The Frugal Superpower: America's Global Leadership in a Cash-Strapped Era Read online

  The Balkan interventions, and those in Somalia and Haiti, did not command appreciable public support because Americans, like other people, are disposed to risk the lives of their countrymen only for the sake of vital interests: that is, to prevent harm to themselves. Protecting others from harm, which is what humanitarian intervention involves, qualifies as a form of social work: admirable in principle, perhaps, but not something for which most Americans believe they should shed their soldiers’ blood or spend their own tax dollars.

  The public did believe that American interests were at stake in Afghanistan and Iraq. Afghanistan, after all, was the home base of the perpetrators of the attacks of September 11, which killed almost 3,000 people. In the wake of those attacks, the Bush administration persuaded the public that Saddam posed a similar, even a related, threat. The Congress did approve the Bush interventions, but those, too, lost popularity when the mission changed from removing a dangerous government to trying to keep order and construct functioning public institutions.

  Avoiding military interventions and state-building is one way to lower the expense of American foreign policy. Another is to share with others the costs of the policies the country does carry out. This is particularly attractive because it offers the prospect of sustaining the existing array of policies while paying less for them. American policy-makers will therefore attempt to rely, to the extent possible, on international cooperation.

  THE LIMITS OF COOPERATION

  In international relations, cooperation is considered the best of all possible words. Articles, books, even entire scholarly journals are devoted to trying to discover the conditions in which this practice flourishes. The cardinal sin of the Bush administration, according to some of its critics, was its failure to cooperate with other countries, opting instead for cooperation’s disreputable opposite—unilateralism.

  One reason for the glowing reputation of cooperation is that it connotes the absence of the worst feature of international relations: war. Countries that are cooperating are not, it is presumed, fighting each other. Another source of the bright nimbus of approbation that surrounds the idea of cooperation, especially in the United States, is that when countries cooperate they often share the costs and burdens of a common endeavor.

  The decades since the end of World War II constitute the golden age of international cooperation. The fact that the wealthiest countries on the planet, those of North America, Western Europe, and Japan, confronted a common enemy—the Soviet Union and international communism—in the wake of World War II and had similar political and economic systems, gave them similar international goals. That made cooperation among them easier than had previously been the case.

  Cooperation becomes institutionalized through international organizations. The post-1945 era is also, not surprisingly, the golden age of international organization. Indeed, most of the international organizations that have existed since the dawn of recorded history—certainly the vast majority of those other than temporary alliances and empires—came into existence for the first time after World War II.

  In this period organizations for the promotion and regulation of cross-border economic activity in particular have proliferated. But cooperation also takes place outside the boundaries of international organizations. There is no single overarching international antiterrorism organization, for example, but national police forces and intelligence agencies have cooperated, especially since September 11, 2001, to track and neutralize the world’s terrorist networks. Their record in preventing attacks is impressive, if not perfect. Still, even in its golden age, international cooperation, especially the kind that could supplement or replace the American role in the world, has severe limits.

  Sovereign states do not cooperate when they do not agree on what they want. In the worst case, of course, when their goals are directly opposed, they sometimes go to war. Cooperation may also fail because, while countries do share the same goals, their preferred policies for achieving these goals differ. In the face of the global recession that began in 2008, the American government enacted a large stimulus package, which was financed by debt. The countries of the European Union, just as badly hurt by the economic downturn, spent less public money to boost private output, in part because they worried more than did the Americans about the dangers of increasing their indebtedness.

  Countries can fail to cooperate as well because, while they agree on the goals they seek, their priorities among these goals differ. While all the surrounding countries disapprove of North Korea’s nuclear weapons program, for example, South Korea and China have never applied maximal pressure to stop it by closing their borders to all trade with Pyongyang, because they feared the collapse of the communist regime if they did. Such a collapse would have imposed high costs on them: China would have lost a buffer state on its southern border, and South Korea would have had to accept a flood of refugees and pay heavily for the reconstruction of the North.

  Neither wanted North Korea to possess nuclear weapons, or indeed had any affection for the bizarre hereditary communist regime there; but because the cost of that regime’s collapse would be so high for both of them, each was willing to allow North Korea to make a bomb if that was the price they had to pay to keep the regime in place. For America, by contrast, the priorities were reversed: Washington sought above all to keep North Korea from acquiring nuclear weapons, and if the policies necessary to achieve this goal led to the end of the communist government, that was perfectly acceptable to the United States. This was so because a North Korean bomb threatened American interests in a way that the end of communist rule did not. The debris from the collapse of that regime would strike North Korea’s Asian neighbors, but little if any of it seemed likely to reach North America.

  Another obstacle to cooperation between and among countries, even when they have the same order of priorities, is the universal desire to minimize the expense of achieving their shared goals. Countries, like many individuals, are happy to let others pick up the check. This universal syndrome is what economists call the “free rider problem” and is the major obstacle to international cooperation in the twenty-first century. No one wants to pay to ride the bus, but if no one pays, the bus company goes bankrupt and no one rides at all.

  Bus companies can deploy fare collectors to ensure that passengers pay, and governments can extract taxes from their citizens to purchase what everybody needs—such things as national defense and clean air, known as “public goods”—but for which nobody wants to pay. Since there is no world government with the power to tax, however, cooperation among countries to achieve common goals is voluntary, and there is less of it than is optimal. This is the greatest impediment the United States faces in securing the kind of cooperation that would help sustain its global roles in an era of scarcity.

  The wealthy countries of Western Europe and Japan share America’s basic political and economic institutions, its political and social values, and, on the whole, its preferences for the way the international system is organized and operated. They are the obvious candidates to cooperate with the United States. Indeed, since 1945 these free-market democracies have cooperated among themselves extensively. They formed the core membership of the most important and successful international organizations. The military alliances that bound them together helped to win the Cold War; the economic organizations that they established contributed to the long period of economic growth after 1945.

  Yet as partners for the United States in the management of the international system in the second decade of the twenty-first century, the Europeans and Japanese have their limitations, especially when it comes to security. In the twenty-first century, the use of military force is not, to understate the matter, their strong suit. Japan’s constitution places strict limits on the military operations that the country may carry out. Moreover, Japan’s misdeeds during its campaign of imperial conquest in the 1930s and 1940s have not, even seven decades later, been entirely forgiven by the countries that were their victi
ms. This makes Japan a poor candidate to supplement the American effort to police the Asia-Pacific region and elsewhere.

  The countries of Europe, by contrast, have forgiven the Germans, who behaved toward them as the Japanese did in Asia, and, with Germany, have established an economic union that aspires to a global political and economic role. Although their professed ambitions have expanded as the European Union has grown larger and become more closely integrated, the European countries’ individual and collective capacities to fulfill these ambitions have not. Despite Europe’s size and wealth, and despite the histories of several of its countries as great military powers, it has very modest and generally declining military forces, and the Europeans are reluctant to use even the modest forces that they have.

  Had the European Union’s designated foreign policy spokesman, Javier Solana, gone to Washington before the launching of the Iraq war and told the Bush administration that Europe would furnish half the forces necessary to topple Saddam’s regime if, but only if, the United States agreed to continue the diplomatic efforts to verify Iraq’s lack of weapons of mass destruction for at least six months, it would have been impossible for American officials, no matter how determined they were to invade Iraq, to refuse. No such offer was made, of course, nor could have been made, and not only because the countries of Europe were divided over the wisdom of forcibly removing the Iraqi dictator from power. They were also incapable of providing half, or even a much smaller fraction, of the forces needed for the invasion.

  While the Europeans did agree to join the American-led effort to pacify post-Taliban Afghanistan, they performed poorly there. They provided fewer troops than they promised and some of them—the Germans are a conspicuous example—imposed such stringent conditions on the operations their troops could perform as to render them all but worthless in military terms. The Western effort in Afghanistan faltered not because of a unilateral, overbearing America but rather because of a fragmented, under-performing Europe. This is likely to be the case for other such undertakings in the future. For the global services involving security that the United States has furnished to the rest of the world, cooperation with Japan and Europe promises all too little assistance.

  While the world enjoys far more international cooperation in the twenty-first century than it did in the first half of the twentieth, or in any century before that, therefore, other countries are unlikely to step in to fill such gaps in global governance as the economic constraints on American foreign policy may create. The United States will still have major, in some cases exclusive, responsibility for quasi-governmental tasks that are vital to global order: providing reassurance, thwarting nuclear proliferation, and furnishing security for international economic activity; but it will have to carry out those tasks with fewer resources than in the past. Just how successful America will be will depend on how formidable are the challenges to doing so that it confronts. That, in turn, will depend on what happens beyond North America, on what other countries do, and especially on the foreign policies of the planet’s two large, nuclear-armed, formerly orthodox communist countries: China and Russia.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THE RETURN OF GREAT-POWER POLITICS?

  THE GLOBAL SECURITY ORDER

  The international system has two overlapping parts: the global economy and the international security order. The United States plays a leading role in both. Malfunctions in either can be costly, but while a breakdown in the international economic system makes people poorer, the cost of a failure in the security order, such as the two world wars of the first half of the twentieth century, is measured in lives lost—in the case of those two conflicts, tens of millions of them.

  Following September 15, 2008, the global economy experienced more turbulence and greater destruction of wealth than at any time since the Great Depression of the 1930s. The international security order, by contrast, remained largely tranquil. The post–Cold War era has in fact been calmer than any period in more than a century and a half, and in some ways calmer than at any time in the past five hundred years, because of a development virtually without historical precedent: the absence of acute military rivalries between and among the great powers. For almost all of recorded history the possibility and occasionally the fact of war dominated the policies of the strongest members of the international system, which vied for power, influence, and the control of territory. They eyed each other warily, armed themselves in anticipation of war, and sometimes fought the wars for which they were constantly preparing. The most recent chapter of this age-old story was the Cold War. Fortunately, it did not erupt into an all-out military conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union. For most of recorded history before it, however, the life of a great power was costly, dangerous, nerve-racking, and sometimes extremely bloody. That has not been the case in the twenty-first century. Since the end of World War II no great-power war has been waged, and since the end of the Cold War none has seemed at all likely.

  The United States contributes to twenty-first-century peace in Europe and East Asia through the reassurance that the presence of American military forces provides to the countries of these two regions, but the extraordinary tranquillity of the global security order of the twenty-first century does not depend entirely on what the United States does. The American role in Europe and East Asia supports a broader trend: the global spread of three great ideas. The first and most important of them is the idea of peace as the most desirable state of international relations. That idea is reinforced by two others: the free market as the optimal method of organizing economic activity, and democracy as the most appropriate form of government.

  War was a normal, natural, or at least unavoidable feature of international life for centuries. Beginning in the second half of the twentieth century, however, peace became the norm because war had grown so costly. The two world wars killed tens of millions of people and laid waste to millions of farms, factories, and homes all over the world. At the end of World War II the United States introduced a weapon—the atomic bomb—capable of reducing major cities to rubble with a single blast. In the nuclear age, war lost its traditional function as a way of using armed force to achieve political goals. A nuclear war of almost any magnitude would be a senseless spasm of mass destruction for all involved.

  The spread of free markets reinforced the global commitment to peace in several ways. It offered a new and peaceful path to wealth. Rather than conquering territory, which traditionally required war, countries increased their wealth by participating in the global marketplace. After World War II, Japan renounced its imperial aspirations, concentrated on international trade, and became unprecedentedly affluent. So successful were market economies in creating wealth in the second half of the past century that the goal of enhancing the material well-being of its citizens replaced expanding the territory it controlled as the principal objective of almost all the world’s governments. Deng Xiaoping, who led China away from orthodox communist economics, coined the slogan “to get rich is glorious.” For most of the world’s governments in the twenty-first century it would be more accurate to say that to get rich became mandatory, and they understood that peace, not war, lends itself to getting rich. Many of them prospered by trading with countries with which they had once engaged in bitter, brutal, bloody conflict.

  Finally, the rules, habits, institutions, and values needed to operate a free-market economy, when transferred to the political sphere, tend to promote democratic politics. The popularity of free markets had a great deal to do with the flowering of democracy all over the world in the last quarter of the twentieth century, when the number of such regimes soared from thirty-five to more than one hundred. Democracies, in turn, as many studies have shown, tend to conduct less warlike foreign policies than countries with undemocratic governments. The spread of this form of government has therefore made the world of the twenty-first century more peaceful.

  It is the dominance of peace, democracy, and free markets, supplemented and bolste
red by the reassurance that the United States supplies, that have made the twenty-first century a peaceful period—so far. But their domination, and the global peace they underpin, are not necessarily destined to last forever; and the recent turmoil in the global economy does raise the possibility that their era of dominance will turn out to be a short one. The severe global economic downturn that the financial collapse of September 15, 2008, catalyzed threatens not only the American role in helping to maintain peace in the world but also the foundations of the stable twenty-first-century global security order itself. The international economic and security systems are not, after all, hermetically sealed off one from the other. To the contrary, each affects the other, and in the 1930s economics had a profound—and profoundly malignant—effect on politics. The crisis of the global economy led to the outbreak of the bloodiest episode in the history of international security, World War II, by bringing to power in Germany and Japan the brutal governments that started that dreadful conflict.

  In the 1930s the financial crash and the high unemployment that followed all over the world discredited the shaky democratic governments in place in Germany and Japan, which fell from power. The fascist regimes that replaced them proclaimed themselves models of governance for the rest of the world and did win admirers and imitators in other countries. These regimes disdained democratic politics and practiced extensive (although not, as in the case of the Soviet Union, total) government control of economic affairs. Far from believing in peace, the two enthusiastically embraced aggressive war for the purpose of expanding the territories under their sway and subjugating—even, in some cases, attempting to exterminate—the people living there.