International Institute for Strategic Studies
5th Global Strategic Review Conference
Managing Global Security and Risk
Managing Global Security: Managing Global Risk
Geneva, 9 September 2007
“Who Will Provide Leadership in Managing Global Security and Risk?”
The Role of the United States
By Joseph S. Nye, Jr.
Leaders are those who help groups create and achieve shared goals. Pure coercion is generally not considered leadership, but mere dictation. Traditionally the leaders in international politics have been the most powerful states. Hard military power counts for more in the context of international politics than it does in democratic domestic politics, but even in international relations conquest is not leadership. Disproportionate power, sometimes called “hegemony,” has been associated with leadership, but appeals to values and ideology also matter even for a hegemon. As the realist E.H.Carr argued, there are three forms of international power: military, economic, and ideas. I combine the first dimensions of coercion and inducement in hard power, and the third is included in the soft power of attraction.
While there are vast differences among nations in terms of cultures and values, there are also some shared goals in the form of international public goods such as stable balances of power, access to global commons, and an open international economy which cut across the divergent values expressed in domestic cultures and polities. The largest states, when they help to provide these shared public goods, act as leaders in the sense of helping groups of nations to create and achieve shared goals. Britain played such a role in the 19th century, as the United States did in the second half of the 20th century. Leadership is a political process with three components – leaders, followers and the contexts in which they interact. Traditionally, the context of international politics is an anarchic world of states seeking security in which the ultimate (but not only) instrument is the use of military force. While this picture remains roughly accurate, it is undergoing change in the 21st century. New dimensions are being added to security, non-state actors are playing larger roles, and the context of power is becoming more complex. All this affects the role of the largest state in providing leadership. A simple model of the United States as a hegemonic successor to Britain no longer suffices.
The Only Superpower?
Analysts and commentators have often misunderstood American power. As recently as 1990, the conventional wisdom portrayed America in decline. Bestseller lists featured books that described America’s fall. Japan would soon become “Number One”. When I published Bound to Lead in 1989, I predicted the continuing rise of American power. But the new conventional wisdom that succeeded the declinists was equally misleading. As expressed by Charles Krauthammer and other neo-conservatives, America was enjoying a “unipolar moment” and could lead unilaterally because others had no choice but to follow. This view misunderstood the limits of American power and led to an over-ambitious and unbalanced foreign policy that resembled a car with an accelerator and no brakes. Sooner or later, it was bound to go off the road. This in turn has led to a new questioning of American power with analogies drawn between America’s imbroglio in Iraq and Britain’s problems in the Boer War as a harbinger of future power shifts. Some observers even worry that America will turn inward after Iraq. I disagree with these views.
A number of realists have expressed concern about America’s staying power. Throughout history, coalitions of countries have arisen to balance dominant powers, and the search for traditional shifts in the balance of power and new state challengers is well underway. Some see China as the new enemy; others envisage a Russia-China-India coalition as the threat. But even if China maintains its high growth rates of nine per cent while the United States achieves only two to three percent, China will not equal the United States in per capita income ( a measure of the sophistication of an economy) until near the end of the century. In contrast, Germany’s industrial production had surpassed Britain well before 1914. Others see India becoming a major challenger to the United States, but despite recent impressive growth, economically India lags behind China, and will have incentives to cooperate with the United States to balance rising Chinese power.
Russia is sometimes cited as a great power, but its recent resurgence is based on a single commodity, energy, and it faces serious health and demographic problems. Others see a uniting Europe as a potential federation that will challenge the United States for primacy. But this forecast depends on a high degree of European political unity, a willingness of European populations to spend heavily on defense, and poor conditions in trans-Atlantic relations. While realists raise an important point about the economic rise of new powers in the international arena, their quest for traditional challengers who will surpass the United States or form coalitions to balance American military power misses a larger point by ignoring the deeper changes that are occurring in the distribution and nature of power in this century.
The Distribution of Power in the Twenty-First Century
At first glance, the disparity between American power and that of the rest of the world looks overwhelming. In terms of military power, the U.S. is the only country with both nuclear weapons and conventional forces with global reach. The United States leads in the information-based “revolution in military affairs.” With nearly half of world military expenditure, it is very difficult for others to organize a traditional military balance of power against the United States. In economic size, America’s roughly one quarter share of world product (at official exchange rates) is equal to the next three countries combined. In terms of soft power and cultural prominence, the United States is far and away the number-one film and television exporter in the world. The U.S. also attracts the most foreign students each year to its institutions of higher education. In terms of power resources, America is well ahead. But power measured in resources is not the same as power measured in the behavior of being able to produce the outcomes one wants.
Some analysts describe this world as unipolar; some as multipolar, but both are wrong because each refers to a different dimension of power that can no longer be assumed to be homogenized by military dominance. Unipolarity is misleading because it exaggerates the degree to which the United States is able to get the results it wants in some dimensions of world politics, but multi-polarity is misleading because it implies several roughly equal counties. Power defined in behavioral terms – the ability to influence others to produce the outcomes one wants—always depends on context, and power resources are different in three major contexts.
Power today is distributed among countries in a pattern that resembles a complex three-dimensional chess game. On the top chessboard or context, military power is largely unipolar. The U.S. is the only country with both intercontinental nuclear weapons and large, state of the art air, naval, and ground forces capable of global deployment. But on the middle chessboard, economic power among states is already multi-polar, with the U.S., Europe and Japan representing a majority of world product, and China’s dramatic growth is rapidly making it the fourth major player. On this economic board, the United States is not a hegemon, and often must bargain as an equal.
The bottom chessboard is the realm of transnational relations that cross borders outside of 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. It also includes ecological threats such as pandemics and global climate change that can do damage on a scale equal or larger to that of major wars. (In 1918, more people died from Avian flu than from World War I. ) This adds a new dimension to questions of security and risk, and includes issues for which the military instruments that dominate the top board are clearly insufficient. On this bottom board, power is widely dispersed, and it makes no sense to speak of unipolarity, multi-polarity or hegemony. And yet it is from this bottom board that many of the most important security challenges and risks arise. Those who recommend a hegemonic American foreign policy based on traditional military power are relying on inadequate analysis, and like one-dimensional chess players in a three dimensional game, they will eventually lose.
Because of its leading edge in the information revolution and its past investment in traditional power resources, the United States will likely remain the world’s single most powerful country in military, economic and soft power terms well into the 21st century. While potential coalitions to check American power could be created, countries like Russia, China and India have their own difference. It is unlikely that they would become firm military alliances unless the United States uses its hard coercive power in an overbearing unilateral manner that undermines its soft or attractive power. Soft power is particularly important in dealing with issues arising from the bottom chessboard of transnational relations. While polls show that American soft power has declined in the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq, they also show that the cause of the decline is government policies, not American culture and values. That is important since policies can change relatively quickly, while culture and values change more slowly. In the early 1970s, American policies in Vietnam led to low rating in polls, but the country regained much of its soft power within a decade.
The real challenges to American power and leadership are of a different sort. The contemporary information revolution and its attendant brand of globalization are transforming and shrinking the world. At the beginning of this new century, these two forces combined to increase American power. But with time, technology will spread to other countries and peoples, and America’s relative preeminence will diminish. For example, at the beginning of this century, the American twentieth of the global population represented more than half of the Internet. Today that share has already declined. 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 mixed coalitions that cut across national boundaries. It is worth noting that a coalition based on NGOs created a land mines treaty over the opposition of the strongest bureaucracy in the strongest country. And a surprise attack by a transnational non-governmental organization killed more Americans in September 2001 than the government of Japan did in its surprise attack in 1941.
September 11 was a symptom of the deeper changes 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 -- that 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 great impact on American lives.
The problem for American leadership in the 21st century is that there are more and more things outside the control of all states -- even the most powerful state. Although the United States does well on the traditional measures of power resources, there is increasingly more going on in the world that those measures fail to capture. Under the influence of the information revolution and globalization, world politics is changing in a way that means Americans cannot achieve all their international goals acting alone. For example, international financial stability is vital to the prosperity of Americans, but the United States needs the cooperation of others to ensure it. Global climate change too will affect Americans’ quality of life, but the United States cannot manage the problem alone. This year China, which adds two new coal-fired generating plants each week, will replace the United States as the largest emitter of greenhouse gases. And in a world where borders are becoming more porous than ever to everything from drugs to infectious diseases to terrorism, America must work with others and mobilize international coalitions to address these new security threats and risks.
Isolationism and Unilateralism after Iraq?
In light of these new circumstances, how will the only superpower guide its foreign policy after Iraq? Will it provide leadership? Some Americans are tempted to believe that the U.S. could reduce its vulnerability if it withdrew troops, curtailed alliances and followed a more isolationist foreign policy. But isolationism would not remove the vulnerability. Even if the U.S. had a more inward looking foreign policy, radical groups would resent the power of the American economy which would still reach well beyond its shores. American corporations and citizens represent global capitalism which is anathema to some. Moreover, American popular culture has a global reach regardless of what the government does. There is no escaping the influence of Hollywood, CNN, and the Internet. American films and television express freedom, individualism and change (as well as sex and violence). Generally, the global reach of American culture helps to enhance America’s soft power. Individualism and liberties are attractive to many people, but they are also repulsive to others, particularly fundamentalists. Moreover, new problems like climate change and pandemics cross borders without the slightest regard to American culture or intentions. Turning inward does no good if the problems follow you home.
Americans who look at their preponderance, see an empire, and urge unilateralism, engage in arrogance that alienates potential followers in other countries. The American public is beginning to react against the unilateralism of the recent past. Granted, there are few pure multilateralists in practice, and multilateralism can be used by smaller states to tie the U.S. down like Gulliver among the Lilliputians, but this does not mean that a multilateral approach is not generally in America’s interests. By embedding its policies in a multilateral framework, the U.S. can make its disproportionate power more legitimate and acceptable to others. No large power can afford to be purely multilateralist, but that should be the starting point for policy. And when the great power defines its national interests broadly to include global interests, some degree of unilateralism is more likely to be acceptable.
At the moment, the United States is unlikely to face a challenge to its preeminence from other states unless it acts so arrogantly that it helps the others to overcome their built in limitations. The greater challenge for the United States will be to learn how to work with other countries to better control the non-state actors that will increasingly share the stage with nation-states. How to control the bottom chessboard in a three-dimensional game and how to make hard and soft power reinforce each other are the key foreign policy challenges for American leadership.
The dramatically decreased cost of communication, the rise of transnational domains (including the internet) that cut across borders, and the “democratization” of technology that puts massive destructive power into the hands of groups and individuals that once was the sole preserve of governments – all suggest dimensions that are historically new. In the last century, men like Hitler, Stalin and Mao needed the power of the state to wreak great evil. If transnational terrorists were to obtain nuclear materials and produce a series of events involving great destruction or great disruption of society, American attitudes might change dramatically, though the direction of the change is difficult to predict. Faced with such a threat, a certain degree of unilateral action, such as the war in Afghanistan, is justified if it produces global goods. After all, the British navy reduced the scourge of piracy well before international conventions were signed in the middle of the 19th century. But isolationism or extreme unilateralism are not promising options for the world’s largest state.
Will the U.S. Lead in Providing Global Public Goods?
How should Americans set priorities in a global information age? What grand strategy would steer between the “imperial overstretch” that would arise out of the role of global policeman while avoiding the mistake of thinking the country can be isolated in a global information age? The place to start is by understanding the relationship of American power to global public goods. On the one hand, for reasons given above, American power is less effective than might first appear. On the other hand, the United States is likely to remain the most powerful country well into this century and this creates an interest in maintaining a degree of international order. To a large extent, international order is a public good – something everyone can consume without diminishing its availability to others.
A small country can benefit from peace in its region, freedom of the seas, open trade, control of infectious diseases or stability in financial markets at the same time that the United States does without either diminishing the benefits to the U.S. or others. Of course, pure public goods are rare. Most public goods only partially approach the ideal definition of being non-rivalrous and non-exclusive (such as the paradigm case of clean air.) Moreover, some things that look good from one perspective may look bad in the eyes of others in different cultures. Too narrow an appeal to “public goods” can become a self-serving ideology for the powerful. But these caveats are a reminder of the need to consult with others, not a reason to discard an important strategic principle that could help America reconcile its national interests with a broader global perspective and assert effective leadership.
According to the logic of collective action, if the largest beneficiary of a public good (like the U.S.) does not take the lead in providing disproportionate resources toward its provision, the smaller beneficiaries are unlikely to be able to produce it because of the difficulties of organizing collective action when large numbers are involved. While this responsibility of the largest often lets others become “free riders,” the alternative is that the collective bus does not move forward at all. To play a leading role in producing public goods, the United States will need to invest in both hard power resources and the soft power of leading by example. The latter will require more self-restraint on the part of Congress as well as putting the American house in order whether in economics, environment, criminal justice and so forth. Global climate change is probably the most dramatic current case. Providing public goods will also require an investment of resources in the non-military aspects of foreign affairs that Americans have been unwilling to make. The military rightly plays a role in diplomacy, but the U.S. is currently investing in its power in overly militarized terms.
An American grand strategy for leadership must first ensure its national survival, but then focus on providing global public goods. The United States would gain doubly from such a strategy: from the public goods themselves, and from the way they legitimize power in the eyes of others. That means giving top priority to those aspects of the international system that, if not attended to properly, would have profound effects on the basic international order and therefore on the lives of large numbers of Americans as well as others. The United States can learn from the lesson of Great Britain in the 19th century, when it was also a preponderant power. Three public goods where Britain took the lead were: (l) maintaining the balance of power among the major states in Europe; (2) promoting an open international economic system; and (3) maintaining open international commons such as the freedom of the seas.
All three translate relatively well to the current situation. Maintaining regional balances of power and dampening local incentives to use force to change borders provides a public good for many (but not all) countries. The United States helps to “shape the environment” (in the words of the Pentagon’s Quadrennial Defense Review) in various regions. The American role as a stabilizer and reassurance against aggression by aspiring hegemons in key regions is generally seen as a public good by smaller states in the regions. Promoting an open international economic system is good for American economic growth, and is good for other countries as well.
Openness of global markets is a necessary (though not sufficient) condition for alleviating poverty in poor countries even as it benefits the United States. In addition, in the long term, economic growth is also more likely to foster stable democratic middle-class societies in other countries, though the time scale will be far more lengthy than it was recently fashionable to believe. To keep the system open, the United States must resist protectionism at home and support international economic institutions such as the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund, and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development that provide a framework of rules for the world economy.
The U.S., like l9th century Britain, has an interest keeping international commons, such the oceans, open to all. Here the record is mixed. It is good on traditional freedom of the seas. Today, however, the international commons include new issues such as global climate change, preservation of endangered species, and the uses of outer space, as well as the “virtual commons” of cyberspace. But on some issues, such as the global climate, the United States has failed to lead. The establishment of rules that preserves access for all remains as much a public good today as in the 19th century, even though some of the issues are more complex and difficult than freedom of the seas.
These three classic public goods enjoy a reasonable consensus in American public opinion, and some can be provided in part through unilateral actions. But there are also three new dimensions of global public goods in today’s world. First, the United States should lead in helping to develop and maintain international regimes of laws and institutions to organize international actions to deal with not just trade and environment, but proliferation, peacekeeping, human rights and other concerns. As a status quo power, the U.S. benefits from the order they provide, but so do others. Unilateralists complain that the United States is constrained by international regimes, but so are others.
The U.S. should also make international development a higher priority, for it is also an important global public good. Much of the poor majority of the world is in turmoil, mired in vicious circles of disease, poverty, and political instability. Financial and scientific help from rich countries is important not only for humanitarian reasons, but to prevent failed states from becoming sources of disorder for the rest of the world.” Here the record is less impressive. Protectionist trade measures often hurt poor countries most, and foreign assistance is generally unpopular with the American public. Development will take a long time, and the international community needs to explore better ways to make sure that help actually reaches the poor, but both prudence and a concern for soft power suggest that the U.S. should lead in making development a higher priority.
Finally, as a preponderant power, the United States should provide an important public good by acting as a mediator and convenor of coalitions. By using its good offices to mediate conflicts in places like Northern Ireland, Morocco, and the Aegean Sea, the U.S. has helped in shaping international order in ways that are beneficial to other nations. The Middle East is the crucial current case. It is sometimes tempting to let intractable conflicts fester, and there are some situations where other countries can more effectively play the mediator’s role. Even when the U.S. does not want to take the lead, it can share with other such as Europe as in the Balkans. But often the United States is the only country that can bring parties together at relatively low costs. And when successful, such leadership increases American soft power at the same time that it reduces a source of instability. Finally, the United States can encourage other countries to share in production of such public goods. Welcoming the rise of Chinese power in terms of China becoming a “responsible stakeholder” is an invitation to begin such a dialogue.
A Leadership Strategy Based on Global Public Goods
1. Maintain the balance of power in important regions
2. Promote an open international economy
3. Preserve international commons
4. Maintain international rules and institutions
5. Assist economic development
6. Act as convener of coalitions and mediator of disputes.
Conclusion: The Future of American Power and Leadership
The United States is well placed to remain the leading power in world politics well into the 21st century. This prognosis depends upon assumptions that can be spelled out. For example, it assumes that the American economy and society will remain robust and not decay; that the United States will maintain its military strength, but not become over-militarized; that Americans will not become so unilateral and arrogant in their strength that they squander the nations’ considerable fund of soft power; that there will not be some catastrophic series of events that profoundly transforms American attitudes in an isolationist direction; and that Americans will define their national interest in a broad and farsighted way that incorporates global interests. Each of these assumptions can be questioned, but they currently seem more plausible than their alternatives. If the assumptions hold, America will continue to be in a position to provide leadership in managing global security in all its dimensions. But it will have to learn to work with other countries to share such leadership. That will require combining the soft power of attraction with hard power into a “smart power” strategy. The information revolution, technological change, and globalization will not replace the nation-state but they will continue to complicate the actors and issues in world politics for all states. The paradox of American power in the 21st century is that the largest power cannot achieve its objectives by acting alone. Just as shared and participatory leadership is becoming more prevalent in managing modern organizations, so also will the international situation require more cooperative leadership.
