The Emanation of Power

Power IT h e balance between goals and the means with which to achieve them has been the historic dilemma of great power statesmensinceThucydides. In more recent history, the question of that balance provided an intellectualproblem for the authors of NSC 68.’ That great civilizations exert an influence well beyond their apparent means is a puzzle. It is no wonder that the elements of that balance in many cases defy simple quantification or expression in military formulae. The United States, since 1945, like Rome and other powerful societies in their heydays, has exerted an international influence far wider than its territorial base and physical resources. Today, the assets on which American world leadership has long been based appear to many critics of American policy inadequate. Nonetheless, the predominanceof American influence in most of the post-1945 era has been a fact. How can this paradoxical phenomenon -of nearly unlimited ends appearing to be achievedby limitedmeansbe explained? How can American world leadership, if now more clearly incapable of being supported by material resources alone, be advanced?We shall see. Theabilityto transcendthe bounds of a nation’s physicalmeans-to radiate an uuru of power beyond its national borders and material resources-may be the distinguishingmark of a civilization’sgreatness. In the final analysis, as Napoleon said, “power is based on opinion.” Superior physical might, if patently governed by virtue, engenders in other peoples not only awe, but also respect, an appreciation that the uses made of the power are worthy ones. Such favorable opinion can magnify a country’s power, making overt coercion by it less necessary. Usually conceived of as an alternative to physical force, the exertion of influence through the consent and participation of the parties influenced is an integral feature of any “power system.”*The voluntary and consensual Alan K . Henrikson is Associate Professor of Diplomatic History at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University, and an Associate of the Centerfor International Affairs, Harvard University. 1. John Lewis Gaddis, “NSC 68 and the Problem of Ends and Means,” International Security, Vol. 4, No. 4 (Spring 1978), pp. 164-170. 2. Talcott Parsons, ”On the Concept of Political Power,“ American Philosophical Society Proceedings , Vol. 107, No. 3 (1963), pp. 232-262. International Security, Summer 1981 (Vol. 6, No. 1) 0162-2889/8l/OlOl52-13$02.50/0 @ 1981 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 152 Emanation of Power I 153 aspects of power in international relations should be better recognized. A great power, without a keen appreciation of the way other nations’ views of it condition their willingness to cooperate with it, cannot completely know or sensitively play its role in the world. A society potent and admirable enough to have a perceived aura of power-to be able to emanate power, as the process of exerting influence without articulation of specific demands or sanctions will be termed in this essay-can, in a sense, partly create its own environment. It radiates a pattern of order within whose interstices other societies, too, can find security , prosperity, and comity. “By every honourableexpedient,” wrote Gibbon of the Romans in the age of Hadrian and the Antonines, “they invited the friendshipof the barbarians; and endeavoured to convince mankind that the Roman power, raised above the temptation of conquest, was actuated only by the love of order and ju~tice.”~ Ever since the Pax Rornana, great powers have aspired to the kind of universal leadership Gibbon describes. They have seldom achieved it; still less often, maintained it. Failing to understand its nature, they periodically become afflicted by the sense that they are living beyond their means, and demand that their foreign policies be made “~olvent.”~ By this is meant not precisely that a nation’s budget be balanced or that its import-exportaccount be cleared, but that its idealisticpurposes be made congruentwith its material resources, that its ends be adapted to its assets. Thus at the height of the Vietnam war, one hears SenatorJ. WilliamFulbrightlamenting for the United States: “Having done so much and succeeded so well, America is now at that historical point at which a great nation is in danger of losing...