The End of Power

by Naim, Moises

  Since 1945, many devastating regional conflicts have caused much devastation without expanding into all-out world war. Why this unprecedented extended global peace? A key part of the answer is hegemony. For six decades, countries have had no questions about where they stood in the hierarchy of nations and thus what boundaries they could not cross. In the bipolar system of the Cold War, most of the rest of the world fell more or less firmly into the American or Soviet sphere of influence, and the remaining countries knew better than to challenge this overall frame. And once the Cold War ended, one country, the United States, towered over all the others in military and economic might as well as cultural sway.

  Hegemonic stability theory, developed in the 1970s by MIT professor Charles Kindleberger, underlies, more or less explicitly, much of today’s debate. Its central insight is that a dominant power that has both the unique ability and the interest to ensure world order is the best antidote to costly and dangerous international chaos. If there is no hegemon, the theory holds, the only way to bring peace and stability is through a system of rules—norms, laws, and institutions that every country agrees to abide by in exchange for the benefits of peace and stability. Needless to say, this is a complicated alternative, no matter how worthy, and hegemony tends to deliver the goods more effectively.10

  Writing about the world between the wars, Kindleberger argued that the economic and political turmoil of the time—the collapse of the gold standard, the Great Depression, instability in Europe, and the rise of the fascist threat—showed a failure of hegemony. Great Britain’s willingness and ability to deploy the forces and spend the money to maintain supremacy were in decline. The only credible contender to step into that role, the United States, was locked in an isolationist stance. The absence of a stabilizing hegemon—one with both the ability and the political will to use its power to preserve order—contributed to the spread of the depression and ultimately to World War II.

  Historians using a wide range of measures to estimate national power, from population and economic output to military spending and industrial capacity, have identified moments when the pure hegemony of one country—basically, the gap between it and everyone else—has been the clearest. Britain in the 1860s and the United States right after World War II, from 1945 to 1955, are two cases that “reflect the greatest concentrations of power in the system leader,” according to the scholar William Wohlforth, who has analyzed these data extensively. But both of them pale in comparison with America after the Cold War. “The United States is the first leading state in modern international history with decisive preponderance in all the underlying components of power: economic, military, technical and geopolitical,” Wohlforth wrote in 1999. He argued—in a view echoed by many other analysts—that the emergence of the United States as an overwhelmingly dominant power with no credible competitor across all the different arenas of international rivalry established a unipolar world. This was an entirely new configuration in world history, and one that had the ingredients not just to deliver global peace and stability but also endure over time.11

  THE NEW INGREDIENTS

  The very success of the United States in providing the world with hegemonic stability helped bring to the fore two new dimensions of power in the world system. One was “soft power”—the idea that a state’s power might be expressed and reinforced through the appeal of its culture and ideas. The other was the extraordinary proliferation of organizations, treaties, international laws, and conventions to which more and more countries signed up in the second half of the twentieth century. This growing institutional framework created a system of global cooperation with far more participants, covering far more subjects, than had ever been anticipated.

  Soft power had its rougher antecedents in imperialism, whether of the Roman, British, or French variety—the mission civilisatrice that sought to indoctrinate colonial subjects into the glories of western civilization, through the seduction of lucre and pomp, or the creation of educational, social, and cultural frameworks. The kinder, gentler, and more egalitarian modern version was posited by political scientist Joseph Nye—later a senior official in the Clinton administration—in a 1990 book titled Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power. The concept took hold, and Nye expanded it in a 2004 book called Soft Power. Its subtitle gives away the plot: The Means to Success in World Politics.12

  Soft power as Nye envisions it is a kind of power that is hard to measure but easy to detect: the power of reputation and esteem, the goodwill radiated by well-regarded institutions, a desirable economy to work in or trade with, an attractive culture. This form of power might be less quantifiable than the number of fighter jets, infantry divisions, or billions of barrels of oil reserves, but its value is no less clear. In the 1990s, it was clear that Silicon Valley and Hollywood were adding to America’s soft power by driving global technological innovation and spreading entertainment products laced with American culture. Soft power was not unique to the United States, but in the mid-1990s American dominance in this newly crucial arena of power seemed as thorough as it did in the traditional areas.

  The world also enjoyed the highest degree of international cooperation in history. Starting with the founding of the United Nations in 1945, governments have steadily invested more and more in new tools of cooperation. From 1970 through 1997 alone, the number of international treaties more than tripled.13 The US State Department publishes a listing of treaties currently in force for the United States that is almost five hundred pages long, listing thousands of treaties covering everything from polar bears and road traffic to nuclear fuel.14 Today’s widely agreed-upon norms of behavior for states and apparatus of treaties and organizations could scarcely have been imagined a century ago. They govern everything from treatment of prisoners of war to the management of fishery stocks and how much you pay for an international telephone call. Trade, finance, communications, migration, outer space, nuclear proliferation, endangered species, epidemics, terrorism, crime—all are underpinned by agreements or organizations that limit the options of nations and create a space to compromise and work out differences.

  Scholars call this a regime—a set of rules and forums addressing a particular issue of common concern. And when a new global challenge takes shape—a recent example might be climate change or financial contagion—there is a healthy instinct to gather and attempt to construct a regime to deal with it together, rather than let every country fend for itself. It is a far cry from the predatory and narrowly self-interested politics among nations once held as a given by Machiavelli and Hobbes. Today, in a once unimaginable world of almost two hundred separate sovereign states, there is a greater moral consensus about the proper behavior of nations than humanity has ever known before.

  The combination of hegemony and rules has been good for global stability. The two approaches have functioned together rather than in competition. The United Nations system itself, with its permanent seats and veto powers on the Security Council, was set up to entrench the authority of the winners of World War II, particularly the United States. The United States assumed many classic burdens of hegemony: posting troops in Europe and Asia and acting as global policeman, underwriting the Marshall Plan, contributing the lion’s share of the UN’s budget and that of other international organizations. Its rival, the Soviet Union, used ideology, oil, and weapons to prop up a bloc of satellite states in Eastern Europe and throughout the developing world. Undergirded by the threat of mutually assured nuclear destruction, the standoff between the two left little room for local conflicts to spread. Once the Soviet Union collapsed, the United States was left with all the attributes and burdens of a hegemon. It possessed vast military supremacy; the world’s largest economy and investment and trading ties around the world; a strong and stable political system; a safe and well-defended national territory; and a robust network of diplomats, troops, and spies in every important corner of the world. Meanwhile, the impressive web of global agreements and forums kept disputes from bec
oming violent and channeled rivalries toward discussion and agreement. The theorists of hegemonic stability seemed vindicated: the hard power of guns and money, the soft power of culture and ideas, and the binding ties of institutions suggested that a long and virtuous Pax Americana lay ahead.

  IF NOT HEGEMONY, THEN WHAT?

  A decade later, the picture is more complicated. The body blow of 9/11 shattered America’s illusion of immunity to domestic attack. Intractable conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan showed the limits of its military supremacy. The financial crisis and great recession exposed weaknesses in its economy. Administrations of both of its major parties struggled with polarized domestic politics. Yet, at the same time, no clear rival has emerged. China and India have posted phenomenal growth but are far behind and have severe internal weaknesses. No major alliances or treaties have been signed by powers seeking to exploit America’s vulnerabilities. The classic elements of the balance of power—whereby countries scheme to offset one another’s alliances and limit one another’s zones of influence—remain muted. A few countries are clearly vying for leadership in global talks on everything from trade rules to climate change, but this is a far cry from massing weapons on the border. Since the end of the Warsaw Pact, no military alliance has arisen to oppose American-led NATO. Yet the exercise of hegemony by America, divided politically at home, is uncertain at best. So what is happening? For the last several years this sense of unease has fueled a great deal of speculation and worry.15

  One response has been to point to signs of American decline as the country’s economic ability and political will to pay the costs of hegemony decrease. This is a recurring topic. A famous 1987 book by Yale historian Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, described five hundred years of shifts in the world power system and ended with cautions about the fragility of American dominance based on the experience of past empires, which came undone when they could no longer marshal the resources to support their overstretched military operations. The collapse of the Soviet Union seemed to refute Kennedy’s prediction, but in the post-9/11 world it seemed relevant once again. And even boosters of American hegemony worried that the biggest risk to the world order was not the rise of some devious competitor but, rather, America’s failure to live up to its role. In his 2004 book Colossus, prolific British historian Niall Ferguson argued the United States needed to do more to assume its responsibility of leadership as a “liberal empire.” All the postwar rules and regimes were not enough to handle threats from rogue states, terrorism, or disease—all given new force by technology, Ferguson argued. “What is required is an agency capable of intervening . . . to contain epidemics, depose tyrants, end local wars and eradicate terrorist organizations.” In other words, a capable and active hegemon.16

  Views about the future of international rivalry span the gamut. Conservative scholar Robert Kagan anticipated that “the twenty-first century will look like the nineteenth,” he wrote, with powers like China, Russia, India, and a unifying Europe jostling for supremacy.17Another view holds that even if the rival powers are not overtly challenging American hegemony, they are using techniques known as “soft balancing”—such as informal agreements, voting blocs in international forums, or turning down American diplomatic and military requests—to limit and undermine it.18 Other thinkers argue that fears like Ferguson’s are overstated, because American hegemony is not that damaged. Even in a world with new rivals and multiple poles of influence—a “post-American world,” as Fareed Zakaria has put it—the United States enjoys unique advantages that reinforce, not diminish, its power.19

  Still others fear that changes in the global economy and the way we live have been so radical that neither hegemony nor global rules are even possible anymore. They fear that a form of anarchy—the primeval state of the world system—is once again taking hold. As early as 1994, Robert Kaplan saw anarchy emerging from failed states and ethnic rivalries, the rise of unchecked terrorist and criminal networks, and the vulnerability of an interconnected world to the spread of disease and other catastrophes. An even more dire view is that of political scientist Randall Schweller, who compares changes under way in the world system to the onset, in physics, of the state of entropy, when a system becomes so disorganized that it changes nature in a way that is impossible to reverse. Information overload and the scattering of identities and interests will make international politics essentially random, Schweller argues. “Entropy will reduce and diffuse usable power in the system,” he writes. “No one will know where authority resides because it will not reside anywhere; and without authority, there can be no governance of any kind.”20

  Clearly, the world system is in a state of flux. The above debates are important, yet they ring hollow when the main views on where the world is headed are so wildly different and subject to shifting conventional wisdoms. The decay of power helps to clarify the picture.

  WHO’S AFRAID OF THE BIG BAD WOLF? TRADITIONAL POWER AT BAY

  Fundamentally, the tools that big powers use to get their way in the international system have not changed much. Weapons, money, and diplomatic ingenuity have usually carried the day. A robust army equipped with state-of-the-art equipment and staffed by a large and competent fighting force; a large economy, advanced technology, and a strong natural resource base; a loyal and well-trained cadre of diplomats, lawyers, and spies; and an attractive ideology or system of values have always been major assets to international influence. In every era of history, such attributes have conferred advantage on the most populous, economically advanced, politically stable and resource-rich nations. It is not the raw assets themselves that are shrinking. What is waning is the effectiveness, usability and impact of the traditional modes of power that they underpin: whether military, economic, or soft power.

  From Overwhelming Force to the Age of Ad Hoc Allies

  As we saw in the last chapter, one country—the United States—spends more on its arsenal, troops, and logistics than do all others combined. It is not a fruitless expense. Pax Americana—in which American military supremacy acts as the ultimate guarantor of stability—has been real. Indeed, the United States now formally guarantees the security of more than 50 countries.21 The disparity in military spending between the United States and other countries endures, as does the phenomenal breadth of the US military presence in 130 countries, from large contingents in long-term bases to small units in training, peacekeeping, special operations, and counterinsurgency activities.

  The United States also leads NATO, the most important military alliance in the world and, with the fall of the rival Warsaw Pact, the only one of its scale. This is as strong an indicator of hegemony as there could be. Alliances were always the core instrument of great-power politics, backing up diplomacy with the credible threat of military action, delineating spheres of influence and no-go areas, and deterring attack by guaranteeing mutual defense. They were, in other words, the building blocks of world order. And for many decades the pattern of alliances in the world remained steady. NATO and the Warsaw Pact enforced a rigid order on either side of the Iron Curtain. In the developing world, newly independent countries quickly got courted, co-opted, or coerced into alliances with the West or the communist bloc.

  Today, more than a decade after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact by its members in July 1991, NATO stands triumphant. In fact, three former Soviet republics and a further seven former members of the Soviet bloc have joined the alliance. NATO and Russia remain rivals: Russia resists having more of its neighbors join the alliance and opposes the deployment of NATO missile defense in central Europe. But they have also proclaimed themselves partners, not enemies, and since 2002 have had a dedicated council to smooth out their relations and solve any disputes. Beyond Russia, NATO has no other obvious potential enemy—a novel situation for a major alliance, and one that has forced it to seek out new ways to remain relevant. The chief case in point is its mission in Afghanistan, in which all twenty-eight member-states plus another twenty-one countries
have supplied troops.

  But its apparent supremacy conceals mounting weaknesses that reflect both the absence of an existential threat and the dilution of power among its participants. The Afghanistan mission has been heavily dominated by the United States, with many countries making modest or symbolic contributions. Several countries have withdrawn. Domestic opposition to the continued presence of Dutch troops in the mission contributed to the fall of the Netherlands government in February 2010, presaging withdrawal. Participants such as France and Germany have demurred at American requests for additional troops. Moreover, each contingent in Afghanistan has operated under different rules imposed by its own national military command departments or even its country’s legislature. A provision hammered out in parliament in Prague or The Hague might limit what actions a NATO soldier might take in the field fighting the Taliban, training Afghan soldiers, or combating the opium trade. Such restrictions have prompted some American soldiers to rechristen the so-called International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) as “I Saw Americans Fight.”22

  While NATO strains under these contradictions, coordination among its members is rivaled by parallel structures. A long-standing defense organization, the Western European Union, overlaps with NATO. The European Union has its own official defense policy apparatus, including the European Defense Agency and other bodies; it carries out its own overseas missions including peacekeeping, military assistance, and contributions to multinational forces. Of course, each EU member-country has retained its own military. Between NATO, national governments, and the many layers of EU bureaucracy, the Atlantic alliance is increasingly a hodgepodge of jurisdictions and forums with overlapping memberships, but with no decision-making hierarchy or clear lines of command.