The World America Made (7 page)

This broad acceptance of American power should not be confused with helpless tolerance of U.S. predominance. There has been that, too. Nations have sometimes accepted American power because they have little choice. Europeans, including Britain’s pro-American prime minister Margaret Thatcher, did not approve of the American intervention in Grenada in 1983, for instance, but there was nothing they could do to prevent it, so they registered their objections and let it pass. There is not much other nations can do when the United States decides to take military action without their approval, unless they are willing to constrain American power in some active way, which would require dramatically shifting their entire economies toward military spending. But most nations in the world, including the most advanced nations, simply do not feel threatened enough by America’s great power, even when they find it unconstrained and reckless, to warrant major expenditures on their own military forces.

This is a new phenomenon in international affairs. Even when the United States has engaged in what others regard as unjustified and illegal military actions, this has not led to a withdrawal of general support for American power. The 2011 action in Libya was a prime example. Only a few years after the global uproar over the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and with American troops still engaged in that unpopular war, many nations, led by France and
Britain, and even the Arab states, were beseeching the United States to deploy its great military power again to unseat yet another Muslim ruler in an Arab country. So many nations supported the United States’ use of force in Libya that two nations that certainly would have preferred not to see American power on display again—Russia and China—felt they had no choice but to acquiesce in the prevailing desire to have the United States once more unsheathe its sword.

One can’t blame Moscow or Beijing for being unhappy and reluctant backers of American military action, in Libya and elsewhere. Neither of those two great powers has ever enjoyed similar international support for their use of force. When Russia goes to war, it goes alone, at least since World War II. There are no votes at the UN or in any other multilateral organization sanctioning Moscow’s use of force. When Russia sent its troops into Georgia in 2008, even its own version of NATO, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, would not give its blessing. When the Soviets intervened in Afghanistan in 1979, they went in without Polish or other Warsaw Pact troops beside them. Ironically, when Polish troops finally did go fight in Afghanistan a little over two decades later, it was alongside American troops.

When China intervened in Korea in 1950, it, too, went in alone. It has not used force since it began to reemerge as a great power, but would it receive international blessing if it did? Today, even as China lends a few ships to antipiracy efforts off the coast of Africa, it spurs a bit of nervousness among local powers, like India. Chinese strategists sometimes marvel at what the United States
can get away with. As the strategic thinker Yan Xuetong puts it, the Americans have created “an institutionalized system of hegemony” by “establishing international norms” in accordance with American principles of behavior. Once these norms are “accepted by a majority of countries,” American hegemony becomes “legitimized.”
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But what the Chinese find really upsetting is the extent of America’s military alliances, for, as Yan Xuetong notes, “America has more than 50 formal military allies, while China has none.”
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This gives the United States an enormous advantage.

Other countries do enjoy international support when they use force: France and Great Britain, for instance, in Côte d’Ivoire, Sierra Leone, and Libya; Australia in East Timor. But they are not great powers and do not wield anything like the kind of military power the United States does. Moreover, they are part of the still-dominant global democratic club, which alone has been able to bestow some international legitimacy on military action. As a rule, either nations have possessed great power but enjoyed low international acceptance of its use, or they have enjoyed high international acceptance for their use of force but had relatively little of it to use. And it makes sense. Why should weaker nations encourage the strongest nations to use their power? The United States has been an anomaly in this respect. Since the end of World War II, it has held a near monopoly of legitimated military power, and it still does today.

Why has the world been so accepting of American military power? It is not because that power has been used either sparingly or unerringly or always in accord
with international law or even always in consultation with allies. Some argue that the international system established by the United States after World War II was based on rules and institutions to which Americans bound themselves as well as others. According to this theory, other nations could trust the United States to abide by these rules, especially those governing the use of force, and to work within the institutions like the United Nations and NATO. This gave other nations a measure of confidence that the United States would not abuse its power.
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In fact, however, the United States has not always felt constrained by either laws or institutions, even those of its own creation. From the overthrow and attempted overthrow of governments in Iran, Guatemala, and Cuba, to the Vietnam War and the intervention in the Dominican Republic, to the invasion of Panama and the war over Kosovo, the United States under both Democratic and Republican presidents often defied or ignored international laws and institutions, both during the Cold War and in the two decades afterward.

Nor have Americans, though usually committed in principle to multilateralism, allowed themselves to be hemmed in very much by their allies or by institutions like the United Nations. The Founders’ admonitions against “entangling alliances” have echoed down through the centuries, as has a very American suspicion of international institutions and any perceived constraint on American sovereignty. These have provided a counterpoise to American affection for international laws and institutions. The United States, moreover, as a very powerful
nation, has been no more willing than past powerful nations to be entirely constrained by weaker nations. The United States did not hesitate to go to war over Kosovo in 1999, despite failing to gain approval at the UN Security Council, or to bomb Iraq in 1998, despite loud objections from close democratic allies like France. Even during the Cold War, as one scholar has noted, America’s rhetorical commitment to “multilateralism generally masked the substance of unilateralism.”
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As a general rule, the United States has sought approval for its military actions only when confident it could get it, as when Truman sought UN authorization for the intervention in Korea while the Soviet Union was boycotting the Security Council, or when George H. W. Bush sought UN authorization for the war against Iraq in 1991 at a time when he knew the Soviet Union, weakened and on its last legs, would be compliant. Does anyone believe Bush would have refrained from acting had the Soviet Union disapproved? When he ordered the invasion of Panama in 1989 to remove Manuel Noriega, he was undeterred by the fact that the UN General Assembly condemned the action as a violation of international law, the Organization of American States passed a resolution deploring it, and at the UN Security Council a draft resolution demanding the immediate withdrawal of American forces had to be vetoed.

This sometimes cavalier attitude toward allies and institutions has been apparent on economic matters, too. When Richard Nixon took the United States off the gold standard in 1971, thus putting an end to the Bretton Woods system the United States had devised after World War II,
he did so without even consulting America’s closest allies. It is hard to believe the rest of the world has regarded the United States as consistently abiding by the rules of the international system it helped devise. Although Americans would claim otherwise, and although they are among the most legalistic people in the world, the order they have sustained has never been based strictly on law, but rather on Americans’ perception of their interests and on their judgments about right and wrong.

So why has the world been so accepting? The perception of American motives and goals is one answer. Whatever other countries may say, many implicitly accept that when America uses force, it is rarely in pursuit of narrow interests alone but also in defense of principles of an order that other liberal nations share and from which they benefit. In effect, many nations do agree with American definitions of right and wrong, even if they sometimes decry American methods of adjudicating. Nor can other nations fail to see the ambivalence with which Americans wield their power. It is Americans’ evident reluctance to wield power, their obvious aversion to the responsibilities of ruling others—more than their commitment to laws and institutions—that makes the United States for many nations a tolerable if often misguided hegemon.

Some of this acceptance has nothing to do with what Americans say or believe or how they behave. It is simply a matter of geography—the fact that even in this modern world of rapid communications and transportation, the United States is, in geopolitical terms, a distant island, far from the centers of great-power competition. The world’s cockpits of conflict for centuries have been in Europe,
Asia, and the Middle East, where multiple powers share common neighborhoods, jostle for primacy, and have engaged in endless cycles of military competition and warfare. The United States, alone of the world’s great powers, is not part of such a region. It is neighbor to no other great power (with apologies to Mexico and Canada). It stands apart. No matter how deeply involved it becomes in other heavily contested areas of the world, it remains distant from them, both physically and spiritually. As a result, Asians, Europeans, and the peoples of the Middle East have invariably worried more about what neighboring powers are up to than about the distant American power, despite its far greater strength. And when the power and behavior of one of their neighbors has grown menacing, they have looked to the United States as a natural partner—comforting both for its strength and for its distance. France and Britain have turned to the United States for help against Germany; Germany has turned to the United States for help against the Soviet Union, as has China; China and Korea have turned for help against Japan; Japan turns for help against China; the Gulf Arab states turn for help against Iran or Iraq—and always because the neighboring threat looks more menacing and because the United States really has the power to help.
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This points to the final reason why American power has been tolerated and even welcomed by many nations around the world. They need it—or at least they feel they may need it in the future. They have accepted America’s great power not primarily out of affection or admiration but out of self-interest. They have wanted the United States to be militarily powerful and also militarily
engaged, even if that has meant tolerating what many regard as profligate use of that military power. In the 1960s, as German students protested in the streets against American escalation of the war in Vietnam, the German chancellor signaled caution. The United States was “fighting there for reasons of treaties and solemn obligations,” he noted, and if the Americans abandoned their ally in South Vietnam, Germans might be abandoned someday, too. “It came down unavoidably to the question if one could generally trust America.”
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In 1968, criticism of the Vietnam War became temporarily muted after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. Whatever their qualms, and there have been many, America’s allies would not have valued the United States as much were it not both capable and willing to use force.

This general acceptance of American power over the past several decades has been critical to the maintenance of peace among great powers. Would-be challengers to the international order, even would-be challengers to the regional orders in Asia, Europe, and the Middle East, have had to weigh not only the fact of America’s lethal military but also the support it enjoys from the majority of the world’s most important nations. In addition to facing American military might, a regional challenger could find itself diplomatically isolated and subject to economic and other sanctions in an international system in which the United States has much greater influence than the challenging power does.

This has certainly been a major preoccupation of Chinese leaders, especially since the events in Tiananmen Square, when the United States organized a regime of
international isolation and economic sanctions targeted at the Beijing government. It revealed, in the words of Chinese scholars, the existence of an “international hierarchy dominated by the United States and its democratic allies.” There was a “U.S.-centered great power group,” from which China was an “outlier.”
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Were China to engage in some military action, even in its own neighborhood, not only would it have to worry about American forces and those of local powers, but it could well find itself confronted diplomatically and economically by a U.S.-led global coalition of advanced and wealthy democracies.

As it is, Chinese leaders look around and perceive an American-built wall of containment. As Hu Jintao put it only a few years ago, the United States has “strengthened its military deployments in the Asia-Pacific region, strengthened the US-Japan military alliance, strengthened strategic cooperation with India, improved relations with Vietnam, inveigled Pakistan, established a pro-American government in Afghanistan, increased arms sales to Taiwan, and so on. They have extended outposts and placed pressure points on us from the east, south, and west.”
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Chinese leaders harbor a “constant fear of being singled out and targeted by the leading powers, especially the United States,” and a “profound concern for the regime’s survival, bordering on a sense of being under siege.”
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The prospect of this global American
posse comitatus
, together with the hard reality of American military power, has been something to take seriously. As careful students of history, the Chinese are well aware of the fates of Germany, Japan, and the Soviet Union.