Great Powers

by Thomas P. M. Barnett

  America simply didn’t have the Leviathan-like capabilities necessary to impose its globalization model upon the world until World War II forced such developments. Mahan’s dream of a two-ocean navy would not be fulfilled until then, nor Dwight Eisenhower’s nightmare of a permanent military-industrial complex. Then again, America wasn’t doing the world much of a favor in the early twentieth century—any more than China is today—by merely “speaking softly” and carrying a “big stick” whose reach was regional at best. For the United States to impose its model of interstate political and economic relations globally would require a military Leviathan, and such a military was simply impossible to achieve absent the rise of a strong federal government back home. While the Civil War certainly accelerated that development, as did Theodore Roosevelt’s presidency, it would take the twin challenges of the Great Depression and World War II to make America’s federal government truly strong enough to raise and maintain a global military Leviathan capable of (1) standing up to the Soviet threat, and, upon waiting it out, (2) providing the muscle to ensure globalization’s rapid advance both eastward and southward over the past quarter-century.

  That testing and that transformation of our global system is the story of the second half of the twentieth century. The story of the first half of the twentieth century is one of America’s proposing that global model following World War I (Woodrow Wilson) and then, following that failure, finally imposing that model on as much of the world as we could readily control following World War II (Franklin Roosevelt’s “New Deal for the world” yielding to the near-term requirements of Harry Truman’s containment of the Soviet threat). In this first half of the twentieth century, then, America would learn a series of profound lessons, using them to effectively rebrand our nation from its previous role as mere shining example to that of architect of a global environment we came to recognize as defining our national interest. During that time, those various “stationary states,” whose lineup would change over the decades as we successfully co-opted them, would birth a sequence of isms that we’ve spent the last century battling: Europe’s fascism, Eurasia’s Communism, and now Islam’s terrible twins of rancid authoritarianism and violent radicalism.

  The basic outline of this historic journey can be summed up as follows: Europe’s imperial powers go to war with one another, beginning in 1914; after various surging tides favoring one side or the other, America enters the war in 1917 and, by surging huge numbers of troops across the summer, proves decisive in favor of Great Britain and France; after allied Russia dissolves into revolution and as Germany’s surrender looms imminent, President Woodrow Wilson proposes 14 Points to guide the subsequent peace talks, with roughly half addressing specific national claims and the other half proposing a new international order, including a “general association of nations” (later to become a League of Nations) for arbitrating disputes and processing demands for national self-determination within crumbling empires. The subsequent negotiations at Versailles end the following summer with England and France imposing a very harsh peace upon Germany, including unbearably heavy economic reparations. In the process: Wilson’s 14 Points largely go by the wayside, even though the resulting League of Nations represents a significant step forward; Wilson returns to an American public not given to embracing the responsibilities of enforced collective security implied by membership in the League, and the treaty is twice rejected by the U.S. Senate; while America progressively withdraws from the global scene to concentrate on domestic developments, the global economy suffers increasing volatility until a great stock market crash in 1929 sends all advanced powers into a frightening tailspin that is further exacerbated by their self-destructive policies of trade protectionism in subsequent years. And by 1933, the fascist Nazi party has gained control of enfeebled, chaotic Germany, and the long march to World War II in Europe begins, with Imperial Japan playing a similarly disruptive and aggressive role in East Asia. The lineup of forces in this resumed conflict is very similar to the first conflagration, with America once again joining in midstream and this time proving decisive in both the European and Asian theaters. Learning multiple lessons from WWI, America proactively shapes the postwar settlement, generating a host of international institutions (e.g., United Nations, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, North Atlantic Treaty Organization) and resource flows (e.g., Marshall Plan, Truman Doctrine, Berlin Airlift, postwar rehabilitations of German and Japan), many of which prove critical in generating and maintaining a Western identity in the follow-on Cold War against the Soviet Union and the bloc of states it dominates and/or supports as a result of WWII and subsequent revolutionary developments in Asia (e.g., Chinese Revolution, Korean War, Vietnam Conflict).

  In homage to Wilson, I offer Barnett’s 14 Points to remember from this journey, all of which are elemental to America’s becoming a great power in the last century, and foundational to grand strategy today.

  1. MAKE SURE YOU CAN ACCESS THE CRISIS WITHOUT ADDING TO THE CRISIS.

  The first thing to recognize is that America had begun an effective rebranding of its military long before its entry into the First World War put us in the position of proposing a new global order based on the American historical orientation. There is a great lesson in this process, because absent that effective rebranding, starting roughly in 1880 with the building up of America’s naval forces and extending through our war with Spain and subsequent quasi-imperialist experiences in the Philippines and the Caribbean (subtext: start easy and work your way up), America would have had neither the ambition nor the wherewithal to have engaged that distant conflict to Great Britain’s advantage. And absent that slow, painful learning process on Great Britain’s part (in effect, “Who’s your daddy now?”), it’s not clear that London would have been strategic enough the second time around in WWII to have so singularly sought America’s alliance, even to the point of sacrificing its imperial economic order in the process (Churchill’s agonizing choice). My point in mentioning this is: Absent that realization among grand strategic thinkers like Theodore Roosevelt and Alfred Mahan, America would not have made the long-term effort to effectively position itself for the opportunities and challenges that inevitably lay ahead. They knew, in effect, that America would be forced by events to project its model of globalization upon the world in order to continue flourishing, accepting what obligations came its way as a result.

  Simply put, the nonstationary state could not abide a stationary system.

  I mean “inevitably” in the following sense: America’s strategic thinkers of the 1880s could see how our nation’s economic and network connectivity with the global economy was expanding far beyond our diplomatic and military capabilities to defend it, and realizing that this capabilities gap constituted its own strategic threat to our growing national interest, they decided to gradually eliminate it through (a) a buildup of such needed capabilities, (b) a progressive willingness to employ those burgeoning capabilities, and (c) a grand strategic vision that justified both. At first, the grand strategy came in pieces: the “open door,” the Great White Fleet, a focus on arbitrationism (negotiating and enforcing rules), and so on. It took the crystallizing experience of World War I to force a more coherent expression—namely, Wilson’s 14 Points, which projected an American-inspired constellation of global governing principles and institutions to modulate future imperial clashes over trade and territory and to process future claims for national self-determination within that crumbling imperial order.

  It’s important to remember this journey, because today we’re watching similarly rising powers, such as China and India, propose their own, internally driven expressions of such grand strategies to justify their own instinctive buildup of capabilities—especially naval capabilities. Then there’s a similarly resurgent Russia that again lays claim to its historical spheres of influence, intimidating its targets in the manner it knows best—tanks and rockets. For now, those grand strategies are rather incoherent and poorly articulated, meaning we
can let current events fill in those blanks (e.g., letting third parties declare our wars against their preferred targets) or we can seek out alliances with these powers in such a way as to force a synthesis between their strategies and our own. If we do it well, we won’t face a crucible, such as a global conflict, that forces our pained accommodation of their “reasonable” demands, much as Great Britain was forced to accept ours following WWII. Then again, given the experience to date in our self-declared “global war on terror,” there’s good reason to believe that, in today’s interdependent environment, something far less obvious than global war might do the trick—to wit, our strategic tie-down in Iraq and Afghanistan. Perhaps any “new global order” won’t arrive in the form of new international institutions but simply sovereign wealth funds’ acquiring our economic assets in some sort of superpower “estate auction.” Bottom line: We need to be working on our strategic protégés now as opposed to waiting on events, because the earlier you engage, the lower the price.

  And yes, their price is a function of their confidence, just as it was with us roughly a century ago.

  The most important reason America should want to rebrand rising powers like China and India (and to a lesser extent the demographically moribund Russia) as globally accepted interventionary forces is that getting them to the war ensures they’ll be interested—and credentialized—for the postwar. This is something America discovered in the Versailles talks after WWI: Because we hadn’t played militarily in the Middle East, whenever that subject came up Wilson was effectively excluded from the debate. A century later, we’re still haunted by that reality in terms of the “badly drawn” states that emerged from that postwar process. That doesn’t always mean you can fix things simply by being at the table. It means that unless you’re at the table, there’s no chance of making your voice heard.

  2. FIGURE OUT YOUR ACTUAL ECONOMIC LEVERAGE GOING IN AND MAKE IT CLEAR IN NEGOTIATIONS.

  Wilson arrived at Versailles in 1918 believing he had his European allies over a barrel because of their growing dependence on American agriculture and financial capital. It would, as Wilson confided to an aide, “force them to our way of thinking.” Over the long haul, as the influential British economist and policymaker John Maynard Keynes would argue, Wilson was correct on finance but less so on agriculture, because America’s domestic demands were rapidly rising. But the war didn’t drag on long enough to maximize America’s financial hold over the Europeans, who were willing to spend the money we lent them in American markets during the war (as we demanded), but then abruptly started canceling contracts as soon as peace talks were slated, immediately curtailing America’s wartime boom and thus diminishing Wilson’s capital. Certain realities should have driven this home to Wilson, such as our military’s dependence on Britain’s diminished but still sizable merchant fleet to return our troops home (our planned merchant fleet was just beginning to be built). As historian Kendrick Clements notes in his biography of Wilson, “Despite the extraordinary reversal of roles between creditor and debtor that had taken place during the war, the United States was caught up in a web of interdependence and was less dominant than its leaders imagined.”

  Fast-forward to Franklin Roosevelt’s historic decision to launch, in response to Winston Churchill’s 1940 request, the Lend-Lease Program, by which substantial amounts of war matériel were lent to the British in return for nominal basing rights in the Western Hemisphere. Lend-Lease was designed, as historian Elizabeth Borgwardt states, “as a lawyerly end-run around the entrenched culture of the Neutrality Act of 1935,” which an isolationist Congress had passed, along with three expansive renewals in subsequent years, to prevent FDR from embroiling America in yet another costly European world war. Robert Skidelsky, British biographer of Keynes, describes Lend-Lease as “the most adventurous political coup of Roosevelt’s presidency” precisely because it broke from the American tradition of wartime loans made strictly on business terms, something America did right through WWI. As President Calvin Coolidge coldly replied in response to European pleas to help them out with their American bank creditors following that war, “We hired them the money, didn’t we?”

  By making such concessionary loans, FDR did two things: (1) he established the precedent that made the later Marshall Plan possible; and (2) he so indebted the British to U.S. economic aid that during subsequent negotiations on a postwar liberal trade order, Roosevelt’s administration was able to hold the British to their promise, made in Article 7 of the Lend-Lease agreement, to end their system of imperial trade preferences and submit to the Bretton Woods Agreements—the “real price” of Lend-Lease.

  As we look back from today’s perspective, it’s interesting to note how private-sector loans and harsh economic reparations defined WWI, while WWII is best known for Lend-Lease and the Marshall Plan. As for today’s “global war on terrorism”? So far we can cite higher oil prices and an unprecedented amount of government postwar reconstruction contracts granted to private contractors, but no overarching economic agenda proposed or implemented by the Bush administration, which, like the Wilson administration, seemed to overestimate our home market’s power to “force them to our way of thinking”—to wit, Bush’s admonition to citizens to keep shopping despite the war on terror. But as we’re already seeing with the rise of a global middle class, flush with insatiable desires and enough disposable income to warrant market respect, America no longer wields the same immense—if passive—demand power within globalization.

  3. BUILD YOUR DOMESTIC CONSTITUENCY FROM THE START AND KEEP IT BIPARTISAN.

  Wilson, whose 1885 scholarly book Congressional Government set the standard for describing, as Clements termed it, “the American political system not as it was supposed to function but as it actually worked,” was enormously successful in pushing his progressive domestic agenda through Congress in his first term, despite the highly partisan nature of that age. Nonetheless, Wilson totally blew his chances of gaining Senate acceptance for the League of Nations charter. By taking no senators along to the Versailles talks, much less any prominent Republicans, Wilson alienated the very body he needed to institutionalize his dreams for a liberal postwar order. This was not a singular mistake. Rather, it followed Wilson’s pattern of managing America’s participation in the war in a highly unilateral fashion, not even including any military officers in his war council. It also reflected Wilson’s personality: Despite the obvious social demands of the office, he was distinctly uncomfortable at White House social events and thus sought to limit their number to an absolute minimum. In short, Dr. Wilson didn’t make or offer house calls on rival politicians, thus depriving his administration of their lubricating effect.

  But it was more than that with Wilson, who, as a true academic genius, had an ego to match. As Clements argues, “He wanted to be remembered as the author of a new international structure that could abolish war” and felt that “he alone had a clear vision” of what that structure needed to be. As for his assumption that he could cajole Europe’s leaders into accepting a new global order that would accommodate the growing revolutionary impulse of national self-determination, well, they would just have to be made to see the logic of it all. After all, when Wilson landed in France in 1918, he was arguably the most popular leader in the world. If Wilson’s arrogance and ambition blinded him during this crucial period, the danger was apparent to others. As Walter Lippmann, a future influential columnist and then assistant secretary of war, penned six months prior in an internal memo concerning Wilson’s plans for the Middle East, America was liable “to win a war and lose the peace” unless the president’s rhetoric was quickly reconciled with the reality that, as one academic involved in the U.S. government’s secret planning for the region’s postwar structure put it, most of Wilson’s European counterparts at Versailles viewed it as the “great loot of the war.” In the end, Arabs who believed Wilson’s 14 Points had promised them freedom were sorely disappointed by the colonial mandates produced by the Versailles Trea
ty.

  Franklin Roosevelt would likewise be blamed for disappointing postwar outcomes, particularly in his apparent accession, at the infamous Yalta Conference of February 1945, to Soviet demands for political hegemony over Poland and the rest of Eastern Europe. Given the military facts on the ground at that time, Roosevelt had little choice, in my opinion, especially since he was eager to gain Russia’s entry into our Pacific War, which, at that time, appeared as though it could drag on for a significant amount of time and at great human cost. Nonetheless, it was exactly that sort of balancing between external goals and internal cost considerations that made FDR’s management of the war so impressive. For it was the mix of relatively low American casualties, significant wartime economic advance, and the unprecedented exposure of millions of Americans to a larger world (almost 10 percent of all Americans served abroad in the military) that enabled such a strong postwar public consensus to emerge concerning the need for the nation to stay globally engaged, as well as establish and join permanent international organizations designed to prevent future wars.