In sending troops to Afghanistan in 2001, the Bush administration was fighting the most familiar kind of war, and the one with the strongest support in international law. It was responding to an attack, and thus acting in self-defense. The campaign to remove the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein from power in 2003, however, had as its justification the prospect that, if left in charge of the country, he was likely to act in ways that jeopardized major American interests. The United States thus waged a preventive war against Iraq, an unfamiliar kind of war in American history and a kind of war that international law does not allow. The Bush administration announced as goals for the protracted and bloody military deployments in Afghanistan and Iraq not only to defeat anti-American forces but also to bring democratic government to the two countries. Neither of them had such a government at the time of the American intervention or indeed had ever had one.
These post–Cold War goals of American military intervention were more ambitious, complicated, and, as it turned out, difficult to achieve than the older, more familiar, and relatively straightforward aims, which had animated foreign policy before 1991, of defending the country and its vital interests. Rather than leading to a contraction of the nation’s foreign policy, the end of the Cold War had the opposite impact. The United States had always sympathized with foreigners oppressed by their governments and had aspired to spread the blessings of democracy beyond North America. But it was only with the apparent end of the Cold War, and with it the apparent end of making the protection of the United States from mortal threats the overriding goal of American foreign policy, that these sympathies and aspirations could achieve the prominence, and claim the resources, that they did during the Clinton and George W. Bush presidencies.
From 1941 to 1991 and then from 1991 to 2008, the United States carried out the same kind of foreign policy, but for opposite reasons. In the first period, such a policy was necessary to meet the threat the country faced; in the second, it was possible precisely because there was no such threat. In the first era, the nation’s security required that it mount the foreign policy it did; in the second, without a comparable threat but also without serious economic constraints, it could comfortably afford such a foreign policy. In the first, the price of not being active all over the world seemed unacceptably high; in the second, the economic, political, and military costs of such activism seemed, for the most part, acceptably low. For five decades, in conducting its foreign policy, the United States operated with the mind-set of a doctor, doing whatever was necessary to safeguard the patient—that is, itself. For the next two decades it assumed the role of the philanthropist, investing its large surplus of power and wealth in worthy causes all over the planet.
The financial and economic circumstances of the second decade of the twenty-first century will not by themselves re-create the kind of external military and political danger that necessitated the global role of the first era. They will, however, put an end to the condition that made such policies possible in the second. The reversal of the expansive American foreign policy that seemed imminent at the end of World War II, and again at the end of the Cold War, has finally arrived.
THE LIMITS OF AMERICAN DECLINE
Where will the consequences of the great reversal in American foreign policy be felt? While they will certainly be felt in some ways by the people who have ultimate sway over that policy—the American public—the most important impact of these new limits will come not in the United States but in other countries. The rest of the world will change because American foreign policy has played such a large role in the rest of the world.
As for the nature of that change, two different perspectives are likely to become the main frameworks for understanding the consequences of the constraints that the country’s domestic economic challenges will impose on its foreign policy. One is the perspective of the historian, which places the United States and its foreign policy in a wider historical context and thus permits a comparison with the great powers of the past. The other perspective might be called the anti-American approach to the interpretation of American foreign policy: its premise is a negative judgment on the foreign relations of the United States. Each, however, misleads more than it illuminates because neither proceeds from an accurate understanding of the unique features of America’s global role in the twenty-first century.
A retrenchment in its international activities is unusual for the United States, but the decline in the international reach and ambitions of powerful countries is anything but unusual in the history of international relations. To the contrary, it is the norm. One of the principal themes of international history—perhaps its major theme—is expressed by the title of a book on the subject by the eminent historian Paul Kennedy: The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. Like flowers, powerful countries have tended, over the centuries, to bloom and then to fade.
In Kennedy’s telling, the great powers of the past five centuries have regularly suffered from “imperial overstretch.” The rising cost of maintaining an armed presence beyond their borders weakens them internally to the point that they suffer defeat in a major war and a consequent demotion in the international hierarchy. To be sure, in the age of nuclear weapons a great, hierarchy-changing war is unlikely, and the expenses that are forcing a contraction in American foreign policy come from within rather than outside the country’s borders: America’s problem is “entitlement overstretch.”
The general pattern is, however, a familiar one, not least in the twentieth century. While the United States rose to a position of global primacy, other sovereign states declined in power and influence, with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 being merely the most recent. As a result of World War I, the great land empires of Eurasia—those of the Habsburgs in Central Europe; the Ottomans in southern Europe, Anatolia, and the Middle East; and the Romanovs, which stretched from Poland to the Pacific Ocean, all of them long established and all of them defeated in the war—ceased to exist. World War II so weakened Great Britain and France, even though the British were part of the winning coalition, that over the next decade they both liquidated their overseas empires. The British empire had been the largest in the world, the one on which the sun never set. As Britain declined, the United States assumed some of its global responsibilities.
The United States of the twenty-first century, however, even with the economic pressure that the 2008 financial crisis has produced, its rising debt burden, and its unfunded entitlement obligations, differs from the declining powers of the twentieth century, and the centuries before, in two important ways. First, the American decline will not be nearly as steep as the previous ones. The American empire will not disappear, as did the empires of the twentieth century, because the United States does not have an empire. The American economy will remain the largest one on the planet for some time to come, and American military forces, for the foreseeable future, will be the world’s most powerful.
The economic shocks constraining American power have affected other countries as well, which means that, even with the economic challenges it faces, the American margin of superiority in usable power over many other countries will not diminish. That fact is connected to a second key difference between the twenty-first-century United States and other countries whose power has waned. No other country will, in the foreseeable future, rise to challenge America’s global role, let alone supplant it as the most powerful member of the international system.
Neither of the two candidates usually cited as challengers and successors to the United States will attain such a status in the near future, if ever. The countries of Europe are wealthy and have both experience as global powers in the past and aspirations—at least rhetorically—to resume that role in the future. In part in hopes of resuming it, they have banded together to form the twenty-seven-member European Union (EU), with a population of 491 million and an output of $14 trillion. (The comparable figures for the United States are 300 million and $14 trillion.) Anticipating the often-predicted emergence of
Europe as a twenty-first-century powerhouse in international affairs comparable to the United States, however, resembles the plot of the Samuel Beckett play Waiting for Godot.
Godot never arrives and the European superpower will not arrive either. For one thing, the demographic pressures that make American entitlement programs so burdensome will weigh even more heavily on Europe. Birthrates there are lower than in the United States, so unlike in the United States, the populations of many European countries will actually shrink. With retirement benefits generally higher, European workers will have to pay more to support the non-working populations, leaving fewer resources for other endeavors and contributing to slower economic growth than in the United States. More important, the EU has proven itself unable to act as a single unit in political and military affairs. Even if the EU could somehow manage to forge a consensus on security issues, an achievement that has thus far eluded it, it has very little usable military force to back up whatever policies it might choose to adopt.
A more plausible candidate to challenge and ultimately surpass the United States is China. It has the world’s largest population and fastest-growing economy. At some point in the twenty-first century it will almost certainly overtake the United States as the possessor of the world’s largest economy measured by total production. Although not necessarily in straightforward fashion, economic growth does enhance a country’s international influence, so China’s influence is destined to grow, perhaps rapidly, in the decades ahead.
Yet in the decades ahead China will remain a poor country as measured by per capita income. Whatever regime governs the country will have as its highest priority improving the fortunes of the hundreds of millions of Chinese who will remain poor, which will direct the country’s attention and energies inward. China’s population will also grow older, although later in the century than Europe’s, as the result of the one-child-per-couple policy the government imposed on Chinese families beginning in the 1970s. China, too, will have to support an expanding number of retired workers with a shrinking pool of people active in the workforce. This will constrain China’s international activities in the middle years of the century just as an aging population and its fiscal consequences will restrict American foreign policies in its second decade and beyond. China’s international influence will surely continue to grow, above all in East Asia, but not so rapidly as to displace that of the United States.
While the United States will have fewer resources for foreign policy, therefore, others will not necessarily have more. America will be able to do less internationally compared to what it has done in the past, but this does not mean that the international efforts of others will rise in proportion to the American decline. What the world’s strongest power faces in conduct of its foreign policy is not only (and perhaps not mainly) weakness in relation to others but also, where usable foreign policy resources are concerned, scarcity.
The prospect of scarcity in disposable American power will come as welcome news to the anti-Americans, in whose view American power is the principal source of the world’s troubles. Evidence of this sentiment can be found all over the world, including in the United States. The anti-Americanism that is manifested in opinion polls, demonstrations, political speeches, and private conversations has a variety of sources.
In the Arab Middle East, for example, oppressive dictatorships use the United States as a scapegoat for their own failures, and hostility to America is virtually the only political view, aside from support for the regimes, that governments permit to be publicly expressed. The administration of George W. Bush attracted special opprobrium in Western Europe because the core principles of his Republican Party—assertive nationalism, social conservatism, and a hostility toward taxation—are not widely shared on the Continent and thus made his government seem alien and vaguely menacing.
Anti-Americans believe that the less powerful the United States is, the better off they, their countries, and the rest of the world will be. With the exception of the terrorist devotees of fundamentalist Islam and the leaders of North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, and a handful of other countries, however, those who believe this are wrong. American power confers benefits on most inhabitants of the planet, even on many who dislike it and some who actively oppose it, because the United States plays a major, constructive, and historically unprecedented role in the world.
THE WORLD’S GOVERNMENT
When societies become sufficiently complex, and its members closely enough connected with one another, they require a government to set rules, keep order, and support their various transactions. The small bands of hunter-gatherers of prehistory did not need formal government. The settled agricultural communities of antiquity and the premodern era, and of course the great urban civilizations of today, emphatically do need it.
So it has been with the contemporary society of sovereign states. As cross-border trade and investment have grown, and as the march of technology has produced ever more powerful weapons that have vastly expanded the destructive potential of warfare, the world has come to need governance. Much of the governance that the world has comes from the United States. In the twenty-first century the United States provides to the world some of the services that governments within countries furnish to the societies they govern.
The first duty of government is to keep order. American security commitments in Europe and East Asia, the two most economically productive and heavily armed parts of the world outside North America, and the American military forces deployed there, help to keep order by providing reassurance in both regions. Reassurance is the policy of instilling confidence in countries that they are not in imminent danger, that sources of insecurity will not suddenly materialize, and that they can therefore conduct their relations with other countries without fear. The United States provides reassurance by serving as a buffer between and among countries that are not actively hostile to one another but that harbor fears that hostility might someday arise. Effective reassurance, like good fences in the Robert Frost poem, makes good neighbors.
Specifically, the American security role in Europe reassures the Western Europeans that if Russia should attempt to intimidate them, the United States will protect them as it did during the Cold War. At the same time, the American military presence in Europe and the enduring alliance with Germany reassure Russia that Germany itself, which invaded Russia twice in the first half of the twentieth century, will not become a major, aggressive military power again. The similar American role in Asia reassures the countries of the region that they have a means of counterbalancing China, while reassuring China that Japan, like Germany an American ally and one that invaded and occupied the Chinese mainland in the twentieth century, will not reprise its past pattern of conquest. The American military presence in both regions, although reduced from its Cold War levels, enables the countries in each to feel that the region is safe and that they can behave accordingly, just as a policeman on patrol imparts a sense of safety to a neighborhood.
The United States has also taken the lead in trying to prevent what is, by common consent, the most urgent threat to international security in the twenty-first century: the spread of nuclear weapons to governments, or non-governmental groups such as terrorist organizations, that would wield them in dangerous ways or even actually use them. The Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) of 1968 enshrines the global norm against the spread of nuclear weapons, but the treaty does not provide the means to enforce this norm. American political leadership, American surveillance techniques and intelligence-gathering organizations, and sometimes American military power have done more to keep these weapons from spreading than the efforts of any other country. The military forces that provide reassurance also aid the cause of nonproliferation: without the assurance of American protection if it should be needed, Germany and Japan might well conclude that, to deal on an equal basis with their nuclear-armed neighbors Russia and China, they themselves need nuclear weapons.
American military forces also provide important
services to the global economy. In national economies people have the confidence to trade and invest freely because they know that the government stands ready to step in and enforce the contracts they make if this should be necessary. Governments punish default and theft. American military forces perform a version of this function for cross-border economic transactions: the U.S. Navy patrols and safeguards the world’s most important trade routes, the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.
Governments also supply electricity and water to their citizens. The international equivalent of these public utilities, necessary for the smooth functioning of everyday life in much of the world, is a reliable supply of oil. American diplomacy and the American armed forces have guaranteed such a supply by ensuring a measure of political stability in the region with the planet’s largest reserves of readily accessible petroleum—the Persian Gulf—and by safeguarding the sea lanes along which the oil moves from producers to consumers.
Governments routinely supply the currency that their citizens use, and for international transactions the most frequently used currency comes from the United States—the American dollar. Because it is so frequently employed, the dollar is also the world’s most widely held reserve currency, reserves being liquid resources that countries keep on hand to pay their foreign debts and foster confidence in their own national currencies.
In times of economic downturn, finally, twenty-first-century economic orthodoxy, based on the writings of John Maynard Keynes, teaches that the government must stimulate or provide directly the consumption that ordinarily comes from firms and individuals. Here, too, the United States has made a quasi-governmental contribution to the international economy. Especially in the last decade of the twentieth century and for most of the first decade of the twenty-first, the United States furnished a very large proportion of the world’s total consumption, sustaining economic growth in parts of the planet far from North America. This is a role that the financial crisis of 2008 brought to an abrupt end, plunging the world into a deep recession.
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