Are We Doomed?
Justin Logan’s on leave from the high-stakes DC think tank blogging game to go to grad school, but along he comes chiming in with an IR theory question to mull over:
Under unipolarity, what constraints are acting, given that structure really isn’t, and is there any reason to believe that any of these constraints will start limiting American strategic options any time soon? If there are no binding constraints in sight, aren’t we very likely (destined?) to continue with the primacy strategy we’ve followed more or less since 1991?
When I was working on Heads in the Sand near the end of the book when I had to write my prescriptive, forward-looking ideas I became haunted by a similar fear. Not so much that it’s impossible for change, but that it might be impossible for us to actually follow wise policies in a sustained way or are we destined to flit from error to error until our national power is so badly compromised that we have few options left? As someone who likes to think of himself as involved, in a small way, in trying to get the country on a better course I don’t think I have any option other than to say the answer is “no.” But I’m not always sure I believe that.
29 Responses to “Are We Doomed?”
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January 7th, 2009 at 4:32 pm
here’s a question: What exactly changed in terms of constraints for the US in the “unipolar” world after 1991?
In other words, what has the US done since then that it otherwise wouldn’t have done under the Cold War bipolar regime?
One could argue Iraq War I, but under a reasonable level of detente, that could have happened anyway, with the US agreeing not to go all the way to Baghdad and deposing Saddam. But Iraq War II & Afghanistan are consequences of the Cold War ending and the USSR dissolving, so they’re not really good answers to the question.
But have we done anything in North Korea or Iran or anything but the immediate response to Al Qaeda in Iraq/Afghanistan that we couldn’t have done in the bipolar world?
January 7th, 2009 at 4:34 pm
Wasn’t this question answered when Bill Clinton (when President) said something to the effect of “we have to prepare for the time when the United States is no longer the biggest kid on the block” and then was roundly condemned by just about everyone in Washington, R or D, for merely suggesting that such a thing would ever come to pass? And wasn’t this hinted at even earlier when Jimmy Carter got bitch-slapped for his so-called “malaise” speech and suggesting that maybe we should cut back a bit?
In other words, yes, we are very likely to continue with the primacy strategy until it’s unsustainable because any politician who suggests otherwise is “not serious” and the American people, for the most part, think they are God’s Chosen Ones living in a shining city on a hill.
January 7th, 2009 at 4:37 pm
I reckon money is going to be a restraint sometime soon, and will remain a constraint for a long time.
January 7th, 2009 at 4:45 pm
We re living in a unipolar world? I don’t think there are many people believing this.
If we do, the clock is ticking and the window is closing fast.
January 7th, 2009 at 4:54 pm
Are we going to keep screwing the pooch until the unipolar phase passes? I think it the evidence thus far shows that it depends on whether we elect cosmopolitan presidents, or not.
Consider the foreign policy records of GHB and WJC, vs. GWB.
We’ll see whether BHO supports my thesis, or not.
January 7th, 2009 at 5:07 pm
On a related note, I work in the “solve global warming” business, and I find myself wondering the same thing. And I’m not really a DFH. It’s just a really big problem.
January 7th, 2009 at 5:24 pm
Paul Kennedy likes to show three piecharts with the US percentage of world population, world GDP and world military expenditure. In the relationship between those three values, there lies your constraints. But as Ugh says, to talk about the idea of managed decline is anathema in American politics, and that creates another constraint.
January 7th, 2009 at 5:52 pm
Do we really live in a “unipolar world”? Unipolarity is supposed to occur when one state has most of the world’s power. Thus, even if all other states acted in coalition, they would not possess as much power as the most powerful state. But it is absurd to think that the United States literally has most, i.e. more than half, of the world’s totality of power. Nobody could believe that. We possess about 4% of the world’s population and are at about 1/3rd, I believe, of global GDP.
We are at just under half, I believe, of total global military spending. But even if we were at more than half of global military spending, percentage of current spending is not a measure of the amount of military force that can be brought to bear over any reasonable war-length period of time. And clearly, the military force a country can exert is only one component of its power.
Maybe the idea is that unipolarity exists when there is a power that has more power than any other single state, and whose power exceeds the power of every other state by some substantial factor. For example, imagine a world in which the most powerful state has at least twice as much power as any other single state. Yet, obviously, such a situation is compatible with a circumstance in which the most powerful state has a very small percentage of total power.
Surely if enough non-US states got together, the US could be crushed. Maybe the idea, then, is that we have a “unipolar” situation because the likelihood of enough other states getting together to form a coalition sufficient to outweigh US power is extremely small. Maybe we are supposed to think in terms of something like “coalition potential” among other powers, and measure polarity by some kind of weighted sum of power, using coalition potentials as a weight.
But power comes in different forms. We can have a situation in which the dominant power is such that for any potential exercise of any one form of its power for the achievement of any given end, there is a perfectly reasonable potential of a coalition of other states that could block that action; and we could have a situation in which the likelihood of the dominant power marshaling all of the forms of its power for the pursuit of a given end is extremely low. In such a case, even the most powerful state, even if it is substantially more powerful than any other single state, cannot get everything done that it would like to get done without substantial amounts of cooperative assistance.
There are abundant checks on US power, all over the world. We can’t even accomplish what we want in two Middle east countries. Why would anyone think that we are in a “unipolar” situation.
I actually feel embarrassed about indulging this pseudo-scientific lingo about “amount of power”, and “share of power”. And what is the difference between a constraint and a “structural constraint”. I suspect that distinction collapses pretty quickly once one attempts to define “structure”. But playing along with this IR gibberish seems necessary to undo its spell.
January 7th, 2009 at 6:08 pm
IR theory has nothing to teach us–it’s as close to unalloyed junk as we have in social science, which is saying a lot.
January 7th, 2009 at 6:09 pm
In theory, unipolar systems produce backlash from rival powers over the long run and usually devolve into highly unstable multi-polar systems. Wise policy choices, multi-lateralism, and cosmopolitan values can prolong the unipolar system (perhaps even for many centuries), but they cannot sustain it indefinitely. Even Rome fell.
I think global climate disruption is the big unknown when it comes to the question you pose. Strained resources and collapsing ecosystems across the globe could easily accelerate the collapse of the current unipolar system if those changes deal a significant blow to the United States. On the other hand, if those changes leave this country sitting upon a proverbial pot of gold, the United States could maintain its dominance for centuries even with regular and frequent foreign policy disasters.
International systems throughout history frequently boil down to questions of geography, resources, and demographics. Without climate change, it would be fairly easy to predict what’s going to happen over the next hundred years for each of those three variables. However climate change introduces an unprecedented level of instability and uncertainty to those equations. Literally unprecedented. Nothing like it has ever occurred in recorded history on a global scale.
To the extent that there are constraints or necessities placed upon US foreign policy, I think they are likely to be primarily climate-related. And unfortunately, wisdom is not a sustainable virtue.
January 7th, 2009 at 6:55 pm
or are we destined to flit from error to error until our national power is so badly compromised that we have few options left?
Aren’t we pretty much there already???
January 7th, 2009 at 7:26 pm
Matt, your concern is unwarranted. Systemic constraints limit a nation’s choices, but not always to wise or just ones; only to security or power maximizing options. Even among these, a nation faces a narrower set of those than would be available absent constraint.
Of course we will falter, and it’s likely that American broad-spectrum preeminance is unsustainable whatever we do. I’m not suggesting optimism– merely that we wouldn’t be making better choices if we happened to be “lucky” enough to have the Soviets or some other peer-competitor to constrain the scope of our actions.
January 7th, 2009 at 7:36 pm
even if we were at more than half of global military spending, percentage of current spending is not a measure of the amount of military force that can be brought to bear over any reasonable war-length period of time.
It’s more a matter of breadth than depth, a military panopticon: the deployment of carrier battle groups and overseas bases is premised upon the idea of having decent amounts of military hardware and personnel within a few days’ reach of anywhere on the planet. (Josh Marshall made the broad point about piracy in the context of a great power’s capacity to patrol and control the sea lanes.)
I’ve pointed before to Kennedy’s LSE lectures on these topics, and I’ll do so again: they tend to avoid the IR abstractions, given that he’s a military and economic historian. He uses Nye’s definition of ‘power’, which is the capacity to get others to do what you want them to do.
January 7th, 2009 at 8:06 pm
Maybe we are supposed to think in terms of something like “coalition potential” among other powers, and measure polarity by some kind of weighted sum of power, using coalition potentials as a weight.
If you take this approach, be sure to remember that the coalition potentials are variables, not constants, and one of the things they vary with respect to is the perceived obnoxiousness of the superpower.
Invading Iraq made us some enemies, but wasn’t enough to get Europe and China and various other powers off their butts and convince them to actively oppose us. It does not follow that no possible action we could take in the future could do so.
January 7th, 2009 at 9:55 pm
I wonder if the Founders knew that Washington, DC would be full of so many squatters, parasites, and hangers-on.
January 7th, 2009 at 10:32 pm
There are three points here. First, there are plenty of constraints acting on US behavior at the moment, thanks to the resources we have tied down in Iraq, and the international political capital we have expended there. Specifically, US policy towards both North Korea and Iran has, I would argue, been notably less belligerent than the Bush administration would have preferred, thanks to these constraints. The US is the most powerful state in the international system right now, but it does not require the efforts of a counter-balancing coalition to limit its freedom of action. We can do that just fine on our own, thank you very much.
Second, even during the Cold War, the US was plenty capable of getting involved in ill-advised quagmires. I mean, Vietnam was the original Vietnam. Expecting the distribution of power in the international system to prevent the US from undertaking stupid interventions is frankly asking a bit too much. Just because we were prevented from freeing Poland doesn’t mean we wouldn’t find somewhere else to “liberate”. It seems to me that the root causes of military interventionism are somewhat deeper than opportunity.
Third, to those above arguing that IR theory has no relevance to explaining state behavior (and btw, which IR theory?), Walt has argued in his more academic writing that countries don’t simply balance against power, they balance against threats. The reason the US has been able to remain in a relatively unipolar system is that no matter how much most countries may not like things we do, the idea that the US would ever militarily invade Europe, Japan, India, etc. is simply not credible. Among states that are at greater risk of being targeted by the US (Venezuela, Iran, Syria, North Korea), you do see a larger degree of attempting to band together to confront the US, at least politically. Of course, those countries don’t present any real threat to the US, even collectively, so unipolarity does seem likely to continue for the foreseeable future, as long as we don’t do anything really stupid towards China.
January 8th, 2009 at 12:00 am
Hans Rosling is truly awesome at explaining why we are not doomed.
January 8th, 2009 at 12:00 am
well wouldn’t this be part of the puzzle:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_dilemma
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