How America Can Be a Superpower the World Respects

By Jason Marsh, Greater Good. Posted February 13, 2008.

An interview with foreign policy expert Anne-Marie Slaughter by Jason Marsh.

"World's only superpower" -- that's the title bestowed on the United States for the last two decades. It has a nice ring to it, but what does it mean today?

"Measured by economic statistics and military might, our power is greater than ever," writes foreign policy expert Anne-Marie Slaughter in her recent book, The Idea That Is America. "But measured by the commonsense measure of whether we can get others to do what we want them to do, we have clearly lost ground since the Cold War."

For years, foreign policy experts like Slaughter, dean of Princeton University's eminent Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, have warned that our unrivaled wealth and military power are not enough to tackle the kinds of problems we face today, from terrorism to climate change to the widening gaps between rich and poor around the world.

"These are issues that require the cooperation of, if not all 191 nations, then a good many of them," Slaughter said. "And for that, you have to be able to mobilize people; you have to be able to inspire them. That means we have to have a set of ideas that will be deeply attractive to other countries and will convince other countries that we are actually pulling together to fight a common threat."

In The Idea That Is America, Slaughter identifies seven key principles -- liberty, democracy, equality, justice, tolerance, humility, and faith -- that she sees as central to America's identity. She describes how a U.S. foreign policy grounded in these principles could offer a new model of American power, one that inspires and mobilizes other nations to work with us.

The Idea That Is America has been endorsed by distinguished figures ranging from former Reagan secretary of state George Shultz to former Clinton secretary of state Madeline Albright (who called the book "brilliant ... deeply moving, exquisitely timed, authored by one of our country's leading scholars"). Slaughter herself has been mentioned as a possible secretary of state should the Democrats win the White House.

Slaughter recently spoke with me during a brief trip back to the U.S. from China, where she's on sabbatical for the year.

Jason Marsh: If you were advising the next American president, how would you recommend he or she act to restore America's moral and political standing in the world?

Anne-Marie Slaughter: I would start with humility. In my view, we need to start by acknowledging that we have made some real errors -- that we were badly frightened after 9/11, and we overreacted in many ways. We're not alone as a nation in doing that; many nations respond that way. But we have to own up to that. We have to take responsibility for our actions and acknowledge our errors, and acknowledge that in many cases we actually should have been listening to other countries. That kind of humility is needed to give us enough room to start to do some very positive things.

There are four concrete things we need to do right away. The first is to close Guantanamo and declare that we will not engage in torture or cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment. We must go back to the standards that we have always set and we continue to set for our military. We must embrace them across the board.

Second, we must withdraw our troops from Iraq in a way that leaves Iraq as stable as possible, while building regional institutions at the same time. It cannot be just a unilateral withdrawal. Rather it must be a declared policy of, "We are now withdrawing our troops and working to make that a safe and stable withdrawal," rather than figuring out how to stay in.

Third, we need to work on leading a serious global effort to combat climate change. Our current nonchalant posture is probably the most important global symbol of how the United States effectively doesn't care that the decisions we make affect others. You can't be a leader if you're that irresponsible. We're going to have to ask other countries to make sacrifices, too, so we're going to have to start. And the fourth is to be really serious about nuclear nonproliferation, which means living up to our part of the bargain. It means cutting our nuclear weapons. In my view it means declaring that our ultimate aim is to go to zero, although it could take decades to get there.

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Jason Marsh is a co-editor of Greater Good Magazine.