by Robert Kagan
The only honest answer is, who knows? If American history is any guide, however, there is at least some reason to be hopeful. There have been many times over the past two centuries when the political system was dysfunctional, hopelessly gridlocked, and seemingly unable to find solutions to crushing national problems—from slavery and then Reconstruction, to the dislocations of industrialization at the end of the nineteenth century and the crisis of social welfare during the Great Depression, to the confusions and paranoia of the early Cold War years. Anyone who honestly recalls the 1970s, with Watergate, Vietnam, stagflation, and the energy crisis, cannot really believe the present difficulties are unrivaled. People point to polls showing Americans in despair about the future of their nation; in September 2011, only 11 percent of Americans polled were satisfied with “the way things are going.” But that is not so unusual in times of economic distress. In 1992, only 14 percent were satisfied. In 1979, the number was 12 percent. Neither the magnitude of the problems nor the extent of the despair is unprecedented.
Success in the past does not guarantee success in the future. But one thing does seem clear from the historical evidence: the American system, for all its often stultifying qualities, has also shown a greater capacity to adapt and recover from difficulties than that of many other nations, including its geopolitical competitors. This undoubtedly has something to do with the relative freedom of the society, which rewards innovators, often outside the existing power structure, for producing new ways of doing things, and a relatively open political system, which allows movements to gain steam and influence the behavior of the political establishment. The American system is slow and clunky in part because the Founders designed it that way, with a federal system, checks and balances, and a written Constitution and Bill of Rights. But the system also possesses a remarkable ability to undertake changes just when the steam kettle looks about to blow its lid. There are occasional “critical elections” that allow transformations to occur, providing new political solutions to old and apparently insoluble problems. Of course, there are no guarantees: the political system could not resolve the problem of slavery without war. But on many big issues throughout their history, Americans have found a way of achieving and implementing a national consensus.126
When Paul Kennedy was marveling at the continuing success of the American superpower back in 2002, he noted that one of the main reasons had been the ability of Americans to overcome what had appeared to him in 1987 as an insoluble long-term economic crisis. American businessmen and politicians “reacted strongly to the debate about ‘decline’ by taking action: cutting costs, making companies leaner and meaner, investing in newer technologies, promoting a communications revolution, trimming government deficits, all of which helped to produce significant year-on-year advances in productivity.”127 It is possible to imagine that Americans may rise to this latest economic challenge as well.
It is also reasonable to expect that other nations will, as in the past, run into difficulties of their own. None of the nations currently enjoying economic miracles is without problems. Brazil, India, Turkey, and Russia all have bumpy histories that suggest the route ahead will not simply be one of smooth ascent. There is a real question whether the autocratic model of China, which can be so effective in making some strategic decisions about the economy in the short term, can over the long run be flexible enough to permit adaptation to a changing international economic, political, and strategic environment.
In short, it may be more than good fortune that has allowed the United States in the past to come through crises and emerge stronger and healthier than other nations while its various competitors have faltered. And it may be more than just wishful thinking to believe that it may do so again.
BUT THERE IS A danger. It is that in the meantime, while the nation continues to struggle, Americans may convince themselves that decline is indeed inevitable, or that the United States can take a time-out from its global responsibilities while it gets its own house in order. To many Americans, accepting decline may provide a welcome escape from the moral and material burdens that have weighed on them since World War II. Many may unconsciously yearn to return to the way things were in 1900, when the United States was rich, powerful, and not responsible for world order. Every presidential candidate since the end of the Cold War has promised one way or another to focus more attention at home and to lessen American involvement abroad, only to break that promise almost immediately upon taking office.
The underlying assumption of such a course is that the present world order will more or less persist without American power (or at least with much less of it), that others can pick up the slack, or simply that the benefits of the world order are permanent and require no special exertion by anyone. Unfortunately, however, the present world order is as fragile as it is unique. Preserving it has been a struggle in every decade and will remain a struggle in the decades to come. Those presidents who have come to office expecting to be able to do less have quickly faced the stark reality—often more apparent to presidents than to presidential candidates—that preserving the present world order requires constant American leadership and constant American commitment.
IT’S A WONDERFUL WORLD ORDER
IN THE END, THE decision is in the hands of Americans. Decline, as Charles Krauthammer has observed, is a choice. It is not an inevitable fate—at least not yet. In It’s a Wonderful Life, George Bailey finds himself in a terrible crisis—a fiscal crisis, as it happens—with his bank about to be ruined and his family sent into poverty. He decides that the world would be better off without him and therefore to take his own life. But he is stopped by an angel who takes him on a Dickensian tour of what his town would have looked like had he never been born. The town, now dominated by the greedy banker, is rougher and seedier, more brutal, and also sadder. People who had been good and generous have turned nasty and selfish. Others have been ruined. Once he realizes how terrible this alternative world would be, and understands the special role he had played in making his own world what it was, he returns to his life and finds that, lo and behold, he is able to find a solution. With a little luck but also with the forces of good in the town that he had supported and encouraged, he solves his fiscal crisis and lives happily ever after.
It is, of course, a Hollywood ending. In the real world, things do not have to end well. Empires and great powers rise and fall, and the only question is when. But the when does matter. Whether the United States begins to decline over the next two decades or not for another two centuries will matter a great deal, both to Americans and to the nature of the world they live in. Perhaps if Americans had a clearer picture of what might come after the American world order, they would be more inclined to continue struggling to preserve the world they have made, or at least to ensure that changes in the system do not undermine the order from which they, and others, have so greatly benefited.
What would this require? Above all, it would mean working to shore up all three pillars—politics, economics, security—of what has made this age, with all its brutalities, a golden age for humanity. We have a tendency to separate politics, economics, and security—“ideals” from “interests,” support for democracy from defense of security—but in the American world order they have all been related.
Start with the reality that a liberal world order will only be supported by liberal nations. The expectation that an authoritarian China or Russia will lend assistance in supporting democratic governance and liberal economic principles—and the two are intimately related—is folly. Americans and other liberal peoples who benefit from and support the present world order therefore have an interest in pressing for greater democratic and liberal reforms in the world’s authoritarian nations, including the two great-power autocracies. This is not because it’s just what Americans do, because supporting democracy is consistent with their principles and makes them feel good about themselves. The far more important reason is that the future of the liberal world order may depend on it. If
it is true that the United States may eventually have to share global power with a richer and more powerful China, it will make a very big difference to the future world order whether China remains autocratic or begins to open up politically as well as economically. Would even a democratic Chinese superpower pose challenges for the United States? Of course it would. American influence would necessarily diminish relative to China’s. But at least a democratic China could be more easily trusted to uphold the liberal world order in which Americans could continue to thrive. It would be more akin to the transition between British and American dominance in the twentieth century. Just as the British could safely cede power to a rising United States, and just as the United States has repeatedly tried to cede power across the Atlantic to a unifying and peaceful democratic Europe, so Americans could have an easier time ceding some power and influence across the Pacific to a rising democratic China.
More broadly, Americans also have an interest in whether the global trend is toward more democracies or whether the world begins to experience that great “reverse wave” which has yet to arrive. They have a stake in the outcome of the Arab Spring, whether it produces a new crop of democracies in a part of the world that has known mostly autocracy or whether old autocratic ways, or new theocratic ways, triumph instead.
In their economic policies, Americans need to continue promoting and strengthening the international free-trade and free-market regime. This, of course, means setting their own economy back on a course of sustainable growth. It does mean, as Friedman and others suggest, doing a better job of educating and training Americans to compete with others in an increasingly competitive international economy. It means providing a healthy environment for technological innovation. But it also means resisting protectionist temptations and using American influence, along with that of other free-trading nations, to push back against some of the tendencies of state capitalism in China and elsewhere. Here and on other issues, the United States and Europe must not give up on each other. Together the United States and Europe have more than 50 percent of global GDP. They can wield significant global influence, even in the Asian century, if they can stop indulging in schadenfreude with respect to each other and focus on upholding a free-trade, free-market international system against rising internal and external challenges.
Finally, there is the matter of American hard power. In recent years, wise heads have argued that too much emphasis has been placed on military power and not enough on soft power or on something called smart power. This is understandable, given the bad experiences of both Iraq and Afghanistan, which have pointed up clearly the limits and costs of military power. But it is worth recalling the limits of soft power, too. It is a most difficult kind of power to wield. No American president ever enjoyed more international popularity than Woodrow Wilson when he traveled to Paris to negotiate the treaty ending World War I. He was a hero to the world, but he found his ability to shape the peace, and to establish the new League of Nations, severely limited, in no small part by the refusal of his countrymen to commit American military power to the defense of the peace. John F. Kennedy, another globally admired president, found his popularity of no use in his confrontations with Khrushchev, who, by Kennedy’s own admission, “beat the hell out of me” and who may have been persuaded by his perception of Kennedy’s weakness that the United States would tolerate his placing Soviet missiles in Cuba.
Soft power exists, but its influence is hard to measure and easy to overstate. People and nations may enjoy American pop music and American movies and still dislike America. It is generally true of both people and nations that whether they find someone attractive or unattractive is not the determining factor in their economic, political, and strategic behavior, especially when their core interests are involved. They like you when you are doing something that benefits them, and they don’t like you when you are standing in their way. The United States, even at its most alluring, has seen its influence limited. And even at its most unattractive, it has accomplished some significant objectives, as when the Nixon administration cemented new ties with China.
What has made the United States most attractive to much of the world has not been its culture, its wisdom, or even its ideals alone. At times these have played a part; at times they have been irrelevant. More consistent has been the attraction of America’s power, the manner in which it uses it, and the ends for which it has been used. What has been true since the time of Rome remains true today: there can be no world order without power to preserve it, to shape its norms, uphold its institutions, defend the sinews of its economic system, and keep the peace. Military power can be abused, wielded unwisely and ineffectively. It can be deployed to answer problems that it cannot answer or that have no answer. But it is also essential. No nation or group of nations that renounced power could expect to maintain any kind of world order. If the United States begins to look like a less reliable defender of the present order, that order will begin to unravel. People might find Americans in this weaker state very attractive indeed, but if the United States cannot help them when and where they need help the most, they will have to make other arrangements.
So Americans once again need to choose what role they want to play in the world. They hate making such a choice. If the past is any guide, they will make it with hesitation, uncertainty, and misgivings. They might well decide that the role they have been playing is too expensive. But in weighing the costs, they need to ask themselves: Is the American world order worth preserving?
Not everything can be preserved, of course. The world is always changing. Science and technology, new means of communication, transportation, and calculation, produce new patterns of human behavior and new economic configurations, as do changes in the physical environment. In the international realm, the distribution of power among nations, and between nations and non-state actors, is constantly in flux. Some nations grow richer and stronger, others grow poorer and weaker. Small groups of individuals today can do more damage to powerful nations than they could in the past. In the future new technologies may shift the balance once again against them. It is both foolish and futile to try to hold on to the past and to believe that old ways are always going to be sufficient to meet new circumstances. The world must adjust, and the United States must adjust, to the new.
We cannot be so entranced by change, however, that we fail to recognize some fundamental and enduring truths—about power, about human nature, and about the way beliefs and power interact to shape a world order. We need to be aware of history, not to cling to the past, but to understand what has been unique about our time. For all its flaws and its miseries, the world America made has been a remarkable anomaly in the history of humanity. Someday we may have no choice but to watch it drift away. Today we do have a choice.
NOTES
1. The United States and China fought each other in the Korean War, but whether poverty-stricken China, one year after emerging from civil war, qualified as a great power at that time is questionable. In 1950, when America’s per capita GDP was over $9,000, China’s was $614, below that of the Belgian Congo. http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/eco_gdp_per_cap_in_195-economy-gdp-per-capita-1950.
2. G. John Ikenberry, “The Future of the Liberal World Order,” Foreign Affairs, May/June 2011, p. 58.
3. See, for instance, G. John Ikenberry, Liberal Leviathan: The Origins, Crisis, and Transformation of the American World Order (Princeton, N.J., 2011), chap. 1.
4. The phrase “reluctant sheriff” was coined by Richard N. Haass; see his Reluctant Sheriff: The United States After the Cold War (New York, 1997). The quotation is from John Kerry’s acceptance speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention.
5. Between 1898 and 1928, Americans intervened abroad with force more than two dozen times, mostly in the Western Hemisphere but once in Europe and twice in distant East Asia. Then, after a decade of relative repose, Americans fought three major wars between 1941 and 1965—World War II, the Korean War, and Vietnam—along with smal
ler interventions in Lebanon (1958) and the Dominican Republic (1965). The post-Vietnam hiatus lasted a little over a decade, but from 1989 to 2011 the United States deployed large numbers of combat troops or engaged in extended campaigns of aerial bombing and missile attacks on ten different occasions—Panama (1989), Somalia (1992), Haiti (1994), Bosnia (1995–96), Kosovo (1999), Afghanistan (2001), Iraq (1991, 1998, 2003), and, most recently, Libya—an average of one significant military intervention roughly every two years.
6. Almost 80 percent of Americans believe that “under some conditions, war is necessary to obtain justice,” compared with 20 percent in France, Germany, Italy, and Spain. See the polling done in recent years by Transatlantic Trends, a project sponsored by the German Marshall Fund of the United States.
7. If Dean Acheson had told the American people in 1949, when NATO was born, that American troops would still be in Europe into the twenty-first century, he would have been hounded from office.
8. Geir Lundestad, The United States and Western Europe Since 1945: From “Empire” by Invitation to Transatlantic Drift (Oxford, 2005), p. 35.
9. Martin Gilbert, Churchill and America (New York, 2008), pp. 102, 399, 245.
10. John Lewis Gaddis, The Long Peace: Inquiries into the History of the Cold War (Oxford, 1989), p. 65.