American hawks, focusing on the dangers posed by terrorism, nuclear proliferation and Islamist radicalism, are trying to frame the current situation as “World War IV”: another epic global contest in which the United States is leading the free world against the forces of darkness. Doves, meanwhile, argue that U.S. power and activism are the real problems. Still others think the American moment has already passed, with global power and influence destined to be shared ever more widely with Europe, Russia and fast-growing giants such as China and India.
Each of these perspectives starts from a valid observation but vastly exaggerates its significance. Radical Islam is a problem, but it hardly encompasses or defines all contemporary global affairs. The Bush administration’s recklessness and incompetence have wreaked havoc, but are hardly the source of the world’s major troubles. And power is indeed diffusing more widely—but this won’t challenge American preeminence for a long time to come.
The United States, though chastened, remains not only the leading country in the world but the most dominant power in the history of the modern state system. The dilemmas it faces stem less from any lack of capabilities or influence than from the intractable nature of reality itself. Despite what everybody seems to think, however, those dilemmas are relatively minor and the world is generally heading in the right direction.
The Bush administration’s two great failures lay in not recognizing this truth—in thinking that the world was on the wrong track and could be put right by American will. Bush’s team came to office believing their own overheated campaign rhetoric about Bill Clinton’s failures, and they took the 9/11 attacks as a sign that the rot ran even deeper than they’d thought.
Changing the course of history thus became their avowed purpose. Drunk with the nation’s unprecedented power, the neoconservatives in the administration decided to overturn the existing order in the Middle East and to bring the region into the light. As a senior White House aide told the journalist Ron Suskind in 2002, top officials believed that “we’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study, too. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
Such idealism can sometimes be a good thing, since it allows one to envision a better world. But it can also be dangerous, because visionaries with their eyes on the distant horizon often stumble on the rocks at their feet. Indeed, that’s exactly what happened to the United States. Following a quick success in Afghanistan, the Bush administration’s new policies quickly ran into trouble. The supposedly revolutionary Bush doctrine was built on three pillars: threats had to be dealt with before they materialized (pre-emption), bad foreign governments were the real problem (regime change) and the world could be neatly divided between those “with us” and “against us.” Within a few years each pillar came crashing down. The bad reputation of pre-emption—or, rather, preventive war—has only been reinforced by events in Iraq. Regime change remains what it always was: a worthwhile goal that’s very difficult to achieve. And as for dividing the world between friends and foes, Bush, like all his predecessors, has found himself stuck dealing with inconvenient cases in the middle.
Seen in proper perspective, in other words, Bush’s approach did not represent some durable, world-historical shift in U.S. foreign policy but merely an immature attempt to escape the trade-offs and compromises that international politics inevitably demand. The truth is that the United States is strong enough to do anything it wants, but that does not mean it can get anything it wants. Many problems just can’t be solved through simple unilateral action. If Washington’s hopes were misplaced, however, so were many of its fears. Iraq, terrorism and nuclear proliferation remain serious threats. But despite them and other problems like climate change, the world is better off now than it’s ever been, and things are likely to keep improving. The history of humanity is largely a history of war, tyranny and poverty—yet each is now on the run. The diplomatic historian John Lewis Gaddis pointed out in the mid-1980s that the cold war should really be renamed the long peace, since it represented the longest period without great-power war in modern times. Since then, that peace has only continued, and with the collapse of the Soviet Union and unquestioned American military dominance, it looks set to last for a good while longer. Despite the bloody headlines, studies show that military conflicts of all sorts have actually declined in recent decades and continue to do so.
It’s true that the recent global flowering of democracy has slowed, but the supposed resurgence of authoritarianism is a myth. Russia’s recent economic success has been due not to Putin’s iron fist but to high commodity prices and a natural recovery after the transition from communism. China’s spectacular economic dynamism will not be able to continue much longer without some sort of political reform. And the petrostates of the Middle East have little but trouble ahead unless they can transform themselves beyond recognition. Meanwhile, although the “bottom billion” of humanity does not see its benefits, economic development has never occurred so quickly or in so many places simultaneously. More than a third of the world’s population now lives in countries growing at about 10 percent annually, and an increasingly interconnected global economy is open to all comers.
The great challenge now is thus to keep the world on track, allowing liberalizing trends to continue where they’ve begun and helping them get off the ground elsewhere. Of course, progress won’t always be quick, smooth or uniform. Everything we know about modernization tells us that it’s slow, difficult and often traumatic. But for most of the world, the big-picture outlook is rosy: economic, social and political developments generally reinforce each other; open systems beat closed systems in the long run; and the formula for success is available to all.
The international system that has allowed all this is largely Washington’s creation. It has been sustained by U.S. power and nourished by American values and practices. The United States is also the system’s chief beneficiary, and so should willingly and gracefully accept the burdens of maintaining it. Yet the Bush administration, like some ne’er-do-well heir to a great fortune, has neglected this patrimony and squandered much of the good will its predecessors accumulated. Its successor will need to invest heavily in routine diplomacy, transforming America’s unquestioned material dominance into legitimate authority.
Fortunately, there’s good reason to think that’s possible. Terrorism is a threat to the system as a whole, not to the United States alone, and proper diplomacy can recast the struggle against it into a consensual, multilateral activity rather than a source of division. Capitalism is a win-win game; one person’s (or one state’s) profits needn’t come at another’s expense. And democracy’s value doesn’t diminish when shared. So the economic and political development of other powers can and should be welcomed rather than feared.
In his final lame-duck year, Bush is unlikely to dramatically change either the positive or negative side of the ledger. Soon a new administration will get a fresh start. The 9/11 attacks set a floor on isolationism below which U.S. foreign policy won’t sink, and Iraq has set a ceiling on adventurism above which it won’t rise. Yet that will still allow plenty of maneuvering room for a wise leader ready to take America’s unique global position and responsibilities seriously and to use American power on behalf of generally accepted ends. If the next administration can avoid the present one’s mistakes, it should find keeping the world on track much easier than most expect. It won’t always get what it wants. But if it tries sometimes, it just might find it gets what it needs.
