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Redefining the National Interest

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The Paradox of American Power: Why the World's Only Superpower Can't Go It Alone Joseph S. Nye

Print publication date: 2003 Print ISBN-13: 9780195161106 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: November 2003 DOI: 10.1093/0195161106.001.0001

Redefining the National Interest Joseph S. Nye (Contributor Webpage)

DOI:10.1093/0195161106.003.0005

Abstract and Keywords The issues raised in the foregoing chapters demonstrate the importance, insufficiently appreciated by the current administration of President George. W. Bush, of defining the U.S. national interest in a manner, which addresses the wider concerns of world order and stability, and which aims to defend the humanitarian values on which such order and stability depend. It is necessary for U.S. foreign policy to recalibrate its sense of priorities, and to recognize that there is a U.S. interest in preserving the “public good” of a stable international social and economic order.

Keywords: foreign policy, national interest, U.S.A

How should the United States define its interests in this global information age? How shall we decide how much and when to join with others? What should we do with our unprecedented power? Isolationists who think we can avoid vulnerability to terrorism by drawing inward fail to understand the realities of a global information age. At the same time, the new unilateralists who urge us to unashamedly deploy it on behalf of self‐defined global ends are offering a recipe for undermining our soft power and encouraging others to create the coalitions that will eventually limit our hard power. We must do better than that.

When Condoleezza Rice, now the national security advisor, wrote during the 2000 campaign that we should “proceed from the firm ground of the national interest and not from the interest of an illusory international community,” what disturbed our European allies was “the assumption that a conflict between the pursuit of national interest and commitment to the interests of a far‐from‐

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illusory international community necessarily exists.”1 The ties that bind the international community may be weak, but they matter. Failure to pay proper respect to the opinion of others and to incorporate a broad conception of justice into our national interest will eventually come to hurt us. As our allies frequently remind us, even well‐intentioned (p.138) American champions of benign hegemony do not have all the answers. While our friends welcomed the multilateralism of the Bush administration's approach after September 2001, they remained concerned about a return to unilateralism.

Democratic leaders who fail to reflect their nation's interest are unlikely to be reelected, and it is in our interest to preserve our preeminent position. But global interests can be incorporated into a broad and farsighted concept of the national interest. After all, terrorism is a threat to all societies; international trade benefits us as well as others; global warming will raise sea levels along all our coasts as well as those of other countries; infectious diseases can arrive anywhere by ship or plane; and financial instability can hurt the whole world economy. In addition to such concrete interests, many Americans want global values incorporated into our national interest. There are strong indications that Americans' values operate in a highly global context—that our sphere of concern extends well beyond national boundaries. Seventy‐three percent agreed with the poll statement “I regard myself as a citizen of the world as well as a citizen of the United States,” and 44 percent agreed strongly.2 We need a broad definition of our national interest that takes account of the interests of others, and it is the role of our leaders to bring this into popular discussions. An enlightened national interest need not be myopic—as September 2001 reminded us.

Traditionalists distinguish between a foreign policy based on values and a foreign policy based on interests. They describe as vital those interests that would directly affect our safety and thus merit the use of force—for example, to prevent attacks on the United States, to prevent the emergence of hostile hegemons in Asia or Europe, to prevent hostile powers on our borders or in control of the seas, and to ensure the survival of U.S. allies.3 Promoting human rights, encouraging democracy, or developing specific economic sectors is relegated to a lower priority.

I find this approach too narrow, as I believe that humanitarian interests are also important to our lives and our foreign policy. Certainly national strategic interests are vital and deserve priority, because if we fail to protect them, our very survival would be at stake. For example, today countering and suppressing catastrophic terrorism will deserve (p.139) the priority that was devoted to containing Soviet power during the Cold War.4 Survival is the necessary condition of foreign policy, but it is not all there is to foreign policy. Moreover, the connection between some events (for example, Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, or a North Korean missile test) and a threat to our national survival may involve a long chain of causes. People can disagree about how probable any link in the

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chain is and thus about the degree of the threat to our survival. Consequently, reasonable people can disagree about how much “insurance” they want our foreign policy to provide against remote threats to a vital interest before we pursue other values such as human rights.

In my view, in a democracy, the national interest is simply what citizens, after proper deliberation, say it is. It is broader than vital strategic interests, though they are a crucial part. It can include values such as human rights and democracy, particularly if the American public feels that those values are so important to our identity or sense of who we are that people are willing to pay a price to promote them. Values are simply an intangible national interest. If the American people think that our long‐term shared interests include certain values and their promotion abroad, then they become part of the national interest. Leaders and experts may point out the costs of indulging certain values, but if an informed public disagrees, experts cannot deny the legitimacy of their opinion.

Determining the national interest involves more than just poll results. It is opinion after public discussion and deliberation. That is why it is so important that our leaders do a better job of discussing a broad formulation of our national interest. Democratic debate is often messy and does not always come up with the “right” answers. Nonetheless, it is difficult to see a better way to decide on the national interest in a democracy. A better‐informed political debate is the only way for our people to determine how broadly or narrowly to define our interests.

The Limits of American Power Even when we agree that values matter, the hard job is figuring out how to bring them to bear in particular instances. Many Americans (p.140) find Russia's war in Chechnya disturbing, but there are limits to what we can do because Russia remains a nuclear power and we seek its help on terrorism. As our parents reminded us, “Don't let your eyes get bigger than your stomach, and don't bite off more than you can chew.” Given our size, the United States has more margin of choice than most countries do. But as we have seen in the earlier chapters, power is changing, and it is not always clear how much we can chew. The danger posed by the outright champions of hegemony is that their foreign policy is all accelerator and no brakes. Their focus on unipolarity and hegemony exaggerates the degree to which the United States is able to get the outcomes it wants in a changing world.

I argued in chapter 1 that power in a global information age is distributed like a three‐dimensional chess game. The top military board is unipolar, with the United States far outstripping all other states, but the middle economic board is multipolar, with the United States, Europe, and Japan accounting for two‐thirds of world product, and the bottom board of transnational relations that cross borders outside the control of governments has a widely dispersed structure of

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power. While it is important not to ignore the continuing importance of military force for some purposes, particularly in relation to the preindustrial and industrial parts of the world, the hegemonists' focus on military power can blind us to the limits of our power. As we have seen, American power is not equally great in the economic and transnational dimensions. Not only are there new actors to consider in these domains, but many of the transnational issues— whether financial flows, the spread of AIDS, or terrorism—cannot be resolved without the cooperation of others. Where collective action is a necessary part of obtaining the outcomes we want, our power is by definition limited and the United States is bound to share.

We must also remember the growing role of soft power in this global information age. It matters that half a million foreign students want to study in the United States each year, that Europeans and Asians want to watch American films and TV, that American liberties are attractive in many parts of the world, and that others respect us and want to follow our lead when we are not too arrogant. Our values are significant sources of soft power. Both hard and soft power (p.141) are important, but in a global information age, as we saw in chapter 2, soft power is becoming even more so than in the past. Massive flows of cheap information have expanded the number of transnational channels of contacts across national borders. As we also noted earlier, global markets and nongovernmental groups—including terrorists—play a larger role, and many possess soft power resources. States are more easily penetrated and less like the classic military model of sovereign billiard balls bouncing off each other.

The United States, with its open democratic society, will benefit from the rapidly developing global information age if we develop a better understanding of the nature and limits of our power. Our institutions will continue to be attractive to many and the openness of our society will continue to enhance our credibility. Thus as a country, we will be well placed to benefit from soft power. But since much of this soft power is the unintended by‐product of social forces, the government will often find it difficult to manipulate.

The good news is that the social trends of the global information age are helping to shape a world that will be more congenial to American values in the long run. But the soft power that comes from being a shining “city upon a hill” (as the Puritan leader John Winthrop first put it) does not provide the coercive capability that hard power does. Soft power is crucial, but alone it is not sufficient. Both hard and soft power will be necessary for successful foreign policy in a global information age. Our leaders must make sure that they exercise our hard power in a manner that does not undercut our soft power.

Grand Strategy and Global Public Goods How should Americans set our priorities in a global information age? What grand strategy would allow us to steer between the “imperial overstretch” that

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would arise out of the role of global policeman while avoiding the mistake of thinking the country can be isolated in this global information age? The place to start is by understanding the relationship of American power to global public goods. On one hand, for reasons given above, American power is less effective than (p.142) it might first appear. We cannot do everything. On the other hand, the United States is likely to remain the most powerful country well into this century, and this gives us an interest in maintaining a degree of international order. More concretely, there is a simple reason why Americans have a national interest beyond our borders. Events out there can hurt us, and we want to influence distant governments and organizations on a variety of issues such as proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, terrorism, drugs, trade, resources, and ecological damage. After the Cold War, we ignored Afghanistan, but we discovered that even a poor, remote country can harbor forces that can harm us.

To a large extent, international order is a public good—something everyone can consume without diminishing its availability to others.5 A small country can benefit from peace in its region, freedom of the seas, suppression of terrorism, open trade, control of infectious diseases, or stability in financial markets at the same time that the United States does without diminishing the benefits to the United States or others. Of course, pure public goods are rare. And sometimes things that look good in our eyes may look bad in the eyes of others. Too narrow an appeal to public goods can become a self‐serving ideology for the powerful. But these caveats are a reminder to consult with others, not a reason to discard an important strategic principle that helps us set priorities and reconcile our national interests with a broader global perspective.

If the largest beneficiary of a public good (like the United States) does not take the lead in providing disproportionate resources toward its provision, the smaller beneficiaries are unlikely to be able to produce it because of the difficulties of organizing collective action when large numbers are involved.6

While this responsibility of the largest often lets others become “free riders,” the alternative is that the collective bus does not move at all. (And our compensation is that the largest tends to have more control of the steering wheel.)

This puts a different twist on former secretary of state Madeleine Albright's frequent phrase that the United States is “the indispensable nation.” We do not get a free ride. To play a leading role in producing public goods, the United States will need to invest in both hard power resources and the soft power resources of setting a good example. The (p.143) latter will require more self‐ restraint on the part of Congress as well as putting our own house in order in economics, environment, criminal justice, and so forth. The rest of the world likes to see the United States lead by example, but when “America is seen, as with emission standards, to put narrow domestic interests before global needs, respect can easily turn to disappointment and contempt.”7

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Increasing hard power will require an investment of resources in the nonmilitary aspects of foreign affairs, including better intelligence, that Americans have recently been unwilling to make. While Congress has been willing to spend 16 percent of the national budget on defense, the percentage devoted to international affairs has shrunk from 4 percent in the 1960s to just 1 percent today.8 Our military strength is important, but it is not sixteen times more important than our diplomacy. Over a thousand people work on the staff of the smallest regional military command headquarters, far more than the total assigned to the Americas at the Departments of State, Commerce, Treasury, and Agriculture.9 The military rightly plays a role in our diplomacy, but we are investing in our hard power in overly militarized terms.

As Secretary of State Colin Powell has pleaded to Congress, we need to put more resources into the State Department, including its information services and the Agency for International Development (AID), if we are going to get our messages across. A bipartisan report on the situation of the State Department recently warned that “if the ‘downward spiral’ is not reversed, the prospect of relying on military force to protect U.S. national interests will increase because Washington will be less capable of avoiding, managing or resolving crises through the use of statecraft.”10 Moreover, the abolition of the United States Information Agency (which promoted American government views abroad) as a separate entity and its absorption into the State Department reduced the effectiveness of one of our government's important instruments of soft power.11 It is difficult to be a super‐ power on the cheap—or through military means alone.

In addition to better means, we need a strategy for their use. Our grand strategy must first ensure our survival, but then it must focus on providing global public goods. We gain doubly from such a strategy: from the public goods themselves, and from the way they legitimize (p.144) our power in the eyes of others. That means we should give top priority to those aspects of the international system that, if not attended to properly, would have profound effects on the basic international order and therefore on the lives of large numbers of Americans as well as others. The United States can learn from the lesson of Great Britain in the nineteenth century, when it was also a preponderant power. Three public goods that Britain attended to were (l) maintaining the balance of power among the major states in Europe, (2) promoting an open international economic system, and (3) maintaining open international commons such as the freedom of the seas and the suppression of piracy.

All three translate relatively well to the current American situation. Maintaining regional balances of power and dampening local incentives to use force to change borders provides a public good for many (but not all) countries. The United States helps to “shape the environment” (in the words of the Pentagon's quadrennial defense review) in various regions, and that is why even in normal times we keep roughly a hundred thousand troops forward‐based in Europe, the

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same number in Asia, and some twenty thousand near the Persian Gulf. The American role as a stabilizer and reassurance against aggression by aspiring hegemons in key regions is a blue chip issue. We should not abandon these regions, as some have recently suggested, though our presence in the Gulf could be handled more subtly.

Promoting an open international economic system is good for American economic growth and is good for other countries as well. As we saw in chapter 3, openness of global markets is a necessary (though not sufficient) condition for alleviating poverty in poor countries even as it benefits the United States. In addition, in the long term, economic growth is also more likely to foster stable, democratic middle‐class societies in other countries, though the time scale may be quite lengthy. To keep the system open, the United States must resist protectionism at home and support international economic institutions such as the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund, and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development that provide a framework of rules for the world economy.

(p.145) The United States, like nineteenth‐century Britain, has an interest in keeping international commons, such the oceans, open to all. Here our record is mixed. It is good on traditional freedom of the seas. For example, in 1995, when Chinese claims to the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea sparked concern in Southeast Asia, the United States avoided the conflicting claims of various states to the islets and rocks, but issued a statement reaffirming that the sea should remain open to all countries. China then agreed to deal with the issue under the Law of the Seas Treaty. Today, however, the international commons include new issues such as global climate change, preservation of endangered species, and the uses of outer space, as well as the virtual commons of cyberspace. But on some issues, such as the global climate, the United States has taken less of a lead than is necessary. The establishment of rules that preserve access for all remains as much a public good today as in the nineteenth century, even though some of the issues are more complex and difficult than freedom of the seas.

These three classic public goods enjoy a reasonable consensus in American public opinion, and some can be provided in part through unilateral actions. But there are also three new dimensions of global public goods in today's world. First, the United States should help develop and maintain international regimes of laws and institutions that organize international action in various domains— not just trade and environment, but weapons proliferation, peacekeeping, human rights, terrorism, and other concerns. Terrorism is to the twenty‐first century what piracy was to an earlier era. Some governments gave pirates and privateers safe harbor to earn revenues or to harass their enemies. As Britain became the dominant naval power in the nineteenth century, it suppressed piracy, and most countries benefited from that situation. Today, some states harbor terrorists in order to attack their enemies or because they are too weak

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to control powerful groups. If our current campaign against terrorism is seen as unilateral or biased, it is likely to fail, but if we continue to maintain broad coalitions to suppress terrorism, we have a good prospect of success. While our antiterrorism campaign will not be seen as a global public good by the groups that attack us, our objective should be to isolate them and diminish the minority of states that give them harbor.

(p.146) We should also make international development a higher priority, for it is an important global public good as well. Much of the poor majority of the world is in turmoil, mired in vicious circles of disease, poverty, and political instability. Large‐scale financial and scientific help from rich countries is important not only for humanitarian reasons but also, as Harvard economist Jeffrey Sachs has argued, “because even remote countries become outposts of disorder for the rest of the world.”12 Here our record is less impressive. Our foreign aid has shrunk to 0.1 percent of our GNP, roughly one‐third of European levels, and our protectionist trade measures often hurt poor countries most. Foreign assistance is generally unpopular with the American public, in part (as polls show) because they think we spend fifteen to twenty times more on it than we do. If our political leaders appealed more directly to our humanitarian instinct as well as our interest in stability, our record might improve. As President Bush said in July 2001, “This is a great moral challenge.”13 To be sure, aid is not sufficient for development, and opening our markets, strengthening accountable institutions, and discouraging corruption are even more important.14 Development will take a long time, and we need to explore better ways to make sure that our help actually reaches the poor, but both prudence and a concern for our soft power suggest that we should make development a higher priority.

As a preponderant power, the United States can provide an important public good by acting as a mediator. By using our good offices to mediate conflicts in places such as Northern Ireland, the Middle East, or the Aegean Sea, the United States can help in shaping international order in ways that are beneficial to us as well as to other nations. It is sometimes tempting to let intractable conflicts fester, and there are some situations where other countries can more effectively play the mediator's role. Even when we do not want to take the lead, our participation can be essential—witness our work with Europe to try to prevent civil war in Macedonia. But often the United States is the only country that can bring together mortal enemies as in the Middle East peace process. And when we are successful, we enhance our reputation and increase our soft power at the same time that we reduce a source of instability. (p.147)

Table 5.1 A Strategy Based on Global Public Goods

1. Maintain the balance of power in important regions

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2. Promote an open international economy

3. Preserve international commons

4. Maintain international rules and institutions

5. Assist economic development

6. Act as convenor of coalitions and mediator of disputes.

Human Rights and Democracy A grand strategy for protecting our traditional vital interests and promoting global public goods addresses two‐thirds of our national interest. Human rights and democracy are the third element, but they are not easily integrated with the others. Other countries and cultures often interpret these values differently and resent our intervention in their sovereign affairs as self‐righteous unilateralism. As Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohamed complained of the Clinton administration: “No one conferred this right on this crusading President.” Or in the words of a Republican critic (now a high official in the Pentagon): “America is genuinely puzzled by the idea that American assertiveness in the name of universal principles could sometimes be seen by others as a form of American unilateralism.” Yet this charge is levied by many countries, including some of our friends. “Wilsonian Presidents drive them crazy—and have done ever since the days of Woodrow Wilson.”15

Americans have wrestled with how to incorporate our values with our other interests since the early days of the republic, and the four main views cut across party lines. Isolationists hark back to John Quincy Adams's famous 1821 assertion that the United States “goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy,” while realists focus on his pragmatic advice that we should not involve ourselves “beyond the power of extrication in all the wars of interest and intrigue.”16 At least since the days of Woodrow Wilson, liberals have stressed democracy and human rights as foreign policy objectives, and Jimmy (p.148) Carter reestablished them as a priority. Even Ronald Reagan, certainly a conservative, resorted to the language of human rights, and today's neoconservatives “represent, in fact, a Reaganite variant of Wilsonianism.”17

President George W. Bush frequently reiterated the realist warning that the United States “cannot become the world's 911,” but two dozen leading neoconservatives, including William Bennett and Norman Podhoretz, have urged him to make human rights, religious freedom, and democracy priorities for American foreign policy and “not to adopt a narrow view of U.S. national interests.”18

Geopolitical realists deplore Wilsonian idealism as dangerous. As Robert Frost ironically noted, good fences can help to make good neighbors. While the erosion of sovereignty may help advance human rights in repressive regimes, it also portends considerable disorder. The Peace of Westphalia in the seventeenth

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century created a system of sovereign states to curtail vicious civil wars over religion. The fact that sovereignty is changing is generally a constraint for policy, not an objective of policy. But whether the realist strategists like it or not, humanitarian cases such as Somalia, Bosnia, Rwanda, Haiti, Kosovo, and East Timor will force themselves to the foreground because of their ability to command attention in a global information age. And their number will continue to burgeon. As we saw in chapter 3, globalization is disrupting traditional lifestyles, and the weak states left in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet empire and old European empires in Africa are particularly vulnerable. If there are clashes of civilizations, they occur more often within countries or regions over what Freud called the narcissism of small differences rather than a grand clash between “the West and the rest.”19 This in turn leads to increased violence and violation of human rights—all in the presence of television cameras and the Internet. The result puts a difficult set of issues on our foreign policy agenda and presents a challenge to our values. And, of course, our values are an important source of our soft power.

So where do human rights and democracy fit in the strategy? Human rights is an important part of foreign policy, but it is not foreign policy itself, because foreign policy is an effort to accomplish several objectives: security and economic benefits as well as humanitarian results. During the Cold War, this often meant that we reluctantly (p.149) had to tolerate human rights abuses by regimes that were crucial to balancing Soviet power, such as in South Korea before its transition to democracy. Similar problems persist in the current period—witness the absence of an American policy to promote democracy in Saudi Arabia, or the need to balance human rights in Russia with our interest in forming an anti‐ terrorist coalition.

Former Clinton administration officials William Perry and Ashton Carter have suggested a scheme to evaluate risks to U.S. security and help reassert national priorities in cases that might involve the use of force. At the top of their hierarchy are A‐list threats, of the scale that the Soviet Union presented to our survival. A threatening China or the spread of nuclear materials would also fit this category. The B list of imminent threats to our interests (but not to our survival) includes situations such as those on the Korean Peninsula and in the Persian Gulf. Their C list of important “contingencies that indirectly affect U.S. security but do not directly threaten U.S. interests” includes “the Kosovos, Bosnias, Somalias, Rwandas, and Haitis.”20

What is striking, however, is that their C list of humanitarian interventions often dominates the foreign policy agenda. Carter and Perry speculated that this was because of the absence of A‐list threats after the end of the Cold War. To some extent this is true, but another reason is the ability of C‐list issues to dominate media attention in the global information age. Dramatic visual portrayals of immediate human conflict and suffering are far easier to convey to the public

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than A‐list abstractions such as the possibility of a “Weimar Russia,” the importance of our alliance with Japan, or the potential collapse of the international system of trade and investment. Few Americans can look at television pictures of starving people or miserable refugees on the evening news just before dinner and not feel that we should do something about it if we can. Some cases are quite easy, such as hurricane relief to Central America or the early stages of famine relief in Somalia. But as with Somalia, apparently simple cases can turn out to be extremely difficult, and others, such as Kosovo, are difficult from the start.

The problem with such cases is that the humanitarian interest that instigates the action often turns out to be quite shallow when it encounters significant costs in lives or money. The impulse to help (p.150) starving Somalis (whose food supply was being interrupted by various warlords) vanished in the face of an image of a dead American being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu. This is sometimes attributed to popular reluctance to accept casualties. That is too simple. Americans went into the Gulf War expecting more than ten thousand casualties. More properly expressed, Americans are reluctant to accept casualties when their only interests are unreciprocated humanitarian interests. Ironically, the reaction against such cases may not only divert attention and limit willingness to support A‐list interests but also interfere with action in more serious humanitarian crises. One of the direct effects of the Somalia disaster was an American failure (along with other countries) to support and reinforce the United Nations peacekeeping force in Rwanda, which could have limited a true genocide in 1994.21

There are no easy answers for such cases. We could not simply turn off the television or unplug our computers even if we wanted to. We cannot simply ignore the C list, nor should we. But there are certain rules of prudence for humanitarian interventions that may help us integrate our values and our security interests, to steer a path between the dangers of unfettered Wilsonianism and the narrow realism that George W. Bush articulated in his 2000 campaign.

First, there are many degrees of humanitarian concern and many degrees of intervention, such as condemnation, sanctions targeted on individuals, broad sanctions, and various uses of force. We should save the violent end of the spectrum for only the most egregious cases discussed below. Second, when we do use force, it is worth remembering some principles of just war: having a just cause in the eyes of others, discrimination in means so that we do not unduly punish the innocent, proportionality of our means to our ends, and a high probability (rather than wishful thinking) of good consequences. Such considerations would keep us from sending troops into civil wars in Congo or

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Chechnya, where the difficulty and costs of achieving our ends would exceed our means.

Third, we should generally (except in cases of genocide) avoid the use of force unless our humanitarian interests are reinforced by the existence of other national interests, because we are unlikely to have (p.151) the necessary staying power. This was the case in the Gulf War, where we were concerned not only with the aggression against Kuwait but also with energy supplies and regional allies. This was not the case in Somalia, where, as we have seen, the absence of other interests made the intervention unsustainable when costs mounted. In the former Yugoslavia (Bosnia and Kosovo), our other interests flowed from our European allies and NATO.

Fourth, we should try to involve other regional actors, letting them lead where possible. In East Timor, Australia took the lead, while the United States offered support in logistics and intelligence. In Sierra Leone, Britain took the lead. After our failure in Rwanda, the United States belatedly offered to help African countries with training, intelligence, logistics, and transportation if they would provide the troops for a peacekeeping force. If regional states are unwilling to do their part, we should be wary of going it alone. In Europe, we should welcome the idea of combined joint task forces, including the planned European Rapid Reaction Force, that would be able to act in lesser contingencies where we did not need to be involved. We should encourage a greater European willingness and ability to take the lead on such issues as keeping the peace in the Balkans.

Fifth, the American people have a real humanitarian interest in not letting another holocaust occur, as we did in Rwanda in 1994. We need to do more to organize prevention and response to real cases of genocide. Unfortunately, the genocide convention is written so loosely and the word is so abused for political purposes that there is danger of the term becoming trivialized by being applied to any hate crimes. We should follow the recommendations of a 1985 UN study that recommended that “in order that the concept of genocide should not be devalued or diluted by the inflation of cases . . . considerations both of proportionate scale and of total numbers are relevant.”22 Regardless of the wording of the convention and the efforts of partisans in particular cases, we should focus our military responses on instances of intent to destroy large numbers of a people.

Finally, we should be very wary about intervention in civil wars over self‐ determination, such as demands for secession by groups in Indonesia, Central Asia, or in many African countries. Sometimes we (p.152)

Table 5.2 Rules of Prudence for Humanitarian Interventions

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1. Distinguish degrees of intervention and proportionality

2. Determine that there is just cause and probable success

3. Reinforce humanitarian interests with other interests

4. Give priority to other regional actors

5. Be clear about genocide

6. Be wary of civil wars over self‐determination

will be drawn in for other reasons as in the cases mentioned above, but we should avoid taking sides among ethnic groups as much as possible. Albanians killing Serb civilians after the Kosovo war is no more justifiable than Serbs killing Albanian civilians before the war. In a world of nearly ten thousand ethnic and linguistic groups and only about two hundred states, the principle of self‐determination presents the threat of enormous violence. It is dangerously ambiguous in moral terms. Atrocities are often committed by activists on both sides (reciprocal genocide), and the precedent we would create by endorsing a general right of self‐determination could have disastrous consequences. None of these rules will solve all the problems of determining our national interest in hard cases. They would have led to intervention in former Yugoslavia and stronger action in Rwanda, but greater caution in Somalia and many African civil wars. Somewhere between being the world's 911 and sitting on the sidelines, we will need some such prudential rules to help us meld our strategic, economic, and human rights interests into a sustainable foreign policy.

Finding a formula for deciding when humanitarian intervention is justified is necessary but not sufficient for the integration of human rights into foreign policy. How we behave at home also matters. Amnesty International is overly harsh in its declaration that “today the United States is as frequently an impediment to human rights as it is an advocate,” but by ignoring or refusing to ratify human rights treaties (such as those concerning economic, social, and cultural rights and discrimination against women), the United States undercuts (p.153) our soft power on these issues.23 Sometimes the causes of our reluctance are minor while the costs to our reputation are considerable. For instance, it took six years for the United States to sign the Protocol on Involvement of Children in Armed Conflict because the Pentagon wanted to recruit seventeen‐year‐olds (with parental consent). It turned out that this affected fewer than 3,000 of the 1.4 million Americans in uniform.24

The promotion of democracy is also a national interest and a source of soft power, though here the role of force is usually less central and the process is of a longer‐term nature. The United States has both an ideological and a pragmatic interest in the promotion of democracy. While the argument that democracies never go to war with each other is too simple, it is hard to find cases of liberal democracies doing so.25 Illiberal populist democracies such as Peru, Ecuador,

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Venezuela, or Iran, or countries going through the early stages of democratization, may become dangerous, but liberal democracies are less likely to produce refugees or engage in terrorism.26 President Clinton's 1995 statement that “ultimately the best strategy to ensure our security and to build a durable peace is to support the advance of democracy elsewhere” has a core of truth if approached with the caveats just described.27 The key is to follow tactics that are likely to succeed over the long term without imposing inordinate costs on other foreign policy objectives in the near term.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the United States was among a handful of democracies. Since then, albeit with setbacks, the number has grown impressively. A third wave of democratization began in southern Europe in the 1970s, spread to Latin America and parts of Asia in the 1980s, and hit Eastern Europe in the 1990s.28 Prior to the 1980s, the United States did not pursue aid to democracy on a wide basis, but since the Reagan and Clinton administrations, such aid has become a deliberate instrument of policy. By the mid‐1990s, a host of U.S. agencies (State Department, Defense Department, AID, Justice Department, National Endowment for Democracy) were spending over Z$700 million on such work.29 Our economic and soft power helps promote democratic values, and at the same time, our belief in human rights and democracy helps to increase our soft power.

(p.154) The Battle Between Unilateralists and Multilateralists How should we engage with other countries? There are three main approaches: isolation, unilateralism, and multilateralism. Isolationism persists in public opinion, but it is not a major strategic option for American foreign policy today. While some people responded to the September 2001 terrorist attacks by suggesting that we cut back on foreign involvements, the majority realized that such a policy would not curtail our vulnerability and could even exacerbate it. The main battle lines are drawn among internationalists, between those who advocate unilateralism and those who prefer multilateral tactics. In William Safire's phrase, “Uni‐ is not iso‐. In our reluctance to appear imperious, we could all too quickly abdicate leadership by catering to the envious crowd.”30 Of course, the differences are a matter of degree, and there are few pure unilateralists or multilateralists. When the early actions of the Bush administration led to cries of outrage about unilateralism, the president disclaimed the label and State Department officials described the administration's posture as selective multilateralism. But the two ends of the spectrum anchor different views of the degree of choice that grows out of America's position in the world today. I will suggest below some rules for the middle ground.

Some unilateralists advocate an assertive damn‐the‐torpedoes approach to promoting American values. They see the danger as a flagging of our internal will and confusion of our goals, which should be to turn a unipolar moment “into

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a unipolar era.” In this view, a principal aim of American foreign policy should be to bring about a change of regime in undemocratic countries such as Iraq, North Korea, and China.31 Unilateralists believe that our intentions are good, American hegemony is benevolent, and that should end the discussion. Multilateralism would mean “submerging American will in a mush of collective decision‐making —you have sentenced yourself to reacting to events or passing the buck to multilingual committees with fancy acronyms.”32 They argue that “the main issue of contention between the United States and those who express opposition to its hegemony is not American ‘arrogance.’ It is the inescapable reality of American (p.155) power in its many forms. Those who suggest that these international resentments could somehow be eliminated by a more restrained American foreign policy are engaging in pleasant delusions.”33

But Americans are not immune from hubris, nor do we have all the answers. Even if it happened to be true, it would be dangerous to act according to such an idea. “For if we were truly acting in the interests of others as well as our own, we would presumably accord to others a substantive role and, by doing so, end up embracing some form of multilateralism. Others, after all, must be supposed to know their interests better than we can know them.”34 As one sympathetic European correctly observed, “From the law of the seas to the Kyoto Protocol, from the biodiversity convention, from the extraterritorial application of the trade embargo against Cuba or Iran, from the brusk calls for reform of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund to the International Criminal Court: American unilateralism appears as an omnipresent syndrome pervading world politics.”35 When Congress legislated heavy penalties on foreign companies that did business with countries that the United States did not like, the Canadian foreign minister complained, “This is bullying, but in America, you call it ‘global leadership.’ ”36

Other unilateralists (sometimes called sovereigntists) focus less on the promotion of American values than on their protection, and they sometimes gain support from the significant minority of isolationist opinion that still exists in this country. As one put it, the strongest and richest country in the world can afford to safeguard its sovereignty. “An America that stands aloof from various international undertakings will not find that it is thereby shut out from the rest of the world. On the contrary, we have every reason to expect that other nations, eager for access to American markets and eager for other cooperative arrangements with the United States, will often adapt themselves to American preferences.”37 In this view, Americans should resist the encroachment of international law, especially claims of universal jurisdiction. Instead, “the United States should strongly espouse national sovereignty, the bedrock upon which democracy and self‐government are built, as the fundamental organizing principle of the international system.”38 Or as Senator Jesse Helms warned, (p. 156) the United Nations can be a useful instrument for America's world role, but if it “aspires to establish itself as the central moral authority of a new

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international order . . . then it begs for confrontation and, more important, eventual U. S. withdrawal.”39

This battle between multilateralists and unilateralists, often played out in a struggle between the president and Congress, has led to a somewhat schizophrenic American foreign policy. The United States played a prominent role in promoting such multilateral projects as the Law of the Seas Treaty, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, the Land Mines Treaty, the International Criminal Court, the Kyoto Protocol on climate change, and others, but it has failed to follow through with congressional ratification. In some instances, the result has been what The Economist calls “parallel unilateralism—a willingness to go along with international accords, but only so far as they suit America, which is prepared to conduct policy outside their constraints.”40 For instance, the United States asserts the jurisdictional limits of the unratified Law of the Seas Treaty. It has pledged not to resume testing nuclear weapons, but because of the unilateral nature of the decision, it does not gain the benefits of verification and the ability to bind others. In other instances, such as antipersonnel land mines, the United States has argued that it needs them to defend against tanks in Korea, but it has undertaken research on a new type of mine that might allow it to join by 2006.41 In the case of the Kyoto Protocol, President Bush refused to negotiate and peremptorily pronounced it “dead.” The result was a foreign reaction of frustration and anger that undermined our soft power.

During the 2000 political campaign, George W. Bush aptly described the situation: “Our nation stands alone right now in the world in terms of power. And that's why we've got to be humble and yet project strength in a way that promotes freedom. . . . If we are an arrogant nation, they'll view us that way, but if we're a humble nation, they'll respect us.”42 Yet our allies and other foreign nations considered the early actions of his administration arrogantly unilateral. Within a few months, America's European allies joined other countries in refusing for the first time to reelect the United States to the UN Human Rights Commission. The secretary of defense, Donald (p.157) Rumsfeld, said that “gratitude is gone,”43 and the secretary of state, Colin Powell, explained that “the ‘sole superpower’ charge is always out there and that may have influenced some.”44 In the less temperate words of television commentator Morton Kondracke, “We're the most powerful country in the world by far, and a lot of pipsqueak wannabes like France resent the hell out of it. . . . When they have a chance to stick it to us, they try.”45 The House of Representatives responded by voting to withhold funds from the UN. But the situation was more complicated than such responses acknowledged.

At the beginning of the last century, as America rose to world power, Teddy Roosevelt advised that we should speak softly but carry a big stick. Now that we have the stick, we need to pay more attention to the first part of his admonition.

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And we need not just to speak more softly but to listen more carefully. As Chris Patten, the EU commissioner for external affairs and former British Conservative leader, explained a year earlier, the United States is a staunch friend with much to admire, “but there are also many areas in which I think they have got it wrong, the UN, for example, environmental policy, and a pursuit of extraterritorial powers combined with a neuralgic hostility to any external authority over their own affairs.”46 In the words of one observer, at the start of his administration President Bush “contrived to prove his own theory that arrogance provokes resentment for a country that, long before his arrival, was already the world's most conspicuous and convenient target.”47

The United States should aim to work with other nations on global problems in a multilateral manner whenever possible. I agree with the recent bipartisan commission on our national security, chaired by former senators Gary Hart and Warren Rudman, which concluded that “emerging powers—either singly or in coalition—will increasingly constrain U.S. options regionally and limit its strategic influence. As a result we will remain limited in our ability to impose our will, and we will be vulnerable to an increasing range of threats.” Borders will become more porous, rapid advances in information and biotechnologies will create new vulnerabilities, the United States will become “increasingly vulnerable to hostile attack on the American homeland, and the U.S. military superiority will not entirely protect (p.158) us.”48 This means we must develop multilateral laws and institutions that constrain others and provide a framework for cooperation. In the words of the Hart‐Rudman Commission, “America cannot secure and advance its own interests in isolation.”49 As the terrorist attacks of September 11 showed, even a superpower needs friends.

Granted, multilateralism can be used as a strategy by smaller states to tie the United States down like Gulliver among the Lilliputians. It is no wonder that France prefers a multipolar and multilateral world, and less developed countries see multilateralism as in their interests, because it gives them some leverage on the United States.50 But this does not mean multilateralism is not generally in American interests as well. “By resting our actions on a legal basis (and accepting the correlative constraints), we can make the continued exercise of our disproportionate power easier for others to accept.”51

Multilateralism involves costs, but in the larger picture, they are outweighed by the benefits. International rules bind the United States and limit our freedom of action in the short term, but they also serve our interest by binding others as well. Americans should use our power now to shape institutions that will serve our long‐term national interest in promoting international order. “Since there is little reason for believing that the means of policy will be increased, we are left to rely on the greater cooperation of others. But the greater cooperation of others will mean that our freedom of action is narrowed.”52 It is not just that

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excessive unilateralism can hurt us; multilateralism is often the best way to achieve our long‐run objectives.

Action to shape multilateralism now is a good investment for our future. Today, as we have seen, “worried states are making small adjustments, creating alternatives to alliance with the United States. These small steps may not look important today, but eventually the ground will shift and the U.S.‐led postwar order will fragment and disappear.”53 These tendencies are countered by the very openness of the American system. The pluralistic and regularized way in which foreign policy is made reduces surprises. Opportunities for foreigners to raise their voice and influence the American political and governmental system not only are plentiful but constitute an important incentive for alliance.54 Ever since Athens transformed the Delian (p.159) League into an empire, smaller allies have been torn between anxieties over abandonment or entrapment. The fact that American allies are able to voice their concerns helps to explain why American alliances have persisted so long after Cold War threats receded.

The other element of the American order that reduces worry about power asymmetries is our membership in a web of multilateral institutions ranging from the UN to NATO. Some call it an institutional bargain. The price for the United States was reduction in Washington's policy autonomy, in that institutional rules and joint decision making reduced U.S. unilateralist capacities. But what Washington got in return was worth the price. America's partners also had their autonomy constrained, but they were able to operate in a world where U.S. power was more restrained and reliable.55 Seen in the light of a constitutional bargain, the multilateralism of American preeminence is a key to its longevity, because it reduces the incentives for constructing alliances against us. And to the extent that the EU is the major potential challenger in terms of capacity, the idea of a loose constitutional framework between the United States and the societies with which we share the most values makes sense.56

Of course, not all multilateral arrangements are good or in our interests, and the United States should occasionally use unilateral tactics in certain situations, which I will describe below. The presumption in favor of multilateralism that I recommend need not be a straitjacket. Richard Haass, the State Department's director of policy planning, says, “What you're going to get from this administration is ‘à la carte multilateralism.’ We'll look at each agreement and make a decision, rather than come out with a broad‐based approach.”57 So how should Americans choose between unilateral and multilateral tactics? Here are seven tests to consider.

First, in cases that involve vital survival interests, we should not rule out unilateral action, though when possible we should seek international support for these actions. The starkest case in the last half century was the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. American leaders felt obliged to consider unilateral use of force,

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though it is important to note that President Kennedy also sought the legitimacy of opinion expressed in multilateral forums such as the United Nations and the (p.160) Organization of American States. Strikes against terrorist camps and safe havens are a current example, but again, unilateral actions are best when buttressed by multilateral support.

Second, we should be cautious about multilateral arrangements that interfere with our ability to produce stable peace in volatile areas. Because of our global military role, the United States sometimes has interests and vulnerabilities that are different from those of smaller states with more limited interests—witness the role of land mines in preventing North Korean tanks crossing the demilitarized zone into South Korea. Thus the multilateral treaty banning land mines was easier for other countries to sign. As noted previously, the United States announced that it would work to develop new mines that might allow it to sign by 2006. Similarly, given the global role of American military forces, if the procedures of the International Criminal Court cannot be clarified to ensure protection of American troops from unjustified charges of war crimes, they might deter the United States from contributing to the public good of peacekeeping. The ICC procedures currently proposed give primary jurisdiction over alleged war crimes by American servicemen to the United States, but there is still a danger of overzealous prosecutors egged on by hostile NGOs in instances where the United States finds no case. We should seek further assurances such as clarifying declarations by the UN Security Council. While the ICC has problems, helping to shape its procedures would be a better policy than abetting the current trend toward national claims of universal legal jurisdiction that are evolving in ad hoc fashion beyond our control.58

Third, unilateral tactics sometimes help lead others to compromises that advance multilateral interests. The multilateralism of free trade and the international gold standard in the nineteenth century were achieved not by multilateral means but by Britain's unilateral moves of opening its markets and maintaining the stability of its currency.59 America's relative openness after 1945 and, more recently, trade legislation that threatened unilateral sanctions if others did not negotiate helped create conditions that prodded other countries to move forward with the WTO dispute settlement mechanism. Sometimes the United States is big enough to set high standards and get (p.161) away with it —witness our more stringent regulations for financial markets. Such actions can lead to the creation of higher international standards. The key is whether the unilateral action was designed to promote a global public good.

The Kyoto Protocol, which caused President Bush such trouble at the beginning of his presidency, could have been another case in point had it been handled differently. Many who accept the reality of global warming and support the Framework Convention on Climate Change (the Rio agreement signed by President George H. Bush and ratified by the Senate in 1992) believed that the

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Kyoto agreement was badly flawed because it did not include developing countries and because its target for emission cuts, according to The Economist, “could not be done except at ruinous cost, and perhaps not even then.” A longer‐ term plan based on milder reductions at the start followed by more demanding targets farther out would provide time for capital stocks to adjust and market‐ based instruments such as tradable permits to lower the costs of emissions reductions.60 It would also reduce the trade‐off with economic growth, which benefits a wide range of nations, including the poor.61 If, instead of resisting the science and abruptly pronouncing the protocol dead on grounds of domestic interest, the Bush administration had said, “We will work on a domestic energy policy that cuts emissions and at the same time negotiate with you for a better treaty,” his initial unilateralism would arguably have advanced multilateral interests.62

Fourth, the United States should reject multilateral initiatives that are recipes for inaction, promote others' self‐interest, or are contrary to our values.63 The New International Information Order proposed by the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in the 1970s would have helped authoritarian governments to restrict freedom of the press. Similarly, the New International Economic Order fostered by the General Assembly at the same time would have interfered with the public good of open markets. Sometimes multilateral procedures are obstructive—for example, Russia's and China's efforts to prevent Security Council authorization of intervention to stop the human rights violations in Kosovo in 1999. Ultimately the United States decided to go ahead without Security (p.162) Council approval, but even then the American intervention was not purely unilateral but taken with strong support of our allies in NATO.

Fifth, multilateralism is essential on intrinsically cooperative issues that cannot be managed by the United States without the help of other countries. Climate change is a perfect example. Global warming will be costly to us, but it cannot be prevented by the United States alone cutting emissions of carbon dioxide, methane, and particulates. The United States is the largest source of such warming agents, but three‐quarters of the sources originate outside our borders. Without cooperation, the problem is beyond our control. The same is true of a long list of items: the spread of infectious diseases, the stability of global financial markets, the international trade system, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, narcotics trafficking, international crime syndicates, transnational terrorism. All these problems have major effects on Americans, and their control ranks as an important national interest—but one that cannot be achieved except by multilateral means.

Sixth, multilateralism should be sought as a means to get others to share the burden and buy into the idea of providing public goods. Sharing helps foster commitment to common values. Even militarily, the United States should rarely

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intervene alone. Not only does this comport with the preferences of the American public, but it has practical implications. The United States pays a minority share of the cost of UN and NATO peacekeeping operations, and the legitimacy of a multilateral umbrella reduces collateral political costs to our soft power.

Seventh, in choosing between multilateral and unilateral tactics, we must consider the effects of the decision on our soft power. If we continue to define our power too heavily in military terms, we may fail to understand the need to invest in other instruments. As we have seen, soft power is becoming increasingly important, but soft power is fragile and can be destroyed by excessive unilateralism and arrogance. In balancing whether to use multilateral or unilateral tactics, or to adhere to or refuse to go along with particular multilateral initiatives, we have to consider how we explain it to others and what the effects will be on our soft power. (p.163)

Table 5.3 Checklist for Multilateral Versus Unilateral Tactics

1. Survival interests at stake

2. Effect on military and peace

3. Leadership increases public goods

4. Consistency with our values

5. Intrinsically cooperative issues

6. Helps on burden sharing

7. Effects on our soft power

In short, American foreign policy in a global information age should have a general preference for multilateralism, but not all multilateralism. At times we will have to go it alone. When we do so in pursuit of public goods, the nature of our ends may substitute for the means in legitimizing our power in the eyes of others. If, on the other hand, the new unilateralists try to elevate unilateralism from an occasional temporary tactic to a full‐fledged strategy, they are likely to fail for three reasons: (1) the intrinsically multilateral nature of a number of important transnational issues in a global age, (2) the costly effects on our soft power, and (3) the changing nature of sovereignty.

Sovereignty, Democracy, and Global Institutions As we saw in chapter 3, at this point in history democracy works best in sovereign nation‐states, and that is likely to change only slowly. Giving too much power to global institutions could lead to a loss of democracy in decision making for the United States as well as other countries.64 But sovereignty is a slippery term. Those who resist multilateralism define sovereignty narrowly as domestic authority and control. But as we have seen, unilateral control may be impossible

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on some global issues. In instances where we do not have the unilateral capability to produce the outcomes we want, our sovereign control may be enhanced by membership in good standing in the regimes that make up the substance of international life.65

(p.164) We saw in chapters 2 and 3 that sovereignty remains important but that its content is changing under the influence of transnational forces of information and globalization. Sovereign states have always been porous to some degree, but today, less than ever, we cannot protect our homeland simply by protecting our borders.66 As we found after September 2001, the only way to deal with many transnational intrusions is to mount a forward defense that involves cooperation in intelligence and law enforcement with other countries behind their borders and inside ours. Other countries' governments are quite often better placed to identify and arrest terrorists. Their cooperation is essential, and obtaining it will depend on both our hard and soft power.

Transnational relations and multiple identities also undermine our impermeability. Who we are is harder to define when Japanese firms are major exporters from the United States, American firms produce more overseas than they export, and the NGOs and political leaders who pressed for the land mines treaty included large numbers of Americans, including prominent senators. Mixed coalitions crisscross borders, and the price of stopping them would be prohibitive in terms of our basic democratic values and civil liberties.

Some sovereigntists believe that “America does not have to play by the rules that everybody else plays by because nobody can make it play by them—and besides it has its own set of more important ones.”67 But the costs are high in terms of rejection of U.S. leadership by states that otherwise would defer to our views, as well as our inability to achieve all our objectives alone. Moreover, American corporations are vulnerable to foreign and NGO reactions, and when they are hurt, they will press the government for relief at national or state levels. As columnist Tom Friedman observed, the smart activists are saying, “Okay, you want to play markets? Let's play.” After Exxon supported the Bush administration's killing of the Kyoto Protocol, activists in Europe started a boycott of its products. Shell and BP, on the other hand, had withdrawn from the oil industry lobby that had been dismissing climate change.68 And American corporations send armies of lobbyists to Brussels and Geneva, where the EU, the WTO, and the International Telecommunications Union shape new global rules on matters such as electronic commerce, intellectual property, (p.165) and technical standards. “No government, no matter how powerful, can unilaterally impose or enforce its will on these issues. They embroil too many actors and interests in too many countries to be susceptible to brute, hegemonic force.”69

And when our rejection of cooperation appears narrowly self‐interested and

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arrogant, we undercut our soft power. A consistently unilateral view of sovereignty will prove too costly to sustain.

At the same time, the problem of democratic accountability of multilateral institutions, discussed in chapter 3, remains a real one. As the lawyer Kal Raustiala notes, “It is the process of multilateral lawmaking, rather than the substance, that largely creates tensions with democracy and sovereignty. . . . The threats to sovereignty and democracy from multilateral cooperation are not large but they are real.”70 Rather than rejecting such institutions, as the sovereigntists advise, there are several things that the United States should do to respond to the concerns about a democratic deficit and to enhance the accountability and legitimacy of the multilateral institutions and networks that provide the necessary governance for globalism.

Most important, perhaps, is to try to design multilateral institutions that preserve as much space as possible for domestic democratic processes to operate. The real policy challenge is making the world safe for different brands of national economies to prosper side by side. The answer involves multilateral procedures, modest barriers, and rules of the game that allow countries to reimpose restrictions when not doing so would jeopardize a legitimate national objective.71 Here the WTO is illustrative. While its dispute settlement procedures intrude on domestic sovereignty, as mentioned above, a country can respond to domestic democratic processes and reject a judgment if it is willing to pay carefully limited compensation to the trade partners injured by its actions. And if a country does defect from its trade agreements, the procedure limits the tit‐for‐tat downward spiral of retaliation that so devastated the world economy in the 1930s. In a sense, the procedure is like having a fuse in the electrical system of a house—better the fuse blows than the house burns down. The danger, however, is that our governments will legalize rather than negotiate too many of their trade disputes and eventually (p.166) overburden an institution that, contrary to the protesters' arguments, leaves room for domestic democratic processes.

In addition, better accountability can start at home in democracies. If the American people believe that environmental standards are not adequately taken into account at WTO meetings in Geneva, we can press our government to include EPA officials in our delegations. Congress can hold hearings before or after meetings, and legislators can themselves become members of the national delegations to various organizations.

Moreover, Americans should understand that democratic accountability can be quite indirect. Accountability is ensured in multiple ways, not only through voting, even in well‐functioning democracies. In the United States, for example, the Supreme Court and the Federal Reserve system are responsive to elections only indirectly through a long chain of delegation. Professional norms and

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standards also help to keep judges and bankers accountable. IMF and World Bank officials are accountable to executive directors who are accountable to governments. There is no reason in principle that indirect accountability should be inconsistent with democracy, or that international institutions should be held to a higher standard than domestic institutions.

Increased transparency—that is, curtailing secrecy of procedures—is essential if international institutions are to be held accountable. In addition to voting, people in democracies communicate and agitate over issues through a variety of means ranging from letters and polls to protests. Interest groups and a free press play an important role in creating transparency in our domestic democratic politics. We call the press the essential fourth branch of government, and this is a role that the press and NGOs can play at the international level as well. NGOs are self‐selected, not democratically elected, but they can play a positive role in increasing transparency. They deserve a voice but not a vote. For them to fill this role, they need to be provided with information and included in dialogues with institutions. In some instances, such as judicial procedures or market interventions, it is unrealistic to provide the information in advance, but records and justifications of decisions can later be provided for comment and criticism, as the Fed and the Supreme Court do in our domestic politics. We should press (p.167) international institutions and networks to put more information on the Internet.72 (The same standards of transparency should be applied to NGOs themselves.)

The private sector can also contribute to accountability. Private associations and codes, such as those established by the international chemical industry in the aftermath of the explosion of Union Carbide's plant in the Indian city of Bhopal in 1984, can prevent a race to the bottom in standards. The practice of naming and shaming has helped consumers to hold accountable transnational firms in the toy and apparel industries—as Mattel and Nike can attest. And while people have unequal votes in markets, in the aftermath of the Asian financial crisis, accountability through markets may have led to more increases in transparency by corrupt governments than any formal agreements did. Open markets can help to diminish the undemocratic power of local monopolies and can reduce the power of entrenched and unresponsive government bureaucracies, particularly in countries where parliaments are weak. Moreover, efforts by investors to increase transparency and legal predictability can have beneficial spillover effects on political institutions.

If multilateral institutions are to be preserved, we will need to engage in experiments designed to improve accountability. Transparency is essential, and international organizations can provide more access, even if it requires delayed release of records in the manner practiced by the Supreme Court and Federal Reserve. NGOs could be welcomed as observers (as the World Bank has done) or allowed to file amicus curiae briefs in WTO dispute settlement cases (although

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the privilege might be extended only to those who are transparent about their own membership and finances). In some cases, such as the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN, which is incorporated as a nonprofit institution under the laws of California), experiments with direct voting for board members may prove fruitful, though the danger of capture by well‐ organized interest groups remains a problem. Hybrid network organizations that combine governmental, intergovernmental, and nongovernmental representatives, such as the World Commission on Dams or Kofi Annan's Global Compact, are other avenues to explore. (p.168)

Table 5.4 Enhancing Accountability of Global Institutions

1. Design institutions to protect domestic processes (e.g., WTO)

2. Involve legislators in delegations and advisory groups

3. Make use of indirect accountability (e.g., reputations, markets)

4. Increase transparency through the press, NGOs, Web sites

5. Encourage private sector accountability

6. Experiment with new forms (e.g., ICANN, World Commission on Dams, Global Compact)

Congressmen could attend assemblies of parliamentarians associated with some organizations to hold hearings and receive information, even if not to vote (for reasons given earlier). There is no single answer to the question of how to reconcile the necessary global multilateral institutions with democratic accountability. Highly technical organizations may be able to derive their legitimacy from their efficacy alone. But the more that an institution deals with broad values, the more the legitimacy of democratic accountability becomes relevant. Americans concerned about democracy will need to think harder about norms and procedures for the governance of globalization. Demands for withdrawal, direct elections, or control by unelected NGOs will not solve the problem. Changes in processes that increase transparency and take advantage of the multiple forms of accountability that exist in modern democracies will be necessary to preserve the multilateral options that we will need to deal with global problems.

Peering into the Future The September 2001 wake‐up call means that Americans are unlikely to slip back into the complacency that marked the first decade after the Cold War. If we respond effectively, it is highly unlikely that terrorists could destroy American power, but the campaign against terrorism will require a long and sustained effort. At the same time, the (p.169) United States is unlikely to face a challenge to its preeminence unless it acts so arrogantly that it helps other states to overcome their built‐in limitations. The one entity with the capacity to

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challenge the United States in the near future is the European Union if it were to become a tight federation with major military capabilities and if the relations across the Atlantic were allowed to sour. Such an outcome is possible but would require major changes in Europe and considerable ineptitude in American policy to bring it about. Nonetheless, even short of such a challenge, the diminished fungibility of military power in a global information age means that Europe is already well placed to balance the United States on the economic and transnational chessboards. Even short of a military balance of power, other countries may be driven to work together to take actions to complicate American objectives. Or, as the French critic Dominique Moisi puts it, “The global age has not changed the fact that nothing in the world can be done without the United States. And the multiplicity of new actors means that there is very little the United States can achieve alone.”73

The United States can learn useful lessons about a strategy of providing public goods from the history of Pax Britannica. An Australian analyst may be right in her view that if the United States plays its cards well and acts not as a soloist but as the leader of a concert of nations, “the Pax Americana, in terms of its duration, might . . . become more like the Pax Romana than the Pax Britannica.”74 If so, our soft power will play a major role. As Henry Kissinger has argued, the test of history for the United States will be whether we can turn our current predominant power into international consensus and our own principles into widely accepted international norms. That was the greatness achieved by Rome and Britain in their times.75

Unlike Britain, Rome succumbed not to the rise of a new empire, but to internal decay and a death of a thousand cuts from various barbarian groups. We saw in chapter 4 that while internal decay is always possible, none of the commonly cited trends seems to point strongly in that direction at this time. At the start of the century, terrorist threats notwithstanding, American attitudes are both positive and realistic. The initial response to September 2001 was encouraging. (p.170) The public did not turn to isolationism and the Congress and administration curbed their unilateralism. The public is also realistic about the limits of American power and expresses a willingness to share.“While 28% say America will remain the major world power in the next 100 years, 61% believe the United States will share this status with a few other countries. (Fewer than one in 10 thinks the U.S. will no longer be a major power.)”76 Large majorities oppose a purely unilateralist approach. “Upwards of two‐thirds of the public oppose, in principle, the U.S. acting alone overseas without the support of other countries.”77 The American public seems to have an intuitive sense for soft power even if the term is unfamiliar.

On the other hand, it is harder to exclude the barbarians. The dramatically decreased cost of communication, the rise of transnational domains (including the Internet) that cut across borders, and the democratization of technology that

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/0195161106.001.0001/acprof-9780195161106-chapter-4#

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puts massive destructive power (once the sole preserve of governments) into the hands of groups and individuals all suggest dimensions that are historically new. In the last century, men such Hitler, Stalin, and Mao needed the power of the state to wreak great evil.“Such men and women in the 21st century will be less bound than those of the 20th by the limits of the state, and less obliged to gain industrial capabilities to wreak havoc. . . . Clearly the threshold for small groups or even individuals to inflict massive damage on those they take to be their enemies is falling dramatically.”78 Countering such terrorist groups must be a top priority. Homeland defense takes on a new importance and a new meaning and will require an intelligent combination of hard and soft power. If such groups were to produce a series of events involving even greater destruction and disruption of society than occurred in September 2001, American attitudes might change dramatically, though the direction of the change is difficult to predict. Isolationism might make a comeback, but greater engagement in world events is equally plausible.

Other things being equal, the United States is well placed to remain the leading power in world politics well into the twenty‐first century or beyond. This prognosis depends upon assumptions that can be spelled out. For example, it assumes that the long‐term productivity of the American economy will be sustained, that American (p.171) society will not decay, that the United States will maintain its military strength but not become overmilitarized, that Americans will not become so unilateral and arrogant in their strength that they squander the nation's considerable fund of soft power, that there will not be some catastrophic series of events that profoundly transforms American attitudes in an isolationist direction, and that Americans will define their national interest in a broad and farsighted way that incorporates global interests. Each of these assumptions can be questioned, but they currently seem more plausible than their alternatives. If the assumptions hold, America will continue to be number one, but even so, in this global information age, number one ain't gonna be what it used to be. To succeed in such a world, America must not only maintain its hard power but understand its soft power and how to combine the two in the pursuit of national and global interests. (p.172)

Notes:

(1.) Peter Ludlow, “Wanted: A Global Partner,” The Washington Quarterly, summer 2001, 167.

(2.) Program on International Policy Attitudes, “Americans on Globalization: A Study of US Public Attitudes,” University of Maryland, 1999, 8.

(3.) America's National Interests: A Report from the Commission on America's National Interests (cochairs Robert Ellworth, Andrew Goodpaster, and Rita Hauser, 1996), 13.

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(4.) See Ashton Carter, John Deutch, and Philip Zelikow, Catastrophic Terrorism: Elements of a National Policy (Cambridge, MA: Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard University, 1998). See also Joseph S. Nye Jr. and R. James Woolsey, “Perspective on Terrorism,” Los Angeles Times, June 1, 1997, M‐ 5.

(5.) For a full discussion of the complexity and problems of definition, see Inge Kaul, Isabelle Grunberg, and Marc A. Stern, eds., Global Public Goods: International Cooperation in the 21st Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). Strictly defined, public goods are nonrivalrous and nonexclusionary.

(6.) Mancur Olson, The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965).

(7.) Philip Bowring, “Bush's America Is Developing an Image Problem,” International Herald Tribune, May 31, 2001, 8.

(8.) Richard N. Gardner, “The One Percent Solution,” Foreign Affairs, July‐August 2000, 3.

(9.) Dana Priest, “A Four Star Foreign Policy?” Washington Post, September 28, 2000, 1.

(10.) Robin Wright, “State Dept. Mismanaged, Report Says,” Los Angeles Times, January 30, 2001, 10.

(11.) The United States Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy, Consolidation of USIA into the State Department: An Assessment After One Year (Washington, D.C.: October 2000).

(12.) Jeffrey Sachs, “What's Good for the Poor Is Good for America,” The Economist, July 14, 2001, 32–33.

(13.) “Bush Proposes Aid Shift to Grants for Poor Nations,” New York Times, July 18, 2001, A1.

(14.) William Easterly, “The Failure of Development,” Financial Times (London), July 4, 2001, 32; Dani Rodrik, The New Global Economy and Developing Countries: Making Openness Work (Washington, D.C.: Overseas Development Council, 1999).

(15.) Peter Rodman, Uneasy Giant: The Challenges to American Predominance (Washington: The Nixon Center, 2000), 3, 15, 44.

(16.) Richard Bernstein, “To Butt In or Not in Human Rights: The Gap Narrows,” New York Times, August 4, 2001, 15.

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(17.) Rodman, Uneasy Giant, 40.

(18.) Steven Mufson, “Bush Nudged by the Right over Rights,” International Herald Tribune, January 27–28, 2001, 3. See also “American Power—For What? A Symposium,” Commentary, January 2000, 21n.

(19.) G. Pascal Zachary, “Market Forces Add Ammunition to Civil Wars,” Wall Street Journal, June 12, 2000, 21. From 1989 to 1998, 108 armed conflicts broke out in seventy‐three places around the world; 92 of them took place within a country rather than between countries.

(20.) Ashton B. Carter and William J. Perry, Preventive Defense: A New Security Strategy for America (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 1999), 11– 15.

(21.) Samantha Power, “Bystanders to Genocide,” Atlantic Monthly, September 2001, 84–108.

(22.) Samantha Power, “A Problem from Hell”: America's Failure to Prevent Genocide (New York: Basic Books, 2002), chapter 5.

(23.) Norman Kempster, “US Is Sharply Criticized on Human Rights Issues,” International Herald Tribune, May 31, 2001, 3.

(24.) Barbara Crossette, “Clinton Signs Agreements to Help Protect Children,” New York Times, July 6, 2000, A7.

(25.) John M. Owen, “How Liberalism Produces Democratic Peace,” International Security, fall 1994; John R. Oneal and Bruce Russett, “Assessing the Liberal Peace with Alternative Specifications: Trade Still Reduces Conflict,” Journal of Peace Research (Oslo), July 1999; Fareed Zakaria, “The Rise of Illiberal Democracy,” Foreign Affairs, November‐December 1997. For a critical monographic look at the “liberal peace” thesis, see Joanne Gowa, Ballots and Bullets: The Elusive Democratic Peace (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999); for a favorable monographic assessment, see Spencer R. Weart, Never at War: Why Democracies Will Not Fight One Another (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).

(26.) See Edward D. Mansfield and Jack Snyder, “Democratization and War,” Foreign Affairs, May 1995.

(27.) Thomas Carothers, Aiding Democracy Abroad: The Learning Curve (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment, 1999), 5.

(28.) Samuel P. Huntington, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991).

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(29.) Ibid., 7.

(30.) William Safire, “The Purloined Treaty,” New York Times, April 9, 2001, A21.

(31.) Robert Kagan and William Kristol, “The Present Danger,” The National Interest, spring 2000, 58, 64, 67.

(32.) Charles Krauthammer, “The New Unilateralism,” Washington Post, June 8, 2001, A29.

(33.) Kagan and Kristol, “The Present Danger,” 67.

(34.) Robert W. Tucker in “American Power—For What? A Symposium,” Commentary, January 2000, 46.

(35.) Harald Muller quoted in Franz Nuscheler, “Multilateralism vs. Unilateralism,” Development and Peace Foundation, Bonn, 2001, 5.

(36.) Lloyd Axworthy quoted in Stewart Patrick, “Lead, Follow, or Get Out of the Way: America's Retreat from Multilateralism,” Current History, December 2000, 433.

(37.) Quoted in Peter Spiro, “The New Sovereigntist,” Foreign Affairs, November‐December 2000, 12–13.

(38.) David B. Rivkin Jr. and Lee A. Casey, “The Rocky Shoals of International Law,” The National Interest, winter 2000–1, 42.

(39.) Jesse Helms, “American Sovereignty and the UN,” The National Interest, winter 2000–1, 34.

(40.) “Working Out the World,” The Economist, March 31, 2001, 24.

(41.) James Glanz, “Study Optimistic on Safer Land Mines, but Says Push is Needed,” New York Times, March 22, 2001, A18.

(42.) “2nd Presidential Debate Between Gov. Bush and Vice President Gore,” New York Times, October 12, 2000, A20.

(43.) Brian Knowlton, “Bush Aide Calls UN Vote an Outrage,” International Herald Tribune, May 7, 2001 (http://www.iht.com/articles/19081.html).

(44.) David Sanger, “House Threatens to Hold U.N. Dues in Loss of a Seat,” New York Times, May 9, 2001, A1.

(45.) Quoted in The Hotline: National Journal's Daily Briefing on Politics, May 8, 2001, 4.

http://www.iht.com/articles/19081.html

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(46.) Barry James, “The EU Counterweight to American Influence,” International Herald Tribune, June 16, 2000, 4.

(47.) Roger Cohen, “Arrogant or Humble? Bush Encounters Europeans' Hostility,” International Herald Tribune, May 8, 2001, 1. Among the multilateral treaties and agreements that the administration opposed in its first six months were the International Criminal Court, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, the ABM Treaty, the Kyoto Protocol, a small arms control pact, a biological weapons protocol, and an OECD measure to control tax havens. “By knocking off several of the hard‐earned, high‐profile treaties on arms control and the environment, Mr. Bush has been subjected to outrage from some of America's closest friends— who wonder what will replace a world ordered by treaties—as well as its adversaries who see arrogance in Mr. Bush's actions.” Thom Shanker, “White House Says US Is Not a Loner, Just Choosy,” New York Times, July 31, 2001, 1.

(48.) United States Commission on National Security in the Twenty‐first Century, New World Coming: American Security in the 21st Century (Washington, D.C., 1999), 4.

(49.) United States Commission on National Security in the Twenty‐first Century, Roadmap for National Security: Imperative for Change, Phase III Report (Washington, D.C., 2001), 2, 5.

(50.) Dominique Moisi, “The Right Argument, but the Wrong Tone,” Financial Times (London), November 22, 1999, 13.

(51.) Joshua Muravchik in “American Power—For What? A Symposium,” Commentary, January 2000, 41.

(52.) Robert W. Tucker in “American Power—For What? A Symposium,” Commentary, January 2000, 46.

(53.) G. John Ikenberry, “Getting Hegemony Right,” The National Interest, spring 2001, 19.

(54.) Robert O'Neill, “Working with the US: An Allied Perspective,” lecture, All Souls Foreign Policy Studies Program, May 10, 2001.

(55.) Ikenberry, “Getting Hegemony Right,” 21–22.

(56.) Mark A. Pollack and Gregory C. Shaffer, eds., Transatlantic Governance in the Global Economy (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001).

(57.) Shanker, “White House Says the US Is Not a Loner, Just Choosy.”

(58.) The problems stem not only from foreign courts, but from a new trend in lawsuits brought in U.S. courts to challenge human rights abuses around the

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world. American lawyers who boast about unilaterally exporting our conception of law and who argue that the post–Cold War paradigm is the United States as global attorney fail to pay adequate attention to the costs of the doctrine of universal jurisdiction for the United States. William Glaberson, “U.S. Courts Become Arbiters of Global Rights and Wrongs,” The New York Times, June 21, 2001, 1. See also Henry A. Kissinger, “The Pitfalls of Universal Jurisdiction,” Foreign Affairs, July‐August 2001, 86–96.

(59.) John Ruggie, Constructing the World Polity (London: Routledge, 1998), 118. Britain's unilateral willingness to bear the costs (and benefits) encouraged free riding. American actions have been conditioned on reciprocity.

(60.) “Rage over Global Warming,” The Economist, April 7, 2001, 18. For a careful study of Kyoto's flaws, see David Victor, The Collapse of the Kyoto Protocol and the Struggle to Slow Global Warming (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).

(61.) Robert N. Stavins, “Give Bush Time on Climate Issues,” Boston Globe, April 4, 2001, A21.

(62.) Andrew Revkin, “After Rejecting Climate Treaty, Bush Calls in Tutors to Give Courses and Help Set One,” New York Times, April 28, 2001, A9.

(63.) I am indebted to Robert Keohane for help on this point.

(64.) John R. Bolton, “Should We Take Global Governance Seriously?” Chicago Journal of International Law, fall 2000.

(65.) For contrasting views, see Jeremy Rabkin, Why Sovereignty Matters (Washington, D.C.: AEI Press, 1998), and Abram Chayes and Antonia Handler Chayes, The New Sovereignty: Compliance with International Regulatory Agreements (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 27.

(66.) Stephen Krasner, Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).

(67.) Spiro, “The New Sovereigntists,” 14.

(68.) Thomas Friedman, “Kyoto Will Come Back to Haunt Bush,” International Herald Tribune, June 2, 2001, 8.

(69.) Moises Naim, “New Economy, Old Politics,” Foreign Policy, January‐ February 2001, 108.

(70.) Kal Raustiala, “Trends in Global Governance: Do They Threaten American Sovereignty?” Chicago Journal of International Law, fall 2000, 418.

(71.) Dani Rodrik, “The Global Fix,” New Republic, November 2, 1998, 17.

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Access brought to you by:

(72.) For interesting suggestions on “virtual visibility,” see Anne‐Marie Slaughter, “Agencies on the Loose? Holding Government Networks Accountable,” in George Bermann et al., eds., Transatlantic Regulatory Cooperation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 528.

(73.) Dominique Moisi, “The Real Crisis over the Atlantic,” Foreign Affairs, July‐ August 2001, 153.

(74.) Coral Bell, “American Ascendancy—and the Pretense of Concert,” The National Interest, fall 1999, 60.

(75.) Henry Kissinger, “Our Nearsighted World Vision,” Washington Post, January 10, 2000, A19.

(76.) Albert R. Hunt, “Americans Look to 21st Century with Optimism and Confidence,” Wall Street Journal, September 16, 1999, A9.

(77.) Department of State, Opinion Analysis, “Sizable Majority of U.S. Public Supports Active, Cooperative Involvement Abroad,” Washington, D.C., October 29, 1999.

(78.) United States Commission on National Security in the Twenty‐first Century, New World Coming, 4.

Redefining the National Interest

Joseph S. Nye

Redefining the National Interest

Joseph S. Nye (Contributor Webpage)

Abstract and Keywords
Redefining the National Interest
Redefining the National Interest
The Limits of American Power
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Grand Strategy and Global Public Goods
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Notes:

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