An official German account of the Bremen meeting of the Western European Union in May 1999 reported,

"Minister Joschka Fischer and Defense Minister Rudolf Scharping urge a rapid buildup of common EU forces to master crises and conflicts in Europe even without participation of the United States. The Kosovo conflict expresses how urgent and indispensable this buildup will be for the future of Europe, declared Fischer."

At the Helsinki summit of the EU in December 1999, the Europeans announced their intention to field an all-European force of 50,000 to 60,000 men by 2003. While the position of all the European allies is that NATO remains the foundation of European security, German Greens have hailed the EU's all-European defense project precisely as the beginning of Europe's "emancipation" from the United States.

Japan's attitude toward American pre-eminence is somewhat more complicated. While the end of the Soviet threat led many in Japan to question why the Americans were still hanging around, the North Korean menace and the emergence of China have supplied a persuasive answer to the question. Japan's assertiveness on many issues has also been dampened by its disappointing economic performance in recent years. Yet experts agree that Japanese nationalism is re-emerging.

Japanese officials now routinely stress "autonomy" from the United States as a central theme. Other Japanese are calling on their country to rewrite its American-drafted constitution; to forge a new identity as a bridge between East and West (rather than as just an appendage of the West); to seek greater influence and empowerment vis-à-vis the United States by becoming more active in the United Nations; and to challenge U.S. dominance of international economic policy. And in its own way, the debacle of the Seattle meeting of the World Trade Organization last December may have had some of the same impact in Japan as the Kosovo crisis had in Europe. "The failure poured cold water on the overconfidence of the United States", trumpeted Asahi Shimbun in an editorial. "The conference was an occasion that the other developed countries and developing countries said no to the United States, which is selfish and over-proud of itself as the sole superpower of the world."

. . . And the Third World Joins In

MANY countries in the Third World as well view the emergence of the United States as the sole superpower as a mixed blessing. During the Cold War, they had played the two superpowers against each other. The Soviet collapse left the international system too "unbalanced" for some countries' tastes.
Egyptian Foreign Minister Amre Moussa, in a revealing 1996 interview in Middle East Quarterly, lamented the "lack of international balance" now that the Soviet Union was gone. This represented a remarkable shift from the policy of Anwar Sadat, who had expelled the Soviet presence from Egypt and cast Egypt's lot with the United States, calculating (even while the Soviet Union still existed) that America held "most of the cards" in the Middle East.

A more extreme statement comes from the egregious Mahathir Mohamad, prime minister of Malaysia. His speech to the UN General Assembly last September 29 was a diatribe complaining that the international system was completely unbalanced without the Soviets. It is hard to say whether Mahathir speaks only for himself or whether he simply says openly what many other Third World leaders believe privately. In any case, his indictment is worth quoting at length:
"With [the destruction of the Eastern bloc] the liberal democratic free market capitalists see no more need to be gentle in spreading their systems or in profiting from them. No one would be allowed any other political or economic system except what is prescribed by the sole dominant bloc. The true ugliness of Western capitalism revealed itself, backed by the military might of capitalism's greatest proponent.

For the small countries the demise of the Eastern bloc is a major disaster. Now they are exposed to pressures which they cannot resist. . . .
[T]he principle that prevailed in the third quarter of the 20th Century was that no one should interfere in the internal affairs of a nation. That in fact was the essence of independence. As long as the world was divided into Eastern and Western blocs this principle was respected.

But then a President decided that his country had a right and a duty to oversee that human rights are not abused anywhere in the world irrespective of borders and the independence of nations. No one conferred this right on this crusading President. But small things like that was [sic] not going to stop him. . . .
For the poor and the weak, for the aspiring tigers and dragons of Asia, the 21st Century does not look very promising. Everything will continue to be cooked in the West. . . . And what is from the West is universal. Other values and cultures are superfluous and unnecessary. If they remain there will be a clash of civilizations. To avoid this there should be only one civilization in the world. Thus the Globalized world will be totally uniform. Variety is equal to being intransigent and must therefore be eliminated."

Keeping Our Cool

Most of this reaction to American pre-eminence is inevitable, and much of it is, in fact, healthy. For our allies in particular, the end of the Cold War is an opportunity to restore some balance to a relationship of dependency. Such relationships are by their nature corrosive, breeding resentments on both sides. A U.S. Congress that has been complaining for years about inequitable "burden-sharing" should be pleased if allies now seek greater self-reliance. The issue with the Europeans, then, becomes a narrower one. As even the French agree, the Atlantic Alliance remains important, and valued, on both sides of the Atlantic. Therefore the task of U.S. policy is to develop the European Union's new defense policy and structure in a way that complements the Alliance and remains within its broad framework, rather than disrupting its unity. Assuming the anti-American rhetoric can be kept under control, the result could be positive, especially if the Europeans actually develop capabilities for handling a variety of crises and peacekeeping chores. With Japan, similarly, sufficient dangers exist to justify continuation of the security alliance, but a more equal strategic partnership would be healthy.

As for the general foreign complaint that the world is "unbalanced", there is not much the United States can do about that, short of collapsing or abdicating its international role. The demise of the Soviet Union did, alas, vindicate market economics and the idea of freedom; if this is painful for governments that would prefer to govern by contrary principles, then they have a problem that we cannot solve for them. The laws of economics apply to everyone, and we live in an age when every authoritarian regime faces a problem of legitimacy. We could not shield others from these forces even if we wanted to.

Yet, all this having been said, the United States has a problem too. Americans need to understand that other countries are not all eager and happy to fall into line under our leadership. Europe is the continent where the balance of power was invented; for most nations the fact of a single predominant power triggers a reflex to build counterweights. Probably we should not take it so personally; it is a survival instinct of smaller countries throughout history. It is a law of geopolitics -- something that should be a surprise only to those who do not know geopolitics.

U.S. policymakers would also do well to remember that America's predominance may not last forever. This is not because our physical power will be matched anytime soon; William Wohlforth has made an overwhelming case that America's position of unipolar preponderance is probably going to be quite durable. The problem is rather that policy ineptitude could render that predominant power less impressive. Whether our physical predominance translates into actual influence over events will depend on intangibles such as our political will and staying power, the credibility of our commitments, our perceived willingness or unwillingness to take risks and bear costs, our reputation for reliability and competence. All these depend on our performance over time. They could all be badly weakened by a major policy fiasco -- such as a failed military intervention.

The Pentagon has a phrase, "asymmetric strategies", which refers to the strategies by which smaller powers seek to exploit the vulnerabilities of a stronger power. Lord knows we have such vulnerabilities -- and others are eagerly searching for them. (Chinese strategists, for example, have analyzed the 1991 Gulf War and satisfied themselves that if Saddam Hussein had not committed a few key errors, the outcome would have been quite different.) The intensity of rogue states' pursuit of weapons of mass destruction, moreover, undoubtedly derives from their conviction that such a capability would prove a great "equalizer", significantly compounding America's reluctance to use its power in some hypothetical future confrontation.

Finally, there is the broader issue of grand strategy: how a superpower can maximize its chances of preserving its advantageous position and minimize, for example, the risks of provoking countervailing coalitions. Some of this is merely a question of style. Triumphalism, gloating, bullying, lecturing about our "indispensability" -- all these are counterproductive, and also avoidable. Sometimes the matter seems trivial; for example, President Clinton's forcing the embarrassed Helmut Kohl and Jacques Chirac to wear cowboy boots at the Denver G-7 summit in 1997 caused a wave of resentful press commentary in Europe. But peremptory American impositions of policy -- the insistence on only three new admittees to NATO in the first round at the Madrid summit, after some allies had publicly committed themselves to five; the abrupt U.S. veto of Germany's first nominee for IMF director this year -- have the same effect. Whatever the substantive merits of the U.S. position in such instances, the style rankles. Congress' recent habit of imposing third-country sanctions on allies over Cuba, Libya and Iran forms a part of this background. Again, even if we are correct on the merits (which we often are), we need to realize that in the eyes of our allies there is a rapidly lengthening list of examples of "unilateralism", if not high-handedness.

Josef Joffe has offered a model of grand strategy for the United States to follow. He sees America as the hub of a wheel, with other major powers as the spokes. America's central, pivotal, advantageous position rests not only on our strength, but on the fact that all other powers either need us for something, or want something from us, are afraid of crossing us, or are afraid of leaving us in bed with one of their rivals. Europe and Japan still need us for security, as a hedge against Russia and China; Russia and China worry about Japan, and both also wish to be part of the Western economic system; and so on. The United States continues, as Sadat said, to hold most of the cards.

Deterrence of major challenges to the world balance of power must certainly remain a key component of U.S. policy. But Joffe's concept is an argument for maintaining positive links with all the other major players, so that each continues to have a stake in its relations with America. This keeps us in the position of master of the geopolitical game. It is a logical formula for a pre-eminent power that wants to pre-empt counter-coalitions and retain influence over events. The United States has an excellent chance to prolong its advantage by a conscious strategy of this kind.

Conscious strategy does not come easily to American leaders, accustomed as they are to making policy by a series of ad hoc, unrelated, "pragmatic" decisions. Nor is subtlety our strong suit. But we would be well advised to give this some thought.

Essay Types: Essay