by Robert Kagan
“We are Americans: part of something larger than ourselves,” declared George H. W. Bush on the eve of the first Gulf War. “For two centuries we’ve done the hard work of freedom.” Even today, presidents and politicians speak of the “leader of the free world” (Barack Obama), the “indispensable nation” (Madeleine Albright) upon which “the world is counting” for “global leadership” (Hillary Clinton). Of course, no sooner are these words uttered than the pride fades and the concerns rise, and the same leaders start talking about the need to focus on “nation building at home.”
Americans, in foreign policy, are torn to the point of schizophrenia. They are reluctant, then aggressive; asleep at the switch, then quick on the trigger; indifferent, then obsessed, then indifferent again. They act out of a sense of responsibility and then resent and fear the burden of responsibility they have taken on themselves. Their effect on the world, not surprisingly, is often the opposite of what they intend. Americans say they want stability in the international system, but they are often the greatest disrupters of stability. They extol the virtues of international laws and institutions but then violate and ignore them with barely a second thought. They are a revolutionary power but think they are a status quo power. They want to be left alone but can’t seem to leave anyone else alone. They are continually surprising the world with their behavior, but not nearly as much as they are continually surprising themselves.
When Winston Churchill observed that Americans could always be counted on to do the right thing, but only after exhausting all other alternatives, it was a sardonic, backhanded kind of compliment. Over the course of the first half of the twentieth century he watched them try to do the wrong thing many times. He watched them stay out of World War I in Europe until it was almost too late to prevent a German victory. In the interwar years, he saw them reject participation in the League of Nations and then waited anxiously for them to abandon neutrality and throw their weight against Hitler, which they did only after the attack on Pearl Harbor and only when it was almost too late again. At the dawn of the Cold War he found them insufficiently attentive to the threat of the Soviet Union; then he found them too uncompromising. He knew Americans when they were “sunk in selfishness,” and yet he marveled “at America’s altruism, her sublime disinterestedness.” He compared the United States to some “gigantic boiler,” quiet and cold until “the fire is lighted under it,” and then with “no limit to the power it can generate.”9 Above all, he knew Americans were human beings, neither devils nor angels.
THAT IS IMPORTANT TO keep in mind. It is nations, made up of people, that shape the world, not gods or angels. That is why the present order, shaped by Americans, often unconsciously, and with all their peculiarities and flaws, is all the more remarkable. The great mastermind of Germany’s unification, Otto von Bismarck, is supposed to have said that God looks out for drunkards, fools, and the United States of America. Perhaps that extends to the world order that Americans have built and maintained, almost despite themselves.
THE WORLD AMERICA MADE
THE IRONY IS THAT the peculiar blend of qualities that Americans have displayed, not all of them admirable, not all of them noble, and not all of them obvious traits of effective leadership, have nevertheless been a strange kind of asset to American foreign policy. For while it is true that the United States has been a powerful if unpredictable and often unwitting agent of change in the world, the ambivalence of the American people as well as their lack of self-awareness has paradoxically made their awesome power less threatening than it might be. Americans would be scarier if they actually had a plan. Their very distractedness, their evident desire to hold themselves apart from the world even as they shape it with their power, makes them an often frustrating ally, a confusing adversary, but also a less imposing, less frightening hegemon.
These qualities proved indispensable more than six decades ago when the United States laid the main foundation for today’s liberal world order by cementing its economic and strategic alliance with Europe. It is easy to forget, now that Europe is supposedly passé and we’ve entered the “Asian century,” that the world we know today—the political, economic, and strategic order in which Asia itself has prospered—was born atop the rubble of Europe after World War II. And it was born only because the United States supplied a novel solution to Europe’s insoluble problem.
The European powers after the mid-nineteenth century had fallen into a tragic syndrome from which they were unable to extricate themselves. Too many strong and ambitious powers were too close to one another to offer any of them a measure of security. The European balance of power had worked for stretches of time, but it had also failed periodically and catastrophically. Between 1850 and 1945, France and Germany (or Prussia in the first instance) went to war three times—in 1870, 1914, and 1940. Russia and Germany went to war twice. Britain and France together fought Russia once. In between these major wars were several near wars as tensions rose, especially in the Balkans but also in the division of colonial spoils in Africa and East Asia. Even when the European balance of power succeeded in keeping the peace, it was through the constant threat of war, the dispatch of battle fleets to contested waters, the menacing mobilization of ground forces during crises. Europe had become a cockpit of geopolitical rivalry between heavily armed great powers, with no way of ending the cycle of insecurity. All this had transpired despite a common European culture and civilization, an increasingly integrated and interdependent European economy, and blood relations among some of the ruling families.
Enter the United States, reluctantly. Even after World War II most Americans had never intended to become a global power. Preserving world peace, most imagined vaguely, would somehow be the job of the United Nations. When war ended, the Truman administration looked to pull back across the ocean, rapidly demobilize its armed forces, cut the defense budget, and establish Europe as an independent “third force,” capable of standing up to the Soviet Union by itself. That was the original aim of the Marshall Plan and other efforts to boost Europeans’ shattered confidence, rebuild their devastated economies, and turn onetime enemies into a united European entity. The Europeans, however, were not interested in being a third force, nor, as quickly became apparent, were they capable of it on their own. They wanted “American troops” standing “between them and the Red Army” and to keep a revived Germany in check.10 The NATO alliance was really Europe’s idea more than America’s, an “invitation to empire,” which the Americans grudgingly accepted only when it became clear their original plan was hopeless.11
George Kennan opposed the idea of NATO or any extended American presence in Europe. He feared Americans were “not fitted, either institutionally or temperamentally, to be an imperial power in the grand manner,” and he much preferred to divest “ourselves gradually of the basic responsibility for the security of western Europe.”12 Yet it was precisely Americans’ limitations and hesitations that made them such an attractive leader of the transatlantic “empire.” With the Soviet version of empire taking hold in the East, the great power across the ocean, distant both physically and emotionally, appeared to Europeans as the perfect deus ex machina to solve their dilemma. The United States was geographically far enough away to be a less threatening hegemon, and with no enemies on its own borders, it was secure enough at home to keep large numbers of its powerful armed forces on permanent station thousands of miles away. It helped that America was a democracy, not only because Americans shared common values with the British and the French, but also because, as the historian John Lewis Gaddis has noted, their style of working with allies had a democratic quality that permitted weaker powers a very unimperial autonomy.13
The United States played a similarly critical role in East Asia after World War II. There, too, large-scale war among neighboring powers had become common by the end of the nineteenth century. Japan and China fought each other several times between 1895 and 1945, at a cost of tens of millions of lives, mostly Chinese. Japan and Russia
fought each other twice. Korea served as the battleground for a number of conflicts, and of course the civil war in Korea sucked in both the United States and China. The entrance of the United States into a permanent security role in the region did not put an end to war—the United States itself fought in both Korea and Vietnam—but it did put an end to the cycle of warfare among the region’s great powers. The close American security relationship with Japan mirrored the role the United States played in Germany. The region’s most aggressive power was put out of the aggression business, its people’s vast energies channeled instead into economic growth, technological innovation, and world trade.
It is worth reflecting on these great geopolitical problems that the United States solved after 1945, for had they not been solved, the world would look entirely different today. The strategic relationships Americans formed in Europe and Asia became the pillars of the liberal world order during the Cold War, the engines of the global economy, the heart of the expanding democratic world, and the primary guarantee against world wars and the great-power conflicts that had plagued the world for a century. Over time the self-contained liberal order built around American leadership during the Cold War proved too strong, economically, militarily, and politically, for its chief competitor, the Soviet Union, and its own efforts to establish a global communist order. The American order became the dominant world order. Moscow’s former satellites eagerly joined “the West,” thereby making possible the full flowering of the liberal world that we enjoy today.
THERE WAS NOTHING INEVITABLE about this turn of events. No divine providence or progressive teleology, no unfolding Hegelian dialectic required that liberalism triumph after World War II. Those who live in this remarkable world tend to assume that both the global explosion of democracy and the liberal economic order of free trade and free markets that have spread prosperity these past sixty years were simply a natural stage in humankind’s upward progress. We like to believe that the triumph of democracy is the triumph of an idea and the victory of market capitalism is the victory of a better system, and that both are irreversible.
It’s a pleasant thought, but history tells a different story. Democratic progress and liberal economics have been and can be reversed and undone. The ancient democracies in Greece and the republics of Rome and Venice all fell to more powerful forces or through their own failings. The evolving liberal economic order of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries collapsed in the 1920s and 1930s. The better idea doesn’t have to win just because it is a better idea. It requires great powers to champion it.
Consider the ups and downs of democracy in just the last two centuries. From the time of the American Revolution until near the end of the nineteenth century, there had never been more than five nations in the world that could be called democracies. A brief flurry of liberal and constitutional revolutions in Europe in 1848 had been suppressed. But in the late nineteenth century there was an upswing. By 1900 there were a dozen democracies in the world, a growth so astonishing that contemporaries believed a democratic revolution was about to sweep the planet. Then came World War I and the victory of Great Britain, France, and the United States. Democratic governments sprouted up all across Europe, in the defeated powers of Germany, Austria, and Ottoman Turkey, in Finland, Poland, and Greece, and then also in Latin America. In 1920, with the number of democracies suddenly doubled, the historian James Bryce wondered, along with many others, whether this “trend toward democracy” was no temporary fluctuation but “a natural trend, due to a general law of social progress.”14 As the British economist J. A. Hobson later recalled, democracy “was making such advances in most countries of the world as to be considered the natural goal of political evolution. Even those who distrusted it believed it to be inevitable.”15
Over the course of the 1920s and 1930s, however, the trend moved in the other direction—a “reverse wave,” as Samuel P. Huntington called it. It began with Mussolini’s fascist takeover in Italy in 1922. Then the newly born democracies in Lithuania, Poland, Latvia, and Estonia fell. Then came the rise of Hitler and the Nazis in Germany in the early 1930s and their forcible takeover in Austria and then Czechoslovakia. Greek democracy fell in 1936, and Spanish democracy fell to Franco and his fascist regime that same year. Military coups overthrew democratic governments in Portugal, Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina. Japan’s democracy became a façade for military rule in the 1930s. Across three continents, fragile democracies gave way to authoritarian forces exploiting the vulnerabilities of the democratic system, while others fell prey to economic depression. There was a ripple effect, too—the success of fascism in one country strengthened similar movements elsewhere. Spanish fascists received military assistance from the fascist regimes in Germany and Italy. By 1939, on the eve of World War II, the number of democracies had fallen back to no more than a dozen. All the democratic gains of the previous forty years had been wiped out.
The period after World War I showed not only that democratic gains could be reversed but that democracy did not always have to win the competition of ideas. It wasn’t just that democracy was overthrown. As Hobson observed, the very idea of democracy was “discredited.”16 Its aura of inevitability vanished. Great numbers of people did not believe democracy was a better form of government.
The fascist governments looked stronger, more energetic and efficient, and more capable of providing reassurance in troubled times. They also appealed effectively to nationalist sentiments. The many weaknesses of Germany’s Weimar democracy and of the fragile and short-lived democracies of Italy and Spain made their people susceptible to the appeals of Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco, just as the weaknesses of Russian democracy in the 1990s made a more authoritarian government under Vladimir Putin attractive to many Russians—at least for a while. It turns out that human beings yearn not only for freedom, autonomy, individuality, and recognition. Especially in times of difficulty, they also yearn for security, order, and a sense of belonging to something larger than themselves, something that submerges autonomy and individuality—which autocracies often provide better than democracies. People also tend to follow winners. In the 1920s and 1930s the democratic capitalist countries looked weak compared with the apparently vigorous fascist regimes and with Stalin’s Soviet Union.
It took another war and another victory by Allied democracies (and the Soviet Union) over the fascist governments to reverse the trend again. The United States imposed democracy through force and prolonged occupations in West Germany, Italy, Japan, Austria, and South Korea. With the victory of the democracies, and the discrediting of fascism, many other countries followed suit. Greece and Turkey both moved in a democratic direction, as did Brazil, Argentina, Peru, Ecuador, Venezuela, and Colombia. Some of the new nations born as Europe shed its colonies also experimented with democratic government, the most prominent example being India. By 1950 the number of democracies had grown to between twenty and thirty, representing close to 40 percent of the world’s population.
Was this the victory of an idea or the victory of arms, the product of an inevitable human evolution or, as Huntington later observed, of “historically discrete events”?17 The evidence suggests the latter, for it turned out that even the great wave of democracy following World War II was not irreversible. Another “reverse wave” hit from the late 1950s through the early 1970s. Peru, Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Uruguay, Ecuador, South Korea, the Philippines, Taiwan, Pakistan, Indonesia, and Greece all fell back under authoritarian rule. In Africa, Nigeria was the most prominent of the newly decolonized nations where democracy failed. By 1975, over three dozen governments around the world had been installed by military coup.18
This reverse wave occurred, moreover, at a time of significant growth in global GDP. The greatest surge in the global economy occurred between 1950 and 1975, and it slowed appreciably thereafter. So while more countries were moving into the phase of economic development that political scientists consider most favorable to democracy, the number of demo
cracies in the world actually declined. Few spoke of democracy’s inevitability in the 1970s or even in the early 1980s. As late as 1984, Huntington himself believed “the limits of democratic development in the world” had been reached. He noted the “unreceptivity to democracy of several major cultural traditions” as well as “the substantial power of antidemocratic governments (particularly the Soviet Union)” as contributing to democracy’s dim future.19
But then, unexpectedly, came the “third wave.” From the late 1970s through the early 1990s the number of democracies in the world rose to an astonishing 120, representing well over half the world’s population. And it is possible that in the Arab Spring we are seeing a continuation of this third wave, or perhaps even a fourth. The explosion of democracy is now about to enter a fifth straight decade, the longest and broadest such expansion in history. Although there has been backsliding in some parts of Latin America and the former Soviet Union, we have yet to witness a reverse wave.
What explains the prolonged success of democratization over the last quarter of the twentieth century? It cannot only be the steady rise of the global economy and the general yearning for freedom, autonomy, and recognition. These were critical ingredients, but they were not sufficient. Presumably, human beings always have an innate yearning for autonomy and recognition, when these are not outweighed by other concerns and innate yearnings. And the economic growth between 1950 and 1973 was even greater than in the years that followed. Yet neither human yearnings nor economic growth prevented a reversal of the democratic trend in the 1960s and early 1970s. Until the third wave, many nations around the world careened back and forth between democracy and authoritarianism, in a cyclical and almost predictable manner. What has been most notable about the third wave is that this cyclical alternation between democracy and autocracy has been interrupted. Nations have moved into a democratic phase and stayed there. But why?
