or the power to do it. India lives in a dangerous and not very democratic neighborhood, and Indian leaders consider support for democracy abroad a luxury they cannot and need not afford. South Africa, which supported Qaddafi until the bitter end, often seems more interested in pan-African solidarity than in aiding democracy beyond its borders. Brazil, like many Latin American democracies, has veered back and forth between the often clashing principles of democracy and self-determination. Of all these rising powers, only Turkey has tentatively sought to aid democratic forces in its region, and only following more aggressive efforts by Europe and the United States. That is not enough to make up the difference. There is nothing unusual in a democracy being uninterested in supporting democratic movements beyond its borders. Asian democracies, though well established, have not been prominent in protecting or promoting democracy abroad. The United States is unusual in this respect, if not quite unique. Some European powers have made the promotion of democracy outside Europe a major goal of foreign policy, but most have not.