The World America Made (14 page)

The low point came in 1979, when the Shah was overthrown, the radical Islamic revolution led by Ayatollah Khomeini came to power, and fifty-two Americans were taken hostage and held for more than a year. The hostage crisis, as Yergin has observed, “transmitted a powerful message: that the shift of power in the world oil market in the 1970s was only part of a larger drama that was taking place in global politics. The United States and the West, it seemed to say, were truly in decline, on the defensive, and, it appeared, unable to do anything to protect their interests, whether economic or political.” Secretary of Energy James Schlesinger declared that Americans faced “a world crisis of vaster dimensions than Churchill described half a century ago—made more ominous by the problems of oil.” There was, he said, “little, if any, relief in prospect.” As Carter put it, “They have us by the balls.”
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If one wanted to make a case for American decline,
the 1970s would have been the time to do it; and many did. The United States, Kissinger believed, had evidently “passed its historic high point like so many earlier civilizations … [E]very civilization that has ever existed has ultimately collapsed. History is a tale of efforts that failed.”
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It was in the 1970s that the American economy lost its overwhelming primacy, when the American trade surplus began to turn into a trade deficit, when spending on entitlements and social welfare programs ballooned, when American gold and monetary reserves were depleted.

With economic difficulties came political and strategic insecurity. First came the belief that the tide of history was with the Soviet Union. Soviet leaders themselves believed the “correlation of forces” favored communism; the American defeat and withdrawal from Vietnam led Soviet officials, for the first time, to believe they might actually “win” in the long Cold War struggle. A decade later, in 1987, Paul Kennedy depicted both superpowers as suffering from “imperial overstretch” but suggested it was entirely possible that the United States would be the first to collapse, following a long historical tradition of exhausted and bankrupt empires. It had crippled itself by spending too much on defense and taking on too many far-flung global responsibilities. But within two years the Berlin Wall fell, and two years after that the Soviet Union collapsed. The decline turned out to be taking place elsewhere.

Then there was the miracle economy of Japan. A “rise of the rest” began in the late 1970s and continued over the next decade and a half, as Japan, along with the other
“Asian tigers”—South Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan—seemed about to eclipse the United States economically. It was not just the relative strength of its economy that impressed observers but the apparent superiority of its economic model. In 1989 the journalist James Fallows argued that the Japanese state-directed economy was plainly superior to the more laissez-faire capitalism of the United States and was destined to surpass it.
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Japan was to be the next superpower. In 1992, in his best seller
Rising Sun
, Michael Crichton advised Americans to “come to grips with the fact that Japan has become the leading industrial nation in the world. The Japanese have the longest lifespan. They have the highest employment, the highest literacy, the smallest gap between rich and poor. Their manufacturing products have the highest quality.”
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While the United States had bankrupted itself fighting the Cold War, the Japanese had been busy taking all the marbles. As author Chalmers Johnson put it in 1995, “The Cold War is over, and Japan won.”
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Even as Johnson typed those words, the Japanese economy was spiraling downward into a period of stagnation from which it has still not recovered. With the Soviet Union gone and China yet to demonstrate the staying power of its economic boom, the United States suddenly appeared to be the world’s “sole superpower.” Yet even then it was remarkable how unsuccessful the United States was in dealing with many serious global problems. The Americans won the Gulf War, expanded NATO eastward, eventually brought peace to the Balkans, after much bloodshed, and, through most of the 1990s, led much of the world to embrace the “Washington consensus”
on economics. But some of these successes began to unravel and were matched by equally significant failures. The Washington consensus began to collapse with the Asian financial crisis of 1997, where American prescriptions were widely regarded as mistaken and damaging. The United States failed to stop or even significantly retard the nuclear weapons programs of North Korea and Iran, despite repeatedly declaring its intention to do so. The sanctions regime imposed against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was both futile and, by the end of the decade, collapsing. The United States, and the world, did nothing to prevent the genocide in Rwanda, partly because a year earlier the United States had been driven out of Somalia after a failed military intervention. One of the most important endeavors of the United States in the 1990s was the effort to support a transition in post-Soviet Russia to democracy and free-market capitalism. But despite providing billions of dollars and endless amounts of advice and expertise, the United States found events in Russia to once again be beyond its control.

Nor were American leaders, even in the supposed heyday of global predominance, any more successful in solving the Israeli-Palestinian problem than they are today. Even with a booming economy and a well-liked president earnestly working to achieve a settlement, the Clinton administration came up empty-handed. As Middle East peace negotiator Aaron David Miller recounts, Bill Clinton “cared more about and invested more time and energy in Arab-Israeli peace over a longer period of time than any of his predecessors,” he was admired and appreciated by both Israelis and Palestinians, yet he held “three
summits within six months and fail[ed] at every one.”
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Clinton’s term ended with the collapse of peace talks and the beginning of the Palestinian intifada.

Even popularity was elusive for the United States in the 1990s. In 1999, Samuel P. Huntington labeled America the “lonely superpower,” widely hated across the globe for its “intrusive, interventionist, exploitative, unilateralist, hegemonic, hypocritical” behavior. The French foreign minister decried the “hyperpower” and openly yearned for a “multipolar” world in which the United States would no longer be dominant. A British diplomat told Huntington: “One reads about the world’s desire for American leadership only in the United States. Everywhere else one reads about American arrogance and unilateralism.”
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This was nonsense, of course. Contrary to the British diplomat’s claim, many other countries did look to the United States for leadership, and for protection and support, in the 1990s and throughout the Cold War. The point is not that America always lacked global influence. From World War II onward, the United States was indeed the predominant power in the world. It wielded enormous influence, more than any great power since Rome, and it accomplished much.

But it was not omnipotent—far from it. If we are to gauge accurately whether the United States is currently in decline, we need to have a reasonable baseline from which to measure. To compare American influence today with a mythical past of overwhelming dominance can only mislead us. Even at its most extensive, international primacy, as Huntington observed, “means that a government is able to exercise more influence on the behavior of more
actors with respect to more issues than any other government can.”
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It does not mean it can determine all other nations’ behavior on all issues or even on most issues.

The ability to order other nations around is not even the best measure of successful leadership in the present world order. The conspicuous independence of some of the world’s rising powers today can sometimes be more a sign of the success than the decline of American influence. For it is precisely one of the characteristics of the American world order that more nations have more freedom of action. Some of this has to do with the American style of global leadership, with its innate hesitancy and inconstancy, as well as its generally democratic approach to international diplomacy. Some of it is simply structural and intrinsic to the nature of a unipolar world order in which an “island” power exerts its influence in the world’s power centers from a distance. Compared with alternative arrangements, this has increased the freedom of action for more nations.

The Cold War’s bipolar order was more limiting because many nations were locked rigidly into the Western or the Soviet camp. Nations in the Non-Aligned Movement and Gaullist France spent the Cold War struggling to wriggle free from these foreign policy straitjackets. Multipolar world orders are also more constraining. Great powers need to be careful not to do anything that may appear to threaten the other great powers, lest it lead to war. Smaller powers are constrained, for each great power wants to be dominant within its own sphere of influence—that is part of the definition of a great power—and the small powers in their orbit cannot be
permitted to engage in activities that might prompt conflict between the great powers, as Serbia did in sparking World War I. In a unipolar order, the smaller powers enjoy greater independence because the superpower can, if it chooses, prevent regional great powers from oppressing them.

So it is not a sign of weakness if more nations have more freedom of action in the present order. The measure of the order’s success is not whether the United States can tell everyone what to do. It is whether the order itself—the expansion of democracy, prosperity, and security—is sustained. The greater freedom and independence of Brazil in foreign policy can be a sign of the order’s success. The greater freedom of Iran to build nuclear weapons can be a harbinger of its failure.

Today the United States lacks the ability to have its way on many issues, but this has not prevented it from enjoying just as much success, and suffering just as much failure, as in the past. For all the controversy, the United States has been more successful in Iraq than it was in Vietnam. It has been just as incapable of containing Iranian nuclear ambitions as it was in the 1990s, but it has, through the efforts of two administrations, established a more effective global counter-proliferation network. Its efforts to root out and destroy al-Qaeda have been remarkably successful, especially when compared with the failures to destroy terrorist networks and stop terrorist attacks in the 1990s—failures that culminated in the attacks on September 11, 2001. The ability to employ drones is an advance over the types of weaponry—cruise missiles and air strikes—that were used to target terrorists
and facilities in previous decades. Meanwhile, America’s alliances in Europe remain healthy; it is not America’s fault that Europe itself seems weaker than it once was. American alliances in Asia have arguably grown stronger over the past few years, and the United States has been able to strengthen relations with India that had previously been strained.

So the record is mixed, but it has always been mixed. There have been moments when the United States was more influential than today and moments when it was less influential. The exertion of influence has always been a struggle, which may explain why in every single decade since the end of World War II Americans have worried about their declining influence and looked nervously as other powers seemed to be rising at their expense. The difficulties in shaping the international environment in any era are immense. Few powers even attempt it, and even the strongest rarely achieve all or even most of their goals. Foreign policy is like hitting a baseball: if you fail 70 percent of the time, you go to the Hall of Fame.

The challenges today are great, and the rise of China is the most obvious of them. But they are not greater than the challenges the United States faced during the Cold War. Only in retrospect can the Cold War seem easy. Americans at the end of World War II faced a major strategic crisis. The Soviet Union, if only by virtue of its size and location, seemed to threaten vital strategic centers in Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia. In all these regions, it confronted nations devastated and prostrate from the war. To meet this challenge, the United States had to project its own power, which was great but limited,
into each of those regions. It had to form alliances with local powers, some of them former enemies, and provide them with economic, political, and military assistance to help them stand on their own feet and resist Soviet pressure. In the Cold War, the Soviets wielded influence and put pressure on American interests merely by standing still, while the United States had to scramble. It is worth recalling that this strategy of “containment,” now hallowed by its apparent success, struck some influential observers at the time as entirely unworkable. Walter Lippmann attacked it as “misconceived,” based on “hope,” conceding the “strategic initiative” to the Soviets while the United States exhausted its resources trying to establish “satellite states, puppet governments” that were weak, ineffective, and unreliable.
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Today, in the case of China, the situation is reversed. Although China is and will be much richer and will wield greater economic influence in the world than the Soviet Union ever did, its geostrategic position is more difficult. World War II left China in a comparatively weak position from which it has been working hard to recover ever since. Several of its neighbors are strong nations with close ties to the United States. It will have a hard time becoming a regional hegemon so long as Taiwan remains independent and strategically tied to the United States, and so long as strong regional powers such as Japan, Korea, and Australia continue to host American troops and bases. China would need at least a few allies to have any chance of pushing the United States out of its strongholds in the western Pacific, but right now it is the United States that has the allies. It is the United States that has its troops
deployed in forward bases. It is the United States that currently enjoys naval predominance in the key waters and waterways through which China must trade. Altogether, China’s task as a rising great power, which is to push the United States out of its present position, is much harder than America’s, which is only to hold on to what it has.