Power and Responsibility: Building International Order in an Era of Transnational Threats

2. Interests and Order: The United States and the Major and Rising Powers

AN INTERNATIONAL ORDER based on responsible sovereignty must be in the interest of those actors who have the power to build it. Softhearted appeals to the common good are insufficient. The primary question is whether the resulting order provides the vision, institutions, and tools to enable major and rising powers to address the large and complex agenda of transnational crises and challenges before them. The summer of 2008, when we concluded this book, hardly seemed a propitious time for a vision of international order based on responsible sovereignty. The combination of the Russian invasion of Georgia, the failure of the UN Security Council to address Robert Mugabe’s thuggery in Zimbabwe, and China’s assertiveness in Tibet before the Olympic Games all seemed to portend a new era of political competition between the West and the rising powers. In July the collapse of the Doha Round of trade talks signaled a worrying inability of the major and rising powers to balance their economic interests. By the end of the summer, it seemed more likely that Russia would be ejected from the G-8 than China included in it. It is tempting to dismiss the tensions of 2008 as solely a legacy of the unpopularity of the George W. Bush presidency or as fallout from Iraq. Certainly, the credibility of President Bush in decrying Russia’s invasion 21 INTERESTS AND ORDER THE UNITED STATES AND THE MAJOR AND RISING POWERS TWO 02-4706-2 ch02 12/15/08 11:03 AM Page 21 of Georgia was diminished internationally by the still open wounds from the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Condoleezza Rice’s repeated assertion that in the post–cold war era the use of force to annex territory was simply not an option was met with raised eyebrows even by the many states that opposed Russia’s invasion of Georgia. Similarly, the U.S. and U.K. inability to move South Africa toward a more assertive stance on Zimbabwe reflected in part a decline in the international credibility of the West’s message on democracy, again a function of the long shadow of Iraq. More fundamentally, however, the summer of 2008 revealed the urgent need in U.S. foreign policy for a realistic assessment of the structure and nature of power in a transitional era. Respected foreign policy analysts now openly discuss the relative decline of U.S. power and the rise of new powers, including China, India, and Brazil.1 Some go so far as to argue that we have entered an age of nonpolarity: the United States’ unipolar moment has ended and no recognizable power structure has emerged to take its place.2 Power itself is more diffuse than at any time in the last several hundred years. The ability of governments to get what they want varies by issue. In some cases, businesses, foundations, and civil society organizations wield greater influence than governments. Power is soft as well as hard, and culture, values, and diplomacy often matter more than the number of infantry divisions under a state’s command. Even in the realm of hard power, the United States possesses more military might than ever in its history, yet it cannot dictate outcomes in relatively poor states such as Iraq and Afghanistan. Greater lethal capacity is falling into the hands of small, renegade, nonstate actors that do not respond to the traditional incentives and disincentives used to influence states. It seems self-evident that the United States wields less power relative to the rest of the world than it did twenty years ago. The United States brought some of its decline on itself through a combination of overweening ambition abroad and underinvestment at home. The country’s relative decline is also a function of the economic rise of India, China, and Brazil. By 2050, those three dynamic economies and Russia are projected to produce 40 percent of global output, twice the amount of the United States and equal to that of the members of the original Group of Seven (the so-called leading industrial nations), combined.3 22 THE UNITED STATES AND THE MAJOR AND RISING POWERS 02-4706-2 ch02 12/15/08 11:03 AM Page 22 Nonetheless, the United States still exerts disproportionate power on the global stage. By any metric of military power, the United States still dwarfs its nearest rivals. By the Pentagon’s own analysis, not for twenty years...