by Robert Kagan
Almost, but never entirely. Idealism was never the sole source of American generosity or its propensity to seek to work in concert with its allies. American Cold War multilateralism was more instrumental than idealistic in its motives. After all, “going it alone” after 1945 meant going it alone against the Soviet Union. Going it alone meant shearing apart the West. Nor was it really conceivable, with Soviet troops massed in the heart of Europe, for any American foreign policy to succeed if it was not “multilateral” in its inclusion of Western European interests. On the other hand, genuine idealistic multilateralism had been interred for most Americans along with Wilson and the League of Nations Covenant. Dean Acheson, among the leading architects of the postwar international order, considered the UN Charter “impracticable” and the United Nations itself an example of a misguided Wilsonian “faith in the perfectibility of man and the advent of universal peace and law.”[60] He and most others present at the creation of the postwar order were idealists, but they were practical idealists. They believed it was essential to present a common Western front to the Communist bloc, and if that meant swallowing what Acheson disparaged as the “holy writ” of the UN Charter, they were prepared to play along. For Acheson, support for the UN was nothing more than “an aid to diplomacy.”[61] This is important, because many aspects of American behavior during the Cold War that both Europeans and many Americans in retrospect find so admirable, and whose passing they so lament, represented concessions made in the cause of Western unity. That unity was not always easy to maintain. American hostility to de Gaulle’s determined independence, American suspicion about British imperialism, arguments over Germany’s Ostpolitik, strategic debates over arms agreements and arms buildups, especially during the Reagan years, all threatened to open cracks in the alliance. But the cracks were always healed, because everyone agreed that while disagreements were inevitable, fissures were dangerous. If “the West” was divided, it would fall. The danger was not only strategic; it was ideological, even psychological. “The West” had to mean something, otherwise what were we defending? And, of course, during the Cold War, “the West” did mean something. It was the liberal, democratic choice of a large segment of humanity, standing in opposition to the alternative choice that existed on the other side of the Berlin Wall.
This powerful strategic, ideological, and psychological need to demonstrate that there was indeed a cohesive, unified West went down with the Berlin Wall and the statues of Lenin in Moscow. The loss was partly masked during the 1990s. Many saw the struggles in Bosnia and Kosovo as a new test of the West. The enlargement of NATO to include former Warsaw Pact nations was an ingathering of peoples who had been forcibly excluded from the West and wanted to be part of it again. They saw NATO as not only or even primarily a security organization but simply as the one and only institution that embodied the transatlantic West. Certainly, the United Nations was not “the West.”
But the very success of the transatlantic project, the solution of the European security dilemma, the solution of the German problem, the completion of a Europe “whole and free,” the settlement of the Balkan conflicts, the creation of a fairly stable zone of peace and democracy on the European continent—all these great and once unimaginable accomplishments had the inevitable effect of diminishing the significance of “the West.” It was not that the West had ceased to exist. Nor was it that the West had ceased to face enemies, for surely militant Muslim fundamentalism is an implacable enemy of the West. But the central point of Francis Fukuyama’s famous essay, “The End of History,” was irrefutable: The centuries-long struggle among opposing conceptions of how mankind might govern itself had been definitively settled in favor of the Western liberal ideal. Muslim fundamentalism might have its following in the parts of the world where Muslims predominate. Nor can we doubt any longer its capacity to inflict horrific damage on the West. But as Fukuyama and others have pointed out, Muslim fundamentalism does not present a serious challenge to the universal principles of Western liberalism. The existence of Muslim fundamentalism may force Americans and Europeans to defend themselves against devastating attack, and even to cooperate in providing a common defense. But it does not force “the West” to prove itself unified and coherent, as Soviet communism once had.
With less need to preserve and demonstrate the existence of a cohesive “West,” it was inevitable that the generosity that had characterized American foreign policy for fifty years would diminish after the Cold War ended. This may be something to lament, but it is not something to be surprised at. The existence of the Soviet Union and the international communist threat had disciplined Americans and made them see that their enlightened self-interest lay in a relatively generous foreign policy, especially toward Europe. After the end of the Cold War, that discipline was no longer present. The end of the Cold War subtly shifted the old equation between idealism and interest. Indeed, those who decry the decline of American generosity in the post-Cold War era must at least reckon with the logic of that decline. Since Americans objectively had less interest in a foreign policy characterized by generosity, for the United States to have maintained the same degree of generosity in its foreign policy as it had during the Cold War, the same commitment to international institutions, the same concern for and deference to allies, the American people would have had to become even more idealistic.
In fact, Americans are no more or less idealistic than they were fifty years ago. It is objective reality that has changed, not the American character. It was the changed international circumstances after the Cold War that opened the way to political forces in Congress, chiefly though not exclusively Republican, which aimed to rewrite old multilateral agreements and defeat new ones, to extricate the United States from treaty obligations now considered onerous or excessively intrusive into American sovereignty. What was new was not the existence of such forces and attitudes, for they had always been present in American politics. They had dominated American politics throughout the 1920s and 1930s, a period ushered in by a Republican president promising a “return to normalcy” after the ambitious idealism of the Wilson years. But during the Cold War, and especially during the years dominated by Republican presidents from Nixon to Reagan, the grand anti-communist strategy had overwhelmed such narrow nationalist sentiments and trumped concerns for sovereignty.
Nor was America’s post-Cold War turn toward a more nationalist approach to foreign policy simply the product of a rising Republican Right. Realist international relations theorists and policymakers, the dominant intellectual force in the American foreign policy establishment, also pushed the United States back in the direction of a more narrow nationalism. They decried what Michael Mandelbaum famously called the “international social work” allegedly undertaken by the Clinton administration in Bosnia and Haiti. They insisted that the United States return to a more intent focus on the “national interest,” now more narrowly defined than it had been during the Cold War. American realists from Brent Scowcroft to Colin Powell to James Baker to Lawrence Eagleburger did not believe the United States should take on the burden of solving the Balkan crisis or other “humanitarian” crises around the world. The Cold War was over, they argued, and it was therefore possible for American foreign policy to “return to normal.”
Post-Cold War “normalcy,” however, meant fewer concessions to international public opinion, less deference to allies, more freedom to act as the United States saw fit. These realists gave intellectual legitimacy to the forces in Congress who coupled talk of the “national interest” with calls for reductions in overseas involvements of all kind. If the “national interest” was to be narrowly conceived, many Republicans asked, why, exactly, was it still in the “national interest” for the United States to pay its comparatively exorbitant UN dues? A case that had been easier to make when the preservation of Western unity against communism was the goal of American foreign policy was now harder to make in the absence of such a far-reaching and enlightened definition of the American “nation
al interest.”
Even the Clinton administration, more idealistic and, perhaps ironically, more wedded to the Cold War foreign policy of generosity than the realists and Republicans, nevertheless could not escape the new post-Cold War reality. It was Clinton, after all, who ran for president in 1992 on a platform declaring that the American economy mattered and foreign policy did not. Clinton stepped in to try to repair “the West” only after trying desperately not to take on that responsibility. When the administration of George W. Bush came to office in January 2001, bringing with it the realist-nationalism of 1990s Republicanism, “the West” as a functioning concept in American foreign policy had become dormant. When the terrorists struck the United States eight months later, the Cold War equation was completely inverted. Now, with the threat brought directly to American soil, overleaping that of America’s allies, the paramount issue was America’s unique suffering and vulnerability, not “the West.”
The declining significance of “the West” as an organizing principle of foreign policy was not just an American phenomenon, however. Post-Cold War Europe agreed that the issue was no longer “the West.” For Europeans, the issue became “Europe.” Proving that there was a united Europe took precedence over proving that there was a united West. A European “nationalism” mirrored the American nationalism, and although this was not Europe’s intent, the present gap between the United States and Europe today may be traced in part to Europe’s decision to establish itself as a single entity apart from the United States.
This effort impressed on American minds that the transatlantic goal was no longer a unified West; the Europeans themselves no longer thought in such terms. Instead, Europeans spoke of “Europe” as another pole in a new multipolar world—a counterbalance to America. Europe would establish its own separate foreign policy and defense “identity” outside of NATO. The institutions Europeans revered were the European Union and the United Nations. But for Americans, as for Central and Eastern Europeans, the UN was not “the West,” and the European Union was not “the West.” Only NATO was “the West,” and now Europeans were building an alternative to NATO. Everything the Europeans were doing made sense from a European perspective; and the project of European integration was objectively of benefit to the United States, at least insofar as it strengthened the peace. Nor was it the intention of most Europeans to raise a challenge to the United States, much less to the idea of “the West.” But how surprising was it that Americans no longer placed as high a priority on the unity of the West and the cohesion of the alliance as they once had? Europeans had undertaken an all-consuming project in which the United States by definition could have no part. The United States, meanwhile, has projects of its own.
Adjusting To Hegemony
America did not change on September 11. It only became more itself. Nor should there be any mystery about the course America is on, and has been on, not only over the past year or over the past decade, but for the better part of the past six decades, and, one might even say, for the better part of the past four centuries. It is an objective fact that Americans have been expanding their power and influence in ever-widening arcs since even before they founded their own independent nation. The hegemony that America established within the Western Hemisphere in the nineteenth century has been a permanent feature of international politics ever since. The expansion of America’s strategic reach into Europe and East Asia that came with the Second World War has never been retracted. Indeed, it is somewhat remarkable to reflect that more than fifty years after the end of that war—a period that has seen Japanese and German enemies completely transformed into valued friends and allies—and more than a decade after the Cold War—which ended in another stunning transformation of a defeated foe—the United States nevertheless remains, and clearly intends to remain, the dominant strategic force in both East Asia and Europe. The end of the Cold War was taken by Americans as an opportunity not to retract but to expand their reach, to expand the alliance they lead eastward toward Russia, to strengthen their relations among the increasingly democratic powers of East Asia, to stake out interests in parts of the world, like Central Asia, that most Americans never knew existed before.
The myth of America’s “isolationist” tradition is remarkably resilient. But it is a myth. Expansion of territory and influence has been the inescapable reality of American history, and it has not been an unconscious expansion. The ambition to play a grand role on the world stage is deeply rooted in the American character. Since independence and even before, Americans who disagreed on many things always shared a common belief in their nation’s great destiny. Even as a weak collection of loosely united colonies stretched out across the Atlantic Coast, threatened on all sides by European empires and an untamed wilderness, the United States had appeared to its leaders a “Hercules in the cradle,” “the embryo of a great empire.” To the generation of the early republic, to Washington, Hamilton, Franklin, and Jefferson, nothing was more certain than that the North American continent would be subdued, American wealth and population would grow, and the young republic would someday come to dominate the Western Hemisphere and take its place among the world’s great powers. Jefferson foresaw the establishment of a vast “empire of liberty.” Hamilton believed America would, “erelong, assume an attitude correspondent with its great destinies—majestic, efficient, and operative of great things. A noble career lies before it.”[62]
For those early generations of Americans, the promise of national greatness was not merely a comforting hope but an integral part of the national identity, inextricably entwined with the national ideology. The United States must become a great power, and perhaps the greatest power, they and many subsequent generations of Americans believed, because the principles and ideals upon which it was founded were unquestionably superior—superior not only to those of the corrupt monarchies of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe, but to the ideas that had shaped nations and governments throughout human history. The proof of the transcendent importance of the American experiment would be found not only in the continual perfection of American institutions at home but also in the spread of American influence in the world. Americans have always been internationalists, therefore, but their internationalism has always been a by-product of their nationalism. When Americans sought legitimacy for their actions abroad, they sought it not from supranational institutions but from their own principles. That is why it was always so easy for so many Americans to believe, as so many still believe today, that by advancing their own interests they advance the interests of humanity. As Benjamin Franklin put it, America’s “cause is the cause of all mankind.”[63]
This enduring American view of their nation’s exceptional place in history, their conviction that their interests and the world’s interests are one, may be welcomed, ridiculed, or lamented. But it should not be doubted. And just as there is little reason to expect Europe to change its fundamental course, there is little cause to believe the United States will change its own course, or begin to conduct itself in the world in a fundamentally different manner. Absent some unforeseen catastrophe—not a setback in Iraq or “another Vietnam,” but a military or economic calamity great enough to destroy the very sources of American power—it is reasonable to assume that we have only just entered a long era of American hegemony. Demographic trends show the American population growing faster and getting younger while the European population declines and steadily ages. According to The Economist, if present trends continue, the American economy, now roughly the same size as the European economy, could grow to be more than twice the size of Europe’s by 2050. Today the median age of Americans is 35.5; in Europe it is 37.7. By 2050, the American median age will be 36.2. In Europe, if present trends persist, it will be 52.7. That means, among other things, that the financial burden of caring for elderly dependents will grow much higher in Europe than in the United States. And that means Europeans will have even less money to spend on defense in the coming years and decades than they do
today. As The Economist observes, “The long-term logic of demography seems likely to entrench America’s power and to widen existing transatlantic rifts,” providing a stark “contrast between youthful, exuberant, multi-coloured America and ageing, decrepit, inward-looking Europe.”[64]
If America’s relative power will not diminish, neither are Americans likely to change their views of how that power is to be used. In fact, despite all the seismic geopolitical shifts that have occurred since 1941, Americans have been fairly consistent in their thinking about the nature of world affairs and about America’s role in shaping the world to suit its interests and ideals. The founding document of the Cold War, Kennan’s “Long Telegram,” starkly set out the dominant perspective of America’s postwar strategic culture: The Soviet Union was “impervious to the logic of reason,” Kennan wrote, but would be “highly sensitive to the logic of force.”[65] A good liberal Democrat like Clark Clifford agreed that the “language of military power” was the only language that the Soviets understood, and that the Soviet empire had to be considered a “distinct entity with which conflict is not predestined but with which we cannot pursue common goals.”[66] Few Americans would put things that starkly today, but many Americans would agree with the sentiments. Last year large majorities of Democrats and Republicans in both houses of Congress agreed that the “language of military power” might be all that Saddam Hussein understood.