|
The United States is likely to be the world's top power for many years. This brings challenges that it should not try to face alone, writes Joseph Nye
Shortly after September 11th, President Bush's father observed that just as Pearl Harbor awakened this country from the notion that we could somehow avoid the call of duty to defend freedom in Europe and Asia in World War Two, so, too, should this most recent surprise attack erase the concept in some quarters that America can somehow go it alone in the fight against terrorism or in anything else for that matter.
But America's allies have begun to wonder whether that is the lesson that has been learned - or whether the Afghanistan campaign's apparent success shows that unilateralism works just fine. The United States, that argument goes, is so dominant that it can largely afford to go it alone.
It is true that no nation since Rome has loomed so large above the others, but even Rome eventually collapsed. Only a decade ago, the conventional wisdom lamented an America in decline. Bestseller lists featured books that described America's fall. Japan would soon become "Number One". That view was wrong at the time, and when I wrote "Bound to Lead" in 1989, I, like others, predicted the continuing rise of American power. But the new conventional wisdom that America is invincible is equally dangerous if it leads to a foreign policy that combines unilateralism, arrogance and parochialism.
A number of adherents of "realist" international-relations theory have also expressed concern about America's staying-power. Throughout history, coalitions of countries have arisen to balance dominant powers, and the search for traditional shifts in the balance of power and new state challengers is well under way. Some see China as the new enemy; others envisage a Russia-China-India coalition as the threat. But even if China maintains high growth rates of 6% while the United States achieves only 2%, it will not equal the United States in income per head (measured in purchasing-power parity) until the last half of the century.
Still others see a uniting Europe as a potential federation that will challenge the United States for primacy. But this forecast depends on a high degree of European political unity, and a low state of transatlantic relations. Although realists raise an important point about the levelling of power in the international arena, their quest for new cold-war-style challengers is largely barking up the wrong tree. They are ignoring deeper changes in the distribution and nature of power in the contemporary world.
Three kinds of power
At first glance, the disparity between American power and that of the rest of the world looks overwhelming. In terms of military power, the United States is the only country with both nuclear weapons and conventional forces with global reach. American military expenditures are greater than those of the next eight countries combined, and it leads in the information-based "revolution in military affairs". In economic size, America's 31% share of world product (at market prices) is equal to the next four countries combined (Japan, Germany, Britain and France). In terms of cultural prominence, the United States is far and away the number-one film and television exporter in the world. It also attracts the most foreign students each year to its colleges and universities.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, some analysts described the resulting world as uni-polar, others as multi-polar. Both are wrong, because each refers to a different dimension of power that can no longer be assumed to be homogenized by military dominance. Uni-polarity exaggerates the degree to which the United States is able to get the results it wants in some dimensions of world politics, but multi-polarity implies, wrongly, several roughly equal countries.
Instead, power in a global information age is distributed among countries in a pattern that resembles a complex three-dimensional chess game. On the top chessboard, military power is largely uni-polar. To repeat, the United States is the only country with both intercontinental nuclear weapons and large state-of-the-art air, naval and ground forces capable of global deployment. But on the middle chessboard, economic power is multi-polar, with the United States, Europe and Japan representing two-thirds of world product, and with China's dramatic growth likely to make it the fourth big player. On this economic board, the United States is not a hegemon, and must often bargain as an equal with Europe.
|
|
