The World America Made (10 page)

Even if one takes a more benign view of the role that China, Russia, and other great powers might play, and
assumes that they would continue to have a stake in a liberal economic order, the question is, do they have enough of a stake? Most China experts acknowledge that Chinese rulers, preoccupied as they are with internal challenges, have so far been very reluctant to take on burdensome global responsibilities. For one thing, they do not face the situation the United States faced at the end of World War II, with one world order destroyed and another waiting to be created according to American preferences. The Chinese are being asked to take on the burden of upholding a world they did not create and that was not built with their particular interests in mind. Who can blame them for being reluctant to embrace the new and burdensome “responsibilities” that Americans and others wish to place on their shoulders? The United States found itself in similar circumstances between the wars and refused to take on those responsibilities. Today, the present order is so suited to the interests of the United States, and has been so dependent on American economic and military power, that one must wonder whether it would survive a shift to a multipolar world in which the major actor, as well as other significant players, may not be either as willing or as able to prop it up.

The challenge will be all the greater if the shift from an American-dominated world to a multipolar world leads to an increase in strategic competition and conflict among great powers. Contrary to what one often hears, multipolar systems have historically been neither particularly stable nor particularly peaceful. War among the great powers was a common, if not constant, occurrence in the long periods of multipolarity in the sixteenth, seventeenth,
and eighteenth centuries, the latter culminating in the series of destructive Europe-wide wars following the French Revolution and ending with Napoléon’s defeat at Waterloo in 1815.

The nineteenth century was notable for two stretches of great-power peace lasting thirty-eight years and forty-three years each. The peace was punctuated, however, by major wars among great powers: the Crimean War of 1853 and a series of wars between Prussia and its neighbors—the wars of German unification—culminating in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71. International relations theorists often treat these as minor disturbances in an otherwise peaceful century, but they were massive and costly. The Crimean War was a mini world war involving well over a million Russian, French, British, and Turkish troops, as well as forces from nine other nations, and produced almost half a million dead combatants and many more wounded. In the Franco-Prussian War seventeen years later, the two nations together fielded close to two million troops, of whom nearly half a million were killed or wounded. That kind of war today would not be regarded as a minor disturbance in an otherwise peaceful century.

International relations theorists look back with fondness on the European balance of power that followed the unification of Germany. Perhaps too much fondness. Yes, there was great-power peace for four decades, but the period was characterized by increasing tension and competition, numerous war scares, and massive increases in armaments on both land and sea—all culminating in the most destructive and deadly war mankind had known
up to that point. Even when the balance of power was maintained, it was not only by amicable diplomacy but also by the ever-present prospect of military confrontation. As the political scientist Robert W. Tucker has observed, “Such stability and moderation as the balance brought rested ultimately on the threat or use of force. War remained the essential means for maintaining the balance of power.”
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People imagine that American predominance will be replaced by some kind of multipolar harmony, but there is little reason to believe that a return to multipolarity in the twenty-first century would bring greater peace and stability than it did in the past. The great powers today act in a restrained fashion not because they are inherently restrained but because their ambitions are checked by a still-dominant United States. Some imagine we have entered a “nonpolar” era because, while they believe the United States is declining, they don’t see other powers rising to fill regional vacuums.
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But, in fact, other poles have not emerged, because the American world order is still intact. Were the United States genuinely to decline, great powers like China, Russia, India, and Brazil would quickly become more dominant in their respective regions, and the world would return to something like the multipolar system of nineteenth-century Europe.

The problem in such a world is less likely to come from the other democracies—though even democracies have ambitions and seek their own spheres of influence. It is more likely to come from the autocratic great powers. The democracies can be satisfied with the liberal world order the United States created, duly adjusted to suit their own
growing influence. But can the autocratic powers be satisfied with a world that favors democracy and puts constant pressure on autocratic regimes?

One often hears today that the United States need not worry about China and Russia. China is a cautious actor on the world scene and is not interested in territorial expansion or conflict with its neighbors. Experts on today’s Russia argue that, notwithstanding occasional neo-imperial rhetoric, the rulers in Moscow have no desire to restore the Russian Empire, to take charge of the Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, or to reunite old Soviet republics like Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, and Belarus. But is this because they are innately uninterested in such goals, or is it because they are constrained by the global power equation from realizing these ambitions, and so temper them? There is no way to know for sure, but history suggests that when we look at the behavior of nations and try to understand their motives and ambitions, we need to be aware that their calculations are affected by what they believe they can achieve and what they believe is off-limits.

One thing we do know for sure: a China unchecked by American power would be a different China from one that must worry about American power. If Beijing today does not behave more aggressively toward Japan, or India, or the Southeast Asian nations with which it has disputes, this is not because China is inherently passive and cautious. There have been times in its history when China has taken military action, even in situations where the odds did not favor it—for instance, against American forces in Korea in 1950. Rather, it is because those
powers are backed up by the power of the United States. Were American power removed from the equation, the Chinese would make a different calculation. So would those other nations. Today they are content to resist China’s more ambitious designs, in the South China Sea and elsewhere, because they know the United States is there to support them. China, not surprisingly, is increasing its naval power in an effort to reduce this American role. American officials claim to be puzzled by China’s naval buildup. They ask for greater “transparency” about China’s intentions. They might as well ask why a tiger grows teeth. This is the normal behavior of rising great powers. It only seems unusual because the American world order has until now been suppressing these natural great-power tendencies.

The same is true of Russia and its neighbors. The continued defiance of Moscow in the Baltics, the Caucasus, and eastern Europe owes a great deal to the fact that these nations have a powerful ally to back them up. In the absence of American power, Russia would be far more tempted to compel its neighbors to accommodate Moscow’s wishes, and they would be far more tempted to acquiesce. If Putin, who once called the collapse of the Soviet Union the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the twentieth century, believed he could safely restore it, would he resist the temptation? He is already using every tool short of military force—energy, trade, support for politicians and parties—to bring the former Soviet states as much under Moscow’s influence as possible. Nor, in the one case where he did use force, against Georgia in 2008, is it likely he would have stopped his forces short of
Tbilisi had he not been deterred by the United States and NATO.

To note this is not to impute evil motives to Chinese or Russian leaders. It is to impute normality. All great powers respond to opportunities and constraints in the international system. This includes the United States. When American power grew at the end of the nineteenth century, its global ambitions grew as well. In the twentieth century, the United States conducted a more active interventionist policy after the Soviet Union collapsed than it had throughout much of the Cold War. After 1989, American military interventions abroad became more frequent and occurred in parts of the world that had previously been off-limits due to the Cold War standoff.

We have grown so accustomed to life in the American order that we have perhaps forgotten how nations behave as they acquire power. Increasing power changes nations. It changes their ambitions, their sense of themselves, and even their definition of their interests. It also has a way of bringing out qualities of character that may have been submerged or less visible when they were weaker. Take a friendly power, like France. Today it is a benign middling power with a fairly skillful foreign policy. Most of its European neighbors regard it as a bit arrogant and selfish, but that is tolerable because it certainly is not dangerous. But what would France be like as a superpower? Would the character traits that people today find merely annoying or amusing become more problematic? When France
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one of the world’s two or three strongest powers, under Louis XIV in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and under Napoléon in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries, it twice tried to conquer its way to European supremacy (and twice failed). Maybe a democratic French superpower of tomorrow would pursue a modest, restrained foreign policy, but if so, it would be a historical anomaly. Democratic superpowers can be ambitious, too, as the United States has amply proven. The point is that power changes nations, and sometimes dramatically. Both Germany and Japan were fairly benign as nations of moderate or little power. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, “sleepy Germany” was known as a “land of poets and thinkers.”
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Prior to its modernization during the Meiji period, Japan was a hermit nation that deliberately cut off ties to the outside world and was a threat to no one. Yet both displayed a different set of qualities when they grew strong, unified, and active on the world scene.

Because shifts in relative power change national ambitions and alter constraints, a return to multipolarity would change the character of every great power’s foreign policy. Those nations whose power rose in relative terms would display expanding ambitions commensurate with their new clout in the international system. They would, as in the past, demand particular spheres of influence, if only as security against the other great powers. Those whose power declined in relative terms, like the United States, would have little choice but to retrench and cede some influence in those areas. Thus China would lay claim to its sphere of influence in Asia, Russia in eastern Europe and the Caucasus. And, as in the past, their claims would overlap and conflict: India and China claim the same sphere in the Indian Ocean; Russia and Europe have overlapping spheres in the region between the Black
Sea and the Baltic. Without the United States to suppress and contain these conflicting ambitions, there would have to be complex adjustments to establish a new balance. Some of these adjustments could be made through diplomacy, as they were sometimes in the past. Other adjustments might be made through war or the threat of war, as also happened in the past. The notion that the world could make a smooth and entirely peaceful transition from the present configuration of power to a new configuration reflecting an entirely different distribution of power is wishful thinking.

One of the main causes of war throughout history has been a rough parity of power that leaves nations in doubt about who is stronger. Rough parity creates uncertainty about which power might prevail in war, which leads to a complex interaction of probes and posturing between the contending powers that greatly increase the likelihood of a genuine test to discover which is actually the more powerful. Wars tend to break out as a result of large-scale shifts in the power equation, when the upward trajectory of a rising power comes close to intersecting the downward trajectory of a declining power. The great miracle of the Cold War was that the United States and the Soviet Union never decided to test their relative strength, though there were times when they came dangerously close. There is no better recipe for great-power peace than certainty about who holds the upper hand.
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And it is no coincidence that scholars began talking about the impossibility of great-power conflict after the Cold War, when the United States suddenly enjoyed such a vast military
superiority over every other potential challenger. Were that superiority to erode, the return of great-power competition would make great-power war more likely again.

What about the famous “Concert of Europe”? Could there not be a concert of great powers to coordinate policies and preserve the peace in a post-American world? It is true that in the three-decades-long peace that followed the defeat of Napoléon in 1815, the great European powers did successfully manage their affairs and avoid war. What kept the concert working, however, was not the magic of the balance of power. It was a set of shared values, shared principles, and a shared vision on the most important questions of the day—from the shape of the European order to what constituted legitimate authority and the nature of domestic politics and society. In the immediate aftermath of the French Revolution and the destructive Europe-wide war that followed it, all the leaders of the great powers shared a common horror of radicalism and revolution. They joined together not just to keep peace but to keep a conservative peace. They wanted to make the world safe for monarchy and aristocracy. They shared a vision of a particular kind of “Europe” they wished to preserve against the challenge of liberal and revolutionary forces. That consensus soon began to fray, however, as Britain, the most liberal of the powers, increasingly objected to the insistence of its Austrian and Russian partners that all hints of liberalism on the Continent be crushed by military force. The concert effectively collapsed after liberal revolution swept Europe again in the 1840s.