The World America Made

by Robert Kagan

  11. See John Lewis Gaddis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (Oxford, 1998), p. 49.

  12. Gaddis, Long Peace, pp. 70, 63.

  13. Gaddis, We Now Know, p. 43.

  14. Quoted in Samuel P. Huntington, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century (Norman, Okla., 1993), p. 17.

  15. Quoted in John Keane, The Life and Death of Democracy (New York, 2009), p. 573.

  16. Ibid.

  17. Huntington, Third Wave, p. 40.

  18. Ibid., p. 21.

  19. Samuel P. Huntington, “Will More Countries Become Democratic?,” Political Science Quarterly 99 (Summer 1984); quoted in Larry Diamond, The Spirit of Democracy (New York, 2009), p. 10.

  20. Huntington, Third Wave, p. 47.

  21. Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (Cambridge, U.K., 2009), p. 196.

  22. Diamond, Spirit of Democracy, p. 5.

  23. Huntington, Third Wave, p. 98.

  24. Diamond, Spirit of Democracy, p. 13.

  25. Mike Rapport, 1848: Year of Revolution (New York, 2009), p. 409.

  26. A. J. P. Taylor, The Course of German History (1945; London, 2001), p. 71.

  27. Rapport, 1848, pp. 401, 402.

  28. As Huntington paraphrased the findings of Jonathan Sunshine: “External influences in Europe before 1830 were fundamentally antidemocratic and hence held up democratization. Between 1830 and 1930 … the external environment was neutral … hence democratization proceeded in different countries more or less at the pace set by economic and social development.” Huntington, Third Wave, p. 86.

  29. As Huntington observed, “The absence of the United States from the process would have meant fewer and later transitions to democracy.” Ibid., p. 98.

  30. Robert Gilpin, U.S. Power and the Multinational Corporation: The Political Economy of Foreign Direct Investment (New York, 1975), p. 85.

  31. Prior to the mid-nineteenth century, Britain, like other colonial powers, had preferred a mercantilist system of colonization and closed markets. The United States, from the late eighteenth to the early nineteenth century, was protectionist in an effort to nurture undeveloped industries.

  32. Robert Gilpin, War and Change in World Politics (Cambridge, U.K., 1983), p. 139.

  33. John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society (1958; New York, 1998), p. 1.

  34. Angus Maddison, The World Economy, vol. 1, A Millennial Perspective, and vol. 2, Historical Statistics (Paris, 2007), 1:262 (available online at http://www.keepeek.com/Digital-Asset-Management/oecd/development/the-world-economy_9789264022621-en; accessed December 2, 2011). The figures exclude Japan.

  35. Ian Bremmer, The End of the Free Market: Who Wins the War Between States and Corporations? (New York, 2010), p. 19.

  36. Paul Collier, The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can Be Done About It (Oxford, 2007), pp. 3–8.

  37. Gilpin, U.S. Power, pp. 85, 84.

  38. John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (New York, 1920), pp. 10, 12.

  39. Steven Pinker, “Why Is There Peace?,” Greater Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life, April 1, 2009; http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/why_is_there_peace/. He cites the work on this subject of James Payne, Robert Wright, and Peter Singer.

  40. Robert Jervis, “Theories of War in an Era of Leading-Power Peace,” American Political Science Review 96, no. 1 (March 2002).

  41. Robert Osgood, Ideals and Self-Interest in America’s Foreign Relations: The Great Transformation of the Twentieth Century (1953; Chicago, 1964), pp. 92–94.

  42. Norman Angell, The Great Illusion: A Study of the Relation of Military Power in Nations to Their Economic and Social Advantage (New York and London, 1910).

  43. Randolph S. Churchill, Winston Churchill: Young Statesman, 1901–1914 (Boston, 1967), pp. 101, 494.

  44. Theodore Roosevelt, second annual message to Congress, December 2, 1902, quoted in Strobe Talbott, The Great Experiment: The Story of Ancient Empires, Modern States, and the Quest for a Global Nation (New York, 2008), p. 138; Theodore Roosevelt, first annual message to Congress, December 3, 1901, quoted in James R. Holmes, Theodore Roosevelt and World Order: Police Power in International Relations (Dulles, Va., 2006), p. 69.

  45. According to Ivan Bloch, the “future of war” was “not fighting, but famine, not the slaying of men but the bankruptcy of nations.” Donald Kagan, On the Origins of War and the Preservation of Peace (New York, 1996), p. 3.

  46. Martin Gilbert, The First World War: A Complete History (New York, 2004), p. 12.

  47. The war between Russia and Japan in 1904–5 somehow didn’t count, since most people at the time could not conceive of a non-European power as a “great power.”

  48. Some would argue that the “security dilemma” held between the United States and the Soviet Union throughout much of the Cold War and gave birth to the arms race. Indeed, the concept was to some degree created to describe that situation. Yet there is reason to doubt that the dynamic of a mutual search for security producing mutual insecurity was ever really at work. As Defense Secretary Harold Brown famously noted, Soviet policy did not seem to vary in response to American actions—“When we build, they build. When we stop, they build”—but followed a different strategic logic.

  49. Yan Xuetong, Meiguo Baquan yu Zhongguo Anquan [American hegemony and Chinese security] (Tianjin, 2000), p. 23.

  50. Yan Xuetong, “How China Can Defeat America,” New York Times, November 20, 2011.

  51. This view has been best articulated by G. John Ikenberry in numerous books and essays, including, most recently, Liberal Leviathan.

  52. Robert W. Tucker, “Alone or with Others: The Temptations of Post–Cold War Power,” Foreign Affairs, November/December 1999.

  53. For the best discussion of this geopolitical reality, see William Wohlforth, “The Stability of a Unipolar World,” International Security 24 (Summer 1999).

  54. Lundestad, United States and Western Europe, p. 160.

  55. Yong Deng and Fei-Ling Wang, eds., China Rising: Power and Motivation in Chinese Foreign Policy (Lanham, Md., 2004), p. 10.

  56. Andrew Nathan and Bruce Gilley, China’s New Rulers (New York, 2003), p. 206.

  57. Fei-Ling Wang, “Beijing’s Incentive Structure: The Pursuit of Preservation, Prosperity, and Power,” in Deng and Wang, China Rising, p. 22.

  58. Robert J. Donovan, Tumultuous Years: The Presidency of Harry S Truman, 1949–1953 (Columbia, Mo., 1996), p. 100.

  59. Ibid., pp. 52, 51.

  60. Diamond, Spirit of Democracy, p. 113.

  61. “Never in history … has there been a globally dominant or rising economic power whose standard of living has been substantially lower than that of the status quo power and lower than that of many other countries.” Arvind Subramanian, Eclipse: Living in the Shadow of China’s Economic Dominance (Washington, D.C., 2011), p. 153.

  62. Ibid., p. 186.

  63. Bremmer, End of the Free Market, p. 150.

  64. Ibid., p. 4.

  65. Ibid., p. 61.

  66. Subramanian, Eclipse, p. 125.

  67. Bremmer, End of the Free Market, p. 5.

  68. Robert W. Tucker, Woodrow Wilson and the Great War: Reconsidering America’s Neutrality, 1914–1917 (Charlottesville, Va., 2007), p. 53.

  69. Richard N. Haass, “The Age of Nonpolarity: What Will Follow U.S. Dominance,” Foreign Affairs, May/June 2008.

  70. Mary Fulbrook, History of Germany, 1918–2000: The Divided Nation (1991; Malden, Mass., 2002), p. 4.

  71. This is a key insight of Geoffrey Blainey’s in his study of the causes of war, in which he observes that “a clear preponderance of power tended to promote peace.” War is “a dispute about the measurements of power.” Geoffrey Blainey, The Causes of War (New York, 1988), pp. 113–14.

  72. G. John Ikenberry, “Liberal International Theory in the Wake of 9/11 and American Unipolarity,” paper prepared for the seminar “I
R Theory, Unipolarity, and September 11th—Five Years On,” Norsk Utenrikspolitisk Institutt, Oslo, Norway, February 3–4, 2006.

  73. Huntington, Third Wave, p. 29.

  74. George F. Kennan, American Diplomacy (1951; Chicago, 1985), p. 95.

  75. President George H. W. Bush, address to Congress, March 6, 1991.

  76. Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932; New York, 1960), p. 110.

  77. Holmes, Roosevelt and World Order, pp. 129–30.

  78. Derek Chollet and James Goldgeier, America Between the Wars (New York, 2008), p. 318.

  79. Arch Puddington, “Freedom in the World 2010: Erosion of Freedom Intensifies,” Freedom House online, http://www.freedomhouse.org/template.cfm?page=130&year=2010.

  80. “In the 1990s, the EU enjoyed up to 72% support on human rights issues in the UN General Assembly. In the last two Assembly sessions, the comparable percentages have been 48 and 55%. This decline is overshadowed by a leap in support for Chinese positions in the same votes from under 50% in the later 1990s to 74% in 2007–8. Russia has enjoyed a comparable leap in support.” Richard Gowan and Franziska Brantner, “A Global Force for Human Rights? An Audit of European Power at the UN,” European Council on Foreign Relations paper, September 2008.

  81. Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery (Hampshire, U.K., 1983), pp. 208–9.

  82. Paul Kennedy, “The Eagle Has Landed,” Financial Times, February 2, 2002.

  83. G. John Ikenberry, ed., America Unrivaled: The Future of the Balance of Power (Ithaca, N.Y., 2002), p. 1.

  84. Quoted in Jonathan Marcus, “America: An Empire to Rival Rome?,” BBC News, January 26, 2004.

  85. The U.S. share of global GDP was 28 percent in 1969; 27 percent in 1979; 27 percent in 1989; 28 percent in 1999; 27 percent in 2009. Europe’s share has declined from 35 percent in 1969 to 26 percent in 2009. Asia’s has gone from 13 percent in 1969 to 25 percent in 2009. But Japan’s share has gone from about 18 percent in 1994 to about 9 percent. USDA Economic Research Service, Real Historical Gross Domestic Product (GDP) Shares and Growth Rates of GDP Shares for Baseline Countries/Regions (in Percent), 1969–2010 (updated December 22, 2010); GDP table in the ERS International Macroeconomic Data Set, http://www.ers.usda.gov/Data/Macroeconomics/.

  86. Yan, “How China Can Defeat America.”

  87. This figure does not include the deployment in Iraq, which is ending, or the combat forces in Afghanistan, which are likely to diminish steadily over the next couple of years.

  88. USDA Economic Research Service, Real Historical Gross Domestic Product (GDP) Shares and Growth Rates of GDP Shares for Baseline Countries/Regions (in Percent), 1969–2010; GDP table in the ERS International Macroeconomic Data Set, http://www.ers.usda.gov/Data/Macroeconomics/.

  89. Stephen Walt, “The End of the American Era,” National Interest, November–December 2011.

  90. Donovan, Tumultuous Years, p. 83.

  91. Ibid., p. 141.

  92. NSC 68: United States Objectives and Programs for National Security (April 14, 1950), A Report to the President Pursuant to The President’s Directive of January 31, 1950; Donovan, Tumultuous Years, p. 160.

  93. Douglas MacArthur, keynote address, Republican National Convention, July 7, 1952.

  94. Donovan, Tumultuous Years, p. 59; Herbert Parmet, Eisenhower and the American Crusades (New York, 1972), p. 361.

  95. Parmet, Eisenhower, p. 537.

  96. Stephen E. Ambrose, Eisenhower: Soldier and President (New York, 1991), p. 484.

  97. Westad, Global Cold War, p. 184.

  98. Joseph S. Nye, The Paradox of American Power: Why the World’s Only Superpower Can’t Go It Alone (New York, 2003), p. 10.

  99. Westad, Global Cold War, p. 135.

  100. Ibid., p. 122.

  101. Ibid., p. 149.

  102. Ibid., p. 152.

  103. Ibid.

  104. Kennedy observed that people in Africa who “want a change” were “impressed by the example of the Soviet Union and the Chinese” and believed that the “Communist system holds the secrets of organizing the resources of the state in order to bring them a better life.” Ibid., pp. 134–35.

  105. Dulles worried that the Soviet Union’s Asian neighbors had seen that nation “within a generation develop itself into a major industrial power.” Peter W. Rodman, More Precious Than Peace: The Cold War and the Struggle for the Third World (New York, 1994), p. 69.

  106. Robert J. McMahon, “Introduction: The Challenge of the Third World,” in Empire and Revolution: The United States and the Third World Since 1945, ed. Peter L. Hahn and Mary Ann Heiss (Columbus, Ohio, 2001), p. 7.

  107. Westad, Global Cold War, p. 93.

  108. Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman, “Decolonization, the Cold War, and the Foreign Policy of the Peace Corps,” in Hahn and Heiss, Empire and Revolution, p. 136.

  109. As Rodman observed, Third World leaders were playing both sides off against each other, seeking to get the most for themselves and their nations. They were “not judging a popularity contest or making any kind of moral judgment as to the virtue of the two superpowers.” Rodman, More Precious Than Peace, p. 73.

  110. Westad, Global Cold War, p. 125.

  111. Ibid., p. 136.

  112. Ibid., p. 196.

  113. Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power (1991; New York, 2008), pp. 594, 616.

  114. Ibid., p. 635.

  115. Ibid., p. 662.

  116. Ibid., pp. 698, 701.

  117. Walter Isaacson, Kissinger: A Biography (New York, 1992), pp. 697, 696.

  118. James Fallows, “Containing Japan,” Atlantic Monthly, May 1989, p. 40.

  119. Michael Crichton, Rising Sun (New York, 1992), p. 349.

  120. Chalmers Johnson, Japan: Who Governs? The Rise of the Developmental State (New York, 1995), p. 9.

  121. Aaron David Miller, The Much Too Promised Land (New York, 2008), pp. 310–14.

  122. Samuel P. Huntington, “The Lonely Superpower,” Foreign Affairs, March/April 1999.

  123. Samuel P. Huntington, “Why International Primacy Matters,” International Security 17, no. 4 (Spring 1993).

  124. Walter Lippmann, The Cold War: A Study in U.S. Foreign Policy Since 1945 (New York, 1947), p. 47.

  125. Alice Rivlin, statement at a panel discussion on the U.S. defense budget, Brookings Institution, December 22, 2010. To be clear, she has called for the defense budget to be cut because she feels all parts of the government need to pay their fair share in the search for debt reduction.

  126. I had to be reminded of this point by Gary Schmitt, a presidential scholar and authority on the Founders and the workings of the U.S. government. He is based at the American Enterprise Institute.

  127. Kennedy, “Eagle Has Landed.”

  A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ROBERT KAGAN is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a columnist for The Washington Post. He is also the author of The Return of History and the End of Dreams, Dangerous Nation, Of Paradise and Power, and A Twilight Struggle. Kagan served in the U.S. State Department from 1984 to 1988. He lives in Virginia with his wife and two children.