The End of Power (25 page)

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The United States wringing its hands as the European Parliament prepares to vote down separate measures on tracking terrorist financing and providing airline passenger name records

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The Russian Duma squeezing US credit card companies out of payment processing unless they join a national payment card system that significantly reduces their revenues

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A long-running battle to get the government of Turkmenistan to restore the landing rights of US military aircraft

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Frustration over the refusal of Kazakhstan's government to grant local tax exemptions for equipment and personnel to safeguard spent nuclear fuel—a crucial strategic effort

Even those countries theoretically in thrall to the United States are hardly obedient. Egypt, the recipient of billions of dollars in military and economic aid, imprisons high-profile staff members from US nongovernmental organizations. Pakistan offers sanctuary to Taliban and Al Qaeda terrorists, including Osama bin Laden. Israel defies US requests that it not build settlements on disputed territories. Afghanistan, a government that relies on assistance from the United States and its allies for a staggering portion of its budget, breaks with the United States on the conduct of the war on its soil. And Washington frets over the possibility that despite its strong warnings Israel may unilaterally bomb Iran's nuclear facilities. As former US National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski told me, the world has entered into a “post-hegemonic era” where “no nation has the capacity to impose its will on others in a substantial or permanent way.”
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What happened to American hegemony is the subject of endless debate. The conventional wisdom has swung wildly in response to one unexpected event after another. At first, the sudden end of the Cold War and the ideological victory that it marked, combined with US economic growth and the communications and technology boom of the 1990s, seemed to prefigure a new unipolar world, one in which the sole superpower could thwart the hegemonic ambitions of all credible competitors. But then the 9/11 attacks, the unilateralism of the Bush administration, the return of high deficits, and the continued growth of China shifted the picture. As a result, the declinist view of American power picked up momentum. Reminders that
empires throughout history have always come to an end were captured in book titles such as Cullen Murphy's
Are We Rome?
, published in 2007.
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The improbable election of Barack Obama gave pause to this argument as well. Suddenly, America's moral credit in the world was renewed, and with it the “soft power” of attraction that just a few years earlier had seemed to be fast dwindling. Yet the residual benefits of Obama's global appeal have, in turn, been sapped by the United States' ongoing financial crisis, deep and enduring fiscal imbalances, and energy-draining entanglements in Iraq and Afghanistan. In his 2012 State of the Union address, Obama would defensively say that “[a]nyone who tells you that America is in decline . . . doesn't know what they are talking about.” The debate over America's global status goes on, driven as much by the latest headlines or economic statistics as by erudite theories of international relations or historical comparisons with the world order in centuries past.

Yet just as American power seems wobbly, so does that of some of its competitors. Across the Atlantic, the European Union—an ambitious project that many believed would form a counterpower to the United States—is mired in a devastating economic crisis, hampered by unwieldy governance, and slowed down by an aging population and a massive inflow of immigrants that the continent does not know how to absorb. Russia, the old rival and heir to Soviet resources and military capabilities, is another aging society, an authoritarian petro-state struggling to contain simmering popular discontent. Two decades of postcommunist crony capitalism, heavy-handed state intervention, and outright criminality have transformed the enormous nation into a hobbled and complicated beast that still owns a nuclear arsenal, yet is only a shadow of the superpower that preceded it.

As noted, those searching for evidence of a new ascending great power have an easy answer: there is vitality in the east. Indeed, according to the Global Language Monitor, which follows the world's top media sources, “the rise of China” has been the most-read news story of the twenty-first century.
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China's economy surged ahead through the global recession. Its military capabilities and diplomatic weight continue to expand. Since the mid-1990s, the Asian economies have grown at twice the speed of those of the United States or Europe. Looking ahead, experts differ only on the speed at which the Western economies will be left in the dust. One forecast estimates that as early as 2020, Asia's economy will be larger than those of the United States and Europe combined. Another forecast finds China alone far outweighing the United States by 2050; adjusted for purchasing
power, China's economy at mid-century will be almost double America's, India will follow close behind, and the European Union will come in at third place.
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In Washington, such forecasts are laced with anxiety and alarm. In Beijing, they are flush with triumphalism. And as we saw above, Australians are as engaged in this debate as everyone else—and just as divided.

In China's wake come other credible contestants. In India, fast growth, its generally uncontested acceptance into the nuclear weapons club, and its technology and outsourcing boom have nurtured aspirations of big-power status. Brazil, a large country with an activist foreign policy and now, after displacing the UK, the world's sixth-biggest economy,
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has raised its global profile as well, rounding out the so-called BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) group of emerging powers. Each has its own claim to regional sway and its role as an anchor, moderator, mobilizer, and sometimes bully of smaller nations around it. Moreover, each has resisted and encroached on the hegemon's prerogatives, whether in their bilateral dealings with the United States or in the United Nations and a variety of other multilateral fora.

Does the behavior of these states represent a threat to the stability of the world order that the United States must parry and deter? Are they merely seeking to take maximal advantage of the benefits that flow from Pax Americana and have little interest in overturning it? Does their emergence signal a deepening of the unipolar system around the United States, the early emergence of a major hostile opponent such as China, or a shift to a new multipolar order in which the United States is just one among a growing set of partners, rivals, and peers? And what if all or some of the BRICS are just enjoying a transient prestige and will soon become embroiled in the problems that come from being poor countries full of political, economic, social, or ecological imbalances? Indeed, after their rapid growth, the economies of the BRICS and other superstars among the emerging markets are starting to slow down, a reality that can feed the simmering political discontent always present in fast-changing societies. Each of these views has its partisans who offer prescriptions about what their respective country must do to promote its own interest and, possibly, help preserve the global peace.

In subsequent pages we will look at why the question of hegemony consumes military and foreign policy thinkers, and why power shifts among the world's major nations have implications for everyone, far beyond the superficial focus on who has the largest GDP, military, or haul of
gold medals at the Olympics. But this chapter is about an underlying story—one all too often missed by those who debate and keep track of national fortunes. No nation, whether one on top, one striving to get there, or one of those seemingly stuck at the bottom, is immune to the effects of the More, Mobility, and Mentality revolutions and the decay of power that accompanies them. The staggering growth of output and population, the unprecedented mobility of goods and ideas and people, and the accompanying surge in popular aspirations are eroding the barriers to the projection of power—a reality that holds true for all countries regardless of size, income level, political system, or military force.

As those barriers fall, they are erasing the distinction between elite nations capable of playing power politics and the ex-colonies, client states, and far-flung marginal entities that the great powers could once lord over or ignore. Whereas sophisticated and expensive intelligence systems once gave a few countries an information edge, now off-the-shelf data and online resources help the little ones compete. Whereas billions of dollars in aid budgets once established goodwill and loyal regimes in a big power's sphere of influence, now the sources of foreign aid have multiplied, from smaller countries that punch above their weight to foundations whose endowments dwarf other countries' GDPs. Whereas Hollywood and the Comintern once exerted a strong cultural pull, now Confucius societies, Bollywood films, and Colombian telenovelas win over hearts and minds.

The growing capacity of small countries to ward off the designs of large ones is part of an overall shift that has empowered a much broader range of actors in international affairs. The likes of Al Qaeda, the Gates Foundation, and Al Jazeera have their own agendas largely unmoored from any specific country. Terrorists, insurgents, nongovernmental organizations, immigrant associations, philanthropists, private companies, investors and financiers, media companies, and new global churches have not made armies and ambassadors obsolete. But they are limiting what armies and ambassadors can do and influencing the international agenda through new channels and vehicles. Look at Kony 2012, a video created by a Christian activist and film director named Jason Russell urging the capture of indicted war criminal Joseph Kony. Within weeks of its release through YouTube (not through an established broadcasting company), it had garnered tens of millions of viewers, as well as donations, celebrity endorsements, and calls for action—not to mention howls of outrage from some Ugandans dismayed by the film's portrayal of their country. Of course arms sales, national aid programs, and the threat of invasion or
trade sanctions still do more to shape international relations. Not every small country has managed to exploit the new ways to project power; but many have.

As America, China, Russia, and the other big-power rivals position themselves for military and commercial competition, they must also reckon with the influence of this new kind of activism on their domestic politics, economics, and culture. And as noted in the last chapter, the decay of power has significantly altered the terms of global conflict. Its transformative impact on how nations relate to one another in the everyday conduct of diplomacy—the web of ties that shape our lives and stitch together the prevailing world order—is no less profound. To appreciate its impact, we should look at the reasons why hegemony and the Great Game mattered so much in the first place.

Whenever global politics goes through major flux, the specters of conflict and anarchy raise their fearsome heads. Indeed, when the hierarchy of big powers changes, what is at stake is not just prestige but the stability and even survival of the international system itself.

When states seek to advance their national interests, those interests are bound to collide with those of other countries. The collision could be over territory, natural resources, access to water or clean air, shipping lanes, rules governing the movement of people, sheltering hostile groups, or many other subjects of contention. And that clash of interests tends to lead to border wars, proxy wars, territorial disputes, rebellions, nefarious secret-service operations, humanitarian interventions, violations by rogue states, and power grabs of all kinds. History offers stark lessons about what happens when regional powers are not able to prevent or contain such conflicts. For centuries, from the Thirty Years' War to the Napoleonic Wars to World Wars I and II, the scope and scale of war have advanced in a bleak and bloody progression.

Since 1945, many devastating regional conflicts have caused much devastation without expanding into all-out world war. Why this unprecedented extended global peace? A key part of the answer is hegemony. For six decades, countries have had no questions about where they stood in the hierarchy of nations and thus what boundaries they could not cross. In the bipolar system of the Cold War, most of the rest of the world fell more or less firmly into the American or Soviet sphere of influence, and
the remaining countries knew better than to challenge this overall frame. And once the Cold War ended, one country, the United States, towered over all the others in military and economic might as well as cultural sway.

Hegemonic stability theory, developed in the 1970s by MIT professor Charles Kindleberger, underlies, more or less explicitly, much of today's debate. Its central insight is that a dominant power that has both the unique ability and the interest to ensure world order is the best antidote to costly and dangerous international chaos. If there is no hegemon, the theory holds, the only way to bring peace and stability is through a system of rules—norms, laws, and institutions that every country agrees to abide by in exchange for the benefits of peace and stability. Needless to say, this is a complicated alternative, no matter how worthy, and hegemony tends to deliver the goods more effectively.
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Writing about the world between the wars, Kindleberger argued that the economic and political turmoil of the time—the collapse of the gold standard, the Great Depression, instability in Europe, and the rise of the fascist threat—showed a failure of hegemony. Great Britain's willingness and ability to deploy the forces and spend the money to maintain supremacy were in decline. The only credible contender to step into that role, the United States, was locked in an isolationist stance. The absence of a stabilizing hegemon—one with both the ability and the political will to use its power to preserve order—contributed to the spread of the depression and ultimately to World War II.