No leadership impact.

These assessments of conflict are by necessity relative, because there has not been a “high” level of conflict in any region outside the Middle East during the period of the New Peace. Putting aside for the moment that important caveat, some points become clear. The great powers of the world are clustered in the upper right quadrant, where US intervention has been high, but conflict levels low. US intervention is imperfectly correlated with stability, however. Indeed, it is conceivable that the relatively high level of US interest and activity has made the security situation in the Persian Gulf and broader Middle East worse. In recent years, substantial hard power investments (Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq), moderate intervention (Libya), and reliance on diplomacy (Syria) have been equally ineffective in stabilizing states torn by conflict. While it is possible that the region is essentially unpacifiable and no amount of police work would bring peace to its people, it remains hard to make the case that the US presence has improved matters. In this “strong point,” at least, US hegemony has failed to bring peace.

In much of the rest of the world, the United States has not been especially eager to enforce any particular rules. Even rather incontrovertible evidence of genocide has not been enough to inspire action. Washington’s intervention choices have at best been erratic; Libya and Kosovo brought about action, but much more blood flowed uninterrupted in Rwanda, Darfur, Congo, Sri Lanka, and Syria. The US record of peacemaking is not exactly a long uninterrupted string of successes. During the turn-of-the-century conventional war between Ethiopia and Eritrea, a high-level US delegation containing former and future National Security Advisors (Anthony Lake and Susan Rice) made a half-dozen trips to the region but was unable to prevent either the outbreak or recurrence of the conflict. Lake and his team shuttled back and forth between the capitals with some frequency, and President Clinton made repeated phone calls to the leaders of the respective countries, offering to hold peace talks in the United States, all to no avail.67 The war ended in late 2000 when Ethiopia essentially won, and it controls the disputed territory to this day.

The Horn of Africa is hardly the only region where states are free to fight one another today without fear of serious US involvement. Since they are choosing not to do so with increasing frequency, something else is probably affecting their calculations. Stability exists even in those places where the potential for intervention by the sheriff is minimal. Hegemonic stability can only take credit for influencing those decisions that would have ended in war without the presence, whether physical or psychological, of the United States. It seems hard to make the case that the relative peace that has descended on so many regions is primarily due to the kind of heavy hand of the neoconservative leviathan, or its lighter, more liberal cousin. Something else appears to be at work.

Conflict and US Military Spending

How does one measure polarity? Power is traditionally considered to be some combination of military and economic strength, but despite scores of efforts, no widely accepted formula exists. Perhaps overall military spending might be thought of as a proxy for hard power capabilities; perhaps too the amount of money the United States devotes to hard power is a reflection of the strength of the unipole. When compared to conflict levels, however, there is no obvious correlation, and certainly not the kind of negative relationship between US spending and conflict that many hegemonic stability theorists would expect to see.

During the 1990s, the United States cut back on defense by about 25 percent, spending $100 billion less in real terms in 1998 that it did in 1990.68 To those believers in the neoconservative version of hegemonic stability, this irresponsible “peace dividend” endangered both national and global security. “No serious analyst of American military capabilities doubts that the defense budget has been cut much too far to meet America’s responsibilities to itself and to world peace,” argued Kristol and Kagan at the time.69 The world grew dramatically more peaceful while the United States cut its forces, however, and stayed just as peaceful while spending rebounded after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The incidence and magnitude of global conflict declined while the military budget was cut under President Clinton, in other words, and kept declining (though more slowly, since levels were already low) as the Bush administration ramped it back up. Overall US military spending has varied during the period of the New Peace from a low in constant dollars of less than $400 billion to a high of more than $700 billion, but war does not seem to have noticed. The same nonrelationship exists between other potential proxy measurements for hegemony and conflict: there does not seem to be much connection between warfare and fluctuations in US GDP, alliance commitments, and forward military presence. There was very little fighting in Europe when there were 300,000 US troops stationed there, for example, and that has not changed as the number of Americans dwindled by 90 percent. Overall, there does not seem to be much correlation between US actions and systemic stability. Nothing the United States actually does seems to matter to the New Peace.