U.S. Power and Strategy After Iraq

Joseph S. Nye, Jr.

From Foreign Affairs, July/August 2003

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Summary:  The Bush administration's new national security strategy gets much right but may turn out to be myopic. The world has changed in ways that make it impossible for the most dominant power since Rome to go it alone. U.S. policymakers must realize that power today lies not only in the might of one's sword but in the appeal of one's ideas.

Joseph S. Nye, Jr., is Dean of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and the author of The Paradox of American Power: Why the World's Only Superpower Can't Go It Alone.

THE VIEW FROM THE TOP

The world is off balance. If anyone doubted the overwhelming nature of U.S. military power, Iraq settled the issue. With the United States representing nearly half of the world's military expenditures, no countervailing coalition can create a traditional military balance of power. Not since Rome has one nation loomed so large above the others. Indeed, the word "empire" has come out of the closet. Respected analysts on both the left and the right are beginning to refer to "American empire" approvingly as the dominant narrative of the twenty-first century. And the military victory in Iraq seems only to have confirmed this new world order.

Americans, however, often misunderstand the nature of their power and tend to extrapolate the present into the future. A little more than a decade ago, the conventional wisdom held that the United States was in decline. In 1992, a presidential candidate won votes by proclaiming that the Cold War was over and Japan had won. Now Americans are told that their unipolar moment will last and that they can do as they will because others have no choice but to follow. But focusing on the imbalance of military power among states is misleading. Beneath that surface structure, the world changed in profound ways during the last decades of the twentieth century. September 11, 2001, was like a flash of lightning on a summer evening that displayed an altered landscape, leaving U.S. policymakers and analysts still groping in the dark, still wondering how to understand and respond.

ABOUT-FACE

George W. Bush entered office committed to a realist foreign policy that would focus on great powers such as China and Russia and eschew nation building in failed states of the less-developed world. China was to be "a strategic competitor," not the "strategic partner" of Bill Clinton's era, and the United States was to take a tougher stance with Russia. But in September 2002, the Bush administration issued a new national security strategy, declaring that "we are menaced less by fleets and armies than by catastrophic technologies falling into the hands of the embittered few." Instead of strategic rivalry, "today, the world's great powers find ourselves on the same side -- united by common dangers of terrorist violence and chaos." Not only was Chinese President Jiang Zemin welcomed to Bush's ranch in Crawford, Texas, but Bush's strategy embraces "the emergence of a strong, peaceful, and prosperous China." And it commits the United States to increasing its development assistance and efforts to combat hivffiaids, because "weak states, like Afghanistan, can pose as great a danger to our national interest as strong states." Moreover, these policies will be "guided by the conviction that no nation can build a safer, better world alone." How the world turned in one year! And, between the lines, Iraq came to be viewed as the new strategy's first test, even though another member of the "axis of evil" was much closer to developing nuclear weapons.

The rhetoric of the new ...

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