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299 chapter fifteen From Superpower to Besieged Global Power Edward A. Kolodziej This chapter has three interrelated aims, each providing an ascending level of analysis and explanation of why the Bush model for reform of the international system and global politics was flawed both in aspiration and in application and why it has failed. The first section briefly summarizes what one respected and informed observer and longtime Pentagon watcher has termed the “fiasco” of the Iraqi invasion (Ricks 2006). It both draws on the mounting flood of criticisms of the war and supplements this converging assessment by analysts who otherwise hold rival political perspectives by identifying fault lines in the Bush strategy that have been either overlooked or slighted (Galbraith 2006; M. Gordon and Trainor 2006; P. Gordon 2006; and the belatedly repentant Fukuyama 2006. For counterpoint see Ajami 2005; Bremer 2006; Tenet 2007). The second section, drawing on the regional chapters, widens and deepens this critique. In rich and reinforcing detail these chapters underwrite the argument of this volume: that a balanced understanding of American power, hard and soft, and the development of a workable strategy to advance American interests start with downsizing and ultimately discarding the notion of the United States as a superpower or hegemon. As a precondition for developing such a strategy, we need to realistically appraise the effectiveness and legitimacy of American power, policies, and purposes taking into account the perspectives and countervailing power of other peoples and states. American power must work through this resistant medium to get its way. These perspectives, and the mutually contingent power relations with other peoples and states on which they rest, point to both the limits and (what is often overlooked) the opportunities that define the range of American power. Where constraints are intractable and cannot be wished away, American power is obliged to adapt to them if it is to avoid self-defeating strategies. Conversely, where U.S. and regional-national interests intersect, the impact of the United States on the 300 Limiting Reach to Grasp global system can be positive and reinforcing, resulting in a virtuous circle, much like the use of American power after World War II that created a Western coalition that held together for over a half-century (something many esteemed observers of American foreign policy believed impossible) (de Tocqueville 1945; Kennan 1984; Lippmann 1947). That coalition, the real hegemon in international relations as Patrick Morgan reminds us, emerged ascendant with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the cold war. What we are witnessing today is a vicious circle in which American power and its projection abroad undermine American values and interests, weaken the Western coalition of open, market-oriented societies, and endanger the spread of the very ideals holding this coalition together—security, freedom, popular rule, human rights, and increasing material welfare for the populations of the coalition and those of the world, the stated but miscarried aims driving the Bush model. The third section challenges several widely held notions among theorists about the patterns of power in international relations and global politics and their implications for global governance. The principal conclusion to be drawn from this section is that no actor, or alliance of actors, state or nonstate, is in control of global politics, viewed across the spectrum of the challenges confronting the world’s populations: limiting violence, stanching the production and dissemination of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), assuring sustainable economic growth, and addressing man-made ecological catastrophes. Arguably, most daunting is the imperative to peacefully define a set of moral and political values and institutionalized rules that can be universally accepted by the world’s contesting peoples to regulate their clashing values and aims and to create stable structures of power and set into motion the multiple political processes by which these accords can be implemented and perfected (Keohane and Nye 2001).1 The imperative for consensual accord across cultures, religions, and states at different stages of socioeconomic and political development has never been more urgent or necessary—nor arguably more problematic—than it is now. The decentralization of power, recounted by this volume, across six billion, interdependent peoples and the two-hundred-odd states they have created, within what is an emerging global society for the first time in the evolution of the species, poses a formidable challenge for humans everywhere, and how they cope with that challenge will determine whether they survive and thrive.2 It remains an open question...

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