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The bottom chessboard is the realm of transnational relations that cross borders outside government control. This realm includes actors as diverse as bankers electronically transferring sums larger than most national budgets at one extreme, and terrorists transferring weapons or hackers disrupting Internet operations at the other. On this bottom board, power is widely dispersed, and it makes no sense to speak of uni-polarity, multi-polarity or hegemony. Those who recommend a hegemonic American foreign policy based on such traditional descriptions of American power are relying on woefully inadequate analysis. When you are in a three-dimensional game, you will lose if you focus only on the top board and fail to notice the other boards and the vertical connections among them.
A shrinking and merging world
Because of its leading position in the information revolution and its past investment in traditional power resources, the United States will probably remain the world's most powerful single country well into this new century. While potential coalitions to check American power could be created, it is unlikely that they would become firm alliances unless the United States handles its hard coercive power in an overbearing unilateral manner that undermines its soft or attractive power - the important ability to get others to want what you want.
As Josef Joffe, editor of Die Zeit, has written, "Unlike centuries past, when war was the great arbiter, today the most interesting types of power do not come out of the barrel of a gun." Today there is a much bigger payoff in "getting others to want what you want", and that has to do with cultural attraction and ideology, along with agenda-setting and economic incentives for co-operation. Soft power is particularly important in dealing with issues arising from the bottom chessboard of transnational relations.
The real challenges to American power are coming on cat's feet in the night and, ironically, the temptation to unilateralism may ultimately weaken the United States. The contemporary information revolution and the globalization that goes with it are transforming and shrinking the world. At the beginning of this new century, these two forces have combined to increase American power. But, with time, technology will spread to other countries and peoples, and America's relative pre-eminence will diminish.
For example, today the American twentieth of the global population represents more than half the Internet. In a decade or two, Chinese will probably be the dominant language of the Internet. It will not dethrone English as a lingua franca, but at some point in the future the Asian cyber-community and economy will loom larger than the American.
Even more important, the information revolution is creating virtual communities and networks that cut across national borders. Transnational corporations and non-governmental actors (terrorists included) will play larger roles. Many of these organizations will have soft power of their own as they attract citizens into coalitions that cut across national boundaries. It is worth noting that, in the 1990s, a coalition based on NGOs created a landmines treaty against the opposition of the strongest bureaucracy in the strongest country.
September 11th was a terrible symptom of the deeper changes that were already occurring in the world. Technology has been diffusing power away from governments, and empowering individuals and groups to play roles in world politics--including wreaking massive destruction--which were once reserved to governments. Privatization has been increasing, and terrorism is the privatization of war. Globalization is shrinking distance, and events in faraway places, like Afghanistan, can have a great impact on American lives.
At the end of the cold war, many observers were haunted by the spectre of the return of American isolationism. But in addition to the historic debate between isolationists and internationalists, there was a split within the internationalist camp between unilateralists and multilateralists. Some, like the columnist Charles Krauthammer, urge a "new unilateralism" whereby the United States refuses to play the role of "docile international citizen" and unashamedly pursues its own ends. They speak of a uni-polar world because of America's unequalled military power. But military power alone cannot produce the outcomes Americans want on many of the issues that matter to their safety and prosperity.
As an assistant secretary of defense in 1994-95, I would be the last to deny the importance of military security. It is like oxygen. Without it, all else pales. America's military power is essential to global stability and an essential part of the response to terrorism. But the metaphor of war should not blind us to
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