What to Do With American Primacy

Richard N. Haass

From Foreign Affairs, September/October 1999

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Summary:  The only certainties in today's world are that geopolitics are becoming more multipolar and that America will not stay on top forever. But the United States can protect its interests by embracing and defining the new multipolarity -- rooting it in norms of state behavior rather than just a balance of power. This means fostering international cooperation (so as not to do too little) and developing a set of guidelines for intervention (so as not to do too much). Trading some American power for a more stable international system would be a good deal for America and the world.

Richard N. Haass is Vice President, Director of Foreign Policy Studies, and Sydney Stein, Jr., Chair in International Security at the Brookings Institution.

WE'RE NUMBER ONE. NOW WHAT?

We live in an era of contradictions: globalization and fragmentation, peace and conflict, prosperity and poverty. Only when one or more of these tendencies wins out will our era gain a name of its own, displacing the awkward "post-Cold War" tag line. But amid this uncertainty is the stark reality that the United States is the most powerful country in the world -- first among unequals. Still, this is a description, not a purpose or a policy. The fundamental question that confronts America today is how to exploit its enormous surplus of power in the world: What to do with American primacy?

It must be said at the outset that America's economic and military advantages, while great, are neither unqualified nor permanent. The country's strength is limited by the amount of resources (money, time, political capital) it can spend, which in turn reflects a lack of domestic support for some kind of American global empire. De Tocqueville's observation that democracy is ill suited for conducting foreign policy is even more true in a world without a mortal enemy like the Soviet Union against which to rally the public.

Moreover, U.S. superiority will not last. As power diffuses around the world, America's position relative to others will inevitably erode. It may not seem this way at a moment when the American economy is in full bloom and many countries around the world are sclerotic, but the long-term trend is unmistakable. Other nations are rising, and nonstate actors -- ranging from Usama bin Ladin to Amnesty International to the International Criminal Court to George Soros -- are increasing in number and acquiring power. For all these reasons, an effort to assert or expand U.S. hegemony will fail. Such an action would lack domestic support and stimulate international resistance, which in turn would make the costs of hegemony all the greater and its benefits all the smaller.

Meanwhile, the world is becoming more multipolar. American foreign policy should not resist such multipolarity (which would be futile) but define it. Like unipolarity, multipolarity is simply a description. It tells us about the distribution of power in the world, not about the character or quality of international relations. A multipolar world could be one in which several hostile but roughly equal states confront one another, or one in which a number of states, each possessing significant power, work together in common. The U.S. objective should be to persuade other centers of political, economic, and military power -- including but not limited to nation-states -- to believe it is in their self-interest to support constructive notions of how international society should be organized and should operate.

The proper goal for American foreign policy, then, is to encourage a multipolarity characterized by cooperation and concert rather than competition and conflict. In such a world, order would not be limited to peace based on a balance of power or a fear of escalation, but would be founded in a broader agreement on ...

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