The World America Made (6 page)

Angell’s book sold two million copies a century ago, and it was not just pacifists who found the case persuasive. Winston Churchill, as a young member of Parliament, argued that “those powers that have become interdependent upon others, interwoven by commerce with other States,” would never “threaten the tranquility of the modern world.” As for the Germans, “Why, they are among our very best customers, and, if anything were to happen to them, I don’t know what we would do in this country for a market.”
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At the dawn of the twentieth century, even Theodore Roosevelt believed war “between the great civilized powers [had] become less and less frequent” thanks to “the increasing interdependence and complexity of international political and economic relations.”
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There were other reasons to be hopeful then. Many believed that modern weaponry had become so destructive and modern warfare so horrible that nations would never willingly choose to fight.
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The world’s great powers
were “losing the psychological impulse to war.”
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The wireless telegraph, the ocean liner, and the vast network of trains were allowing peoples of different nations to learn more about one another. Nationalism and xenophobia were giving way to a cosmopolitan consciousness. The dawn of the twentieth century also saw a blossoming of international treaties and peace conferences. Dozens of arbitration agreements were signed in which nations promised to submit disputes to tribunals rather than go to war. Peace conferences at The Hague produced treaties limiting certain kinds of weapons and methods of warfare deemed inhumane—the bombing of cities from zeppelins, for instance, and the use of mustard gas.

What gave such weight to all the arguments for a new and permanent peace was the fact that by the first decade of the twentieth century, there had been no war between great powers for almost four decades.
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To those who recalled the nearly constant great-power warfare of previous centuries, this was an astonishingly long era of peace. Instead of viewing it as an interlude, people naturally came to see it as a permanent condition. Something had changed fundamentally. Humankind had evolved and reached a new plateau.

We now know this judgment, which seemed so sensible at the time, was mistaken. The outbreak of World War I, the most deadly and destructive war in history, a mere four years after Angell’s best seller, revealed a failure of imagination on the part of an entire generation. They simply were not able to imagine that national leaders would behave irrationally, that they would sacrifice economic interests, even bankrupt their treasuries, out of
a combination of ambition and fear, that they would view territory as a worthy object of war, that they would use all the horrible weapons at their disposal without a second thought—in violation of international agreements whose ink had barely dried—and that in all this they would have behind them the enthusiastic support of their people stirred by a very un-cosmopolitan nationalist pride.

Today we suffer from a similar lack of imagination. Once again the conventional wisdom is that great-power conflict is “literally unthinkable.” Even the arguments are the same: economic interdependence, globalization, the irrelevance of territory, the spread of democracy, the unthinkable destructiveness of war in the nuclear age, the belief that nations and peoples have become “socialized” to favor peace over war, that they value life more and feel greater empathy for others—all these have made great-power war irrational and therefore impossible. And, adding force to these arguments, once again, is the long peace we have enjoyed, the remarkable six decades without great-power conflict.

Yet we have less excuse than our forebears to believe that humankind has reached a new level of enlightenment. The optimists of the early twentieth century had not witnessed two world wars, the genocides, and the other horrors of our supposedly advanced era. They had not witnessed the rise of Nazism and fascism. We have seen it all and, in historical terms, quite recently. It was just seven decades ago that the United States was at war with imperial Japan, Nazi Germany, and fascist Italy. It was just thirty-five years ago that Henry Kissinger asked Americans to accommodate themselves to the permanent
reality of Soviet power, with its thousands of nuclear warheads aimed at American and European cities and thousands of American warheads aimed at Russia. The twentieth century was the bloodiest in all history, and we are but a dozen years into the twenty-first. It is premature for us to conclude, after ten thousand years of war, that a few decades and some technological innovations would change the nature of man and the nature of international relations.

People are right to point to the spread of democracy and the free-market, free-trade economic system as important factors in the maintenance of great-power peace. Where they err is in believing these conditions are either sufficient or self-sustaining. In fact, these are more the consequence of great peace than the cause. In 1914, democracy and prosperity did not put an end to great-power war, but great-power war certainly helped put an end to them.

Pinker traces the beginning of a long-term decline in deaths from war to 1945, which just happens to be the birth date of the American world order. The coincidence eludes him, but it need not elude us. The power of the United States has been the biggest factor in the preservation of great-power peace. It has also been a major factor in the spread of democracy and in the creation and maintenance of a liberal economic order. But America’s most important role has been to dampen and deter the normal tendencies of other great powers in the system to compete and jostle with one another in ways that historically have led to war.

It is hard to measure events that don’t happen, to guess
what wars might have broken out had the United States not played the role it has played during the past sixty-five years. The only guide we have is history and a general understanding of the way great powers normally behave. We know, for instance, what Europe and Asia looked like before the United States entered the picture and changed the power equations in both regions. Germany after its defeat in World War I sought to rearm, to regain lost territory and lost honor, to protect itself against former enemies, and to restore itself as a great power. Japan from the late nineteenth century onward sought regional hegemony and coveted territory on the Asian mainland. But when American power was added to these equations after World War II, both nations took entirely different paths, as did the nations around them. Had the American variable been absent, the outcome would have been different.

American power also shaped Soviet behavior throughout the Cold War. The extent of the Soviet reach into Europe was determined by the disposition of military forces at the end of World War II, not by the modesty of Soviet ambitions. Soviet probes in Berlin from 1948 through 1961, had they not been met by the implicit and explicit threat of American force, would have changed the situation in Germany profoundly. The lack of Soviet aggressiveness in Europe thereafter, as well as in the Middle East and the Persian Gulf, was a response to red lines drawn by the United States and its allies. Even today, the continuing large gap in power between the United States and the other great powers tends to dampen natural competitive rivalries and deters attempts to establish regional hegemonies by force.

It’s not just that American power is so overwhelming. The United States also enjoys a unique and unprecedented ability to gain international acceptance of its power. In this respect, it violates almost every theory of international relations. One might expect that other nations, faced with this colossus in their midst, would gang up on it and seek collectively to destroy it, weaken it, or at least severely curtail its ability to use its power. That is what both logic and most of history would predict. The Grand Alliance of European powers came together to resist the great power of Louis XIV’s France at the end of the seventeenth century and then to resist Napoléon at the beginning of the nineteenth century; the Triple Entente of Great Britain, France, and Russia, despite a long history of enmity among them, arose in response to the growth of German power at the beginning of the twentieth century; an alliance of great powers rose to fight against Hitler; and in the Cold War an alliance of the advanced industrial democracies balanced, contained, and eventually undid the Soviet Union. Twenty-five hundred years ago, the rise of Persia sent Greek city-states to Athens for help, and then the rise of Athens sent other Greeks scurrying to Sparta. China’s leaders are acutely aware of this long and consistent history, so much so that they have for two decades worked hard to amass power quietly to avoid a similar response, and with only mixed results.

Yet the United States, which has wielded even greater power relative to the rest of the world than these past would-be hegemons, has not spurred the rise of coalitions aimed at balancing against it. On the contrary, the acceleration of American military dominance in the
1980s and 1990s was accompanied by significant reductions in military capacity in both Europe and the former Soviet Union. As American power grew, almost all the other world powers reduced the size of their militaries. The United States thus also defied what international relations theorists call the “security dilemma.” According to this theory, when one nation builds up its forces, even if for defensive purposes, other powers feel compelled to build up their military strength, too, in order to defend themselves. Yet in the teeth of Reagan’s arms buildup, Mikhail Gorbachev sued for peace and began reducing Soviet power, and Russia dramatically disarmed in the 1990s.
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Europe has steadily disarmed in recent decades as American military power has grown. And even China’s arms buildup for most of the past twenty-five years has been driven more by the rhythms of its economic growth, by efforts to “reunite” Taiwan to the mainland, and by changing perceptions of its global interests than by the need to respond specifically to increases in American capabilities, although this has begun to change in recent years.

It is remarkable, even astonishing, that the American superpower, for all its flaws, its excesses, and its failures, has been accepted and tolerated by much of the world to such a degree. Indeed, America’s great power has been more than tolerated. Other nations have abetted it, encouraged it, joined it, and, with surprising frequency, legitimated it in multilateral institutions like NATO and the UN, as well as in less formal coalitions. From a historical perspective, this is unique. Nations have always welcomed the intervention of a foreign power to aid them
in their own struggles. But what the United States has often enjoyed when using force is something different: a broad acceptance even by nations with no vital interests directly at stake. The American-led war against Slobodan Milosevic in 1999 was supported by most Europeans, who believed they did have some stake in the Balkan turmoil. It was also supported by the Japanese, Australians, and others who really had no stake, whose support sprang from humanitarian concerns but also, importantly, from a general faith that the United States could be trusted to use its power for acceptable ends.

The fact is, when the United States goes to war, it rarely goes alone. In the Korean War, American forces were joined by those from the United Kingdom, Turkey, Canada, Australia, France, Greece, Colombia, Thailand, the Philippines, Belgium, New Zealand, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg. In the unpopular war in Vietnam, Americans had forces working in various capacities beside them from Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, Thailand, and Spain. And the habit persisted after the Cold War. In the first Gulf War, American troops were joined by forces from Britain, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Egypt, France, Morocco, Kuwait, Oman, Pakistan, Canada, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bangladesh, Italy, Australia, the Netherlands, Niger, Sweden, Argentina, Senegal, Spain, Bahrain, Belgium, Poland, South Korea, Czechoslovakia, Greece, Denmark, New Zealand, Hungary, and Norway. Many nations were actually annoyed when the United States initially invaded Afghanistan in 2001 without inviting in the usual contingent of allies, but eventually more than forty nations took part in the
effort. The expectation of this level of global support for American military intervention is so great that in the Iraq war of 2003, Americans were shocked and disturbed when
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thirty-eight nations participated in either the invasion or the post-invasion occupation of Iraq. It was almost unbearable to find democratic allies like France and Germany withholding their endorsement.

The fact that Americans want this endorsement is in itself significant. They want it as a way of easing their consciences and reaffirming the justice of their decision to use force. Some measure of international approval gives them greater confidence that they are acting in the world’s interests and not simply being selfish. It also means they won’t be carrying the burden entirely by themselves. It’s no surprise that Americans want this affirmation. More unusual is that other nations so often grant it. They are willing to acknowledge that the United States is indeed engaged in actions that serve the interests of others—that serve world order.

There are few historical parallels to this situation. No other nation in recent centuries has enjoyed such broad acceptance for its use of power. The closest example would be Britain’s use of its navy to limit the slave trade in the 1830s, but even that was accepted only grudgingly by other naval powers, like France, which saw it as an assertion of British naval and economic hegemony. (And of course the slaveholding United States did not approve at all.) In a multipolar world of the kind that existed in the centuries prior to World War II, any exercise of power by one of the leading nations was seen as potentially threatening by others—an attempt to transform the existing
delicate balance. In the American-dominated order, with its clear and unchallenged hierarchy, the exercise of American power is less threatening because it generally serves to confirm the existing imbalance.