The World America Made (11 page)

People sometimes hope that a concert of great powers
might be constituted today, but do today’s great powers share, as the Europeans briefly did, a vision of both international order and domestic legitimacy? Not many years ago, the answer might have seemed to be yes. In the 1990s most people believed the world had entered a period of convergence and consensus similar to that of the early nineteenth century, only this time not on behalf of conservatism, aristocracy, and monarchy but in favor of liberalism, free markets, and democracy. The 1990s were the End of History, the triumph, in the words of one scholar, of “the liberal vision of international order,” a world in which “democracy and markets flourished … globalization was enshrined as a progressive historical force, and ideology, nationalism and war were at a low ebb.”
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In the post–Cold War world, all the great powers were embracing liberalism, or so people wanted to believe: Russia under Boris Yeltsin; China in the midst of its economic liberalization. So the idea of an “international community” was reborn, and its task was to address the many “global issues”—disease, poverty, climate change, terrorism, ethnic conflict—on which all nations had common rather than conflicting interests.

But in the second decade of the twenty-first century, convergence feels like another idealistic illusion. The great powers do not agree on the sources of domestic legitimacy. The United States and its liberal allies naturally favor democracy. Russia and China, just as naturally, want a world that is safe for their autocracy. A new, multipolar order, were one to come into being, would include these two great-power autocracies as major players. If the history of the Concert of Europe is any guide, the lack
of agreement on what constitutes legitimate government will be an obstacle to cooperation at best and a source of conflict at worst. Samuel P. Huntington, writing in 1991, speculated that if “the Soviet Union and China become democracies like the other major powers, the probability of major interstate violence will be greatly reduced.” But, on the other hand, “a permanently divided world” was “likely to be a violent world.” In Lincolnesque fashion, he asked, “How long can an increasingly interdependent world survive part-democratic and part-authoritarian?”
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Those who understand that the present liberal order was built around American power have wrestled with the question of how to preserve it if and when that power fades. John Ikenberry, among others, has argued that the task of the United States in an era of declining influence is to establish international institutions and laws that can take root and sustain the order as America declines, and to persuade rising powers that they have an interest in participating in and maintaining those institutions and those international rules. In this way, the institutions can acquire a life of their own and can constrain even powerful nations that might otherwise be inclined to disrupt the liberal order. These stronger institutions and rules would eventually become substitutes for American power.

This idea of erecting self-sustaining liberal international institutions has tantalized Americans since the nation first became a great power at the end of the nineteenth century. George Kennan and other “realists” have bemoaned the American propensity to seek succor in international laws and institutions, hoping to “suppress the chaotic and dangerous aspirations of governments”
through a “system of legal rules and restraints.”
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But it is understandable that Americans would like a world order that was essentially self-regulating and self-sustaining. It is the answer to the conundrum of power and interest that so bedevils them—how to create a world conducive to American ideals and interests without requiring the costly and morally complex exercise of American power. Theodore Roosevelt thought in terms of an international consortium of great powers, working cooperatively to advance civilization—a dream shattered when those same great powers all but destroyed civilization themselves in 1914. Woodrow Wilson picked up the banner after the war, calling into being a League of Nations (in which his countrymen then refused to take part) that was meant to uphold laws and institutions backed by the collective strength of the liberal powers. The attempt was made again after World War II, with the founding of the United Nations, and again after the Cold War, when President George H. W. Bush spoke hopefully of a coming “New World Order,” in which “the rule of law supplants the rule of the jungle,” “nations recognize the shared responsibility for freedom and justice,” and the United Nations “performs as envisioned by its founders.”
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Many have seen the transition from American hegemony, or from any great-power arrangement, to a world of international laws and institutions as the final stage of human progress. The subordination of the individual nation-state to the collective will of all nations, the supplanting of nationalism by an international cosmopolitanism, the replication on the international scene of the legal and institutional restraints of American domestic
life—these goals remain as enticing to people today as they have to generations past. The only difference is that in the past, Americans sought to erect such a world at a time when U.S. power was rising. Today, such a world is meant to compensate for an American power allegedly in decline.

Is there reason to believe we are better able to build such a world today, ostensibly in a time of decline, than we were a hundred years ago, or even fifty years ago, at a time of ascendancy? The intervening century gives little reason for optimism. All efforts to hand off the maintenance of order and security to an international body with greater authority than the nations within it, or to rely on nations to abide by international rules, regardless of their power to flout them, have failed. The new authority has proven too weak to take up the task. The nations that had responsibility and power have either ignored it or used it as an excuse for inaction themselves. The rules have generally bound only the weak, while the strong, including the United States, have felt free to ignore them and faced no punishment by the “international community.” The League of Nations famously refused to respond to blatant violations of international law—the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931, the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935. The United States and the Soviet Union both spent most of the Cold War ignoring or seeking ways around the United Nations. As Reinhold Niebuhr observed, “the prestige of the international community” is never great enough and its individual members are never unified enough “to discipline recalcitrant nations.”
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Institutions cannot wield more power than the nations that constitute them, but they have often wielded less.

In a multipolar world, which nation or group of nations would be able to use its power alone or collectively to uphold the liberal order against those who would upset it? This is a critical question, because any order rests ultimately not on rules alone but on the power to enforce the rules. Today there is a unique situation in which the world’s most powerful nation enjoys a remarkably high degree of international legitimacy when it uses force. In previous eras of multipolarity, when all nations sought security from an uneasy balance of power and operated within roughly defined spheres of influence, the use of force by any one nation outside its sphere or in areas of overlapping spheres threatened to destabilize the equilibrium. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, for example, the great powers could not bring order to the tumultuous Balkan region because the use of force by any one of the great powers threatened the interests of the others and the overall equilibrium. There was no international power to impose order. This was the dilemma Wilson attempted to solve with the League of Nations. In fact, it was solved only by American hegemony. In the late twentieth century, the United States was able to lead two interventions in the Balkans in the interest of preserving the liberal order without provoking great-power conflict. While Russians felt a bit humiliated by American dominance in a Slavic and traditionally Russian area of concern, there was never any question of war. Were the current disparity of power between the United States and other great powers to diminish, it might become impossible to intervene in similar situations without risking great-power confrontation. Which power or powers in a post-American world would
be able to act with the approval of the others? The lack of legitimated military force would make it increasingly difficult to defend core principles of the liberal order against the inevitable challenges.

The lesson of the twentieth century, perhaps forgotten in the twenty-first, is that if one wants a more liberal order, there may be no substitute for powerful liberal nations to build and defend it. International order is not an evolution; it is an imposition. It is the domination of one vision over others—in this case, the domination of liberal principles of economics, domestic politics, and international relations over other, nonliberal principles. It will last only as long as those who imposed it retain the capacity to defend it. This is an uncomfortable reality for liberal internationalists. We prefer to believe that a liberal international order survives because it is right and just—and not only for us but for everyone. We prefer to imagine that the acceptance of a liberal order is voluntary or, better still, the product of natural forces, not the wielding of power. That is why the “End of History” was such an attractive thesis to many, and remains so even after it has been discredited by events. The theory of inevitable evolution means there is no requirement to impose liberal order. It will merely happen. This resolves the moral ambiguity—and the practical and financial challenges—of imposing it and defending its imposition.

There is an assumption, too, embedded in our Enlightenment worldview, that there is a necessary link between liberal order and the end of nationalism, and even of the nation itself. The rise of supranational institutions and a cosmopolitan sensibility represent progress toward a
more perfect liberal order. But what if this is wrong? What if an order characterized by peace, democracy, and prosperity depends on particular nations to uphold it? The internationalist Theodore Roosevelt argued as much in 1918, in response to the supranationalist visions of his day. “Let us refuse to abolish nationalism,” he said. “On the contrary, let us base a wise and practical internationalism on a sound and intense nationalism.”
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True liberal progress might be tied, paradoxically, to this atavistic concept of the nation, willing to use its power, in conjunction with other nations, to uphold an order that can only approximate but never achieve the liberal international ideal. It is when we try actually to achieve the ideal, to move beyond the nation to a post-national vision of liberal internationalism, that the whole project fails.

In this respect, the European Union may be a warning. No group of nations has ever come closer to achieving the liberal internationalist ideal, the Kantian perpetual peace. But the price has been a Europe increasingly disarming itself while the other great powers refuse to follow on its journey. Would this postmodern Europe even survive if it truly had to fend for itself in a world that did not play by its rules?

The irony is that the success of the American world order has made it possible for so many people to believe that it can be transcended, that American power may no longer be necessary to sustain it. The old dream has come to seem more real over the past two decades because the success of American power has made it seem more real. Instead of realizing that great-power conflict and competition have been suppressed, people imagine that the great
powers themselves are fundamentally changing their character, that institutions, laws, and norms are taking hold. It is as if New Yorkers strolling through a safe Central Park decided that police were no longer going to be needed. The park is safe because the human race has evolved.

President Bill Clinton left office believing that the key task for America was to “create the world we would like to live in when we are no longer the world’s only superpower,” to prepare for “a time when we would have to share the stage.”
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It is an eminently sensible-sounding proposal. But whether it can be done is another question. For when it comes to the relations among states, and particularly in matters of power and war and peace, rules and institutions rarely survive the decline of the power or powers that erected them. Those rules and institutions are like scaffolding around a building: they don’t hold the building up; the building holds them up. When American power declines, the institutions and norms American power supports will decline, too. Or, more likely, if history is a guide, they may collapse altogether as we transition into another kind of world order, or into disorder. We may discover then that the United States was essential to keeping the present world order together and that the alternative to American power was not peace and harmony but chaos and catastrophe—which is what existed before the American world order came into being.

W
E CAN ALREADY SEE
the signs of erosion. The number of electoral democracies peaked at 123 in 2005. Since then it has dropped slightly every year, and as of
2011 there were 115. Freedom House also reports a hollowing out of democracy, with “growing pressures on freedom of expression, including press freedom, as well as on civic activists engaged in promoting political reform and respect for human rights, including the rights of workers to organize.”
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Liberal institutions and norms have also weakened somewhat in recent years. The European Union, aside from its economic difficulties and diminishing military power, has less moral sway in the international system than it did a decade ago. According to scholars at the European Council on Foreign Relations, for instance, the EU is suffering “a slow-motion crisis” at the United Nations, where its ability to “promote an international rule of law based on human rights and justice” is steadily declining. They attribute this chiefly to the growing influence of China, which has established at the UN “an increasingly solid coalition of general assembly votes, often mobilized in opposition to EU values such as the defense of human rights.”
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