U.S. unipolarity is inevitable---no rivals are strong enough to challenge it

CHAPTER 6 The Unipolar Era “If Sparta and Rome perished,” the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau asked, “what State can hope to endure forever?”1 The resounding answer given by history is “no state.” In time, perhaps in another century or so, the American empire will crumble and new powers will rise. But we are not there yet, nor will we be for many decades. We are living in the unipolar era, and it will probably outlive us. So what? The United States might be the most powerful country in his- tory, but it has a limited presence in many corners of the globe, and weaker nations routinely trample on U.S. interests.2 The United States failed to pre- vent the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the rise of the Islamic State, the Russian inva- sion of Crimea, Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, North Korean nuclear proliferation, and Chinese island-building in the South China Sea. Unipolarity, bipolarity, multipolarity: What difference does it make? In this final chapter, I explain why this view is wrong by highlighting several ways that unipolarity transforms world politics. The good news is that unipolarity dramatically reduces the likelihood of great power war. The bad news is that it may increase the likelihood of asymmetric conflict and undermine American national unity and the liberal world order. No Hegemonic Rivalry The story of world politics is often told as a game of thrones in which a rotating cast of great powers battles for top-dog status. According to researchers led by Graham Allison at Harvard, there have been sixteen cases in the past five hundred years when a rising power challenged a rul- ing power.3 Twelve of these cases ended in carnage. One can quibble with Allison’s case selection, but the basic pattern is clear: hegemonic rivalry has sparked a catastrophic war every forty years on average for the past half millennium. The emergence of unipolarity in 1991 has put this cycle of hegemonic competition on hold. Obviously wars and security competition still occur in today’s unipolar world—in fact, as I explain later, unipolarity has made certain types of asymmetric conflict more likely—but none of these con- flicts have the global scope or generational length of a hegemonic rivalry. To appreciate this point, just consider the Cold War—one of the four “peaceful” cases of hegemonic rivalry identified by Allison’s study. Although the two superpowers never went to war, they divided the world into rival camps, waged proxy wars that killed millions of people, and pushed each other to the brink of nuclear Armageddon. For forty-five years, World War III and human extinction were nontrivial possibilities. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, by contrast, the United States has not faced a hegemonic rival, and the world, though far from perfect, has been more peaceful and prosperous than ever before. Just look at the numbers. From 1400 to 1991, the rate of war deaths world- wide hovered between 5 and 10 deaths per 100,000 people and spiked to 200 deaths per 100,000 during major wars.4 After 1991, however, war death rates dropped to 0.5 deaths per 100,000 people and have stayed there ever since. Interstate wars have disappeared almost entirely, and the number of civil wars has declined by more than 30 percent.5 Meanwhile, the global economy has quadrupled in size, creating more wealth between 1991 and 2018 than in all prior human history combined.6 What explains this unprecedented outbreak of peace and prosperity? Some scholars attribute it to advances in communications technology, from the printing press to the telegraph to the Internet, which supposedly spread empathy around the globe and caused entire nations to place a higher value on human life.7 Such explanations are appealing, because they play on our natural desire to believe in human progress, but are they convincing? Did humans sud- denly become 10 to 20 times less violent and cruel in 1991? Are we orders of magnitude more noble and kind than our grandparents? Has social media made us more empathetic? Of course not, which is why the dra- matic decline in warfare after 1991 is better explained by geopolitics than sociology.8 The collapse of the Soviet Union not only ended the Cold War and related proxy fighting, it also opened up large swathes of the world to democracy, international commerce, and peacekeeping forces—all of which surged after 1991 and further dampened conflict.9 Faced with overwhelming U.S. economic and military might, most countries have decided to work within the American-led liberal order rather than fight to overturn it.10 As of 2018, nearly seventy countries have joined the U.S. alliance network—a Kantian community in which war is unthinkable—and even the two main challeng- ers to this community, China and Russia, begrudgingly participate in the institutions of the liberal order (e.g., the UN, the WTO, the IMF, World Bank, and the G-20), engage in commerce with the United States and its allies, and contribute to international peacekeeping missions.11 History may not have ended in 1991, but it clearly changed in profound ways—and mostly for the better.