Falling superpower

Posted by Joshua Holland at 10:44 AM on May 23, 2006.

The Christian Science Monitor's Tom Regan -- one of my favorites -- looks at a series of recent articles about the United States' position in the world and asks: "Is the U.S. Fading as Superpower?":

For the past five years, since the 9/11 attacks, US President George Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair have helped shape key world events. But now, some influential media and political critics are saying that both men, and the US in particular, no longer can get the world to do as they wish. In a recent article entitled, "Axis of Feeble," the Economist argues that "the debacle in Iraq and problems at home have turned both leaders from soaring hawks into the lamest of ducks." […]

… an era is plainly drawing to an end. No matter how long they remain in office, the self-confident and often self-righteous political partnership that shaped the West's military response to Al Qaeda and led the march into Afghanistan and Iraq is now faltering.

WBUR.org's OnPoint recently looked at the question "Is America losing its luster?" (audio link). The conclusion reached by panelists on the show was that while the US continues to be militarily powerful, the "notion of irresistible power" no longer is the case. David Kennedy, professor of history at Stanford University, argued that the US is learning "[t]he world is a recalcitant place and does not yield itself to us easily." He added that the notion the US could shape the world as it wished proved to be an illusion. The US is learning the lesson that all great powers have learned, Kennedy said, that no matter how much power a country has, the world will not just go along with its wishes.

Kennedy also argues that after World War II, the US used its position as a dominant power to work with other countries to create new global initiatives. But since the start of the Bush administration, the notions of cooperation, diplomacy, and multilaterialism have been replaced by a unilaterial [sic] approach that has led much of the world to "push back" or even work to "check our power."

This is an argument that usually revolves around our relative degree of hard power (which is more than just military power). On the one hand, we are unrivalled in our ability to project force, our culture is everywhere, and American businesses continue to shape the global economy. On the other, our hegemony is less pronounced than it once was -- we controlled about half the world's GDP after World War II, and our economy makes up less than a quarter now. While we still dominate the institutions of the international system, there is far more resistance to our dictates than there was a few decades ago.

But I think David Kennedy's point is more important: with the rise of the Bush Administration's foreign policy hardliners -- who view their primary mission to be the maintenance of American supremacy in the 21st century -- the United States is no longer viewed as a benevolent power and that shift has, ironically, cost us an untold amount of global influence.

A hegemonic state is one with enough relative power to shape the international system. Scholars have identified a pattern -- a story arc -- common to hegemonic powers and the U.S. fits the theory to a tee.

According to Hegemonic Stability Theory, as a great state rises to prominence, it is a "generous" or "benevolent" power -- a rising hegemon. It uses its power to create a system that is conducive to its own interests, but that also benefits lesser states. Think about the Romans building roads and aqueducts throughout the empire, or the Brits clearing the shipping channels of pirates, or the U.S. creating the Bretton-Woods system after World War II. All of those efforts were inspired by self-interest, but also created benefits for others.

Then there's the "selfish" hegemon -- a hegemon in decline. A falling power spends too much on security, its leaders become obsessed with preserving its position and it stops focusing on mutually beneficial goals and starts looking out for itself. Inevitably, this leads other states to combine forces to check its power, and the country is replaced by a new, rising hegemon that is more attractive to other states to follow than the "me-first" policies of the falling star.

The key to America's six-decade run was that we disguised our relentless pursuit of our "national interests" with great skill. We kept our iron fist covered in a velvet glove. As an old professor of mine used to say, the definition of real power is the ability to make people do what you want them to do while believing it was their idea in the first place. We've lost that power.

It was blown-away by Bush and Co before 9/11, when they shredded the notion that the U.S. will cooperate with the rest of the world. These people came into office and pulled out of treaty after treaty, insisting the U.S.wasn't into "nation-building" and would be happy to go it alone when it suited our purposes. After 9/11, they launched a war of aggression against Iraq, and then followed that war with another campaign against the UN, our European allies and anyone else who questioned their agenda. The irony is that there are at least fifteen senior officials in the administration who have been associated to one degree or another with the Project for a New American Century -- a group of American hard-liners whose mission is to create and nurture a Pax Americana -- a benevolent American empire -- for the 21st Century.

And they've done more to undermine America's global influence than any foreign leader could ever hope to do.

Immanuel Wallerstein, a scholar at Yale, said after the U.S. invasion of Iraq that the rift between the U.S. and its allies was permanent. "Once you take the velvet glove off the iron fist," he said, "there's no putting it back."

Joshua Holland is a staff writer at Alternet and a regular contributor to The Gadflyer.