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THE TWILIGHT OF THE UNIPOLAR WORLD
BY CORAL BELL
VOLUME I, NUMBER 2 (WINTER 2005)
www.the-american-interest.com
At this noontide of U.S. power, it may seem premature
to talk of the twilight of unipolarity. But after
all, every noon presages a transition toward twilight.
My reasons for believing that this moment of transition
has passed are not the usual ones of "imperial
overstretch", burgeoning budget and trade deficits
and so on. Those are problems that could well be
remedied by the next U.S. administration, or even
by the current one if it exerted itself to do so.
The global tendency that will prove decisive is
beyond remedy by even the most Machiavellian or,
depending on one's point of view, enlightened policymaker
in Washington: the current and by historical standards
rapid redistribution of power internationally. This
trend, which is quite unstoppable, is based on two
linked developments: the rise of the un-West and
the split of the old West. Together, these developments
will disestablish three main pillars of post-Cold
War U.S. unipolarity: American economic dominance,
the capacity of the United States for diplomatic
bandwagoning, and the appeal of American "soft
power."
Thus, even without the obvious or rapid rise of
a classical "peer competitor"—to
borrow the Pentagon's language—the age of
American unipolarity will end. I do not expect American
paramountcy in advanced weapons systems and both
conventional and nuclear war-fighting capacity to
disappear for a very long time. But as events since
September 2001 have shown, that paramountcy is by
no means as conclusive an answer to U.S. security
problems, or as much a boon to U.S. statecraft,
as its original sponsors (or present directors)
expected.
THE RISE OF THE UN-WEST
Probably everyone is aware that by mid-century India
and China each will have populations near the billion
and a half mark, together making up about a third
of the 9 billion people expected then to inhabit
the world. But most of us are less conscious of
other prospective rates of population growth. According
to UN projections, Pakistan will be approaching
350 million; Indonesia, Bangladesh, Brazil and Nigeria
each about 300 million; Mexico, Vietnam, the Philippines
and several others more than 100 million—all
compared to a projected U.S. population of about
400 million.
At the same time, Russia will be moving downward
toward 80 million, to hold that vast swath of territory
from west of the Urals all the way to the Pacific
Ocean. The European Union as a whole may grow to
about 600 million, but Japan and individual long-time
U.S. allies within Europe will shrink.
As significant as raw populations totals, the shape
of populations will be of great consequence. The
current reductions in infant mortality that are
dramatically increasing the populations of what
we used to call the Third World took place long
ago in the West. The phenomenon that will continue
to characterize reductions in mortality in Western
countries now comes at the other end of life. So
there will be ever more 80- and 90-year-olds in
the present dominant powers of the West, and ever
more 16- to 30-year-olds in the newly arriving powers
of the un-West.
There is no getting around the basic economic implication
of these demographic data: Young societies grow
faster than those with lower ratios of workers to
dependent oldsters. Just as important, many of the
younger populations of the arriving powers show
signs of wanting to change the social and political
status quo of their own societies and of the society
of states as a whole-whether by jihad or by other,
mostly indelicate, means.1 About two billion among
these youths will be Muslims.
I am well aware that in the past mere population
size has been no indicator of either economic or
military clout—nor has a psychologically restive
youth bulge. In many cases, as any sentient reader
of history knows, large numbers of disgruntled,
poor and uneducated people have represented a significant
net liability to the accrual and exercise of national
power. But that was before the civilizations of
the non-Western world regained their full sovereignties
after centuries of eclipse, and acquired competent
governments that in many cases are strongly nationalistic
and determined to take their rightful places in
the diplomatic sun.2
Perhaps more important, as literacy rates and higher
educational levels among the peoples of these countries
move toward equality with those in the West, and
as a more integrated world economic system enables
more rapid and widespread distribution of wealth,
large populations need not be impediments to national
power—quite the reverse. Only a deeply habituated
condescension, in which peoples of European origin
are so well practiced, prevents many in the West
from crediting this possibility.
Of course, not all of the new titans of the un-West
will be successful, well-governed and affluent states.
The power of the un-West can express itself in negative
and in simply unconventional terms, as well. Take
Bangladesh, for instance. A first reaction might
be to dismiss it as a place with no assets and little
more than a multitude of very poor people. But who
these days is inclined to argue that 100 million
young Muslims with very few jobs or prospects have
no means of making an impact on the society of states?
South Africa's potential status depends on its regional
influence, which may be greater than its raw power
would suggest. Vietnam's strategic location vis-à-vis
China and the United States, and its historical
record of resistance to Chinese hegemony in the
region, give it, too, a potential role exceeding
conventional measures of clout.
Moreover, whether wealthy or not, stable or not,
modern communications will keep the citizens of
the un-West fully informed about how citizens live
in the West. We should therefore not be surprised
if these populations and their governments become
decidedly revisionist with regard to what constitutes
a fair share of the world's resources. In any event,
increased demand for those resources cannot but
have a significant impact on world prices, as is
already the case, for instance, with oil.
Above all, the advent of several, if not many, relatively
competent, wealthy and populous new powers will
profoundly affect the basic structure of the society
of states. Let but one not-so-distant example illustrate.
As things stand today, the policies of the World
Bank and the International Monetary Fund are heavily
determined by the views of the U.S. Treasury—rules
that reflect relative power at the time the system
of weighted voting for the Bretton Woods institutions
was created. But in a few years the absolute majority
of international capital liquidity will reside in
Asia, and much of it in China. A re-weighted voting
system in the World Bank and the IMF would likely
produce policies very different from the ones we
see today, policies—on the conditionality
of loans, for example—not generally to the
liking of the United States.
If one multiplies this example and applies the principle
to the international system as a whole, it is clear
that U.S. economic dominance and the political prerogatives
that flow from it will be vastly eroded. With that
erosion will come a reduction in the appeal of diplomatic
bandwagoning with the United States and in the attractiveness
of its soft power. If it is true that everyone loves
a winner, it follows that fewer will love a power
that loses and draws as often as it wins. The sense
of global order will weaken as American power ebbs.
In consequence, the international landscape of a
few decades hence may resemble that of Easter Island:
dominated by giants, and battered by tempestuous
winds of change. And the United States may not have
its traditional allies with it to withstand those
winds.
LE DEFI EUROPEAN
Some may be skeptical of the impact of the joining
of demography, economics and global arriviste politics
I have sketched here. It is harder to ignore the
growing Transatlantic and Transpacific rifts and
the evident truth that their causes lay not in personalities
or other superficial factors, but in the massive
tectonic shift of post-Cold War circumstances that
has, in turn, allowed long-standing attitudinal
and cultural differences to emerge in full.
For the moment, the challenge to America's strategic
position seems to come from an ideologically motivated
jihadist movement. In broadly diplomatic terms,
however, it is not precisely a threat, for despite—or
rather because of—its capacity to inflict
death, grief and damage almost anywhere, the jihadists'
war tends to induce solidarity among the governments
of the world. There is no diplomatic glue like a
common enemy.
Most analysts predict that China will be America's
future challenger, but China's capacity to mount
a plausible bid is still decades away—though
its economic clout is already being used very adroitly
to political effect in some surprising places (even
Australia). Besides, it is by no means assured that
China's aggregation of economic power will continue
for another two decades without significant interruption.
Though we may wish to dismiss the possibility for
cultural reasons alone, it is the European Union
that represents the more likely and immediate rival
to the United States. The EU is the only actor that
has recently had reason to feel that the time may
be coming to set up a diplomatic bandwagon of its
own. What should surprise us is not that Europe
may become a competitor to the United States, but
that the European impulse to desert the U.S. bandwagon
has taken so long to emerge. The prime factor that
created the Atlantic Alliance back in 1946, the
fear of Soviet intentions and power, vanished 16
years ago. Europe now faces no military threat other
than that posed by the same jihadists who threaten
America, and it is hard to see how American military
power can be of much use to Europe in light of the
nature of that threat. Indeed, many Europeans believe
(quite mistakenly) that a public divorce from U.S.
power and purposes would exempt them from danger,
and let them get on more easily with the business
of assimilating their large Muslim communities into
the mainstream of their societies.
If I may preempt a likely counter-argument, the
recent defeat of the proposed EU "constitution"
(more a treaty revision than a constitution, strictly
speaking) is likely to accelerate rather than retard
the EU's progress. This is because in the fullness
of time that defeat may reduce the obstacles to
strengthening the EU in two key states on its western
and eastern periphery: Britain and Russia.
PERFIDIOUS ALBION: During the century-long rise
of the United States to its present ascendancy beginning
in 1898, Europe's longstanding tradition of balancing
against any prospective hegemon emerging on the
horizon was never invoked against America. Americans
tend to explain Europeans shrugging off the implied
threat to their own preeminence by pointing to the
genuine benevolence of American intentions and the
undoubted merits of their democratic way of life.
But another reason is clearly visible in retrospect:
the strategic choices of Great Britain.
For some centuries, the traditional convenor of
the European balance of power coalition has been
Britain. Just before the turn of the 20th century,
however, the powerful foreign policy establishment
in London decided that Britain could no longer afford
to be at odds with the United States. One can see
that resolution in the settlement of an obscure
little crisis in 1895 over the border between Venezuela
and a slice of British colonial territory now called
Guyana.3 The same resolution was visible several
years later, when the United States and Great Britain
were together "in the dock" as far as
general European opinion was concerned—the
United States over the Spanish-American War and
Britain over the Boer War. Concern over the security
of Canada might also have been a factor in Britain's
approach to the United States right up to World
War I.
From the 1940s onward, Britain's sense of the importance
of the U.S. security relationship became even more
dominant. The military disasters of 1940-41 taught
London that the collapse of the Continental powers
before a determined aggressor left it with no prospect
of help except from its overseas connections, primarily
the United States. Hugh Gaitskell, the Labour Party's
great white hope before the advent of Tony Blair,
reflected that feeling when he rejected early bids
for the integration of Britain into Europe with
the words, "For us the open seas and a thousand
years of history." And no British prime minister
since then to this very day, save for Edward Heath,
has ever believed the European connection more important
for Britain's future than that with the United States.
If Britain's strategic choices have given such basic
direction to the European diplomatic posture toward
America in recent centuries, it follows that a change
in British attitudes, even in its reduced post-imperial
position, would make a difference. What is the prospect
for such a change?
The current Conservative leadership in Britain shows
little inclination of ever deserting the Atlanticist
definition of Britain's destiny—or much likelihood
of ever getting back into office. On the other hand,
a new center-Left coalition of Liberal Democrats
and Labour dissidents, even if it never forms itself
into a Social Democratic Party, could modify the
British attitude toward America. Such a post-Blair
coalition could conceivably grow strong enough to
block decisions as bravely unpopular as that which
the Prime Minister took in 2003 to ally with America
against Iraq.
Even such a coalition would not be enough to overwhelm
Atlanticist sentiment in Britain, but other recent
developments-or rather the prospect of non-developments
following the French and Dutch vote against the
European constitution—make Europe more palatable
as an alternative identity in Britain. The setbacks
to the proposed constitution indicate that at least
for the time being the EU's future is not with deepening
or "ever closer union", as the euphemism
has it. Since, except for the few true believers,
that is what mainstream British opinion has feared
most, the diminished prospect of a future "United
States of Europe" will bring Britain closer
to the EU for a host of practical reasons.
Moreover, if the EU continues to be seen as primarily
an economic, security and cultural community, not
a would-be sovereignty, that may also increase its
appeal as a useful model for much of the rest of
the world, especially for prospective new members
on the periphery of today's 25-member-strong grouping.
So as the threat of deepening recedes, the prospect
of further widening may grow. That, in turn, will
increase the appeal of the EU in Britain.
RUSSIA IN EUROPE: With time, then, the idea of Europe
as a security and economic community with a cultural
basis, but not as a threat to familiar national
sovereignties, may come to coincide with the traditional
geographic definition of Europe. And that traditional
geographic definition includes Russia.
"Europe"
as a meta-geographical construct has included Russia
ever since the time of Peter the Great. Many of
the major stars of European culture have been Russians:
Tolstoy and Chekhov are right up there with Shakespeare
and Mozart. The economic case is also powerful:
Russian oil and gas supplies to western Europe are
lifelines for both sides, and European foreign direct
investment is Moscow's best hope of rapid economic
advance.
Above all, there is an inherent strategic advantage
to a close connection for both sides. The Russians
may face the prospect later this century of defending
territories that stretch right to the Pacific with
too few people for the purpose. They are going to
need a sturdy alliance system, and an assurance
that their western front in Europe is secure if
push should ever come to shove in the Far East.
So a strong alliance with the West, either through
the EU or NATO, will be in the Russian national
interest. The Europeans, for their part, may well
see such a development as their only way of achieving
anything like parity in strategic clout with the
United States—and strategic independence of
it. And Britain, so long the "balancer"
in the European diplomatic constellation, remembers
Russia as an historically familiar ally: against
Napoleon, against the Kaiser, against Hitler.
Demographically, too, the Russian connection offers
an advantage to the EU. Many of the French and Dutch
voters who resoundingly rejected the EU constitution
apparently did so because they feared that the changes
would somehow enhance the probability of Turkish
membership. Only a few decades hence, the Turkish
population is slated to reach 100 million people,
almost all Muslim and a great many presumed likely
to seek better prospects further west. Many Europeans
are reluctant to see a Muslim society as prospectively
the largest member of the EU. They argue that Turkey
is neither in Europe geographically nor of European
culture. Some undoubtedly remember that in its first
few years Europe was idealized as a sort of return
to Charlemagne's Holy Roman Empire, Christendom
in political form.
Russia's prospect, contrarily, is of population
decline, which should reduce the current popular
fear among Europeans of being overrun by foreigners
wanting their jobs (the Turkish truck driver joining
the Polish plumber as an object of dread). Christian
Russia indeed could be seen, rather, as a sphere
of opportunity, more likely to need extra people
than to export them, and endowed with plentiful
natural resources just waiting to be developed by
European capital.
Politically speaking, the authorities in Moscow
seem at present more comfortable in their strategic
relations with NATO than in those with the EU. That
is partly because the EU people keep harassing them
about human rights and Chechnya and such, whereas
the NATO people just talk about strategy and armaments.
But contemplating a more distant future when the
Russian political leadership will have changed,
Moscow's norms may conform more to EU standards.
And the EU has now a tested technique for imposing
its norms on societies anxious to join its ranks.
Ordinary Russians would be considerably advantaged
if the prospect of membership drove Moscow's decision-makers
to move their own policies in the EU's direction.
Considering all the changes that have already occurred
in that part of the world in so short a time, this
does not seem all that improbable.
An EU-Russia hook-up could well inconvenience Washington,
especially as Russia's oil and gas reserves increasingly
give it an economic clout it has never enjoyed before.
At present rates of growth in demand, the United
States, the European Union, China and India may
all in time be bidding there for supply and cultivating
Moscow politically and diplomatically to that end.
The EU may in time be in a position to take a decided
advantage in that competition. But that still begs
the main question, however, of how a wider EU that
includes Russia could be a strategic challenger
to the United States. If the European Union can
only widen at the expense of deepening, how could
it acquire a genuinely common foreign policy and
a decision structure that could deploy a truly unified
military? Doesn't it need these attributes to be
such a challenger? The answer is not necessarily,
and certainly not to begin with.
An EU-Russia conjunction would have, at the least,
a considerable power of diplomatic denial. Such
an EU may or may not be able to initiate and carry
through a cohesive and independent strategy of its
own, but it could deny the United States the ability
to recruit coalitions of the willing from among
its members. In so doing, the EU could withhold
enough legitimacy from U.S. actions to give any
sitting administration pause.
More arresting is the possibility that an EU which
widens instead of deepens may retain a capacity
to deepen after it has widened. Most consequential
errors in the history of diplomacy turn on a single
factor: a failure of imagination, whether of tragedy
or triumph. Who thought in 1919 that another world
war was only two decades away? Who thought a century
ago that France and Germany could ever be allies,
or half a century ago that the Cold War could end
decisively without a shot being fired? Europe could
indeed widen to include Russia before it deepens
into an effective unitary strategic actor, and it
could be a very adept military actor at that.
It is true, of course, that the EU has shown little
military ambition in recent years, but it was not
always so, as the history of the abortive European
Defence Community attests. Nor need it always be
so. The EU today includes countries with long military
traditions and weapons-building capacities, two
of them nuclear, some very rich and nearly all with
advanced scientific and technological skills in
the relevant fields. There is no impediment to European
military power on the basis of means, only of will.
With Russia, Ukraine and other states added to it,
together with the changes in the scope of opportunity
and challenge they will bring to the EU, who can
be sure that the will must remain lacking as the
future unfolds? For American statesmen to assume
that could come to constitute a failure of imagination
of the first order.
BALANCE OR CONCERT?
The rise of the un-West will diminish America's
relative power, challenge the legitimacy of the
post-World War II liberal order with which America
is so closely associated, and make Washington's
self-assumed management tasks as much more than
international primus inter pares all but impossible.
The likely development of the European Union, buttressed
by closer association with Russia, would simultaneously
limit sharply Washington's capacity for diplomatic
bandwagoning. And the combination will erode the
appeal of American soft power. This defines the
twilight of American unipolarity.
But American statesmen are not helpless in the face
of such trends. Multipolar international systems
can function as either a balance of power or be
shaped by diplomatic agency into a concert of powers-and
the two are neither as separate nor as incompatible
as is sometimes supposed. The five nations that
made up the core of the European Concert of Powers
from 1815 to 1914—Britain, France, Russia,
Prussia and Austria—mutated into a balance
of power when the consensus among them failed, as
it did temporarily in the period between 1854 and
1871, and as it did catastrophically in 1914.
Washington's diplomatic and military choices in
the next two decades will determine whether and
to what extent the current unipolar world mutates
into a multipolar global balance of power—probably
a tension-ridden and fractious one—or coalesces
into a more cohesive, crisis-managing concert of
powers. The world will be much less in danger of
hegemonic war if the foundation of the second model
is laid during the long unipolar twilight before
us, for preventing such a war is the primary function
of a concert of powers. And we have evidence that
it works.
The historical evidence appears to indicate that
the 19th-century Concert was more successful at
preventing hegemonic war than the Wilsonian systems
that succeeded it. There was no hegemonic war between
1815 and 1914 despite continuous high tensions between
Britain and France over Africa, and between Britain
and Russia over Afghanistan and Persia. The two
major wars of the century, the Crimean War and the
Franco-Prussian War, did not become hegemonic wars
because consensus within the Concert prevented it.
By contrast, in the period of the two formal international
organizations, the League of Nations and the United
Nations, there have arguably been three hegemonic
wars: World War II, the Cold War and now the jihadists'
war—which is a hegemonic war at least in the
sense that it is about the order of power in the
world and is strategically global in scope. In this
light, it seems reasonable enough to say that the
old, informal Concert was more effective in its
most essential task than its two successors (though
the question of why that is so is too large to discuss
here).
As with the 19th-century Concert, then, our world
in the future will be much safer if the major powers
operate, or seek to operate, primarily as a concert.
For one thing, there will be at least seven nuclear
weapons states among them, possibly more. In the
asymmetric war we now endure, the jihadists can
inflict death and damage on what seems a large scale,
but the assessment for a nuclear war among the great
powers is 300 million dead in the first hour. Not
even the most ambitious jihadist could aspire to
that.
Some fervid U.S. nationalists may be inclined to
see the essential processes involved in maintaining
a concert of powers—processes having to do
with multilateral decision-making and consultation—as
the lately ubiquitous Gulliver again allowing himself
to be tied down by Lilliputians and railed against
by Yahoos. But the realities of the relationships
that are already emerging will force the recognition
on even the most Jacksonian-minded Americans that
some of the possible challengers are by no means
Lilliputian in size. Most will come to see, too,
that the alternative prospect, a balance of power,
might readily be converted into an anti-hegemonic
alliance directed against the United States. That
would be the worst possible outcome for Washington's
diplomacy, but for the first time in U.S. history
it is no longer inconceivable.
Indeed, there has already been a moment when that
outcome looked close to emerging. At the decision
point of the Iraq crisis in mid-March 2003, one
could see it as a specter hanging in the air of
the UN's corridors. The final prewar resolution
seeking UN legitimation of the invasion of Iraq
had to be withdrawn, not because France was preparing
to cast a veto, but because the resolution might
have failed of a simple majority in the Security
Council. And some of the countries that were steeling
themselves to refuse approval of Washington's strategy
were ones which earlier would have been seen as
U.S. client states. Their desertion would have been
a first milestone on the path away from unipolarity,
a development that the first Bush term made more
likely in many ways.
Most of Washington's allies, formal and informal,
were willing and indeed eager to stay on the U.S.
bandwagon during the Cold War because, some bad
moments aside, the general course of American policy
seemed prudent. But from 2002 to 2005 that vital
attribute, prudence, seemed absent from Bush Administration
policies. The United States became, as Owen Harries
eloquently pointed out in his 2003 Boyer Lectures,
a revisionist power that aimed to transform the
whole society of states into something that looked
suspiciously like an image of itself writ very large.
Indeed, the world just then could be seen as torn
between two fundamentalist revisionist doctrines,
since the jihadists are even keener on transforming
governments, especially Arab ones, than the most
ardent Washington hawk.
The results were sobering. At the end of 2001, the
United States enjoyed the sympathy and support of
almost the entire world, save for a few Muslim communities.
By the end of 2005 popular sentiment even among
its two closest allies, Britain and Australia, is
pervasively anti-American. A few years ago it would
have seemed almost certain that the Latin Americans
would remain on the U.S. bandwagon. But the Organization
of American States has elected as secretary-general
a candidate that Hugo Chavez and his friend Fidel
Castro liked rather than the one favored by the
State Department; refused to back Defense Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld's proposals for a new defense accord;
and refused to support, even diplomatically at the
United Nations, the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
Even Chinese diplomacy seems to be doing better
in some regions lately than American. The July 2005
communiqué of the Shanghai Group (Russia,
China and the Central Asians, joined for this meeting
by India, Pakistan and Iran) inquired tartly when
the United States was going to remove its bases
from Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. The Russia-China
connection is a reminder that Russia will probably
inherit Britain's old role as the "balancer"
in any revived multilateral balance, since it has
the potential to align with the EU, China, India
or the United States, as best suits its national
interests.
In the second Bush term, the prospect of widespread
and sudden allied desertions has faded for the time
being. But it can rise up again like the phoenix,
and would almost certainly do so if Washington appeared
bent on intolerably dangerous and destructive strategies.
The most obvious such strategy would be one likely
to precipitate war with China, but there are other
forms of dangerous and destructive strategy, as
well. Some of them are bound up with what could
turn into an injudicious campaign to democratize
the Middle East.
The changes the United States desires in the Arab
and wider Muslim worlds are indeed desirable, but
can democracy really be exported on Abrams tanks?
And the assumption that democracies never make war
on each other, so blithely and regularly asserted
by President Bush, rests on very thin historical
ice. Until about the middle of the 20th century
there were very few democracies, and still fewer
that had been in existence for a reasonable length
of time. The three most important and obvious examples,
Britain, France and the United States, showed no
tendency whatsoever to avoid the use of warfare
(think of the 19th-century histories of all three).
Democracies tend to be fervently nationalistic,
particularly young democracies. And wars of nationalism
above all have composed much of human history for
the past three centuries. Nationalism's fervor seems
now to be subdued in Europe, its original home,
but to be burgeoning in the rest of the world. No
case exists for assuming that it will prove less
lethal among its new hosts than it was among its
original ones.
The faith-based, ahistorical assertions of the Bush
Administration are already sufficient explanation
for a certain rarified form of anti-Americanism,
mainly in the West. The pervasive, almost automatic
anti-Americanism of much of the contemporary world,
however, stems from another source. The very fact
of unipolarity is in itself a fount of resentment.
Every society has to reflect from time to time that,
though all sovereignties may be theoretically equal,
one is for the time being a great deal more equal
than all the others. The great powers of the past
were similarly resented, but those resentments could
at least be divided among a number of targets. Now
they are practically all directed at Washington,
seen as arrogating to itself the management of the
world, and as managing it badly by the light of
illusion-ridden concepts of what level of enforced
change in other societies is possible.
It doesn't help, either, that the tarnished image
of American competence has been accompanied by shocking
and unexpected questions about its probity. Lord
Acton's old tag that "power tends to corrupt,
and absolute power corrupts absolutely" has
seemed uncomfortably relevant at times, especially
when the news has been from Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo
Bay.
Washington can in due course offset prevalent views
about U.S. power. All that is necessary to begin
is for U.S. statesmen to treat the emerging company
of giants as if they were a concert of powers. Treated
as such, they will have strong incentives to act
that way, for it is in their overall interests in
order and stability to do so. The twilight of unipolarity
is likely to be quite long drawn out—20 years
or more—so there should be time enough for
useful habits of consultation to set in. For Washington,
the interim period could be regarded as a sort of
"practice session" to develop the necessary
diplomatic modes before the realities of power redistribution
make them mandatory. The first effort must obviously
be to reduce the suspicion, widespread among governments
as well as common citizens, that Washington is irredeemably
unilateralist. A unipolar world undoubtedly does
tempt the paramount power to pursue unilateralist
policies, but that temptation can be resisted by
policymakers who understand the diplomatic costs
of yielding to it.
The mix of military hubris and nationalist messianism
among neoconservatives and Evangelical Christians,
which fostered the disastrous strategy in Iraq,
has apparently exhausted itself. At least the past
few months of U.S. policies on North Korea and Iran
appear to indicate as much. Washington has let China
carry the ball on North Korea, and the Europeans
and the UN do so on Iran. That has been encouraging.
Moreover, recent policy on India and Japan seems
to signal that someone with real clout in the Administration
(Dr. Rice?) is thinking in balance of power terms.
The Wilsonian rejection of that traditional rule
of thumb is likely to prove impractical in the emerging
society of states, which is probably going to run
to twelve great powers, most of them nuclear.
Luckily there is already to hand a diplomatic grouping
that can help promote the inevitably slow mutation
from balance of power calculations to concert of
powers architecture. In diplomacy as in bridge-building,
any viable construction has to be based on a prudent
preliminary assessment of strengths and stresses.
The diplomatic asset I have in mind is not the Security
Council (one can hardly see John Bolton developing
zeal for the task) but the G-8, which could readily
become the G-12 if the present members decide to
issue the invitations. The next to be invited should
clearly be India and China. The group as a whole
could evolve quickly into an embryonic concert of
powers, at first economically focused and in time
diplomatically so. Its dominant spirit at the moment
is Tony Blair, and he may retain that status for
longer than his formal role, because the other possible
contenders (Bush, Koizumi, Chirac, Berlusconi, Merkel)
all seem to have some count against them. But the
truly crucial players in this diplomatic enterprise
will be the decision-makers of the great powers
in the 2020s and 2030s. For the rest of this decade
and probably for much of the next, the jihadists'
war seems likely to serve as a sufficient bond to
hold the great powers together. They all have something
to fear. It is when that threat has waned or vanished
that a stable consensus on the advantages of cooperation
will be vital.
It is therefore imperative that American statesmen
look beyond current challenges and grasp the shape
of the future. The current restiveness among traditional
U.S. allies in Europe and the Pacific is only part
of the formidable complexity of the next phase of
international history, rather little of which, when
one comes right down to it, is liable to focus on
Muslim terrorists or the dangerously vulnerable
states of the Middle East. As many are wont to remind
us lately, the owl of Minerva takes wing only at
dusk. As the twilight of the unipolar world deepens,
let us hope that it has an appointment in Washington.
CORAL BELL is a visiting
fellow at the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre
at the Australian National University.
1 As described
in Zbigniew Brzezinski, "The Dilemma of the
Last Sovereign", The American Interest (Autumn
2005).
2 As
described in Kishore Mahbubani, "Asia's Destiny,
America's Choice", The American Interest (Autumn
2005).
3 Some
of the U.S. press denounced British policies as
an attempt to undermine the Monroe Doctrine, and
some policymakers in London became rather huffy
about what they regarded as U.S. intervention in
an issue that was none of America's concern. There
was even mention of hostilities, but more prudent
voices prevailed.
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