The World America Made

by Robert Kagan

  In a multipolar world, which nation or group of nations would be able to use its power alone or collectively to uphold the liberal order against those who would upset it? This is a critical question, because any order rests ultimately not on rules alone but on the power to enforce the rules. Today there is a unique situation in which the world’s most powerful nation enjoys a remarkably high degree of international legitimacy when it uses force. In previous eras of multipolarity, when all nations sought security from an uneasy balance of power and operated within roughly defined spheres of influence, the use of force by any one nation outside its sphere or in areas of overlapping spheres threatened to destabilize the equilibrium. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, for example, the great powers could not bring order to the tumultuous Balkan region because the use of force by any one of the great powers threatened the interests of the others and the overall equilibrium. There was no international power to impose order. This was the dilemma Wilson attempted to solve with the League of Nations. In fact, it was solved only by American hegemony. In the late twentieth century, the United States was able to lead two interventions in the Balkans in the interest of preserving the liberal order without provoking great-power conflict. While Russians felt a bit humiliated by American dominance in a Slavic and traditionally Russian area of concern, there was never any question of war. Were the current disparity of power between the United States and other great powers to diminish, it might become impossible to intervene in similar situations without risking great-power confrontation. Which power or powers in a post-American world would be able to act with the approval of the others? The lack of legitimated military force would make it increasingly difficult to defend core principles of the liberal order against the inevitable challenges.

  The lesson of the twentieth century, perhaps forgotten in the twenty-first, is that if one wants a more liberal order, there may be no substitute for powerful liberal nations to build and defend it. International order is not an evolution; it is an imposition. It is the domination of one vision over others—in this case, the domination of liberal principles of economics, domestic politics, and international relations over other, nonliberal principles. It will last only as long as those who imposed it retain the capacity to defend it. This is an uncomfortable reality for liberal internationalists. We prefer to believe that a liberal international order survives because it is right and just—and not only for us but for everyone. We prefer to imagine that the acceptance of a liberal order is voluntary or, better still, the product of natural forces, not the wielding of power. That is why the “End of History” was such an attractive thesis to many, and remains so even after it has been discredited by events. The theory of inevitable evolution means there is no requirement to impose liberal order. It will merely happen. This resolves the moral ambiguity—and the practical and financial challenges—of imposing it and defending its imposition.

  There is an assumption, too, embedded in our Enlightenment worldview, that there is a necessary link between liberal order and the end of nationalism, and even of the nation itself. The rise of supranational institutions and a cosmopolitan sensibility represent progress toward a more perfect liberal order. But what if this is wrong? What if an order characterized by peace, democracy, and prosperity depends on particular nations to uphold it? The internationalist Theodore Roosevelt argued as much in 1918, in response to the supranationalist visions of his day. “Let us refuse to abolish nationalism,” he said. “On the contrary, let us base a wise and practical internationalism on a sound and intense nationalism.”77 True liberal progress might be tied, paradoxically, to this atavistic concept of the nation, willing to use its power, in conjunction with other nations, to uphold an order that can only approximate but never achieve the liberal international ideal. It is when we try actually to achieve the ideal, to move beyond the nation to a post-national vision of liberal internationalism, that the whole project fails.

  In this respect, the European Union may be a warning. No group of nations has ever come closer to achieving the liberal internationalist ideal, the Kantian perpetual peace. But the price has been a Europe increasingly disarming itself while the other great powers refuse to follow on its journey. Would this postmodern Europe even survive if it truly had to fend for itself in a world that did not play by its rules?

  The irony is that the success of the American world order has made it possible for so many people to believe that it can be transcended, that American power may no longer be necessary to sustain it. The old dream has come to seem more real over the past two decades because the success of American power has made it seem more real. Instead of realizing that great-power conflict and competition have been suppressed, people imagine that the great powers themselves are fundamentally changing their character, that institutions, laws, and norms are taking hold. It is as if New Yorkers strolling through a safe Central Park decided that police were no longer going to be needed. The park is safe because the human race has evolved.

  President Bill Clinton left office believing that the key task for America was to “create the world we would like to live in when we are no longer the world’s only superpower,” to prepare for “a time when we would have to share the stage.”78 It is an eminently sensible-sounding proposal. But whether it can be done is another question. For when it comes to the relations among states, and particularly in matters of power and war and peace, rules and institutions rarely survive the decline of the power or powers that erected them. Those rules and institutions are like scaffolding around a building: they don’t hold the building up; the building holds them up. When American power declines, the institutions and norms American power supports will decline, too. Or, more likely, if history is a guide, they may collapse altogether as we transition into another kind of world order, or into disorder. We may discover then that the United States was essential to keeping the present world order together and that the alternative to American power was not peace and harmony but chaos and catastrophe—which is what existed before the American world order came into being.

  WE CAN ALREADY SEE the signs of erosion. The number of electoral democracies peaked at 123 in 2005. Since then it has dropped slightly every year, and as of 2011 there were 115. Freedom House also reports a hollowing out of democracy, with “growing pressures on freedom of expression, including press freedom, as well as on civic activists engaged in promoting political reform and respect for human rights, including the rights of workers to organize.”79

  Liberal institutions and norms have also weakened somewhat in recent years. The European Union, aside from its economic difficulties and diminishing military power, has less moral sway in the international system than it did a decade ago. According to scholars at the European Council on Foreign Relations, for instance, the EU is suffering “a slow-motion crisis” at the United Nations, where its ability to “promote an international rule of law based on human rights and justice” is steadily declining. They attribute this chiefly to the growing influence of China, which has established at the UN “an increasingly solid coalition of general assembly votes, often mobilized in opposition to EU values such as the defense of human rights.”80

  Free-market capitalism, meanwhile, is going through one of its periodic bouts of discrediting itself. The sub-prime mortgage crisis and the ensuing recession have again raised doubts about the viability and desirability of the system, similar to what occurred in the 1930s and 1970s. Other models, like China’s state-guided capitalism, are enjoying greater success, partly because its government’s enormous surpluses have helped cushion the effects of the international downturn.

  Finally, great powers are increasingly behaving in traditional great-power fashion, asserting and attempting to carve out spheres of influence in accordance with their growing power: Putin’s call for a “Eurasian Union” of former Soviet states; China’s claims in the South China and East China Seas; India’s claims in the Indian Ocean region. They are small hints of what might be yet to
come.

  SO IS THE UNITED STATES IN DECLINE?

  ALTHOUGH WE CAN DIMLY see the outlines of what the next world order might look like, it is still from the safe vantage point of a world order that remains shaped by the United States. The question is, how long will it last? Perhaps the mere fact that we can see the distant shore is enough to raise doubts. Is the United States in decline? And if so, is its decline inevitable, or is it still within the power of the United States, and other nations, to fend it off?

  How to evaluate whether the United States is actually in a state of steady decline or whether it is going through a difficult period from which it will recover? Much of the commentary on American decline these days rests on rather loose analysis, on impressions that the United States has lost its way, that it has abandoned the virtues that made it successful in the past, that it lacks the will to address the problems it faces. Americans look at other nations whose economies are, for the moment, in better shape than their own, and which seem to have the dynamism that America once had, and they lament, as in the title of Thomas Friedman’s latest book, “That used to be us.”

  It doesn’t much help to point out that Americans have experienced this unease before, that many previous generations have also felt this sense of lost vigor and lost virtue. Even in 1788, Patrick Henry lamented the nation’s fall from past glory, “when the American spirit was in its youth.”

  The perception of decline today is certainly understandable, given the dismal economic situation since 2008 and the nation’s large fiscal deficits, which, combined with the continuing growth of the Chinese, Indian, Brazilian, Turkish, and other economies, seem to portend a significant and irreversible shift in global economic power. Some of the pessimism is also due to the belief that the United States has lost favor, and therefore influence, in much of the world, because of its various responses to the September 11 attacks. The detainment facilities at Guantánamo, the use of torture against suspected terrorists, and the widely condemned 2003 invasion of Iraq have all tarnished the American “brand” and put a dent in America’s “soft power”—its ability to attract others to its point of view. There have been the difficult wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which many argue proved the limits of military power, stretched the United States beyond its capacities, and weakened the nation at its core. Some compare the United States to the British Empire at the end of the nineteenth century, with the Iraq and Afghanistan wars serving as the equivalent of Britain’s difficult and demoralizing Boer War.

  With this broad perception of decline as the backdrop, every failure of the United States to get its way in the world tends to reinforce the impression. Arabs and Israelis refuse to make peace, despite American entreaties. Iran and North Korea defy American demands that they cease their nuclear weapons programs. China refuses to let its currency rise. Ferment in the Arab world spins out of America’s control. Every day, it seems, brings more evidence that the time has passed when the United States could lead the world and get others to do its bidding.

  Powerful as this sense of decline may be, however, it deserves a more rigorous examination. Measuring changes in a nation’s relative power is a tricky business, but there are some basic indicators: the size and influence of its economy relative to that of other powers; the degree of military power compared with potential adversaries’; the degree of political influence it wields in the international system—all of which make up what the Chinese call “comprehensive national power.” And there is the matter of time. Judgments made based on only a few years’ evidence are problematic. A great power’s decline is the product of fundamental changes in the international distribution of various forms of power that usually occur over longer stretches of time. Great powers rarely decline suddenly. A war may bring them down, but even that is usually a symptom, and a culmination, of a longer process.

  The decline of the British Empire, for instance, occurred over several decades. In 1870 the British share of global manufacturing was over 30 percent. In 1900 it was 20 percent. By 1910 it was under 15 percent—well below the rising United States, which, over the same period, had climbed from more than 20 percent to more than 25 percent; but also less than Germany, which had lagged far behind Britain throughout the nineteenth century yet had caught and surpassed it in the first decade of the twentieth century. Over the course of that period, the British navy went from unchallenged master of the seas to sharing control of the oceans with other, rising naval powers. In 1883 Britain possessed more battleships than all the other powers combined. By 1897 its dominance had been eclipsed. British officials considered their navy “completely outclassed” in the Western Hemisphere by the United States, in East Asia by Japan, and even close to home by the combined navies of Russia and France, and that was before the threatening growth of the German navy.81 These were clear-cut, measurable, steady declines in two of the most important measures of power over the course of a half century.

  Some of the arguments for America’s relative decline these days would be more potent if they had not appeared only in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. Just as one swallow does not make a spring, one recession, or even a severe economic crisis, need not mean the beginning of the end of a great power. The United States suffered deep and prolonged economic crises in the 1890s, the 1930s, and the 1970s. In each case, it rebounded in the following decade and actually ended up in a stronger position relative to other powers than before the crisis. The first decade of the twentieth century, the 1940s, and the 1980s were all high points of American global power and influence.

  Less than a decade ago most observers spoke not of America’s decline but of its enduring primacy. In 2002 the historian Paul Kennedy, who in the late 1980s had written a much-discussed book on “the rise and fall of the great powers,” America included, declared that never in history had there been such a great “disparity of power” as between the United States and the rest of the world.82 John Ikenberry agreed that “no other great power” had held “such formidable advantages in military, economic, technological, cultural, or political capabilities … The preeminence of American power” was “unprecedented.”83 In 2004, Fareed Zakaria described the United States as enjoying a “comprehensive uni-polarity” unlike anything seen since Rome.84 But a mere four years later, Zakaria was writing about the “post-American world,” and Kennedy, again, about the inevitability of American decline. Did the fundamentals of America’s relative power shift so dramatically in just a few short years?

  The answer is no. Let’s start with the basic indicators. In economic terms, and even despite the current years of recession and slow growth, America’s position in the world has not changed. Its share of the world’s GDP has held remarkably steady, not only over the past decade, but over the past four decades. In 1969 the United States produced roughly a quarter of the world’s economic output. Today it still produces roughly a quarter, and it remains not only the largest but also the richest economy in the world. People are rightly mesmerized by the rise of China, India, and other Asian nations whose share of the global economy has been climbing steadily, but this has so far come almost entirely at the expense of Europe and Japan, which have had a declining share of the global economy.85 Optimists about China’s development predict that it will overtake the United States as the largest economy in the world sometime in the next two decades. This could mean that the United States will face an increasing challenge to its economic position in the future. The sheer size of an economy, however, is not by itself a good measure of overall power within the international system. If it were, then early-nineteenth-century China, with what was then the world’s largest economy, would have been the predominant power instead of the prostrate victim of smaller European nations. Even if China does reach this pinnacle again—and Chinese leaders face significant obstacles to sustaining the country’s growth indefinitely—it will still remain far behind both the United States and Europe in terms of per capita GDP.

  Military capacity matters, too, as early-nineteen
th-century China learned and Chinese leaders know today. As Yan Xuetong recently noted, “Military strength underpins hegemony.”86 Here the United States remains unmatched. It is far and away the most powerful nation the world has ever known, and there has been no decline in America’s relative military capacity—at least not yet. Americans currently spend roughly $600 billion a year on defense, more than the rest of the other great powers combined.87 They do so, moreover, while consuming around 4 percent of GDP annually, a higher percentage than the other great powers but in historical terms lower than the 10 percent of GDP that the United States spent on defense in the mid-1950s or the 7 percent it spent in the late 1980s. The superior expenditures underestimate America’s actual superiority in military capability. American land and air forces are equipped with the most advanced weaponry, are the most experienced in actual combat, and would defeat any competitor in a head-to-head battle. American naval power remains predominant in every region of the world.

  By these military and economic measures, at least, the United States today is not remotely like Britain circa 1900, when that empire’s relative decline began to become apparent. It is more like Britain circa 1870, when the empire was at the height of its power. It is possible to imagine a time when this might no longer be the case, but that moment has not yet arrived.

  But what about the “rise of the rest”—the increasing economic clout of nations like China, India, Brazil, and Turkey? Doesn’t that cut into American power and influence? The answer is, it depends. The fact that other nations in the world are enjoying periods of high growth does not mean that America’s position as the predominant power is declining, or even that “the rest” are catching up in terms of overall power and influence. Brazil’s share of global GDP was a little over 2 percent in 1990 and remains a little over 2 percent today. Turkey’s share was under 1 percent in 1990 and is still under 1 percent today.88 People, especially businesspeople, are naturally excited about these emerging markets, but just because a nation is an attractive investment opportunity does not mean it is also a rising great power. Wealth matters in international politics, but there is no simple correlation between economic growth and international influence. It is not clear that a richer India today, for instance, wields greater influence on the global stage than a poorer India did in the 1950s and 1960s under Nehru, when it was a leader of the Non-Aligned Movement, or that Turkey, for all the independence and flash of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, really wields more influence than it did a decade ago.