America has no such global challengers today. The most serious threat to American national security today is not a specific enemy but the erosion of the institutional foundations of the global order that the United States has commanded for half a century and through which it has pursued its interests and national security. America’s leadership position and its authority within the global system are in serious crisis and this puts American national security at risk. The grand strategy America needs to pursue in the years ahead is not one aimed at a particular threat, but rather one aimed at restoring its role as the recognized and legitimate leader of the system and rebuilding the institutions and partnerships upon which this leadership position is based. America’s global position is in crisis, but it is a crisis that is largely of its own making. United States can, in twenty years, still be at the center of a “one world” system defined in terms of open markets, democratic community, cooperative security, and rule-based order. This is a future that can be contrasted with less desirable alternatives that echo through the past great power balancing orders, regional blocs, or bipolar rivalries. The United States should seek to consolidate a global order in which other countries bandwagon rather than balance against it and where it remains at the center of a prosperous and secure democratic capitalist order. Most of the great powers are democracies and tied to the United States through alliance partnership. State power is ultimately based on sustained economic growth; and no major state today can modernize without integrating into the globalized capitalist system. What made the fascist and communist threats of the 20th century so profound was not only the danger of territorial aggression but that these great power challengers embodied rival politicaleconomic systems that could generate growth, attract global allies, and create counter-balancing geopolitical blocs. America is the dominant global power, unchecked by a coalition of balancing states or a superpower wielding a rival universalistic ideology. America pursued in the 1940s and onward with great success. In the postwar era, the United States did not just fight a global war against Soviet communism; it built an open and functional international order. This order was not just the by-product of the pursuit of containment. Instead, it sprang from ideas and logic of order that are deeply rooted in the American experience, Enlightenment era liberal democracy. It is an international order that generated power, wealth, stability, and security all of which allowed the West to prevail in the Cold War. During the decades after World War II, the United States did not just fight the Cold War, it created a liberal international order of multilayered pacts and partnerships that served to open markets, bind democracies together, and create a trans-regional security community. The United States provided security, championed mutually agreed-upon rules and institutions, and led in the management of an open world economy. In return, other states affiliated with and supported the United States as it led the larger order. It was an American led hegemonic order with liberal characteristics. There is still no alternative model of international order that is better suited to American interests or stable global governance. The new agenda for liberal order building involves an array of efforts to strengthen and rebuild global architecture. These initiatives include: building a “protective infrastructure” for preventing and responding to socioeconomic catastrophe, renewal of the Cold War-era alliances, reform of the United Nations (UN), and creation of new multilateral mechanisms for cooperation in East Asia and among the democracies. In the background, the United States will need to renegotiate and renew its grand bargains with Europe and East Asia. In these bargains, the United States will need to signal a new willingness to restrain and commit its power, accommodate rising states, and operate within reconfigured and agreed upon global rules and institutions. Overall, the United States needs to reestablish itself as a producer of world order. What has made the American position in the global system so durable and legitimate over the past decades is that it has been a provider of rules, institutions, and public goods into the system. These features of the international order are what make the resulting system more liberal than imperial and more consensus than coercive. But powerful states are always torn between being “system makers” and “privilege takers.” With the end of the Cold War, the rise of unipolarity, and a diffuse and shifting security environment, it is harder for the United States to remain a system maker and easier for it to be a privilege taker. Nonetheless, the key to reestablishing America’s position at the center of a stable, open, and friendly international system will be to rediscover and reaffirm the restraints and commitments embodied in liberal order. The Bush administration sought a radical break with the postwar American approach to order but it failed—and failed spectacularly. The administration sought to construct a global order based around American unipolar rule, asserting new rights to use force while reducing the country’s exposure to multilateral rules and institutions. America’s strategic position has weakened as a result and the institutions that have leveraged and legitimated U.S. power in the past have eroded. If America wants to remain at the center of an open world system—one that is friendly, cooperative, and capable of generating collective action in pursuit of diverse and shifting security challenges—it will need to return to its tradition of liberal order building. Between 1944 and 1951, American leaders engaged in the most intensive institution-building the world had ever seen—global, regional, security, economic, and political. The UN, Bretton Woods, General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), NATO, and U.S.-Japan alliance were all launched. The United States undertook costly obligations to aid Greece and Turkey and reconstruct Western Europe. It helped rebuild the economies of Germany and Japan. Through the Atlantic Charter, the UN Charter, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, America articulated a new vision of a progressive international community. In all of these ways, the United States took the lead in fashioning a world of multilateral rules, institutions, open markets, democratic community, and regional partnerships—and put itself at the center of it all. This American-led system is now more than a halfcentury old and its institutions and bargains have eroded. Indeed, the American-led international order is in crisis. The UN, NATO, International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank, and even the WTO are all searching for missions and authority. The rise of new powers—particularly in Asia—is also putting pressure on these old postwar institutions to reform their membership and governance arrangements.11 The institutional mechanisms of the system are not functioning very effectively or responding to emerging new demands. But with the end of the Cold War, other states are not dependent on the United States for protection as much and a unifying common threat has been eliminated. So old bargains, alliance partnerships, and shared strategic visions are thrown into question. At the very least, the shift in power advantages in favor of the United States would help explain why it might want to renegotiate older rules and institutions. Taken together, American power and a functioning global governance system have become disconnected. In the past, the United States provided global “services”—such as security protection and support for open markets—that made other states willing to work with rather than resist American power. The public goods provision tended to make it worthwhile for these states to endure the day-today irritations of American foreign policy, but the trade-off seems to have shifted. Today, the United States appears to be providing fewer public goods while irritations associated with American dominance appear to be growing. Create new institutions and reform old ones so that rising states particularly China but also India and other emerging powers can more easily be embedded in the existing global system rather than operate as dissatisfied revisionist states on the outside. The other step is to create a “concert of democracies.” The idea would not be to establish a substitute body for the United Nations—which some advocates of a concert or league suggest but to simply provide another venue where democracies can discuss common goals and reinforce cooperation. The danger of a “concert of democracies” is that it will alienate great powers—such as China and Russia—that are left outside its membership. There is also the danger that the concert will become too successful and undermine the UN as the key universal organization mandated to speak on the grand issues of war and peace. The concert should certainly not aspire to replace the United Nations Security Council and it should not become a vehicle to heighten tension between the democratic world and other states. It should be a club—like other gatherings in world politics— that helps facilitate collective action. It should be low-key and lead by the actions of the middle- to lower-tier democracies rather than through pronouncements from Washington. The concert should not be seen as a body that can simply legitimate American military actions. Quite the contrary, it should act in part to restrain, commit, and inform the exercise of American power and connect that power more closely to other states. The fourth objective addresses the rise of China—and Greater Asia—and is perhaps the seminal drama of our time. In the decades to come, America’s unipolar power will give way to a more bipolar, multipolar, or decentralized distribution of power. China will most likely be a dominant state and the United States will need to yield to it in various ways. The national security question for America to ask today is: what sorts of investments in global institutional architecture do I want to make now so that the coming power shifts will adversely impact me the least? That is, what types of institutional arrangements do I want to have in place to protect my interests when I am less powerful? This inquiry is a neo-Rawlsian question that should inform American strategic decision making. The answer to this neo-Rawlsian question seems to be two-fold. One is that the United States should try to embed the foundations of the Western-oriented international system so deeply that China has overwhelming incentives to integrate into it rather than to oppose and overturn it. Those American strategists who fear a rising China the most should be ultra-ambitious liberal institution builders. The United States should reconcile its differences with Europe and renew joint commitments to multilateral global governance. The more that China faces not just the United States, but a united West, the better. The more that China faces not just a united West, but the entire Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) world of capitalist democracies, the better. This is not to argue that China should face a grand counter-balancing alliance against it. Rather, China should face a complex and deeply integrated global system—one that is so encompassing and deeply entrenched that China essentially has no choice but to join it and seek to prosper within it. Indeed, the United States should take advantage of one of the great virtues of liberal hegemony, namely, that such a world order is easy to join and hard to overturn. The multiple layers of institutions and channels of access provide relatively easy entry points for China to join the existing international order. Now is precisely the wrong historical moment for the United States to be uprooting and disassembling its own liberal hegemonic order. The second answer to the neo-Rawlsian question is to encourage the building of a regional East Asian security order that will provide a framework for managing the coming power shifts. The idea is not to block China’s entry into the regional order but to help shape its terms, looking for opportunities to strike strategic bargains at various moments along the shifting power trajectories and encroaching geopolitical spheres. The big bargain that the United States will want to strike with China is this: to accommodate a rising China by offering it status and position within the regional order, in return for Beijing accepting and accommodating Washington’s core strategic interests, which include remaining a dominant security provider within East Asia. In striking this strategic bargain, the United States will also want to try to build multilateral institutional arrangements in East Asia that will tie down and bind China to the wider region. China has already grasped the utility of this strategy in recent years and it is now actively seeking to reassure and co-opt its neighbors by offering to embed itself in regional institutions such as the ASEAN Plus 3 and Asian Summit. This is precisely what the United States did in the decades after World War II, building and operating within layers of regional and global economic, political, and security institutions, thereby making itself more predictable and approachable while reducing the incentives for other states to resist or undermine the United States by building countervailing coalitions. The challenge for the United States is to encourage China to continue along this pathway, allaying worries about its growing power by facilitating China’s binds to the region. But to do this, there will need to be a more formal and articulated regional security organization into which China can integrate. Such an organization need not have the features of an alliance system, as the countries in the region are not ready for this. What is needed, however, is a security organization that has at its center a treaty of non-aggression and mechanisms for periodic consultation. The United States has no experience managing a relationship with a country that is increasingly becoming its principal economic and security rival. It is unclear, and probably unknowable, how China’s intentions and ambitions will evolve as it becomes more powerful. We do know, however, that the rise and decline of great powers and the problem of “power transitions” can trigger conflict, security competition, and war. The point here is that, in the long run, the way that China rises up in the world could have a more profound impact on American national security than incremental shifts up or down in the fortunes of international terrorist groups. The larger point is and it is a critical assumption here that today, the United States confronts an unusually diverse and diffuse array of threats and challenges. When we try to imagine what the premier threat to the United States will be in 2015 or 2020, it is not easy to say with any confidence. Finally, America must reclaim a liberal internationalist “public philosophy.” When U.S. officials championed the building of a rule-based order after World War II, they articulated a distinctive internationalist vision of order that has faded in recent decades. It was a vision that entailed a synthesis of liberal and realist ideas about economy, national security, and the sources of stable and peaceful order. These ideas—drawn from the 1940s experiences with the New Deal and the previous decades of war and depression—led American leaders to associate the national interest with the building of a managed and institutionalized global system. What is needed today is a renewed public philosophy of liberal internationalism that can inform American elites as they make trade-offs between sovereignty and institutional cooperation. What American elites need to do today is recover this public philosophy of internationalism. In the past, restraint and commitment of American power went hand in hand. Global rules and institutions advanced America’s national interest rather than threatened it. The alternative public philosophies that circulate today—philosophies that champion American unilateralism and disentanglement from global rules and institutions—are not meeting with great success. There now exists an opening for America’s postwar vision of internationalism to be updated and rearticulated. The more this order binds together capitalist democratic states in deeply rooted institutions, the more open, consensual, and rule-based it is, and the more widely spread its benefits, the more likely it will be that rising powers can and will secure their interests through integration and accommodation rather than through war or opposition to America. If the liberal international order offers rules and institutions that benefit the full range of states-rising and falling, weak and strong, emerging and mature—its dominance as an international order is all but certain. For the most part, the great powers of the modern era have pursued “positional” grand strategies. They have identified rivals and enemies and then organized their foreign policies accordingly. Across historical eras, the results have been various sorts of balances of power and imperial systems. Once in a while, a state can dare to ask slightly loftier questions about the organization of the international system. Here, the questions are meta-questions about political order itself. These are essentially “constitutional” questions about the first principles and organizational logic of the global system. The great powers collectively did this after 1815 and the United States and its allies did it again after the world wars. Today, the United States can once again ask these constitutional-like questions. What sort of global governance order would the United States like to see in operation in, say, 2020 or 2030? If we are uncertain today what precisely will worry us tomorrow, what sort of mechanisms of governance would we like to see established to deal with these unknowns? If all we know is that the security threats of tomorrow will be shifting, diffuse, and uncertain, we should seek to create a flexible and capable political system that can meet and defeat a large number of variant and complex threats. Looking into this brave new world, the United States will find itself needing to share power and rely in part on others to ensure its security. It will not be able to depend on unipolar power or airtight borders. To operate in this coming world, the United States will need—more than anything else—authority and respect as a global leader. It has lost that authority and respect in recent years. In committing itself to a grand strategy of liberal order building, America can begin the process of gaining it back. Various threats are interconnected and it is the possibility of their interactive effects that multiples the dangers. This point is stressed by Thomas Homer-Dixon, who states, “It’s the convergence of stresses that’s especially treacherous and makes synchronous failure a possibility as never before. In coming years, our societies won’t face one or two major challenges at once, as usually happened in the past. Instead, they’ll face an alarming variety of problems likely including oil shortages, climate change, economic instability, and mega-terrorism all at the same time.” The danger is that several of these threats will materialize at the same time and interact to generate greater violence and instability. “What happens, for example, if together or in quick succession the world has to deal with a sudden shift in climate that sharply cuts food production in Europe and Asia, a severe oil price increase that sends economies tumbling around the world, and a string of major terrorist attacks on several Western capital cities?” The global order itself would be put at risk as well as the foundations of American national security. This means investment in international cooperative frameworks—rules, institutions, partnerships, networks, standby capacities, social knowledge, and the like in which the United States operates. To build international order is to increase the global stock of “social capital,” which is the term Pierre Bourdieu, Robert Putnam, and others have used to define the actual and potential resources and capacities within a political community, manifest in and through its networks of social relations, that are available for solving collective problems. Taken together, liberal order building involves investment in the enhancement of global social capital so as to create capacities to solve problems that, left unattended, will threaten national security. It is an international order that generated power, wealth, stability, and security all of which allowed the West to prevail in the Cold War. This postwar liberal order was built around a set of ideas, institutions, bargains, democratic community, and American hegemonic power. It is upon this foundation that a renewed strategy of liberal order building must be based. In comparison to the doctrine of containment, the ideas and policies of American postwar liberal order building were more diffuse and wideranging. It was less obvious that the liberal order building agenda was a “grand strategy” designed to advance American security interests. But in other respects, it was the more enduring American project, one that was aimed at creating an international order that would be open, stable, and friendly and that solved the problems of the 1930s, specifically the economic breakdown and competing geopolitical blocs that paved the way for world war. The challenge was not to deter or contain the power of the Soviet Union, but to lay the foundation for an international order that would allow the United States to thrive. This impulse—to build a stable and open international system that advantaged America—existed before, during, and after the Cold War. Even at the moment when the Cold War gathered force, the grand strategic interest in building such an order was appreciated. Indeed, one recalls that NSC-68 laid out a doctrine of containment, but it also articulated a rationale for building a positive international order. The United States needs, it said, to “build a healthy international community,” which “we would probably do even if there were no international threat.” The United States needs a “world environment in which the American system can survive and flourish.” It is useful to distinguish between two types of grand strategies—positional and milieu-oriented. A positional grand strategy is where a great power seeks to counter, undercut, contain, and limit the power and threats of a specific challenger state or group of states: Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, the Soviet bloc, and perhaps—in the future—Greater China. A milieu grand strategy is where a great power does not target a specific state but seeks to structure its general international environment in ways that are congenial with its long-term security. An Agenda for Liberal International Renewal John Ikenberry isn.ethz.ch/Digital-Library/Publications/Detail/?lng=en&id=57064
Posted on: Wed, 26 Nov 2014 22:37:56 +0000
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