The Post-American World: Release 2.0 (29 page)

The rise of the rest, while real, is a long process. And it is one that ensures America a vital, though different, role. As China, India, Brazil, Russia, South Africa, and a host of smaller countries all do well in the years ahead, new points of tension will emerge among them. Many of these rising countries have historical animosities, border disputes, and contemporary quarrels with one another; in most cases, nationalism will grow along with economic and geopolitical stature. Being a distant power, America is often a convenient partner for many regional nations worried about the rise of a hegemon in their midst. In fact, as the scholar William Wohlforth notes, American influence is strengthened by the growth of a dominant regional power.
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These factors are frequently noted in discussions of Asia, but it is true of many other spots on the globe as well. The process will not be mechanical. As one of these countries rises (China), it will not produce a clockwork-like balancing dynamic where its neighbor (India) will seek a formal alliance with the United States. Today’s world is more complicated than that. But these rivalries do give the United States an opportunity to play a large and constructive role at the center of the global order. It has the potential to be what Bismarck helped Germany become (briefly) in the late nineteenth century—Europe’s “honest broker,” forging close relationships with each of the major countries, ties that were closer than the ones those countries had with one another. It was the hub of the European system. Being the global broker today would be a job involving not just the American government but its society, with all the strengths and perspectives that it will bring to the challenge. It is a role that the United States—with its global interests and presence, complete portfolio of power, and diverse immigrant communities—could learn to play with great skill.

This new role is quite different from the traditional superpower role. It involves consultation, cooperation, and even compromise. It derives its power by setting the agenda, defining the issues, and mobilizing coalitions. It is not a top-down hierarchy in which the United States makes its decisions and then informs a grateful (or silent) world. But it is a crucial role because, in a world with many players, setting the agenda and organizing coalitions become primary forms of power. The chair of the board who can gently guide a group of independent directors is still a very powerful person.

Those who have figured out how best to thrive in a post-American world are America’s great multinationals. They are conquering new markets by changing their old ways. Take General Electric, which in the past didn’t believe in joint ventures abroad. It wanted to own 100 percent of every foreign involvement it had. In recent years, however, as it has watched the growing skill and confidence of the local firms in emerging markets like China, India, Brazil, Russia, and South Africa, GE has come to realize that such a strategy would keep it locked out of the fastest-growing parts of the world. So it changed its approach. GE’s CEO Jeffrey Immelt sums it up: “Sure, we could keep buying small companies and G.E.-ize them. But we’ve learned that it’s better to partner with the No. 3 company that wants to be No. 1 than to buy a tiny company or go it alone.” The
New York Times
called it a turn away from “managerial imperialism,” which had become a “luxury G.E. could no longer afford.”
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Washington, which faces no market test, has not yet figured out that diplomatic imperialism is a luxury that the United States can no longer afford.

There is still a strong market for American power, for both geopolitical and economic reasons. But even more centrally, there remains a strong ideological demand for it. “No one in Asia wants to live in a Chinese-dominated world. There is no Chinese dream to which people aspire,” explained Simon Tay, a Singaporean scholar. A former president of Brazil, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, has argued that what the world really wants from America is not that it offer a concession on trade here and there but that it affirm its own ideals. That role, as the country that will define universal ideals, remains one that only America can play.
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America’s soft power, in this sense, is intricately linked to its hard power. But it is the combination of the two that give it a unique role in world affairs.

To describe more concretely what operating in this new world would look like, I have set out six simple guidelines.

1. Choose.
American omnipotence has made Washington believe that it is exempt from the need to have priorities. It wants to have it all. It is crucial that the United States be more disciplined about this. President Obama’s national security adviser, Thomas Donilon, argues properly for a rebalancing of American foreign policy, away from the obsessive attention to the hot spots and failed states in the wider Middle East and toward the new centers of global power in Asia.

While making this strategic shift, Washington will also need to make a shift in its ongoing approach to international problems, in which all too often it balks at making any choices—because they suggest compromise. On North Korea and Iran, for example, the Bush administration could not decide whether it wanted regime change or policy change (that is, denuclearization). The two work at cross-purposes. If you threaten a country with regime change, it only makes more urgent that government’s desire for nuclear weapons, which is an insurance policy in the world of international politics.

Consider what the world looks like to Iran. It is surrounded by nuclear powers (Russia, China, India, Pakistan, Israel), and across two of its borders sit tens of thousands of U.S. troops (in Iraq and Afghanistan). President Bush repeatedly made clear that he regarded the regime in Tehran as illegitimate, wished to overthrow it, and funded various groups which aimed to do just that. If you were in Tehran, would this make you feel like giving up your nuclear program? Insisting on both policy change and regime change, we have gotten neither.

Or take American policy toward Russia. We have never been able to prioritize what exactly our core interests and concerns with Moscow are. Is it the danger of its loose nuclear weapons, which can be secured only with its help? Is it Moscow’s help in isolating Iran? Or its behavior in Ukraine and Georgia? Or its opposition to the missile shield in Eastern Europe? Or its oil and natural gas policies? Or internal human rights conditions in Russia? Recent U.S. policy has been “all of the above.” But to govern is to choose. If we believe that nuclear proliferation and terrorism are the gravest issues we face, as President Bush said, then securing Russia’s nuclear arsenal and preventing Iran from developing nuclear weapons are surely the two issues on which we should be seeking Russian cooperation—above all else.

The United States will especially need to choose with regard to China. China is experiencing the largest, swiftest rise to world power of any country in history—larger and swifter even than that of the United States in the past. It will have to be given some substantial political and even military space commensurate with that power. At the same time, its rise should not become a cover for expansionism, aggression, or disruption. How to strike this balance—deterring China, on the one hand, accommodating its legitimate growth, on the other—is the central strategic challenge for American diplomacy. The United States can and should draw lines with China. But it should also recognize that it cannot draw lines everywhere. Unfortunately, the most significant hurdle the United States faces in shaping such a policy is a domestic political climate that tends to view any concessions and accommodations as appeasement.

To the extent that the United States can learn something from the experience of Great Britain, it is the need to make large strategic choices about where it will focus its energies and attention. Britain did so wisely when it faced the rise of the United States. It was less wise about its own empire. In the early twentieth century, London confronted a dilemma much like Washington’s today. When a crisis broke somewhere, no matter how remote, the world would look to London and ask, “What will you do about this?” Britain’s strategic blunder was to spend decades—time and money, energy and attention—on vain attempts to stabilize peripheral places on the map. For example, Britain should have expended less effort organizing the constitutional arrangements of Dutch farmers in the Transvaal—and thus fighting the Boer War, which broke the back of the empire—and more facing up to its declining productivity and the rise of Germany in the center of Europe.

British elites pored over Roman histories in part because of their fascination with a previous great empire, but also because they were looking for lessons in managing vast swaths of land on different continents. There was a demand, as it were, for people skilled in language, history, and imperial administration. This, however, ended up trumping the need to develop the engineers of the future. Britain’s power and reach also made it intoxicated with a sense of historic destiny, a trend fueled by a Protestant revival. The historian Correlli Barnett wrote (in the 1970s) that a “moral revolution” gripped England in the mid-nineteenth century, moving it away from the practical and reason-based society that had brought about the industrial revolution and toward one dominated by religious evangelicalism, excessive moralism, and romanticism.
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The United States could easily fall into a similar imperial trap. Every crisis around the world demands its attention and action. American tentacles and interests are spread as widely today as were Britain’s at the height of its empire. For those who believe that America’s place in the world is wholly different from that of the British Empire, it is instructive to read the “Base Structure Report” for fiscal year 2006. In it, the Department of Defense boasted of being “one of the world’s largest ‘landlords’ with a physical plant consisting of more than 571,200 facilities (buildings, structure, and utilities) located on more than 3,700 sites, on nearly 30 million acres.” The report lists a sprawling network of 766 bases in forty foreign countries, from Antigua to the United Kingdom. These overseas bases were worth at least $127 billion in 2005, housed 197,000 uniform personnel and an equal number of dependents and civilian officials, and employed an additional 81,000 local foreign hires. They covered 687,000 acres (nearly 1,100 square miles) of foreign land and cost taxpayers $13 billion in maintenance alone.

America may be more powerful than Britain was, but it still cannot neglect the lesson that it must make choices. It cannot be involved in everything. Tensions in the Middle East are important, but they have sucked all the resources, energy, and attention out of every other issue in American foreign policy for the last seven years. Washington has to move out of the eighth century a.d., adjudicating claims between Sunnis and Shias in Baghdad, and move into the twenty-first century—to China, India, Brazil—where the future is being made. Every choice to engage in some cause, worthy as it is, is a distraction from the larger strategic issues that confront the United States. In focusing on the seemingly urgent, we will forget the truly important.

2. Build broad rules, not narrow interests.
There is a fundamental tension in U.S. foreign policy. Does the country want to push its own particular interests abroad, or does it want to create a structure of rules, practices, and values by which the world will be bound? In an age of rising new powers, the United States’ overriding goal should be the latter—so that even as these countries get more powerful, they will continue to live within the framework of the current international system. This is the principal constraint we can construct to ensure that the rise of the rest does not turn into a downward competitive spiral, with great powers freelancing for their own interests and advantage in such a way as to destabilize the whole system. For such a system to work, we would have to adhere to these rules as well. If the United States freelances when it suits its purposes, why would China not do the same with regard to Taiwan? Or India with regard to Pakistan? If we are not bound by the rules, why should they be?

First, that means recommitting itself to the institutions and mechanisms for problem solving and adjudication that the United States (largely) created over the last five decades. But this is more than simply about attending more UN meetings and signing treaties. When the United States proclaims universal values, it must phrase its positions carefully. George Bush declared in his second inaugural that it “is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.” And yet, when democrats in Taiwan and Pakistan and Saudi Arabia were silenced, the United States kept quiet, arguing—perhaps persuasively—that these are special cases. Still, Washington pillories China and scolds India for not being tougher on North Korea and Burma. Diplomats in both countries will tell you that these are special cases for them. Instability in Burma is a remote problem for the United States. But that country shares long borders with China and India. Instability to them means millions of refugees. Washington should recognize that if it has its own exceptions, so do other countries. Or else it should drop its own exceptions. But to do neither, and preach one thing and practice another, is hypocrisy, which is both ineffective and undermining of American credibility.

When it comes to terrorism, the United States has been too narrow-minded. The best systemic protection against the threat of terrorism would be a global set of customs and immigration controls that checks people and cargo around the world, using the same standards and sharing databases. As it is now, America’s unilateral approach forces countries and airlines to comply, but only at its own borders—creating chokepoints, with negative consequences for the economy and for America’s image in the world. That’s why, in the midst of a worldwide tourism boom, travel to the United States has been sluggish ever since 9/11.