The Post-American World: Release 2.0 (28 page)

Unipolarity + 9/11 + Afghanistan = Unilateralism + Iraq.
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It was not just the substance of American policy that changed in the unipolar era. So did the style, which became imperial and imperious. There is much communication with foreign leaders, but it’s a one-way street. Other governments are often simply informed of U.S. policy. Senior American officials live in their own bubbles, rarely having any genuine interaction with their overseas counterparts, let alone other foreigners. “When we meet with American officials, they talk and we listen—we rarely disagree or speak frankly because they simply can’t take it in. They simply repeat the American position, like the tourist who thinks he just needs to speak louder and slower and then we will all understand,” a senior foreign policy adviser in a major European government told me.

“Even for a senior foreign official dealing with the US administration,” writes the solidly pro-American Christopher Patten, recounting his experience as Europe’s commissioner for external affairs, “you are aware of your role as a tributory: however courteous your hosts, you come as a subordinate bearing goodwill and hoping to depart with a blessing on your endeavours. . . . In the interests of the humble leadership to which President Bush rightly aspires, it would be useful for some of his aides to try to get in to their own offices for a meeting with themselves some time!” Patten continues, “Attending any conference abroad, American Cabinet officers arrive with the sort of entourage that would have done Darius proud. Hotels are commandeered; cities are brought to a halt; innocent bystanders are barged into corners by thick-necked men with bits of plastic hanging out of their ears. It is not a spectacle that wins hearts and minds.”
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When President Bush traveled abroad, his trips seemed designed to require as little contact as possible with the countries he visited. He was usually accompanied by two thousand or so Americans, as well as several airplanes, helicopters, and cars. He saw little except palaces and conference rooms. His trips involved almost no effort to demonstrate respect and appreciation for the country and culture he was visiting. They also rarely involved any meetings with people outside the government—businessmen, civil society leaders, activists. Even though the president’s visit must be highly programmed by definition, a broader effort to touch the people in these foreign lands would have had great symbolic value. Consider an episode involving Bill Clinton and India. In May 1998, India detonated five underground nuclear devices. The Clinton administration roundly condemned New Delhi, levied sanctions, and indefinitely postponed a planned presidential visit. The sanctions proved painful, by some estimates costing India one percent of GDP growth over the next year. Eventually Clinton relented and went to India in March 2000. He spent five days in the country, visited famous sights, put on traditional clothes, and took part in dances and ceremonies. He communicated the message that he enjoyed and admired India as a country and civilization. The result was a transformation. Clinton is a rock star in India. And George W. Bush, despite being the most pro-Indian president in American history, commanded none of this attention, affection, or respect. Policy matters but so does the symbolism surrounding it.

Apart from the resentment that the imperial style produces, it ensures that American officials don’t benefit from the experience and expertise of foreigners. The UN inspectors in Iraq were puzzled by how uninterested U.S. officials were in talking to them before the war. The Americans, comfortably ensconced in Washington, lectured the inspectors—who had spent weeks combing through Iraq—on the evidence of weapons of mass destruction. “I thought they would be interested in our firsthand reports on what those supposedly dual-use factories looked like,” one inspector told me. “But no,
they
explained to me what those factories were being used for.”

To foreigners, American officials seem clueless about the world they are supposed to be running. “There are two sets of conversations, one with Americans in the room and one without,” says Kishore Mahbubani, who was formerly Singapore’s foreign secretary and ambassador to the United Nations. Because Americans live in a “cocoon,” they don’t see the “sea change in attitudes towards America throughout the world.”

This Time It’s Different

It is too easy to dismiss the hostility that grew out of the Iraq campaign as just envious anti-Americanism (even if some of it is). American conservatives have claimed that there has been large, popular opposition in Europe every time the United States has taken strong military action—for example, when it deployed Pershing nuclear missiles in Europe in the early 1980s. In fact, the historical record highlights the opposite. The street demonstrations and public protests against the Pershing deployments made for good television, but the reality was that, in most polls, 30 to 40 percent of Europeans, and often more, strongly supported American policies. Even in Germany, where pacifist feelings ran sky-high, 53 percent of the population supported the Pershing deployments, according to a 1981 poll in
Der Spiegel
. A majority of the French supported American policy through much of Ronald Reagan’s two terms, even preferring him to the Democratic candidate in the 1984 election, Walter Mondale. Today, in contrast, staggering majorities in most European countries—as high as 80 percent in many places—oppose U.S. foreign policy. The percentage of people holding a favorable view of the United States has gone up considerably since the election of Barack Obama, but in many countries it is still below the levels seen in 2000.

Josef Joffe, one of Germany’s leading international affairs commentators, observes that, during the Cold War, anti-Americanism was a left-wing phenomenon. “In contrast to it, there was always a center-right that was anti-communist and thus pro-American,” he explains. “The numbers waxed and waned, but you always had a solid base of support for the United States.” In short, the Cold War kept Europe pro-American. The year 1968, for example, saw mass protests against American policies in Vietnam, but it was also the year of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. Europeans (and Asians) could oppose America, but their views were balanced by wariness of the Soviet threat. Again, the polls bear this out. European opposition even to the Vietnam War never approached the level of the opposition to Iraq. This was true outside Europe as well. In Australia, a majority of the public supported that country’s participation in the Vietnam War through 1971, when it withdrew its forces.

For most of the world, the Iraq War was not about Iraq. “What does Mexico or Chile care about who rules in Baghdad?” Jorge Castañeda, the former foreign minister of Mexico, told me. “It was about how the world’s superpower wields its power. That’s something we all care deeply about.” Even if Iraq works out, that will solve only the Iraq problem. The America problem will remain. People around the globe worry about living in a world in which one country has so much power. Even if they cannot contest this power, they can complicate it. In the case of Iraq, no country could stop the United States from going to war without international sanction, but the rest of the world has made the effort more difficult by largely sitting on the sidelines in the aftermath. As late as 2008, not one Arab country had opened an embassy in Baghdad. Non-Arab allies of the United States have not been much more helpful.

Nicolas Sarkozy delighted in being called “the American” and even “the neoconservative” in France. He is unabashedly pro-American and makes clear that he wants to emulate the United States in many ways. When he met Condoleezza Rice after his election as France’s president, in May 2007, she asked him, “What can I do for you?” His response was revealing. “Improve your image in the world,” he said. “It’s difficult when the country that is the most powerful, the most successful—that is, of necessity, the leader of our side—is one of the most unpopular countries in the world. It presents overwhelming problems for you and overwhelming problems for your allies. So do everything you can do to improve the way you’re perceived—that’s what you can do for me.”
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The neoconservative writer Robert Kagan argues that European and American differences over multilateral cooperation are a result of their relative strengths. When Europe’s major countries were the world’s great powers, they celebrated realpolitik and cared little for international cooperation. Since Europe is now weak, according to Kagan, it favors rules and restraints. America, for its part, wants complete freedom of action: “Now that the United States is powerful, it behaves as powerful nations do.”
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But this argument misinterprets history and misunderstands the unique place that America occupied in twentieth-century diplomacy. America was the most powerful country in the world when it proposed the creation of the League of Nations to manage international relations after World War I. It was the dominant power at the end of World War II, when it founded the United Nations, created the Bretton Woods system of international economic cooperation, and launched the world’s key international organizations. America had the world at its feet, but Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry Truman chose not to create an American imperium. Instead, they built an international order of alliances and multilateral institutions and helped get the rest of the world back on its feet by pumping out vast amounts of aid and private investment. The centerpiece of this effort, the Marshall Plan, was worth $100 billion in today’s dollars. For most of the twentieth century, in other words, America embraced international cooperation not out of fear and vulnerability but out of confidence and strength.

Central to this approach was the special attention given to diplomacy. Think of what it must have meant for Franklin Roosevelt, at the pinnacle of power, to go halfway across the world to Tehran and Yalta to meet with Churchill and Stalin in 1943 and 1945. Roosevelt was a sick man, paralyzed from the waist down, hauling ten pounds of steel braces on his legs. Traveling for forty hours by sea and air took the life out of him. He did not have to go. He had plenty of deputies—George Marshall, Dwight Eisenhower—who could have done the job. Or he could have summoned the other leaders to him. But FDR understood that American power had to be coupled with a generosity of spirit. He insisted that British commanders like Montgomery be given their fair share of glory in the war. He brought China into the UN Security Council, even though it was a poor peasant society, because he believed that it was important to have the largest Asian country properly represented within a world body.

The standard set by Roosevelt and his generation endured. When Secretary of State Marshall devised the plan that bears his name, he insisted that the initiative and control lie with Europeans. For decades thereafter, the United States built dams, funded magazines, and provided technical know-how to other countries. It sent its scholars and students abroad so that people got to know America and Americans. It paid deference to its allies, even when they were in no sense equals. It conducted joint military exercises with small nations, even when they added little to U.S. readiness. For half a century, American presidents and secretaries of state circled the globe and hosted their counterparts in a never-ending cycle of diplomacy.

All these exertions served our interests, of course. They produced a pro-American world that was rich and secure. They laid the foundations for a booming global economy in which others could participate and in which America thrived. But it was an enlightened self-interest that took into account the interests of others. Above all, it reassured countries—through word and deed, style and substance—that America’s mammoth power was not to be feared.

New Rules for a New Age

Some Americans believe that we should not learn from history but just copy it. If only we could find another Truman administration, many liberals and Democrats seem to pine, it would establish a new set of institutions for a new era. But this is nostalgia, not strategy. When Truman, Acheson, and Marshall built the postwar order, the rest of the world was in tatters. People had seen the devastating effects of nationalism, war, and economic protectionism. As a result, there was strong support everywhere, especially in the United States, for a large and generous effort to engage the world, raise it out of poverty, create global institutions, and ensure international cooperation—so that such a war never took place again. America had the moral high ground that came from defeating fascism, but it also had unrivaled power. American GDP made up almost 50 percent of the global economy. Outside of the Soviet sphere, Washington’s lead role in devising new institutions was never really questioned. Today, the world is different, and so is America’s position in it. Were Truman and Marshall and Acheson alive, they would face a wholly new set of challenges. The task for Barack Obama and future presidents is to construct a new approach for a new era, one that responds to a global system in which power is far more diffuse than ever before and in which everyone feels empowered.

The United States does not have the hand it had in 1945 or even in 2000. Still, it does have a stronger hand than anyone else—the most complete portfolio of economic, political, military, and cultural power—and it will not be replaced in the foreseeable future. Perhaps more importantly, we do not need to invent the world anew. The international order established by the United States after World War II is in urgent need of expansion and repair, but not reconception. As the Princeton scholar John Ikenberry has perceptively noted, the Western-oriented system created in the 1940s and 1950s allows for the expansion of global trade, the rise of new powers, and mechanisms of cooperation and conflict management. It cannot always and easily address certain problems, such as great power conflict and internal human rights tragedies, but those are the limits of international relations, not of these particular structures. Simultaneously, the reality of nuclear weapons and deterrence makes it extremely costly—suicidal—for a rising power to try to assert itself militarily against its peers. “Today’s Western order, in short, is hard to overturn and easy to join,” writes Ikenberry.
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That is how modern Japan and Germany have seen their choices and how China and India seem to be viewing their future. They want to gain power and status and respect, for sure, but by growing within the international system, not by overturning it. As long as these new countries feel they can be accommodated, they have every incentive to become “responsible stakeholders” in this system.