Once economic development matured enough, a real balance took hold, and power started shifting back and forth between parties. Malaysia heads for the same tipping point today.
Americans, especially experts and politicians, typically view these regimes with a certain disdain, wondering how a public can put up with a manipulative political system where elites decide who runs for high office and only a tiny fraction of the population has any real influence. We demand more competition, more suffrage, and freer elections—now!
But take a trip back with me to the beginnings of our own country, and let me try to convince you that America needs to summon more patience with such developments, because we often demand of others what we certainly didn’t have ourselves as we struggled to our feet as a nation.
Remember this: Our country was born of revolution, including a nasty guerrilla war waged by a ragtag collection of militias against the most powerful military in the world at that time. We fought dirty, even launching a surprise attack during a religious holiday. We mercilessly persecuted fellow citizens who sided with the occupational authority. The enemy branded our military leader a terrorist. In fact, its parliament was the first in history to use such terminology to describe our violent attacks against its commerce. And true to our violent extremism, we “elected” this rebel military leader our first president in 1789. I use the word “elected” loosely, because he essentially ran unopposed—by design.
Less than 2 percent of our country’s population was actually able to cast votes, as roughly half of the states chose electors in their legislatures—rich landowning patricians selecting one of their own. This rebel leader ran unopposed again for reelection three years later in 1792.
When the general finally stepped down in 1797, an outcome by no means certain, he was replaced by another revolutionary leader—an unlovable enforcer to whom the revolutionary elite had delegated a number of unsavory jobs over the years. Like the general, this radical lawyer wasn’t associated with an organized party as such. His revolutionary credentials were beyond reproach.
Our third president, one of the world’s most notorious radical ideologues, ushered in a period of single-party rule in 1800. During that election, only six of sixteen states actually allowed the “people”—white men who met certain qualifications—to vote in the presidential race. Certain racial groups were denied the right to vote, as were women.
This one-party rule, subsequently dubbed the Era of Good Feelings, extended almost a quarter-century, getting so stale at one point that an incumbent president ran unopposed.
Finally, a whopping forty-eight years after we issued our famous Declaration of Independence declaring all men equal, we conducted a presidential election in which three-quarters of the states let their citizens vote directly for electors.
Four years later, in 1828, America finally saw an “outsider,” meaning someone not from the first revolutionary generation or its immediate progeny, win the White House. Naturally, he was another war hero, who, over his eight years in office, brutalized his political opponents so much that they mockingly dubbed him “King Andrew.”
The “king” then displayed the Putinesque temerity to handpick his successor, earning him the equivalent of a “third term.”
This was the first half-century of American political history.
It took us 89 years to free the slaves and 189 years to guarantee African-Americans the right to vote.
Women waited 144 years before earning suffrage.
If a mature, multiparty democracy was so darn easy, everybody would have one.
IN ORDER TO FORM A MORE PERFECT GLOBALIZATION . . .
There are four fundamental reasons why American grand strategy matters more right now than any other nation’s grand strategy.
The first is that the American example is the source code for this era’s version of globalization, which superseded the colonial model of world integration after its collapse as a result of the massive continental civil war that ran from 1914 to 1945. These United States represent the oldest and most successful multinational economic, political, and security union on the planet, a collection of states whose integration has been so successful and so deep that we forget the fantastic journey that brought us to this present state of being. We should not forget it, because it is our essential gift to world history, currently finding its replication—finally—in the European context from which we sprang. The success of that model, the European Union, has made it the second great source code for the future of globalization. By both improving upon and falling short of the original, it provides the world a much-needed contrast and range of choices. It also lightens America’s load in shrinking the Gap.
The second reason is that America currently serves as the sole historical bridge between settled Europe’s postmilitary, postnationalistic achievement of stable identity and rising Asia’s premilitary, prenationalistic pursuit of the same. In other words, while Europe has evolved past the great sources of twentieth-century conflict (militarism, nationalism, ideologies in general), Asia’s emerging powers—except for Japan—are rapidly approaching these historical phases, largely clinging to the hope that comprehensive marketization of their economies alone will so integrate their societies with the larger world as to render these traps obsolete. The trade-off, however, is substantial for the planet as a whole, because in so rapidly integrating with the global economy, Asian nations have turbocharged globalization’s dynamics to the point of resurrecting fears of zero-sum competitions among great powers for resources, markets, and military allies in the decades ahead. They’ve resurrected the specter of empires. Having avoided that historical path through our pursuit of an “empire of ideals,” America remains at once militarily empowered and still ideologically committed enough to use that power in defense of the global system we did so much to create. Europe is no longer able to play that muscular role, and Asia—save Putin—seeks to avoid the temptations associated with it.
Thus, by occupying the military role of global Leviathan, America frees Europe to pursue the further evolution of its multinational union that currently abuts several troubled zones desperately in need of such integration—North Africa, the Middle East, the Caucasus and the Balkans—while likewise providing security coverage for Asia’s far cruder extensions of economic networks in many of these same trouble zones, plus a significant number of others (e.g., Central Asia, Southeast Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, and Andean South America). The trick, of course, is calibrating America’s grand strategy as a whole, and particularly its use of that un-equaled military power, to these seemingly competitive but actually overwhelmingly complementary dynamics of global integration. Pursued too unilaterally or recklessly, America’s use of force in managing globalization’s further expansion can easily trigger conflicting responses from Europe and/or Asia, with the most likely outcome being an East-West standoff painfully reminiscent of the Cold War. If use of force is pursued too “humbly” or with too much deference, today’s emerging powers might feel compelled to replicate the sort of self-destructive foreign policy practices once employed by past colonial powers—a zero-sum mindset the planet can ill afford in the decades ahead.
Third, America’s ability to maintain its status as global military Leviathan is far from assured absent a clear grand strategy that articulates the rationale for such a role. That articulation is what sustains the American public’s support for the regular employment of that force, while dispelling the fears of the rest of the world regarding the use of military might that is often seen as arbitrary or self-aggrandizing. The sweet spot to be targeted is thus a vision that says to both Americans and the rest of the world: These are the mutually agreed-upon conditions under which U.S. military forces are deployed to improve the global security environment. Does this give the world a say in how we use military force? Yes. But it defines more the “ceiling,” or those lines we will not cross, than the “floor,” the minimum effort we are compelled to make. Frankly, America’s fears have alw
ays tended more toward the higher boundaries (Have we gone too far?) than the lower ones (Should we be doing more?), given our overall wealth, geographic security, and sense of duty to others. And so we desire constraints on our tendency to go overboard, just as the world does. If reasonably achieved, such a grand strategy both preserves and sanctifies our status as sole global military superpower.
Finally, America’s grand strategy matters most right now primarily because it is so off-kilter from globalization’s current trajectory. We’re fighting a “global war” that no one else on the globe seems to recognize, against enemies whose power we consistently exaggerate to the point of provoking disbelief among even our closest allies. America seems paranoid and belligerent at exactly the historical moment when the world is going our way. And when that exemplar, sporting the world’s biggest gun, seems so disturbed about global trends, it sows the seeds of uncertainty across the international system by suggesting that we don’t have a clue about what lies ahead. Neither Europe nor Asia can fill this vision void, because while each can offer models (Europe’s integration of states, China’s national development, Russia’s petrocracy), none other than the United States of America can offer a trusted mechanism for eliminating the risk of debilitating conflict—however scaled. The price of war determines all other prices in the global marketplace. Either America backs those “securities” or they will be subject to wild fluctuation.
BORN IN THE USA
In this chapter, we will journey through America’s two great historical arcs: the creation, transformation, and taming of the United States from 1776 to the start of the twentieth century; and the subsequent projection of that “states uniting” model upon the global landscape, beginning with the administration of Theodore Roosevelt, whose presidency marked the great tipping point between the two eras. In the first arc, we’ll see an American System proposed by our revolution and increasingly imposed across a continent’s wilderness, tested by the scourge of civil war and transformed by the process of frontier integration, and then finally shamed by its cruel excesses and tamed by a progressive spirit that marked our true flowering as a nation. Once defined, this United States proposed, with utmost sincerity, a similar solution for the world as a whole, defensively imposing such structure on part of it only after a period of unprecedented global strife, then to have that model immediately tested by its ideological opposite—the Soviets’ empire of force. Meeting that challenge, and better yet, ultimately co-opting it, the American System of states—uniting in increasingly freer markets, integrating trade and production, explicit collective security, and improved network transparency—found its historic moment at the Cold War’s end. This “end” of the Old World’s history saw the exuberant resumption of the New World’s destiny as source code for freedom’s viral advance around the planet, even as that code remains largely “uncracked” by today’s grand strategists and unarticulated by a succession of post-Cold War presidents.
But just as assuredly, the tsunami of integration that is globalization generated many new forms of upheaval and even more forms of local modification, triggering great unease in its modern originator and protective Leviathan. Why? Because this United States failed to recognize its own history in these integrating processes—these states uniting—and thus, in its fears and impatience, began to describe the emerging system it had unleashed as “unmanageable” and “chaotic,” constituting a threat to our future. And when that threat was made manifest on 9/11, our search for a new destiny began, albeit one immediately and instinctively defined in the most selfish and zero-sum terms: securing the homeland from the chaos of globalization’s many untamed frontiers. To their credit, other poles (the EU, China, Russia, India, Brazil) have since stood up to balance our mania, and it is now our challenge to realign our sense of historical purpose with their mix of needs and knowledge, for in our combined assets we locate more than enough resources to master the global challenges that lie ahead. Our American System, tested and transformed by the Cold War into a global platform that we now share with the world, subsequently enters into the same “shaming and taming” period that once marked our own graduation from nearly unsalvageable union to rising world power. Only this time the stakes are not merely our nation’s health but the survival of the world.
Having successfully replicated the economic construct of our American System among the vast majority of the world’s population, we are now faced with the long-term challenge of replicating its political constructs—its laws, its institutions, its culture and associated freedoms of religion, speech, and leadership choice—not merely within nations but across the international system as a whole (and yes, that does mean our global leadership is likewise anything but assured).
This is the world we have created. These are the forces we have unleashed.
Once we bullied, cajoled, and convinced a majority of the planet to embrace our economic model, we set in motion—through the extreme resource demands it has generated and will continue to generate—the historical process by which some version of democracy would emerge worldwide. For only through the flowering of such political openness will all that popular demand be accommodated. Our planet’s ecological limits will simply not tolerate any alternative for long, no matter how virulent the ism. As we know so well, that journey from economic interdependence (that which says we must share to get collectively rich) to political interdependence (the Golden Rule) is fraught with danger. We know where this global journey must lead because we have surmounted these challenges, however imperfectly, in these United States, where our democracy of “tribes”—at times constituted as states and sections, mobs and majorities, trusts and self-made men, cultures and factions, special interests and economic classes, movements and rebellions—has slowly but surely negotiated the needs of the many against the needs of the few.
THE AMERICAN SYSTEM, PROPOSED AND IMPOSED
If America is indeed the source code for this era’s globalization, then we can with great certainty locate America’s kernel code, or its core operating system, within Britain’s political evolution of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, highlighted by the Glorious Revolution of 1688, which established both the rule of parliament over the crown and the political rights of citizens vis-à-vis their government in a Bill of Rights. As Walter Russell Mead correctly notes:
As the heir to centuries of Anglo-Saxon politics the United States supports, however inconsistently, a political and social philosophy based on free choice and private property, tolerance among religions found in Protestant Christian values, and the idea that individuals—including women—have inalienable and equal rights which states must observe and protect.
That freedom from interference “from above,” when combined with the European Enlightenment’s radical notion of individual improvement “from below,” or the idea that economic growth and social progress improve human morality, yields the essential equation of American democracy: Self-rule, however flawed, is progressive rule because of the social and economic talent that is unleashed for the benefit of society, including the systematic improvement of both leadership and laws. Our political development is therefore intimately intertwined with our sense of economic achievement and self-improvement—the pursuit of happiness subject to constant reinvention.
In construct, then, America was built for speed, for the cutting edge, and for both producing and attracting ambition. Our promise is of equal opportunity, not equal outcome. And so, in our supreme optimism, we are the perpetual start-up company of nations, built around ideals that assume an unlimited market for personal growth. So give us your square pegs, your chronically dissatisfied, your insufferable oddballs yearning to try something different, because here, with the most minimal liability we can collectively stomach, we’ll give you that chance to fail repeatedly until you strike your version of gold. In a country where truths are self-evident, anybody can come up with evidence of a better way, because, in the end and from our very beginning, America’s political m
odel revolves around the social and economic goals of constant, individual-led improvement.
But the success of our bizarre revolution-from-below was far from assured in its early days. In a time of “great upheaval” that historian Jay Winik argues “gave birth to the modern world,” America was but one of three age-defining experiments in political liberalization, the other two being the bloody and chaotic French Revolution and Catherine the Great’s ambitious reforms in Imperial Russia. Neither ended well, and if not for George Washington’s unprecedented decisions, first to willingly surrender his sword to Congress in 1783 as the commander of a victorious revolutionary army and then in 1797 to voluntarily step down from near-sovereign power after seven years as our president, who can say how our experiment in self-rule would have turned out?
As Winik describes our infancy, “America was born as an artificial series of states, woven together with the string of precariously negotiated compacts and agreements, charters and covenants.” We had no natural borders, save for that created by the Atlantic Ocean, and the 1783 treaty that ended our revolutionary war against England codified the expansionistic claims of several of America’s free and sovereign states to the lands of the trans-Appalachian West, putting them in potential conflict with one another, as well as with Britain, France, and Spain for future control of the continent. Befitting their individual ambitions and mutual suspicions, each independent state maintained its own army and navy. Our vaunted Constitution, written in 1787 and put into effect two years later, contained so many tortured compromises between the Federalists and the proponents of states’ rights (the Anti-Federalists), including the poison pill of slavery, that the words “nation” and “national” never even made it into the signed document.
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