The Post-American World: Release 2.0 (30 page)

The more significant ongoing example of this tension has to do with nuclear proliferation. The United States asks the rest of the world to strictly adhere to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. The treaty has created a two-tier system: those nations that developed nuclear weapons before 1968 are permitted to have them; those that didn’t are not (and must accordingly follow certain guidelines for developing nuclear energy). But even while insisting that nonnuclear powers comply, the United States and other nuclear powers have been slow to follow the other injunction in the treaty: to “pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race . . . and to nuclear disarmament.” The latest START treaty with Russia is a move in the right direction, but even if fully implemented will leave each side with 1,550 deployed nuclear weapons and thousands more deactivated ones. Thus, when the United States tells countries that to build a single nuclear weapon is a moral, political, and strategic abomination while maintaining such an enormous arsenal, the condemnation rings hollow. Motivated by such concerns, Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, William Perry, and Sam Nunn have proposed that the United States lead an ambitious effort among the nuclear powers to eventually work toward a nonnuclear world. Whether or not we get all the way there—and whether or not a world without nuclear deterrence is a good idea—the United States would gain much credibility if it continued making serious efforts in this direction. Or else, once again it appears to be saying to the rest of the world, “Do what I say, not what I do.”

3. Be Bismarck not Britain.
Josef Joffe has argued that there are two historical analogies that the United States can look to in constructing its grand strategy: Britain and Bismarck.
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Britain tried to balance against rising and threatening great powers but otherwise kept a low profile on the European continent. Bismarck, by contrast, chose to engage with all the great powers. His goal was to have better relations with all of them than any of them had with each other—to be the pivot of Europe’s international system.

For the United States, the British option is not the right one. America has played that role in the past—against Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia—but the circumstances today make such a strategy unwise. The world is not divided into camps, and it is far more connected and interdependent than it was. “Balancing” against a rising power would be a dangerous, destabilizing, and potentially self-fulfilling policy. Were Washington to balance against China, before Beijing had shown any serious inclination to disrupt the international order, it would find itself isolated—and would pay heavy costs economically and politically for itself being the disruptive force. Given America’s massive power, not overplaying its hand must be a crucial component of any grand strategy. Otherwise, others will try—in various ways—to balance against it.

Washington is, however, ideally suited to play a Bismarckian role in the current global system. It has better relations with almost all the major powers than they do with each other. In Asia, the Bush administration did an excellent job of strengthening ties with Japan, Australia, and India. The Obama administration is trying to do the same with Russia and China. While Washington has many differences with Moscow and Beijing, there is no advantage to turning them into permanent adversaries. The virtue of the Bismarckian approach is that it gives the United States the greatest leverage with all parties, maximizing its ability to shape a peaceful and stable world. And if things do not work out, it also gives the United States legitimacy and leeway to move into a balancing role.

4. Order à la carte.
Among scholars and practitioners of international relations, there is one predominant theory about how and why international peace endures. It holds that the most stable system is one with a single dominant power that maintains order. Britain and the United States have played this role for two hundred years. In each case, the hegemon was the dominant economic and military player, becoming the market and lender of last resort, home to the world financial center, and holder of the reserve currency. In politico-military terms, each secured the sea lanes, balanced against rising threats, and intervened when it thought necessary to prevent disorder. Although both made many mistakes, the stability of the system and the success of the world economy and the open societies it created are an extraordinary legacy of Anglo-American hegemony.

What if that hegemony is waning? America no longer has the only large market in the world. The dollar is unlikely to retain its totemic position forever as the reserve currency, yielding to a basket that is largely composed of euros and dollars but includes other currencies too. In certain areas—the South China Sea, for example—U.S. military force is likely to be less relevant than that of China. In international negotiations, America will have to bargain and compromise with others. Does all this add up to instability and disorder?

Not necessarily. Two hundred years of Anglo-American hegemony has in fact created a system that is not as fragile as it might have been in the 1920s and 1930s. (When British power waned, America was unwilling to step in, and Europe fell through the cracks.) The basic conception of the current system—an open world economy, multilateral negotiations—has wide acceptance. And new forms of cooperation are growing. Anne-Marie Slaughter has written about how legal systems are constructing a set of transnational standards without anyone’s forcing them to do so—creating a bottom-up, networked order.
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Not every issue will lend itself to such stabilization, but many will. In other words, the search for a superpower solution to every problem may be futile and unnecessary. Smaller work-arounds might be just as effective.

The United States should embrace such an ad hoc order. Richard Haass, the former head of Policy Planning at the State Department, has creatively called for “à la carte multilateralism.”
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No one institution or organization is always right, no one framework ideal. The UN might work for one problem, NATO for another, the OAS for a third. And for a new issue like climate change, perhaps a new coalition that involves private business and nongovernmental groups would make the most sense. International life is only going to get messier. Being accommodating, flexible, and adaptable is likely to produce better results on the ground than insisting on a pure approach based on the notion that the only way to solve international problems is the way we have solved international problems in the past, in decades when the state was unusually strong. A more organic international system in which problems are addressed through a variety of different structures and solutions can create its own kind of layered stability. It is not as appealing as a more formal structure of peace, rooted in and directed through one or two central organizations in New York and Geneva. But it might be a more realistic and durable order.

The search for order is not simply an American problem. If the rise of the rest also brings about a rise in national pride and interest and assertiveness, it has the potential to produce disorder everywhere. At the same time, this rise is happening in a world in which peace and stability pay great rewards—giving China, India, and even Russia large incentives to keep the system stable. The problem is that these rising powers do not have an obvious and immediate incentive to solve the common problems that this new system generates. National frictions, climate change, trade disputes, environmental degradation, and infectious disease might all fester until a crisis hits—and then it might be too late. Solving such problems and providing global public goods requires a moderator, organizer, or leader.

5. Think asymmetrically.
The United States has the most powerful military in the history of the world. And yet it has found it difficult to prevail in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Israeli military is vastly superior to Hezbollah’s forces. But it was not able to win a decisive victory over the latter in its conflict with it. Why? Because the current era is one in which asymmetrical responses have become easier to execute and difficult to defeat. This is true not simply in war. Consider the rise of drug cartels, money-laundering syndicates, migrant workers, and terrorists, all far smaller and poorer than the governments that oppose them. In an age of constant activity across and within borders, small groups of people with ingenuity, passion, and determination have important advantages.

In working within this context, the first and most important lesson is to not get drawn into traps. In a videotaped message in 2004, Osama bin Laden explained his strategy with astonishing frankness. He termed it “provoke and bait”: “All we have to do is send two mujahedin . . . [and] raise a piece of cloth on which is written ‘Al Qaeda’ in order to make the generals race there, to cause America to suffer human, economic, and political losses.” His point has been well understood by ragtag terror groups across the world. With no apparent communication, collaboration, or further guidance from bin Laden, small outfits from Southeast Asia to North Africa to Europe now announce that they are part of Al Qaeda, and so inflate their own importance, bring global attention to their cause—and of course get America to come racing out to fight them. This kind of overreaction also makes the U.S. military presence and policies—its bombings, its collateral damage—the main issue. The local debate moves from terrorism to U.S. imperialism.

Consider the manner in which the United States started expanding its presence in Africa. The rhetoric that the Bush administration used was commendable. “We want to prevent problems from becoming crises, and crises from becoming catastrophes,” Theresa Whelan, the former deputy assistant defense secretary for African affairs, explained in an interview in 2007. “We have in our national interest that Africa is a stable continent.” Its solution, however, was the creation of a new military command for the continent, AFRICOM, with its own commander and staff. But as the
Washington Post
columnist David Ignatius perceptively asks, “Is the U.S. military the right instrument for the nation-building effort that AFRICOM apparently envisions? Will a larger U.S. military presence check terrorism and instability on the continent, or will it instead become a new magnet for anti-Americanism?” The United States has many interests in Africa, from keeping countries stable to checking China’s influence to preventing humanitarian tragedies. But is a military command the way to go about this? Or is this simply the response generated because this is how the U.S. government knows to respond—with a military command. The danger here is of wasted resources, a reaction to perceived American imperialism. But the deeper problem is conceptual. It is a misdiagnosis of the problem. “To the man who has a hammer,” Mark Twain wrote, “every problem looks like a nail.”

The United States should be thinking creatively and asymmetrically. This would allow it to capitalize on one of its key advantages. The United States has a much broader and deeper range of instruments than just its military. An American policy toward Africa, for example, that focused on building up our diplomatic corps, nation-building capacities, and technical assistance teams would be a bit duller than AFRICOM—but it might be more effective in the long run. This would be true outside Africa as well. What the United States is lacking in a place like Pakistan is a broader effort to assist that country in its modernization and an effort that makes it clear that the United States wants to ally with the people of that country and not merely its military. When I was growing up in India, the U.S. Information Services used to serve as ambassadors of American culture, ideas, and ideals. That entire approach to diplomacy was shuttered after the Cold War and even after 9/11 remains moribund. The U.S. military effort against Islamic extremism has received over $1 trillion in funding. The generous accounting of the figure for diplomatic and civilian activities would be under $10 billion.

America is also much more than its government. And here there is more promising activity. Foundations, universities, charities, and private individuals are working more deeply and effectively abroad. Washington should learn more from these groups, work more with them, and engage other Americans to get involved. American Muslims, instead of being questioned, harassed, and detained, should be enlisted in the effort to understand the appeal of Islamic fundamentalism. One of America’s core strengths—its civil society—has been largely untapped in the war on terror.

6. Legitimacy is power.
The United States has every kind of power in ample supply these days except one: legitimacy. In today’s world, this is a critical deficiency. Legitimacy allows one to set the agenda, define a crisis, and mobilize support for policies among both countries and nongovernmental forces like private business and grass-roots organizations. Legitimacy was what allowed the rock singer Bono, for example, to change government policy on a crucial issue, debt relief. His power lay in his ability to capture the intellectual and moral high ground.

Legitimacy comes in many forms. The Clinton administration used force on three important occasions—in Bosnia, Haiti, and Kosovo. In none of them did it take the matter to the UN Security Council, but there was little suggestion that it needed to do so. Indeed, Secretary General Kofi Annan even made statements that seemed to justify the action in Kosovo, explaining that state sovereignty should not be used as a cover for humanitarian abuses. The Clinton administration was able to get away with this partly because of a basic sense of trust. While the Clinton administration—or the George H. W. Bush administration—was assertive in many ways, the rest of the world did not need assurances about its intentions. Because of 9/11, the Bush administration had no choice but to assert American power and act forcefully on the world stage. But that should have given it all the more reason to adopt a posture of consultation and cooperation while doing what needed to be done. It’s one thing to scare your enemies; it’s another to terrify the rest of the world.