Strategic Asia 2008-09: Challenges and Choices

Preserving Hegemony: The Strategic Tasks Facing the United States

executive summary This chapter explores the means through which the U.S. can maintain its position as global leader amid a changing international landscape, particularly in Asia. main argument: Although the current international system is characterized by the continued dominance of the U.S., in the distant horizon there are new competitors, such as China, poised to lay the foundations for gradually eclipsing U.S. primacy over time. The principal task facing the next administration is thus to consolidate U.S. hegemony by redefining the nation’s global role, renewing its strength, and recovering its legitimacy. Successful resolution of these challenges would empower Washington in its dealings with both Asia and the rest of the world. policy implications: • U.S. efforts in three areas will reaffirm the country’s role as global leader: supporting a durable framework for international trade, maintaining unqualified military supremacy, and ensuring the delivery of certain public goods, such as peace and security, freedom of navigation, and a clean environment. • The renewal of traditional U.S. economic might requires policies that favor growth and innovation, increased capital and labor pools, and sustained pursuit of total factor productivity. • Legitimacy is an important facet of U.S. power that has eroded over the last eight years. The U.S. can secure legitimacy for future political acts by shaping world opinion through a combination of decisiveness, cultivation of key allied support, and attentiveness to the views of others. Overview Ashley J. Tellis (PhD, University of Chicago) is Senior Associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and Research Director of the Strategic Asia Program at NBR. He can be reached at . Preserving Hegemony: The Strategic Tasks Facing the United States Ashley J. Tellis The U.S. experience of hegemony in global politics is still very young. Although the United States entered the international system as a great power early in the twentieth century, its systemic impact was not felt until World War II and, soon thereafter, its power was constrained by the presence of another competitor, the Soviet Union. Only after the demise of this challenger in 1991 has the United States been liberated in the exercise of its hegemonic power but—as has become quite evident in the past two decades—this application of power, although potent in its impact when well exercised, is also beset by important limitations. In any event, the now significant, century-long, involvement of the United States in international politics as a great power tends to obscure the reality of how short its hegemonic phase has actually been thus far. This hegemony is by no means fated to end any time soon, however, given that the United States remains predominant by most conventional indicators of national power. The character of the United States’ hegemonic behavior in the future will thus remain an issue of concern both within the domestic polity and internationally. Yet the juvenescence of the U.S. “unipolar moment,” combined with the disorientation produced by the September 11 attacks, ought to restrain any premature generalization that the imperial activism begun by the Clinton administration, and which the Bush administration took to its most spirited apotheosis, would in some way come to define the permanent norm of U.S. behavior in the global system. In all probability, it is much more likely that the limitations on U.S. 4 • Strategic Asia 2008–09 power witnessed in Afghanistan and Iraq will produce a more phlegmatic and accommodating United States over the longer term, despite the fact that the traditional U.S. pursuit of dominance—understood as the quest to maintain a preponderance of power, neutralize threatening challengers, and protect freedom of action, goals that go back to the foundations of the republic—is unlikely to be extinguished any time soon.1 Precisely because the desire for dominance is likely to remain a permanent feature of U.S. geopolitical ambitions—even though how it is exercised will certainly change in comparison to the Bush years—the central task facing the next administration will still pertain fundamentally to the issue of U.S. power. This concern manifests itself through the triune challenges of: redefining the United States’ role in the world, renewing the foundations of U.S. strength, and recovering the legitimacy of U.S. actions. In other words, the next administration faces the central task of clarifying the character of U.S. hegemony, reinvigorating the material foundations of its power, and securing...