Alternative produces a collapse of the international system

While U.S. hegemony entails perplexities and burdens, an abandonment of hegemony may carry risks. Diminished U.S. leadership could prove dangerously disruptive of the international system and imperil the well-being of peoples everywhere, Americans included. A U.S. retreat could undermine an international economy that has generated impressive global abundance and peace beneficial to many. Simply consider the resources now available today (an annual worldwide output of $30 trillion at the end of the twentieth century) compared to fifty years earlier when it was a tenth that figure. Imagine what this amazing, unprecedented leap in global productivity has meant to health and welfare in all lands. Without U.S. leadership, so the defenders of hegemony claim, these gains might well have been limited, even nonexistent. A future of diminished abundance might prove distinctly unpleasant: greater discord among states and peoples leading to rising cultural intolerance, flaring nationalist fervor and rivalry, deepening international divisions, and fraying economic ties that would slow growth and press down longevity and health in wide swaths of the human population. This would be a world of narrower horizons, fewer choices, and less interaction among peoples and cultures. It would also be a world with diminished capacity for addressing mounting global problems. Advocates for maintaining U.S. dominance along current neoliberal lines hold the ideological high ground. The predominant version of American nationalism took a distinctly activist turn in the course of the twentieth century. From the 1890s to the 1920s the notion of the United States as a dynamic republic with the vision and energy to manage the world’s affairs began to come into its own. Republicans dedicated to an assertive policy along a broad front contributed to this shift in thinking. So too did Woodrow Wilson with his fervent support for the ideal of a progressive international society. In 1941 Henry Luce blended this set of nationalist ideas in his vision of an American century marked by the advance of political freedom, unhampered commerce, and general economic abundance. The most activist U.S. leaders after World War II drew from this creed, as appealing to visionary Wilsonians such as Harry Truman as to corporate-minded Republicans such as Ronald Reagan and the younger Bush. Over the past half century it has become an orthodoxy so potent in its appeal that challengers risk exile from membership in the foreign policy establishment and exclusion from government posts. Such is the allegiance commanded by the one true faith. Or as John Adams observed pungently, “Power always thinks it has a great Soul, and vast Views.”¹⁰ Even so, a good case can be made for a U.S. retreat from hegemony and toward a more modest and sustainable role in the world. A searching critique has no reason to linger on matters of style, particularly such easy targets as a policy governed by restless unilateralism or simplistic assumptions. Such a critique should instead turn to the hegemonic project itself. The place to begin a critical evaluation is with the tendency of the champions of hegemony to oversell the product. They point to its historical achievements to the neglect of the costs it has imposed on others. The leaders of the United States have managed hegemony with a lamentably heavy hand—with scant respect for human life and scant respect for human diversity. Millions died and many societies suffered profound disruption as a result of the U.S. interventions that dot the pages of this account. To those costs would have to be added an intolerance of views on markets and the state that diverge from U.S. preferences. As a result, U.S. pressure has in some cases blocked or disrupted socioeconomic and political experiments favored by others, especially in Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East. In other cases, an insistence on an American way has generated tensions with major states such as China or regions such as western Europe with divergent interests and values; that insistence has also strained ties with genuinely international organizations such as the UN. On virtually every front U.S. leaders have left themselves open to charges of hypocrisy—of ignoring if not violating the ideals of democracy and self-determination that they publicly profess. A look into the future reveals more grounds for doubts about the hegemonic project. Put simply, the time for U.S. hegemony may have passed. As the relative U.S. advantage in economic might and cultural appeal slips, attempts to exercise hegemony may prove increasingly counterproductive, doing more to further undermine than to confirm U.S. dominance. The U.S. economy labors under limits. Persistent structural problems include oil dependency, low domestic savings, and deep trade and federal budget deficits. The core U.S. cultural model—a faith in unending corporate-driven growth and the unending delights of consumerism—may be fading at least in the developed world. Western Europe and Japan have both drawn alongside the United States in their technological capacity, their income levels, their capital resources, and the depth and integration of their home markets. They need no longer look to the United States as a model in any of these areas. The consumer revolution led by Americans may have at least in these two regions run its course. Rising per capita income beyond a point (in the range of $15,000 in a fair sampling of countries recently surveyed) seems to produce no greater individual satisfaction while imposing costs captured not by conventional GDP data but by social GDP estimates.¹¹ In military affairs, the United States has retained, even increased, its dominance. But to what end? Its massive nuclear stockpile can be used only at the risk of profound and widespread moral revulsion and in some circumstances of devastating counterstrikes. Its high-tech forces may be the wonder of the world. But they are effective only against the most peripheral and isolated of states (in what one observer has dismissed as “theatrical micromilitarism”), and they have limited capacity to rebuild what they have destroyed.¹² The exercise of military might has proven a poor substitute for the intricacies of diplomatic negotiation, the trade-offs indispensable to international comity, and the long-term commitment of resources to economic development and human welfare. Finally, hegemony may hurt the hegemon. Evidence can be found in the privileging of corporate interests harmful to popular welfare, a fixation with military power that amounts to a national obsession, an increasingly infantilized and inert public, and the rise of an imperial presidency antithetical to genuine democracy. These trends validate a sharply critical view of foreign adventures that prevailed during the country’s first century. Proponents of republicanism claimed that crusades, even crusades conducted in the name of freedom, threatened freedom at home. The history of republican experiments across history showed that foreign entanglements and adventures created dangerous concentrations of political power within and undermined the very civic virtues on which the survival of any republic depended. Vindicating this republican fear is the rise of the imperial president and the concomitant atrophy of the democratic process. While most Americans today may not see hegemony through this anxious republican lens, many have voiced their discontent with the outward thrust of U.S. policy. Some express it in frustration and chagrin directed not against U.S. leaders but against a seemingly ungrateful, unyielding, dangerous world and call for scaling back international commitments. The most restive have contended that a more isolated, less burdened America would be better off— less vulnerable to attack, less dependent on fickle friends, less likely to get entangled in distant quarrels, and more secure in its homeland and its domestic liberties. Others refuse to go this far and instead put the blame squarely on U.S. leaders—political and corporate—whose free-market, environmental, and human rights policies have betrayed values as important at home as in the international community. Taken together, these critical reactions suggest a broad-based skepticism about hegemony. But the critics may be so fundamentally divided philosophically, politically, regionally, and socially that they cannot cobble together a common program to serve as an alternative to hegemony. A retreat from hegemony need not lead to isolationism. This myth about the nature of U.S. foreign relations in the past, which was constructed in the first place for the very purpose of justifying U.S. dominance, is likely to figure prominently in any defense of the status quo. But the notion of isolation is flawed as history and as a source of lessons. Today as earlier, the United States has a major stake in a productive, peaceful, and just global society. By extension, the United States has an obligation rooted in self-interest if not calculations of altruism and long-term human welfare to help mobilize a collective international response to the problems generated by that society. A retreat implies that the United States would act in world affairs not as the leader but as a leader, perhaps in some circumstances the first among equals. Engaging in a genuinely collaborative relationship with other states and taking international institutions and norms seriously may hold out the best hope of extending the considerable achievements of the previous fifty years and in the bargain maintaining U.S. influence and advancing U.S. well-being. The historical case for the efficacy of collaboration is compelling. The U.S. role after World War I calmed, for a time at least, the arms race, gave the Europeans a chance to sort out their monetary tangle, and sustained the turn-of-the-century drive to create humane standards of international conduct. The post–World War II record is even more striking. The achievements in setting norms (such as outlawing genocide), rehabilitating defeated Germany and Japan, and creating a framework for global prosperity were the result of collaboration richly repaid in international support and respect, not to mention enhanced U.S. security. This collaborative element helped not only to distinguish the U.S. from the Soviet side during the Cold War, but also to determine the outcome of a competition that was as much about systems and values as military might. International cooperation is not an illusion; it yields results far better than a course defined by narrow self-interest and pursued by brute force. Whatever the attractions of a more modest, collaborative internationalism, winning broad acceptance of such an approach faces serious difficulties. It requires that Americans think about their role in the world in a fresh, genuinely global way quite distinct from the cautious opportunism familiar from the first U.S. century and the rising assertiveness that has marked recent decades. It also requires a sensitivity to the intricacies of the global system and the cultural diversity of its parts. That sensitivity will not come easily to today’s body politic, which features a disengaged, ill-schooled public and a political class beholden to interest groups and trapped by shallow rhetoric and narrow, short-term calculations. Above all, the middle way offers nothing heroic to a country of individualists that may be dependent on civic nationalism as one of the few sources of collective identity. Indeed, calls for serious, long-term support for economic development programs, genuine respect for international norms, and tolerance for regional diversity collide with prevailing nationalist and neoliberal notions, which continue to inspire bold dreams of global transformation under the American aegis and in the American image. A retreat from hegemony would require a lot: a more cosmopolitan understanding of other cultures, a more sophisticated grasp of U.S. limits, a genuinely democratic electoral system responsive to popular preferences, and a better informed electorate able to think through those preferences. The fate of the current ascendancy with its hegemonic dimensions may well hang on how Americans measure up to these high standards and how rapidly structural problems eat away at the foundations of our hegemony. What the next page of the national story has to say may depend on how well we take into account the possibilities and constraints created by a history of burgeoning state power, strong nationalism, and intrusive global forces.