Author: Ikenberry, G. John. Source:
Foreign Affairs v. 81 no5 (Sept./Oct. 2002) p. 44-60 ISSN: 0015-7120 Number:
BSSI02112876 Copyright: The magazine publisher is the copyright holder
of this article and it is reproduced with permission. Further reproduction of
this article in violation of the copyright is prohibited. To contact the
publisher: http://www.foreignrelations.org/public/.
THE LURES OF PREEMPTION
IN THE SHADOWS of the Bush administration's war on terrorism; sweeping new
ideas are circulating about U.S. grand strategy and the restructuring of
today's unipolar world. They call for American unilateral and preemptive, even
preventive, use of force, facilitated if possible by coalitions of the
willing--but ultimately unconstrained by the rules and norms of the
international community. At the extreme, these notions form a neoimperial
vision in which the United States arrogates to itself the global role of
setting standards, determining threats, using force, and meting out justice. It
is a vision in which sovereignty becomes more absolute for America even as it
becomes more conditional for countries that challenge Washington's standards of
internal and external behavior. It is a vision made necessary--at least in the
eyes of its advocates--by the new and apocalyptic character of contemporary
terrorist threats and by America's unprecedented global dominance. These
radical strategic ideas and impulses could transform today's world order in a
way that the end of the Cold War, strangely enough, did not.
The exigencies of fighting terrorism in Afghanistan and the debate over
intervening in Iraq obscure the profundity of this geopolitical challenge.
Blueprints have not been produced, and Yalta-style summits have not been
convened, but actions are afoot to dramatically alter the political order that
the United States has built with its partners since the 1940s. The twin new
realities of our age--catastrophic terrorism and American unipolar power--do
necessitate a rethinking of the organizing principles of international order.
America and the other major states do need a new consensus on terrorist
threats, weapons of mass destruction (WMD), the use of force, and the global
rules of the game. This imperative requires a better appreciation of the ideas
coming out of the administration. But in turn, the administration should
understand the virtues of the old order that it wishes to displace.
America's nascent neoimperial grand strategy threatens to rend the fabric
of the international community and political partnerships precisely at a time
when that community and those partnerships are urgently needed. It is an
approach fraught with peril and likely to fail. It is not only politically
unsustainable but diplomatically harmful. And if history is a guide, it will
trigger antagonism and resistance that will leave America in a more hostile and
divided world.
PROVEN LEGACIES
THE MAINSTREAM of American foreign policy has been defined since the 1940s
by two grand strategies that have built the modern international order. One is
realist in orientation, organized around containment, deterrence, and the
maintenance of the global balance of power. Facing a dangerous and expansive
Soviet Union after 1945, the United States stepped forward to fill the vacuum
left by a waning British Empire and a collapsing European order to provide a
counterweight to Stalin and his Red Army.
The touchstone of this strategy was containment, which sought to deny the
Soviet Union the ability to expand its sphere of influence. Order was
maintained by managing the bipolar balance between the American and Soviet
camps. Stability was achieved through nuclear deterrence. For the first time,
nuclear weapons and the doctrine of mutual assured destruction made war between
the great powers irrational. But containment and global power-balancing ended
with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Nuclear deterrence is no longer
the defining logic of the existing order, although it remains a recessed
feature that continues to impart stability in relations among China, Russia,
and the West.
This strategy has yielded a bounty of institutions and partnerships for
America. The most important have been the NATO and U.S.-Japan alliances,
American-led security partnerships that have survived the end of the Cold War
by providing a bulwark for stability through commitment and reassurance. The
United States maintains a forward presence in Europe and East Asia; its
alliance partners gain security protection as well as a measure of regularity
in their relationship with the world's leading military power. But Cold War
balancing has yielded more than a utilitarian alliance structure; it has
generated a political order that has value in itself.
This grand strategy presupposes a loose framework of consultations and
agreements to resolve differences: the great powers extend to each other the
respect of equals, and they accommodate each other until vital interests come
into play. The domestic affairs of these states remain precisely
that--domestic. The great powers compete with each other, and although war is
not unthinkable, sober statecraft and the balance of power offer the best hope
for stability and peace.
George W. Bush ran for president emphasizing some of these themes,
describing his approach to foreign policy as "new realism": the focus
of American efforts should shift away from Clinton-era preoccupations with
nation building, international social work, and the promiscuous use of force,
and toward cultivating great-power relations and rebuilding the nation's
military. Bush's efforts to integrate Russia into the Western security order
have been the most important manifestation of this realist grand strategy at
work. The moderation in Washington's confrontational rhetoric toward China also
reflects this emphasis. If the major European and Asian states play by the
rules, the great-power order will remain stable. (In a way, it is precisely
because Europe is not a great power--or at least seems to eschew the logic of
great-power politics--that it is now generating so much discord with the United
States.).
The other grand strategy, forged during World War II as the United States
planned the reconstruction of the world economy, is liberal in orientation. It
seeks to build order around institutionalized political relations among
integrated market democracies, supported by an opening of economies. This
agenda was not simply an inspiration of American businessmen and economists,
however. There have always been geopolitical goals as well. Whereas America's realist
grand strategy was aimed at countering Soviet power, its liberal grand strategy
was aimed at avoiding a return to the 1930s, an era of regional blocs, trade
conflict, and strategic rivalry. Open trade, democracy, and multilateral
institutional relations went together. Underlying this strategy was the view
that a rule-based international order, especially one in which the United
States uses its political weight to derive congenial rules, will most fully
protect American interests, conserve its power, and extend its influence.
This grand strategy has been pursued through an array of postwar
initiatives that look disarmingly like "low politics": the Bretton
Woods institutions, the World Trade Organization (WTO), and the Organization
for Economic Cooperation and Development are just a few examples. Together,
they form a complex layer cake of integrative initiatives that bind the
democratic industrialized world together. During the 1990s, the United States
continued to pursue this liberal grand strategy. Both the first Bush and the
Clinton administrations attempted to articulate a vision of world order that
was not dependent on an external threat or an explicit policy of balance of
power. Bush the elder talked about the importance of the transatlantic community
and articulated ideas about a more fully integrated Asia-Pacific region. In
both cases, the strategy offered a positive vision of alliance and partnership
built around common values, tradition, mutual self-interest, and the
preservation of stability. The Clinton administration likewise attempted to
describe the post-Cold War order in terms of the expansion of democracy and
open markets. In this vision, democracy provided the foundation for global and
regional community, and trade and capital flows were forces for political
reform and integration.
The current Bush administration is not eager to brandish this
Clinton-looking grand strategy, but it still invokes that strategy's ideas in
various ways. Support for Chinese entry into the WTO is based on the liberal
anticipation that free markets and integration into the Western economic order
will create pressures for Chinese political reform and discourage a belligerent
foreign policy. Administration support for last year's multilateral
trade-negotiating round in Doha, Qatar, also was premised on the economic and
political benefits of freer trade. After September 11, U.S. Trade
Representative Robert Zoellick even linked trade expansion authority to the
fight against terrorism: trade, growth, integration, and political stability go
together. Richard Haass, policy planning director at the State Department,
argued recently that "the principal aim of American foreign policy is to
integrate other countries and organizations into arrangements that will sustain
a world consistent with U.S. interests and values"--again, an echo of the
liberal grand strategy. The administration's recent protectionist trade actions
in steel and agriculture have triggered such a loud outcry around the world
precisely because governments are worried that the United States might be
retreating from this postwar liberal strategy.
AMERICA'S HISTORIC BARGAINS
THESE TWO GRAND STRATEGIES are rooted in divergent, even antagonistic,
intellectual traditions. But over the last 50 years they have worked remarkably
well together. The realist grand strategy created a political rationale for
establishing major security commitments around the world. The liberal strategy
created a positive agenda for American leadership. The United States could
exercise its power and achieve its national interests, but it did so in a way
that helped deepen the fabric of international community. American power did
not destabilize world order; it helped create it. The development of rulebased
agreements and political-security partnerships was good both for the United
States and for much of the world. By the end of the 1990s, the result was an
international political order of unprecedented size and success: a global
coalition of democratic states tied together through markets, institutions, and
security partnerships.
This international order was built on two historic bargains. One was the
U.S. commitment to provide its European and Asian partners with security
protection and access to American markets, technology, and supplies within an
open world economy. In return, these countries agreed to be reliable partners
providing diplomatic, economic, and logistical support for the United States as
it led the wider Western postwar order. The other is the liberal bargain that
addressed the uncertainties of American power. East Asian and European states
agreed to accept American leadership and operate within an agreedupon
political-economic system. The United States, in response, opened itself up and
bound itself to its partners. In effect, the United States built an
institutionalized coalition of partners and reinforced the stability of these
mutually beneficial relations by making itself more
"user-friendly"--that is, by playing by the rules and creating
ongoing political processes that facilitated consultation and joint
decision-making. The United States made its power safe for the world, and in
return the world agreed to live within the U.S. system. These bargains date
from the 1940s, but they continue to shore up the post-Cold War order. The
result has been the most stable and prosperous international system in world
history. But new ideas within the Bush administration--crystallized by
September 11 and U.S. dominance--are unsettling this order and the political
bargains behind it.
A NEW GRAND STRATEGY
FOR THE FIRST TIME since the dawn of the Cold War, a new grand strategy is
taking shape in Washington. It is advanced most directly as a response to
terrorism, but it also constitutes a broader view about how the United States
should wield power and organize world order. According to this new paradigm,
America is to be less bound to its partners and to global rules and
institutions while it steps forward to play a more unilateral and anticipatory
role in attacking terrorist threats and confronting rogue states seeking WMD.
The United States will use its unrivaled military power to manage the global
order.
This new grand strategy has seven elements. It begins with a fundamental
commitment to maintaining a unipolar world in which the United States has no
peer competitor. No coalition of great powers without the United States will be
allowed to achieve hegemony. Bush made this point the centerpiece of American
security policy in his West Point commencement address in June: "America
has, and intends to keep, military strengths beyond challenges--thereby making
the destabilizing arms races of other eras pointless, and limiting rivalries to
trade and other pursuits of peace." The United States will not seek
security through the more modest realist strategy of operating within a global
system of power balancing, nor will it pursue a liberal strategy in which
institutions, democracy, and integrated markets reduce the importance of power
politics altogether. America will be so much more powerful than other major
states that strategic rivalries and security competition among the great powers
will disappear, leaving everyone--not just the United States--better off.
This goal made an unsettling early appearance at the end of the first Bush
administration in a leaked Pentagon memorandum written by then Assistant
Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, he
wrote, the United States must act to prevent the rise of peer competitors in
Europe and Asia. But the 1990s made this strategic aim moot. The United States
grew faster than the other major states during the decade, it reduced military
spending more slowly, and it dominated investment in the technological
advancement of its forces. Today, however, the new goal is to make these
advantages permanent--a fait accompli that will prompt other states to not even
try to catch up. Some thinkers have described the strategy as
"breakout," in which the United States moves so quickly to develop
technological advantages (in robotics, lasers, satellites, precision munitions,
etc.) that no state or coalition could ever challenge it as global leader,
protector, and enforcer.
The second element is a dramatic new analysis of global threats and how
they must be attacked. The grim new reality is that small groups of
terrorists--perhaps aided by outlaw states--may soon acquire highly destructive
nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons that can inflict catastrophic
destruction. These terrorist groups cannot be appeased or deterred, the
administration believes, so they must be eliminated. Secretary of Defense
Donald Rumsfeld has articulated this frightening view with elegance: regarding
the threats that confront the United States, he said, "There are things we
know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things
that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are
things we don't know we don't know. ... Each year, we discover a few more of
those unknown unknowns." In other words, there could exist groups of
terrorists that no one knows about. They may have nuclear, chemical, or
biological weapons that the United States did not know they could get, and they
might be willing and able to attack without warning. In the age of terror,
there is less room for error. Small networks of angry people can inflict
unimaginable harm on the rest of the world. They are not nation-states, and
they do not play by the accepted rules of the game.
The third element of the new strategy maintains that the Cold War concept
of deterrence is outdated. Deterrence, sovereignty, and the balance of power
work together. When deterrence is no longer viable, the larger realist edifice
starts to crumble. The threat today is not other great powers that must be
managed through second-strike nuclear capacity but the transnational terrorist
networks that have no home address. They cannot be deterred because they are
either willing to die for their cause or able to escape retaliation. The old
defensive strategy of building missiles and other weapons that can survive a
first strike and be used in a retaliatory strike to punish the attacker will no
longer ensure security. The only option, then, is offense.
The use of force, this camp argues, will therefore need to be preemptive
and perhaps even preventive--taking on potential threats before they can
present a major problem. But this premise plays havoc with the old
international rules of self-defense and United Nations norms about the proper
use of force. Rumsfeld has articulated the justification for preemptive action
by stating that the "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence of
weapons of mass destruction." But such an approach renders international
norms of self-defense--enshrined by Article 51 of the UN Charter--almost meaningless.
The administration should remember that when Israeli jets bombed the Iraqi
nuclear reactor at Osirak in 1981 in what Israel described as an act of
self-defense, the world condemned it as an act of aggression. Even British
Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and the American ambassador to the UN, Jeane
Kirkpatrick, criticized the action, and the United States joined in passing a
UN resolution condemning it.
The Bush administration's security doctrine takes this country down the
same slippery slope. Even without a clear threat, the United States now claims
a right to use preemptive or preventive military force. At West Point, Bush put
it succinctly when he stated that "the military must be ready to strike at
a moment's notice in any dark corner of the world. All nations that decide for
aggression and terror will pay a price." The administration defends this
new doctrine as a necessary adjustment to a more uncertain and shifting threat
environment. This policy of no regrets errs on the side of action--but it can
also easily become national security by hunch or inference, leaving the world
without clear-cut norms for justifying force.
As a result, the fourth element of this emerging grand strategy involves a
recasting of the terms of sovereignty. Because these terrorist groups cannot be
deterred, the United States must be prepared to intervene anywhere, anytime to
preemptively destroy the threat. Terrorists do not respect borders, so neither
can the United States. Moreover, countries that harbor terrorists, either by consent
or because they are unable to enforce their laws within their territory,
effectively forfeit their rights of sovereignty. Haass recently hinted at this
notion in The New Yorker:.
What you are seeing in this administration is the emergence of a new principle
or body of ideas ... about what you might call the limits of sovereignty.
Sovereignty entails obligations. One is not to massacre your own people.
Another is not to support terrorism in any way. If a government fails to meet
these obligations, then it forfeits some of the normal advantages of
sovereignty, including the right to be left alone inside your own territory.
Other governments, including the United States, gain the right to intervene. In
the case of terrorism, this can even lead to a right of preventive ...
self-defense. You essentially can act in anticipation if you have grounds to
think it's a question of when, and not if, you're going to be attacked.
Here the war on terrorism and the problem of the proliferation of WMD get
entangled. The worry is that a few despotic states--Iraq in particular, but
also Iran and North Korea--will develop capabilities to produce weapons of mass
destruction and put these weapons in the hands of terrorists. The regimes
themselves may be deterred from using such capabilities, but they might pass
along these weapons to terrorist networks that are not deterred. Thus another
emerging principle within the Bush administration: the possession of WMD by
unaccountable, unfriendly, despotic governments is itself a threat that must be
countered. In the old era, despotic regimes were to be lamented but ultimately
tolerated. With the rise of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction, they are
now unacceptable threats. Thus states that are not technically in violation of
any existing international laws could nevertheless be targets of American
force--if Washington determines that they have a prospective capacity to do
harm.
The recasting of sovereignty is paradoxical. On the one hand, the new grand
strategy reaffirms the importance of the territorial nation-state. After all,
if all governments were accountable and capable of enforcing the rule of law
within their sovereign territory, terrorists would find it very difficult to
operate. The emerging Bush doctrine enshrines this idea: governments will be
held responsible for what goes on inside their borders. On the other hand,
sovereignty has been made newly conditional: governments that fail to act like
respectable, law-abiding states will lose their sovereignty.
In one sense, such conditional sovereignty is not new. Great powers have
willfully transgressed the norms of state sovereignty as far back as such norms
have existed, particularly within their traditional spheres of influence,
whenever the national interest dictated. The United States itself has done this
within the western hemisphere since the nineteenth century. What is new and
provocative in this notion today, however, is the Bush administration's
inclination to apply it on a global basis, leaving to itself the authority to
determine when sovereign rights have been forfeited, and doing so on an
anticipatory basis.
The fifth element of this new grand strategy is a general depreciation of
international rules, treaties, and security partnerships. This point relates to
the new threats themselves: if the stakes are rising and the margins of error
are shrinking in the war on terrorism, multilateral norms and agreements that
sanction and limit the use of force are just annoying distractions. The
critical task is to eliminate the threat. But the emerging unilateral strategy
is also informed by a deeper suspicion about the value of international
agreements themselves. Part of this view arises from a deeply felt and
authentically American belief that the United States should not get entangled
in the corrupting and constraining world of multilateral rules and
institutions. For some Americans, the belief that American sovereignty is
politically sacred leads to a preference for isolationism. But the more
influential view--particularly after September 11--is not that the United
States should withdraw from the world but that it should operate in the world
on its own terms. The Bush administration's repudiation of a remarkable array
of treaties and institutions--from the Kyoto Protocol on global warming to the
International Criminal Court to the Biological Weapons Convention--reflects
this new bias. Likewise, the United States signed a formal agreement with
Russia on the reduction of deployed nuclear warheads only after Moscow's insistence;
the Bush administration wanted only a "gentlemen's agreement." In
other words, the United States has decided it is big enough, powerful enough,
and remote enough to go it alone.
Sixth, the new grand strategy argues that the United States will need to
play a direct and unconstrained role in responding to threats. This conviction
is partially based on a judgment that no other country or coalition--even the
European Union--has the force-projection capabilities to respond to terrorist
and rogue states around the world. A decade of U.S. defense spending and
modernization has left allies of the United States far behind. In combat
operations, alliance partners are increasingly finding it difficult to mesh
with U.S. forces. This view is also based on the judgment that joint operations
and the use of force through coalitions tend to hinder effective operations. To
some observers, this lesson became clear in the allied bombing campaign over
Kosovo. The sentiment was also expressed during the U.S. and allied military
actions in Afghanistan. Rumsfeld explained this point earlier this year, when
he said, "The mission must determine the coalition; the coalition must not
determine the mission. If it does, the mission will be dumbed down to the
lowest common denominator, and we can't afford that.".
No one in the Bush administration argues that NATO or the U.S.-Japan
alliance should be dismantled. Rather, these alliances are now seen as less
useful to the United States as it confronts today's threats. Some officials argue
that it is not that the United States chooses to depreciate alliance
partnerships, but that the Europeans are unwilling to keep up. Whether that is
true, the upgrading of the American military, along with its sheer size
relative to the forces of the rest of the world, leaves the United States in a
class by itself. In these circumstances, it is increasingly difficult to
maintain the illusion of true alliance partnership. America's allies become
merely strategic assets that are useful depending on the circumstance. The
United States still finds attractive the logistical reach that its global
alliance system provides, but the pacts with countries in Asia and Europe
become more contingent and less premised on a vision of a common security
community.
Finally, the new grand strategy attaches little value to international
stability. There is an unsentimental view in the unilateralist camp that the
traditions of the past must be shed. Whether it is withdrawal from the
Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty or the resistance to signing other formal
arms-control treaties, policymakers are convinced that the United States needs
to move beyond outmoded Cold War thinking. Administration officials have noted
with some satisfaction that America's withdrawal from the ABM Treaty did not
lead to a global arms race but actually paved the way for a historic
arms-reduction agreement between the United States and Russia. This move is
seen as a validation that moving beyond the old paradigm of great-power
relations will not bring the international house down. The world can withstand
radically new security approaches, and it will accommodate American
unilateralism as well. But stability is not an end in itself. The
administration's new hawkish policy toward North Korea, for example, might be
destabilizing to the region, but such instability might be the necessary price
for dislodging a dangerous and evil regime in Pyongyang.
In this brave new world, neoimperial thinkers contend that the older
realist and liberal grand strategies are not very helpful. American security
will not be ensured, as realist grand strategy assumes, by the preservation of
deterrence and stable relations among the major powers. In a world of
asymmetrical threats, the global balance of power is not the linchpin of war and
peace. Likewise, liberal strategies of building order around open trade and
democratic institutions might have some long-term impact on terrorism, but they
do not address the immediacy of the threats. Apocalyptic violence is at our
doorstep, so efforts at strengthening the rules and institutions of the
international community are of little practical value. If we accept the
worst-case imagining of "we don't know what we don't know,"
everything else is secondary: international rules, traditions of partnership,
and standards of legitimacy. It is a war. And as Clausewitz famously remarked,
"War is such a dangerous business that the mistakes which come from
kindness are the very worst.".
IMPERIAL DANGERS
PITFALLS ACCOMPANY this neoimperial grand strategy, however. Unchecked U.S.
power, shorn of legitimacy and disentangled from the postwar norms and
institutions of the international order, will usher in a more hostile
international system, making it far harder to achieve American interests. The
secret of the United States' long brilliant run as the world's leading state
was its ability and willingness to exercise power within alliance and
multinational frameworks, which made its power and agenda more acceptable to
allies and other key states around the world. This achievement has now been put
at risk by the administration's new thinking.
The most immediate problem is that the neoimperialist approach is
unsustainable. Going it alone might well succeed in removing Saddam Hussein
from power, but it is far less certain that a strategy of counterproliferation,
based on American willingness to use unilateral force to confront dangerous
dictators, can work over the long term. An American policy that leaves the
United States alone to decide which states are threats and how best to deny
them weapons of mass destruction will lead to a diminishment of multilateral
mechanisms--most important of which is the nonproliferation regime.
The Bush administration has elevated the threat of WMD to the top of its
security agenda without investing its power or prestige in fostering,
monitoring, and enforcing nonproliferation commitments. The tragedy of
September 11 has given the Bush administration the authority and willingness to
confront the Iraqs of the world. But that will not be enough when even more
complicated cases come along--when it is not the use of force that is needed
but concerted multilateral action to provide sanctions and inspections. Nor is
it certain that a preemptive or preventive military intervention will go well; it
might trigger a domestic political backlash to American-led and
military-focused interventionism. America's well-meaning imperial strategy
could undermine the principled multilateral agreements, institutional
infrastructure, and cooperative spirit needed for the long-term success of
nonproliferation goals.
The specific doctrine of preemptive action poses a related problem:once the
United States feels it can take such a course, nothing will stop other
countries from doing the same. Does the United States want this doctrine in the
hands of Pakistan, or even China or Russia? After all, it would not require the
intervening state to first provide evidence for its actions. The United States
argues that to wait until all the evidence is in, or until authoritative
international bodies support action, is to wait too long. Yet that approach is
the only basis that the United States can use if it needs to appeal for
restraint in the actions of others. Moreover, and quite paradoxically,
overwhelming American conventional military might, combined with a policy of
preemptive strikes, could lead hostile states to accelerate programs to acquire
their only possible deterrent to the United States: WMD. This is another
version of the security dilemma, but one made worse by a neoimperial grand
strategy.
Another problem follows. The use of force to eliminate WMD capabilities or
overturn dangerous regimes is never simple, whether it is pursued unilaterally
or by a concert of major states. After the military intervention is over, the
target country has to be put back together. Peacekeeping and state building are
inevitably required, as are long-term strategies that bring the UN, the World
Bank, and the major powers together to orchestrate aid and other forms of
assistance. This is not heroic work, but it is utterly necessary. Peacekeeping
troops may be required for many years, even after a new regime is built.
Regional conflicts inflamed by outside military intervention must also be
calmed. This is the "long tail" of burdens and commitments that comes
with every major military action.
When these costs and obligations are added to America's imperial military
role, it becomes even more doubtful that the neoimperial strategy can be
sustained at home over the long haul--the classic problem of imperial
overstretch. The United States could keep its military predominance for decades
if it is supported by a growing and increasingly productive economy. But the
indirect burdens of cleaning up the political mess in terrorist-prone failed
states levy a hidden cost. Peacekeeping and state building will require
coalitions of states and multilateral agencies that can be brought into the
proces only if the initial decisions about military intervention are hammered
out in consultation with other major states. America's older realist and
liberal grand strategies suddenly become relevant again.
A third problem with an imperial grand strategy is that it cannot generate
the cooperation needed to solve practical problems at the heart of the U.S.
foreign policy agenda. In the fight on terrorism, the United States needs
cooperation from European and Asian countries in intelligence, law enforcement,
and logistics. Outside the security sphere, realizing U.S. objectives depends
even more on a continuous stream of amicable working relations with major
states around the world. It needs partners for trade liberalization, global
financial stabilization, environmental protection, deterring transnational
organized crime, managing the rise of China, and a host of other thorny
challenges. But it is impossible to expect would-be partners to acquiesce to
America's self-appointed global security protectorate and then pursue business
as usual in all other domains.
The key policy tool for states confronting a unipolar and unilateral
America is to withhold cooperation in day-to-day relations with the United
States. One obvious means is trade policy; the European response to the recent
American decision to impose tariffs on imported steel is explicable in these
terms. This particular struggle concerns specific trade issues, but it is also
a struggle over how Washington exercises power. The United States may be a
unipolar military power, but economic and political power is more evenly
distributed across the globe. The major states may not have much leverage in
directly restraining American military policy, but they can make the United
States pay a price in other areas.
Finally, the neoimperial grand strategy poses a wider problem for the
maintenance of American unipolar power. It steps into the oldest trap of
powerful imperial states: self-encirclement. When the most powerful state in
the world throws its weight around, unconstrained by rules or norms of
legitimacy, it risks a backlash. Other countries will bridle at an international
order in which the United States plays only by its own rules. The proponents of
the new grand strategy have assumed that the United States can single-handedly
deploy military power abroad and not suffer untoward consequences; relations
will be coarser with friends and allies, they believe, but such are the costs
of leadership. But history shows that powerful states tend to trigger
self-encirclement by their own overestimation of their power. Charles V, Louis
XIV, Napoleon, and the leaders of post-Bismarck Germany sought to expand their
imperial domains and impose a coercive order on others. Their imperial orders
were all brought down when other countries decided they were not prepared to
live in a world dominated by an overweening coercive state. America's imperial
goals and modus operandi are much more limited and benign than were those of
age-old emperors. But a hard-line imperial grand strategy runs the risk that
history will repeat itself.
BRING IN THE OLD
WARS CHANGE world politics, and so too will America's war on terrorism. How
great states fight wars, how they define the stakes, how they make the peace in
its aftermath--all give lasting shape to the international system that emerges
after the guns fall silent. In mobilizing their societies for battle, wartime
leaders have tended to describe the military struggle as more than simply the
defeat of an enemy. Woodrow Wilson sent U.S. troops to Europe not only to stop
the kaiser's army but to destroy militarism and usher in a worldwide democratic
revolution. Franklin Roosevelt saw the war with Germany and Japan as a struggle
to secure the "four great freedoms." The Atlantic Charter was a
statement of war aims that called not just for the defeat of fascism but for a
new dedication to social welfare and human rights within an open and stable
world system. To advance these visions, Wilson and Roosevelt proposed new
international rules and mechanisms of cooperation. Their message was clear: If
you bear the burdens of war, we, your leaders, will use this dreadful conflict
to usher in a more peaceful and decent order among states. Fighting the war had
as much to do with building global relations as it did with vanquishing an
enemy.
Bush has not fully articulated a vision of postwar international order,
aside from defining the struggle as one between freedom and evil. The world has
seen Washington take determined steps to fight terrorism, but it does not yet
have a sense of Bush's larger, positive agenda for a strengthened and more
decent international order.
This failure explains why the sympathy and goodwill generated around the
world for the United States after September 11 quickly disappeared. Newspapers
that once proclaimed, "We are all Americans," now express distrust
toward America. The prevailing view is that the United States seems prepared to
use its power to go after terrorists and evil regimes, but not to use it to
help build a more stable and peaceful world order. The United States appears to
be degrading the rules and institutions of international community, not
enhancing them. To the rest of the world, neoimperial thinking has more to do
with exercising power than with exercising leadership.
In contrast, America's older strategic orientations--balance-of-power
realism and liberal multilateralism--suggest a mature world power that seeks
stability and pursues its interests in ways that do not fundamentally threaten
the positions of other states. They are strategies of co-option and
reassurance. The new imperial grand strategy presents the United States very
differently: a revisionist state seeking to parlay its momentary power
advantages into a world order in which it runs the show. Unlike the hegemonic
states of the past, the United States does not seek territory or outright
political domination in Europe or Asia; "America has no empire to extend
or utopia to establish," Bush noted in his West Point address. But the
sheer power advantages that the United States possesses and the doctrines of
preemption and counterterrorism that it is articulating do unsettle governments
and people around the world. The costs could be high. The last thing the United
States wants is for foreign diplomats and government leaders to ask, How can we
work around, undermine, contain, and retaliate against U.S. power?
Rather than invent a new grand strategy, the United States should
reinvigorate its older strategies, those based on the view that America's
security partnerships are not simply instrumental tools but critical components
of an American-led world political order that should be preserved. U.S. power
is both leveraged and made more legitimate and user-friendly by these
partnerships. The neoimperial thinkers are haunted by the specter of
catastrophic terrorism and seek a radical reordering of America's role in the
world. America's commanding unipolar power and the advent of frightening new
terrorist threats feed this imperial temptation. But it is a grand strategic
vision that, taken to the extreme, will leave the world more dangerous and
divided--and the United States less secure.
Added material.
G. JOHN IKENBERRY is Peter F. Krogh Professor of Geopolitics and Global
Justice at Georgetown University and a regular book reviewer for Foreign