What's Next?

Preserving American Primacy, Institutionalizing Unipolarity

By Thomas Donnelly
Posted: Tuesday, April 22, 2003
NATIONAL SECURITY OUTLOOK
AEI Online (Washington)
Publication Date: May 1, 2003

With Saddam Hussein condemned to the ash heap of history, the professional
punditocracy has flailed about, demanding to know "what's next." Syria? Iran? In fact,
what lies ahead is far more ambitious than any single military operation. The Bush
Doctrine proposes that the United States foster the spread of classical liberalism--its
institutions and values--in order to undermine dictatorships ruled by terror and ultimately
to replace them with just, representative societies. The real question now is how the
United States can leverage its victory in Iraq to uphold, expand, and institutionalize the
Pax Americana.

The Bush Doctrine does not elaborate an actual strategy--in the sense of a "how to" plan-
for preserving the Pax Americana. The administration's National Security Strategy,
released in September 2002, speaks of preserving U.S. military strength, economic
growth, and overall national power, but it does not explicitly set strategic priorities. Nevertheless, I believe that it is
possible to infer the administration's priorities from its actions.

In a nutshell, the practical application of the Bush Doctrine amounts to "rolling back" radical Islamism while "containing"
the People's Republic of China, that is, hedging against its rise to great -power status. A corollary is to prevent strategic
cooperation, formally or de facto, between either terror states or terrorist groups in the Islamic world and Beijing.
Indeed, in a world where hard power realities continue to be the measuring sticks of international politics, these are the
overriding tasks to accomplish if American global leadership and the current liberal order are to be sustained and
extended. These are also immense undertakings. Victory in Afghanistan and Iraq--measured both in terms of the initial
triumphs on the battlefield and the larger task of reconstructing decent states and societies in those countries--signifies
merely the first two steps in the broader process of reforming the broken politics of the greater Middle East. To
paraphrase Michael Ledeen, these are battles in the larger regional war. This is a brutal way to characterize the
administration's purpose, but perhaps indicative of the size of its ambition. "Rolling back" the violently anti-American
forces in the region may not always demand military action; there are genuine political reform movements throughout
the Islamic world, most obviously in places like Iran. Muslims are no less desirous of individual liberty, or less capable of
achieving it, than anyone else.

Yet Americans have determined, post -9/11, that the status quo is no longer acceptable. The many failures of
governance, particularly among Arab states, not only have consequences for the peoples of the region but increasingly
for Americans, our allies, and our interests. Further, the nexus between these failures of governance and the
proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, particularly nuclear weapons, means that the fate of the region cannot be
a matter of indifference to Americans. The despotic and weak regimes and leaders with whom we have made decades'
worth of devilish pacts can no longer be regarded as reliable strategic partners. In the Persian Gulf, for example, we
have tried almost every conceivable option, but the shah always falls, Arab dictators fail to inspire any real nationalism
that transcends tribe or clan, and inbred royalty cowers in the face of radical clerics. As Ralph Peters has observed,

The good news is that the Islamic world, on its populous, decisive frontiers, is far more hopeful than we might
expect in the wake of recent events. While we must deal with fanatical, soulless killers in the present, Islam's
future is undecided. The door to a brighter tomorrow has not closed--far from it--and millions of Muslims are
willing to keep that door open, despite the threats of a legion of fanatics. A struggle of immense proportions and
immeasurable importance is under way for the soul of Islam, a mighty contest to decide between a humane,
tolerant, and progressive faith, and a hangman's vision of a punitive God and a humankind defined by
prohibitions.[1]

In a sense, the problems of the Islamic world-the weakness, corruption, and violence of its leaders--suggest their own
solution: isolated from their own people and from an increasingly free and prosperous world elsewhere, the rogues and
rogue regimes of the region can be rolled back. Contrary to much clever opinion of recent years, it is after all better to
fight failing states than strong ones; Saddamism may be as noxious as Hitlerism or Stalinism, but it has proven much
weaker than either of those evils.

Therefore President Bush's hopes to plant the seeds of democracy in the Islamic world may not be as far-fetched as
popularly supposed. It is reasonable to believe that it is within the power of the United States and its allies to help the
region to a better political life. And to repeat, whatever the odds for the future, the region's past and current
governments can hardly be considered anything other than failures. The "stability" they have provided has proven itself
transitory. If we must have instability, let us have the instability of greater liberty.
It is also reasonable to believe that the United States and its allies can "contain" China's ambitions, helping it make the
transition from communism to democracy, from international outsider to a state satisfied by living within a liberal
international order. There is nothing inevitable about liberty following in the wake of prosperity, but there are powerful
reasons for the People's Republic to become a people's republic. China's plan to get rich depends upon a stable security
environment; the party's plan to stay in power depends upon making everyone (well, more of everyone) rich. The plan
can unravel any number of ways, but the Chinese government's house of cards depends upon its plan holding together.

Beijing further has the good fortune to be undergoing a change of leadership. The world Jiang Zemin knew has changed
immeasurably and so must Chinese national strategy; while Jiang remains an important presence and retains much
power, successor Hu Jintao will have to adapt to new international realities. In brief: China's tolerance of North Korea
cannot continue, because Beijing has as much as anyone to fear from Pyongyang's nuclear shenanigans. The
continental borders Jiang spent so much careful diplomacy securing are now crawling with Americans; South and
Central Asia are being swiftly, if perhaps only partially, amalgamated into the U.S. security perimeter. East Asia, the
"Confucian culture" once thought inhospitable to Western democratic principles, has seen the passing of a number of
local autocratic political parties; not the least of these is changes is in Taiwan, where the Kuomintang is on life support.
India is passing to a new generation of leaders who have cast off the cold-war myopia of the "nonaligned movement."
Beijing's erstwhile client Pakistan turned like an F-16 after September 11; Pervez Musharraf may be walking the
thinnest of tight ropes and may not have much say in what happens on his northwest border, but uncertainty in
Islamabad is probably an improvement compared to the downward spiral of the 1990s.

The pre-9/11 international status quo is not a realistic option in Beijing any more than in Baghdad. The Chinese
Communist Party prides itself on its patience and its long view of history, but a five-thousand-year past may prove to be
just excessive baggage as the world realigns itself. Certainly in the maneuvering leading up to the war in Iraq, China
was very much a bystander, content to let the French take the lead but unwilling, at least in public, to commit seriously
to the project of thwarting the Bush administration. What the Chinese leadership may have known or done in North
Korea I do not know, but appearances suggest that Beijing has been struggling to keep up with the pace of events.

As China sorts through its strategic options in a post -Iraq world, however, it might consider deeper ties with anti-
American forces in the greater Middle East. After all, Beijing has long had interests in the region; indeed those interests
are, if anything, increasing as Chinese economic growth engenders greater energy imports. Conversely, leaders such as
the mullahs in Iran have every reason to seek out a great -power sponsor as a hedge against American dominance in the
region. Indeed, as Bernard Lewis points out in his latest book, The Crisis of Islam, courting the great -power enemy of
one's great -power enemy has been the policy of Middle Eastern governments since Napoleon Bonaparte's 1798
invasion of Egypt: in World War II, it was Nazi Germany (an unholy alliance that more or less spawned the Ba'ath Party
in Iraq and Syria); in the cold war, it was the Soviet Union.[2] For some in the Middle East today, there remains the
inclination to seek out a new patron in the war against the West, whether in China or, ironically, Europe.

Even a loose coalition among Islamists and Chinese communists would, over time, complicate the extension of the Pax
Americana. It would also, at last, be evidence of genuine power-balancing in the traditional, realist sense. For this
reason, the United States is strongly invested in seeing that it does not happen.

Institutionalizing Unipolarity

While it is reasonable to believe that the United States can achieve these long-term strategic goals, it is also reasonable
to wonder how this can be done in the "unilateral" way--which would not be so much a go-it-alone, genuine unilateralism
as it would be an unwillingness to approach these tasks with anything more than an ad hoc coalition. Indeed, it is
difficult to imagine how the United States can maintain global leadership without running the risks of "imperial
overstretch" unless it forges a new set of international institutions, or at very least, radically reforms the current ones.
Even a sole superpower needs strategic partners.

"Institutionalizing unipolarity" is not an unachievable aim. To begin with, Americans have the experience of creating the
international institutions that helped manage the crises of the cold war; despite their recent failures, such organizations
as NATO and the United Nations have generally proved to be very useful tools of U.S. statecraft. Secondly, there are
many states with a tremendous stake in extending the Pax Americana: Great Britain, which is as deeply committed to a
liberal international order as we are and which fields the only military forces outside the United States capable of global
operations; the newly liberated, former Warsaw Pact nations of Eastern Europe; India, with a population of 120 million
Muslims and an unresolved concern over China; and the modern economies and maturing democracies of East Asia,
including Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Australia.

Arguably, the interests and principles Americans share with these states provide a better basis for creating a greater
liberal international order than existed after World War II; the goal of creating "conditions under which our free and
democratic system can live and prosper," as Paul Nitze put it in his famous "NSC 68" memorandum,[3] is in clearer view
than in 1950. Not only is the "allied" side of the ledger larger and richer than fifty years ago, the list of potential enemies
is far weaker than was the Soviet empire. While it is true that China has the potential to become the canonical "global
peer" of the United States, and already possess the ability to complicate American strategy in many places, the global
"correlation of forces" seems very heavily in our favor.

What kind of international institutions, then, would help to preserve the Pax Americana? The Iraq crisis suggests that,
as now configured, the United Nations and NATO do not suit our purposes. The United Nations was designed and built,
in part, to protect sovereign states from the challenge of revolutionary communism. It therefore was endowed with
"check and balance" mechanisms--the veto of the permanent members of the Security Council being the most
conspicuous example--based upon state sovereignty, that were helpful in constraining Soviet behavior and thus in
protecting the liberal order of the West. The Atlantic alliance, though it played an important role in nurturing social and
political reconstruction in Western Europe, was first and foremost a reaction to the threat posed by Soviet military
power.

As we have seen most clearly in the run-up to the Iraq war, the checks and balances embedded in the UN and NATO
structures have served to give legitimacy to Saddam Hussein's regime while frustrating--or at least complicating--the
attempt to liberate Iraq and introduce a new political order in Saddam's place. These international organizations thus
place the right of the state above the individual political rights of the citizenry.

Thus what is needed in the genuinely new world order of Pax Americana is a set of organizations that find legitimacy in
their purposes rather than in their processes. A reformed United Nations--or a successor organization--would value
liberty more than stability and would dedicate itself to helping repressed peoples secure their individual political rights
rather than to tolerating repressive regimes. A new NATO would define itself as an alliance better able to provide forces
for a variety of new missions in support of new purposes rather than simply as a defensive, in-case-of-war coalition.
The American-led "coalitions of the willing" of the past decade have rarely been formal NATO operations, and even
when they were they did not include forces from every member state. Still, NATO has provided the practical model and
most of the tactics, techniques, and procedures in these missions. It is the NATO architecture that allows willing
participants in U.S.-led operations to "plug and play."

In fact, preserving today's Pax Americana calls for extending at least these military institutional ties outside Europe in
ways beyond the bilateral relationships of the past. In addition to conducting combined exercises with Japan, South
Korea, India, Australia, and others in a one-on-one fashion, the United States needs to build a larger security
architecture--something like NATO--in other regions and with other partners. This need not be so formal a structure as
the Atlantic alliance, and especially not so sclerotic a system as NATO has proven itself to be in recent years, but it
could provide the practical and training basis for the wide range of coalition operations that might be necessary in the
coming decades. And there could be other ways to increase cooperation among the democratic stakeholders in the
post -Iraq international order: defense industrial cooperation, intelligence sharing-indeed, all the traditional tools of past
alliances, but applied to new circumstances.

Make no mistake, whatever the advantages of power and principle that inhere in being the sole superpower and the
"last, best hope of mankind," preserving the unipolar moment is a tall order. John Ikenberry is correct when he observed
that "the secret of the United States' long brilliant run as the world's leading state was its ability and willingness to
exercise power within alliance and multinational frameworks."[4] But the challenge now is to weave a new fabric of
international order, one that emphasizes the political rights of individuals, not merely the rights of states.

Notes

1. Ralph Peters, "Rolling Back Radical Islam," Parameters (U.S. Army War College), Autumn 2002, p. 5.

2. Bernard Lewis, The Crisis of Islam (New York: Modern Library, 2003), pp. 59-63.

3. U.S. Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States: 1950, Volume I (also available at
http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/nsc-68/nsc68-1.htm).

4. John Ikenberry, "On the Sustainability of U.S. Power," The Globalist (September 12, 2002), available at
http://www.theglobalist.com/DBWeb/StoryId.aspx?StoryId=2714.

Thomas Donnelly (tdonnelly@aei.org) is a resident fellow at AEI.

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