American Power, Past and Present

This week in the Book Club, Niall Ferguson and Robert Kagan discuss John Lewis Gaddis' Surprise, Security, and the American Experience and Walter Russell Mead's Power, Terror, Peace, and War: America's Grand Strategy in a World at Risk.

This week's reading

Niall Ferguson is Herzog Professor of History at the Stern School of Business, New York University, senior research fellow of Jesus College, Oxford, and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford. He is the author most recently of Colossus: The Price of America's Empire. Robert Kagan is a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the author most recently of Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order.

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Dear Bob,

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Now that you have surrendered, I will get off my imperial hobbyhorse! What's more, I'll agree with you wholeheartedly that the key point raised in both these stimulating essays is "the difficulty of reconciling [American] hegemony with international cooperation." The question, in short, is how to make unipolarity attractive instead of repellant, because world power without legitimacy is not really a sustainable proposition. But, of course, those old British imperialists understood that. That's why Lord Salisbury was scornful of those who advocated "splendid isolation." (Unfortunately, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld didn't appear to realize last year that this was intended as an ironic oxymoron. Splendid it ain't.)

Let's not caricature history. The United States today is not wholly isolated. You've got us—or at least our prime minister. Nor (though it seems to have slipped your mind) did the United States defeat Germany and Japan in isolation. (We were the ones who were isolated before Pearl Harbor.) But John Gaddis is surely right to argue that, after America belatedly entered the Second World War, it embarked on a new era of multilateralism.

According to Gaddis, it was Franklin Roosevelt who supplanted the "unilateralist tradition" of John Quincy Adams with an alternate vision of a multilateral world governed by a great power junta: first the "Four Policemen" (the U.S., the U.S.S.R., the U.K., and China), then the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council (the four globocops plus France). Like Adams, to be sure, Roosevelt aspired to American hegemony but recognized that global rather than just hemispherical dominance could only be based on "consent." This continued to be true even in the bipolar era of the Cold War. The alliance system that sprang up in Europe and Asia was consensual, not imperial—or rather it was what the Norwegian historian Geir Lundestad has nicely called an "empire by invitation."

So, why—and when—did this era of multilateralism end? Strangely, the dramatic denouement of the Cold War scarcely features in Gaddis' analysis. The historical "surprise" that he sees as crucial was 9/11, despite the fact that in many ways 11/9—the date in 1989 when the Berlin Wall came down—dealt a much more severe blow to multilateralism. Gaddis himself notes that the Cold War had fostered Western unity for the simple reason that "there was something worse" than U.S. hegemony—namely Soviet conquest. That "something worse" disappeared on 11/9.

By contrast, Mead sees the entire 1980s as an economic turning point. American dominance today, he suggests, originated in the shift from Keynesian, corporatist policies—which had failed in the 1970s—back to laissez faire liberalism. (In Mead's terms, this was a shift from "Fordism" to "millennial capitalism.") Successive presidents from Reagan through Bush I and Clinton to Bush II gave globalization their backing, and the result was a dramatic spurt forward in growth, not only for the United States but for those countries who adopted similar policies. Forget about NATO, Mead seems to be telling us; focus on the WTO. And that might help explain the breakdown of multilateralism in the non-economic sphere. For free trade is not (despite what Richard Cobden believed) synonymous with international harmony.

In emphasizing 9/11 as a turning point, Gaddis seems to forget that in the wake of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, there was in fact a brief recrudescence of multilateralism, amid worldwide expressions of solidarity with the United States. No one seriously opposed regime change in Afghanistan; indeed, other NATO members were keen to help. The real turning point—when "consensus collapsed"—came last year, when Iraq was invaded. And that could have happened anyway, even if there had been no 9/11, since (as Mead rightly points out) the containment of Saddam with sanctions and weapons inspections was not an indefinitely sustainable policy.

Both authors discern the Wilsonian streak at the heart of Bush's national security strategy—something Bush's less sophisticated liberal critics tend to overlook. All that messianic talk about bringing the global democratic revolution to the Middle East, if necessary at gunpoint, is pure Wilson, minus the reverence for international law. As Gaddis wittily observes: "The formula is to be Fukuyama plus force: the United States must now finish the job that Woodrow Wilson started." (Mead has a more complex equation in which Bush's foreign policy equals the sum of the Wilsonian, Hamiltonian, Jeffersonian, and Jacksonian traditions of American diplomacy, but the point is essentially the same.)

But it's not the idealistic ends of Bush's policy that people abroad dislike so much as the means. As Gaddis argues, the problem with reverting to the Adams model of pre-emption, unilateralism, and hegemony is that "it plays badly at the beginning of the twenty-first" century. It's the old imperial truth, which the Victorians learned in the Indian Mutiny: "You can't sustain hegemony without consent."

Gaddis, the doyen of Cold War historians, evidently has a soft spot for his era of expertise. He looks back fondly at the pre-1989 system of cooperative alliances, which "balanced the leadership needed in seeking a common good against the flexibility required to satisfy individual interests." The trouble is—and here, Bob, you and I are in complete agreement—he doesn't really explain how multilateralism could be resuscitated in these changed times. To conclude that the United States should aim "to make the world safe for federalism" is pie in the sky for the simple reason that a world federation would strike most people as just a fancy label for our old friend … the American empire.

The obvious answer is that continued terrorist activity by Islamist zealots should eventually convince the Europeans that Bush is right to try for a radical transformation of the Middle East. There really is "something worse" out there—and it's been out there since at least the Iranian Revolution. We just haven't quite woken up to the fact that Osama Bin Laden is the Lenin of our time. Must we wait for the Islamist Stalin to appear?

I leave for the final round of this enjoyable chat my thoughts on Walter Russell Mead's three concrete suggestions for boosting the international legitimacy of the American imperium.

Best wishes,

Niall

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