THE SOLE REMAINING SUPERPOWER:
THE NEW LEADERSHIP

 

Each of the preceding four proposed security paradigms shares an essential assumption about American power: that it is in relative decline and that the consequences of that decline will constrain the United States in its role as a world leader, a role to which it has become accustomed in the post –War II period. One proposed paradigm, however, denies this assumption. This is the program I will call the “New Leadership.” In the words of its most articulate spokesman, Charles Krauthammer,

the true geopolitical structure of the post – Cold War world [is that of] a single pole of world power that consists of the United States at the apex of the industrial west… American preeminence is based on the fact that it is the only country with the military, diplomatic, political and economic assets to be a decisive player in any conflict in whatever part of the world it chooses to involve itself…. One can debate whether America is in true economic decline. [One should note, however, that] its percentage of world GNP is roughly where it has been throughout the 20th century (between 22% and 26%) excepting the aberration of the immediate post – World War II era.27

 

This point can be urged even more strongly: the United States, while in relative economic decline vis-à-vis the E.U. and Japan, whose percentages of world GNP were growing more rapidly (at least until the mid-1990s), has actually increased the measure of its geopolitical position by the defeat of its global adversary, the Soviet Union. As a result, as William Odom has written, “the configuration of power today is such that only the United States can launch the construction of a new system.”28 What sort of national security paradigm would enable the United States to play such a role?

Advocates of the New Leadership have something in common with each of the other competing schools: like the nationalists, they advocate a focus on U.S. vital interests and disdain charitable missions abroad, although they draw the line around such national interests far more expansively than other nationalists because they believe American interests to be global in nature and emphasize that American prosperity depends upon a stable international market; like the internationalists, they wish to strengthen NATO and various collective security schemes (such as the OSCE), but they conceive of these groups differently, believing them to be little more than a psychological fig leaf for the robust American assertion of power (and thus reserve a special contempt for the U.N.). As Krauthammer has put it:

There is much pious talk about a new multilateral world and the promise of the U.N. as guarantor of a new post–Cold War order. But this is to mistake cause and effect, the U.S. and the U.S. The U.N. is guarantor of nothing…. Collective security? In the Gulf, without the U.S. leading and prodding, bribing and blackmailing, no one would have stirred. Nothing would have been done: no embargo, no Desert Shield, no threat of force. The world would have written off Kuwait the way the last body pledged to collective security, the League of Nations, wrote off Abyssinia.29

 

Like the realists, advocates of American leadership place a strong emphasis on bilateral ties and on preventing new hegemonies from arising, but in contrast to the realists, leadership partisans focus more closely on internal issues within the great power states and less on a grand ensemble among them. Advocates of the New Leadership point out that balance of power approaches are tone deaf, for example, to the importance of American values in U.S. foreign policy. Moreover, balance of power techniques are considered outmoded from this point of view. As Odom puts it, “the American concept for NATO at its creation was prevention of a return to the old Realpolitik game in Western Europe, and although the alliance balanced Soviet power, it was created as much to solve Western Europe's problem with Germany as it was to prevent Soviet expansion.” Indeed Odom stresses that Europe's security problems are “primarily ones of internal instability and civil war, problems a balance of power approach [with its purely external focus] will not solve.”

One might say that, as opposed to the “democratic enlargement” of the Clinton administration, the advocate of American leadership proposes instead “selective engagement.” But whereas conservative groups, such as the Heritage Foundation, which coined this phrase, are strongly anti-interventionist, the New Leadership would deploy selective American engagement to achieve the global aims of American dominance. For example, this is the only paradigm that would, forthrightly, have counseled significant NATO force against Serbia in 1991, in part because the failure to do so amounted to an abdication of American leadership itself. If vic-tory in the Gulf War may be thought of as symbolizing what might have been the beginning of a new American century, then the collapse of Western will in Yugoslavia demonstrated what happens when the Americans defer to the Europeans on such matters. If the unification of Germany represented a triumph of clear-sighted American diplomatic leadership in the face of European confusion (and accordingly advanced American prestige) then the calamities in Bosnia give us some picture of what diplomacy becomes in the absence of such leadership: impotence draped in cynicism. In the end, the very Europeans who stalemated action in Yugoslavia will be the ones who point to Bosnia as evidence of the futility of American leadership (and our prestige will suffer accordingly).

Advocates of the new leadership are, however, less eager to intervene in Somalia or Haiti, where the outcomes do not appear to affect American leadership one way or the other. Where they perceive future threats—such as those arising from the possession of weapons of mass destruction by terrorist states, such as Iran, Iraq, or North Korea—these advocates favor decisive action untempered by the effort to achieve consensus with our allies. President Clinton's role in negotiating a peaceful solution with North Korea was attacked just as much by partisans of the New Leadership, who favored a more robust response, as it was by the New Nationalists, who really had little to offer as an alternative.

As every leader instinctively knows, one's adversaries may present immediate problems, but preventing one's friends and colleagues from becoming successful rivals is the tricky part of the agenda of dominance. For this reason, New Leaders* and New Realists often appear to agree: both want to prevent the rise of a state, or collection of states, that would threaten the position of the United States. But whereas the realists wish to do so as a consequence of inevitable American relative decline, the leaders wish to preserve American hegemony at the top. Thus some New Realists would have demurred about intervention in the Gulf because Iraq is not a potential power of world-dominating ambitions, whereas for the New Leader, it was essential that the United States demonstrate it could act on behalf of the northern-tier states, from whose number a rival leader might emerge. While realists such as Jeane Kirkpatrick now suggest that “it is time to give up the dubious benefits of superpower status” so that we may aspire to be “a normal country in a normal time,” the New Leader recognizes that we are still far from normal times.30

Above all, is not the New Leader the truly realistic one? For while others call for strengthening the democratic revolution, achieving a robust agenda of counterproliferation, and preventing hostile combinations from forming against us, only the New Leader actually plans to accomplish these goals by specific means within our control, as opposed to offering hortatory rhetoric and a sort of “you first” diplomacy. The probing question for the proponent of this paradigm: Can we afford it? Indeed there are some realists who claim that even attempting such an agenda is bound to weaken our geopolitical position, just as it did those of earlier superpowers who, having vanquished their opponents, found themselves increasingly unable to provide the economic infrastructure that would sustain their gains because they had diverted so great a portion of their resources to military budgets.

To this the New Leader retorts that whether or not our economic health can be improved through American hegemony, it certainly can't prosper without it. Moreover, the decline in American competitiveness is not, he argues, due to overspending on defense, but rather to those national characteristics that are the negative consequence of qualities whose positive effects far better suit us for world political leadership than for cutthroat trade wars in the game of geo-economics, a game that our rivals would be only too anxious to tempt us to play in lieu of the geopolitics where our overwhelming assets lie. Let me take up both these points, one at a time.

First, it is often assumed by many that the vast flow of international goods and information is a natural given and that any American resources spent to ensure international stability through defense expenditures are resources wasted because they are diverted from our economic well-being. How often are we treated to lectures by economists who claim that money spent on tanks is unproductive, while the same money spent on tractors contributes to our national wealth. In fact it took British expenditures well in excess of our own (as a percentage of GDP) to maintain the sea lanes on which British prosperity depended, and to prevent the competing hegemonies of those who would threaten her trade and later her industrial supremacy. It is open to question whether her relative decline began when the costs of empire overstretched her ability to maintain domestic investment, or when other states—Germany, for example, whose military expenditures were far greater than Great Britain's—overtook her and were manifestly willing to threaten the very international security on which complicated contemporary economic life depends. As Krauthammer puts it:

It is a mistake to view America's exertions abroad as nothing but a drain on its economy. As can be seen in the Gulf, America's involvement abroad is in many ways an essential pillar of the American economy. The United States is, like Britain before it, a commercial, maritime, trading nation that needs an open, stable world environment in which to thrive. In a world of Saddams, if the U.S. were to shed its unique superpower role, its economy would be gravely wounded. Insecure sea lanes, impoverished trading partners, exorbitant oil prices… are only the more obvious risks of an American abdication… The cost of ensuring an open and safe world for American commerce—5.4% of GNP and falling—is hardly exorbitant.31

 

But, it is said, this is far more than, for example, the Japanese spend on defense (about 1.5 percent of GNP) and is a competitive drag on the U.S. economy. Surely Japan is as much in need of secure trade lanes as the U.S. and far more sensitive to oil prices. Wouldn't the United States be better off ceding some share of its responsibilities for international security to those states who, when they took up this burden, would thereby acquire a drag on their ascent and thus relatively improve our own competitive position? This is the second question suggested above, and it draws a distinct line between the purported paradigm of leadership and all others. For here the partisan of this approach denies the assumption on which the argument depends: geopolitical leadership, he argues, is not the same as geo-economic competition. “The notion that economic power inevitably translates into geopolitical influence,” Krauthammer writes, “is a materialist illusion.” Economic power is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for great power status, which also comprehends not simply military power, but the will to use it and the legitimacy to do so (so as not to arouse countervailing coalitions). Here the United States, in part because of its benign history toward the defeated states of World War II, is in a unique position. The moment for its aria has arrived.

It may appear that it is the imprimatur of the U.N. that conveys this legitimacy, but in fact this is only a reflection of the American desire not to appear hegemonical and thus to seek U.N. endorsements for its actions. A quick canvass of recent General Assembly resolutions would disabuse anyone who was tempted to think that the U.N. could, acting as an institution, convey legitimacy to any state act without the consent of the great powers.

Indeed the constitutional framework of the United States and its multinational state uniquely suit it to pursue the goals of world power without threatening its peers. The Long War was fought over issues of legitimacy; the resolution of that war in favor of the democratic republics has given us a postwar order over whose protection the United States is well placed to preside. To abandon this role will not only threaten that victory, it will inevitably invite the chaos that is most costly to a status quo power such as the United States. We have the most to lose by our own passivity and no other way to lose it.