The World America Made

by Robert Kagan

  International relations theorists look back with fondness on the European balance of power that followed the unification of Germany. Perhaps too much fondness. Yes, there was great-power peace for four decades, but the period was characterized by increasing tension and competition, numerous war scares, and massive increases in armaments on both land and sea—all culminating in the most destructive and deadly war mankind had known up to that point. Even when the balance of power was maintained, it was not only by amicable diplomacy but also by the ever-present prospect of military confrontation. As the political scientist Robert W. Tucker has observed, “Such stability and moderation as the balance brought rested ultimately on the threat or use of force. War remained the essential means for maintaining the balance of power.”68

  People imagine that American predominance will be replaced by some kind of multipolar harmony, but there is little reason to believe that a return to multipolarity in the twenty-first century would bring greater peace and stability than it did in the past. The great powers today act in a restrained fashion not because they are inherently restrained but because their ambitions are checked by a still-dominant United States. Some imagine we have entered a “nonpolar” era because, while they believe the United States is declining, they don’t see other powers rising to fill regional vacuums.69 But, in fact, other poles have not emerged, because the American world order is still intact. Were the United States genuinely to decline, great powers like China, Russia, India, and Brazil would quickly become more dominant in their respective regions, and the world would return to something like the multipolar system of nineteenth-century Europe.

  The problem in such a world is less likely to come from the other democracies—though even democracies have ambitions and seek their own spheres of influence. It is more likely to come from the autocratic great powers. The democracies can be satisfied with the liberal world order the United States created, duly adjusted to suit their own growing influence. But can the autocratic powers be satisfied with a world that favors democracy and puts constant pressure on autocratic regimes?

  One often hears today that the United States need not worry about China and Russia. China is a cautious actor on the world scene and is not interested in territorial expansion or conflict with its neighbors. Experts on today’s Russia argue that, notwithstanding occasional neo-imperial rhetoric, the rulers in Moscow have no desire to restore the Russian Empire, to take charge of the Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, or to reunite old Soviet republics like Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, and Belarus. But is this because they are innately uninterested in such goals, or is it because they are constrained by the global power equation from realizing these ambitions, and so temper them? There is no way to know for sure, but history suggests that when we look at the behavior of nations and try to understand their motives and ambitions, we need to be aware that their calculations are affected by what they believe they can achieve and what they believe is off-limits.

  One thing we do know for sure: a China unchecked by American power would be a different China from one that must worry about American power. If Beijing today does not behave more aggressively toward Japan, or India, or the Southeast Asian nations with which it has disputes, this is not because China is inherently passive and cautious. There have been times in its history when China has taken military action, even in situations where the odds did not favor it—for instance, against American forces in Korea in 1950. Rather, it is because those powers are backed up by the power of the United States. Were American power removed from the equation, the Chinese would make a different calculation. So would those other nations. Today they are content to resist China’s more ambitious designs, in the South China Sea and elsewhere, because they know the United States is there to support them. China, not surprisingly, is increasing its naval power in an effort to reduce this American role. American officials claim to be puzzled by China’s naval buildup. They ask for greater “transparency” about China’s intentions. They might as well ask why a tiger grows teeth. This is the normal behavior of rising great powers. It only seems unusual because the American world order has until now been suppressing these natural great-power tendencies.

  The same is true of Russia and its neighbors. The continued defiance of Moscow in the Baltics, the Caucasus, and eastern Europe owes a great deal to the fact that these nations have a powerful ally to back them up. In the absence of American power, Russia would be far more tempted to compel its neighbors to accommodate Moscow’s wishes, and they would be far more tempted to acquiesce. If Putin, who once called the collapse of the Soviet Union the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the twentieth century, believed he could safely restore it, would he resist the temptation? He is already using every tool short of military force—energy, trade, support for politicians and parties—to bring the former Soviet states as much under Moscow’s influence as possible. Nor, in the one case where he did use force, against Georgia in 2008, is it likely he would have stopped his forces short of Tbilisi had he not been deterred by the United States and NATO.

  To note this is not to impute evil motives to Chinese or Russian leaders. It is to impute normality. All great powers respond to opportunities and constraints in the international system. This includes the United States. When American power grew at the end of the nineteenth century, its global ambitions grew as well. In the twentieth century, the United States conducted a more active interventionist policy after the Soviet Union collapsed than it had throughout much of the Cold War. After 1989, American military interventions abroad became more frequent and occurred in parts of the world that had previously been off-limits due to the Cold War standoff.

  We have grown so accustomed to life in the American order that we have perhaps forgotten how nations behave as they acquire power. Increasing power changes nations. It changes their ambitions, their sense of themselves, and even their definition of their interests. It also has a way of bringing out qualities of character that may have been submerged or less visible when they were weaker. Take a friendly power, like France. Today it is a benign middling power with a fairly skillful foreign policy. Most of its European neighbors regard it as a bit arrogant and selfish, but that is tolerable because it certainly is not dangerous. But what would France be like as a superpower? Would the character traits that people today find merely annoying or amusing become more problematic? When France was one of the world’s two or three strongest powers, under Louis XIV in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and under Napoléon in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, it twice tried to conquer its way to European supremacy (and twice failed). Maybe a democratic French superpower of tomorrow would pursue a modest, restrained foreign policy, but if so, it would be a historical anomaly. Democratic superpowers can be ambitious, too, as the United States has amply proven. The point is that power changes nations, and sometimes dramatically. Both Germany and Japan were fairly benign as nations of moderate or little power. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, “sleepy Germany” was known as a “land of poets and thinkers.”70 Prior to its modernization during the Meiji period, Japan was a hermit nation that deliberately cut off ties to the outside world and was a threat to no one. Yet both displayed a different set of qualities when they grew strong, unified, and active on the world scene.

  Because shifts in relative power change national ambitions and alter constraints, a return to multipolarity would change the character of every great power’s foreign policy. Those nations whose power rose in relative terms would display expanding ambitions commensurate with their new clout in the international system. They would, as in the past, demand particular spheres of influence, if only as security against the other great powers. Those whose power declined in relative terms, like the United States, would have little choice but to retrench and cede some influence in those areas. Thus China would lay claim to its sphere of influence in Asia, Russia in eastern Europe and the Caucasus. And, as in the past, their claims would over
lap and conflict: India and China claim the same sphere in the Indian Ocean; Russia and Europe have overlapping spheres in the region between the Black Sea and the Baltic. Without the United States to suppress and contain these conflicting ambitions, there would have to be complex adjustments to establish a new balance. Some of these adjustments could be made through diplomacy, as they were sometimes in the past. Other adjustments might be made through war or the threat of war, as also happened in the past. The notion that the world could make a smooth and entirely peaceful transition from the present configuration of power to a new configuration reflecting an entirely different distribution of power is wishful thinking.

  One of the main causes of war throughout history has been a rough parity of power that leaves nations in doubt about who is stronger. Rough parity creates uncertainty about which power might prevail in war, which leads to a complex interaction of probes and posturing between the contending powers that greatly increase the likelihood of a genuine test to discover which is actually the more powerful. Wars tend to break out as a result of large-scale shifts in the power equation, when the upward trajectory of a rising power comes close to intersecting the downward trajectory of a declining power. The great miracle of the Cold War was that the United States and the Soviet Union never decided to test their relative strength, though there were times when they came dangerously close. There is no better recipe for great-power peace than certainty about who holds the upper hand.71 And it is no coincidence that scholars began talking about the impossibility of great-power conflict after the Cold War, when the United States suddenly enjoyed such a vast military superiority over every other potential challenger. Were that superiority to erode, the return of great-power competition would make great-power war more likely again.

  What about the famous “Concert of Europe”? Could there not be a concert of great powers to coordinate policies and preserve the peace in a post-American world? It is true that in the three-decades-long peace that followed the defeat of Napoléon in 1815, the great European powers did successfully manage their affairs and avoid war. What kept the concert working, however, was not the magic of the balance of power. It was a set of shared values, shared principles, and a shared vision on the most important questions of the day—from the shape of the European order to what constituted legitimate authority and the nature of domestic politics and society. In the immediate aftermath of the French Revolution and the destructive Europe-wide war that followed it, all the leaders of the great powers shared a common horror of radicalism and revolution. They joined together not just to keep peace but to keep a conservative peace. They wanted to make the world safe for monarchy and aristocracy. They shared a vision of a particular kind of “Europe” they wished to preserve against the challenge of liberal and revolutionary forces. That consensus soon began to fray, however, as Britain, the most liberal of the powers, increasingly objected to the insistence of its Austrian and Russian partners that all hints of liberalism on the Continent be crushed by military force. The concert effectively collapsed after liberal revolution swept Europe again in the 1840s.

  People sometimes hope that a concert of great powers might be constituted today, but do today’s great powers share, as the Europeans briefly did, a vision of both international order and domestic legitimacy? Not many years ago, the answer might have seemed to be yes. In the 1990s most people believed the world had entered a period of convergence and consensus similar to that of the early nineteenth century, only this time not on behalf of conservatism, aristocracy, and monarchy but in favor of liberalism, free markets, and democracy. The 1990s were the End of History, the triumph, in the words of one scholar, of “the liberal vision of international order,” a world in which “democracy and markets flourished … globalization was enshrined as a progressive historical force, and ideology, nationalism and war were at a low ebb.”72 In the post–Cold War world, all the great powers were embracing liberalism, or so people wanted to believe: Russia under Boris Yeltsin; China in the midst of its economic liberalization. So the idea of an “international community” was reborn, and its task was to address the many “global issues”—disease, poverty, climate change, terrorism, ethnic conflict—on which all nations had common rather than conflicting interests.

  But in the second decade of the twenty-first century, convergence feels like another idealistic illusion. The great powers do not agree on the sources of domestic legitimacy. The United States and its liberal allies naturally favor democracy. Russia and China, just as naturally, want a world that is safe for their autocracy. A new, multipolar order, were one to come into being, would include these two great-power autocracies as major players. If the history of the Concert of Europe is any guide, the lack of agreement on what constitutes legitimate government will be an obstacle to cooperation at best and a source of conflict at worst. Samuel P. Huntington, writing in 1991, speculated that if “the Soviet Union and China become democracies like the other major powers, the probability of major interstate violence will be greatly reduced.” But, on the other hand, “a permanently divided world” was “likely to be a violent world.” In Lincolnesque fashion, he asked, “How long can an increasingly interdependent world survive part-democratic and part-authoritarian?”73

  Those who understand that the present liberal order was built around American power have wrestled with the question of how to preserve it if and when that power fades. John Ikenberry, among others, has argued that the task of the United States in an era of declining influence is to establish international institutions and laws that can take root and sustain the order as America declines, and to persuade rising powers that they have an interest in participating in and maintaining those institutions and those international rules. In this way, the institutions can acquire a life of their own and can constrain even powerful nations that might otherwise be inclined to disrupt the liberal order. These stronger institutions and rules would eventually become substitutes for American power.

  This idea of erecting self-sustaining liberal international institutions has tantalized Americans since the nation first became a great power at the end of the nineteenth century. George Kennan and other “realists” have bemoaned the American propensity to seek succor in international laws and institutions, hoping to “suppress the chaotic and dangerous aspirations of governments” through a “system of legal rules and restraints.”74 But it is understandable that Americans would like a world order that was essentially self-regulating and self-sustaining. It is the answer to the conundrum of power and interest that so bedevils them—how to create a world conducive to American ideals and interests without requiring the costly and morally complex exercise of American power. Theodore Roosevelt thought in terms of an international consortium of great powers, working cooperatively to advance civilization—a dream shattered when those same great powers all but destroyed civilization themselves in 1914. Woodrow Wilson picked up the banner after the war, calling into being a League of Nations (in which his countrymen then refused to take part) that was meant to uphold laws and institutions backed by the collective strength of the liberal powers. The attempt was made again after World War II, with the founding of the United Nations, and again after the Cold War, when President George H. W. Bush spoke hopefully of a coming “New World Order,” in which “the rule of law supplants the rule of the jungle,” “nations recognize the shared responsibility for freedom and justice,” and the United Nations “performs as envisioned by its founders.”75

  Many have seen the transition from American hegemony, or from any great-power arrangement, to a world of international laws and institutions as the final stage of human progress. The subordination of the individual nation-state to the collective will of all nations, the supplanting of nationalism by an international cosmopolitanism, the replication on the international scene of the legal and institutional restraints of American domestic life—these goals remain as enticing to people today as they have to generations past. The only difference is that in the past, Americ
ans sought to erect such a world at a time when U.S. power was rising. Today, such a world is meant to compensate for an American power allegedly in decline.

  Is there reason to believe we are better able to build such a world today, ostensibly in a time of decline, than we were a hundred years ago, or even fifty years ago, at a time of ascendancy? The intervening century gives little reason for optimism. All efforts to hand off the maintenance of order and security to an international body with greater authority than the nations within it, or to rely on nations to abide by international rules, regardless of their power to flout them, have failed. The new authority has proven too weak to take up the task. The nations that had responsibility and power have either ignored it or used it as an excuse for inaction themselves. The rules have generally bound only the weak, while the strong, including the United States, have felt free to ignore them and faced no punishment by the “international community.” The League of Nations famously refused to respond to blatant violations of international law—the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931, the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935. The United States and the Soviet Union both spent most of the Cold War ignoring or seeking ways around the United Nations. As Reinhold Niebuhr observed, “the prestige of the international community” is never great enough and its individual members are never unified enough “to discipline recalcitrant nations.”76 Institutions cannot wield more power than the nations that constitute them, but they have often wielded less.