Pax Americana: The Impossible Dream

NATO's successful 78-day war against the regime in Belgrade last spring has revived debates about America's future global role. The staggering display of technological prowess encouraged some and alarmed others. Some call for America to seize the moment to attempt a global hegemony. Others urge Washington to understand its own limits.

Did the war represent an irrefutable display of America's extraordinary position of power, or did the fact that tiny Serbia held out for 78 days only undermine it? Can Washington now rule the world, if it wishes, or did the war reveal that even the most powerful face limits?

Two sharply opposed views on the consequences of the war against Serbia have developed. The first school sees the war as a proof of American preeminence, a victory so stunning that it serves as a harbinger of future policy initiatives, even global hegemony. Others see the war as a setback or worse. As one leading Republican congressman declared, "If this is victory, what then is defeat?"

President Clinton, understandably, takes the first view. In speaking before NATO troops in Macedonia in late June 1999, he said, "Whether you live in Africa or Central Europe or any other place, if somebody comes after innocent civilians and tries to kill them en masse because of their race, their ethnic background or their religion and it is within our power to stop it, we will stop it." Others in the alliance are clearly not comfortable with this view. As the war was reaching its denouement, German Chancellor Gerhard Schrîeder attempted to put the Kosovo decision into a quite different perspective. "Human rights should be inviolable, but we have to look at issues very closely and in fact differentiate between different situations." In the future, he added, NATO action should be confined to its own territory.

Some key U.S. officials share the German chancellor's caution. On June 28, 1999, in a speech in New York City, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright noted, "Some hope, and others fear, that Kosovo will be a precedent for similar interventions around the globe. I would caution against any such sweeping conclusions. Every circumstance is unique. Decisions on the use of force will be made by any president on a case-by-case basis after weighing a host of factors. Moreover, the response to Milosevic would not have been possible without NATO, and NATO is a European and Atlantic, not a global, institution."

Caution from chancellors and U.S. Cabinet officials notwithstanding, there is no question that many see the intervention in Kosovo as the announcement of a new strategic mission for the United States and its allies. The outcome of the war is viewed as proof that in a post-Cold War world, the United States can impose norms of decency on others with very little risk to itself.

There are some, however, who do not see the war as a victory at all. Ironically, one of them is Robert Hunter, former U.S. ambassador to NATO under Clinton. He contends that the war, in fact, marked a historic setback for Washington. The hope, in his view, was that NATO could be converted from a Western alliance binding the United States to the fate of its European allies into the security organization in Europe, one that would deny all non-members of NATO any decisive voice in European security policy. But, fearing the cost of a ground war, he contends, Washington was impelled to turn to Moscow to bring the war to a close.

In support of Hunter's views is the fact that once the bombing stopped, the Serbian army proceeded to leave Kosovo with little evidence of severe damage to its troops or equipment. Regarding the Russian role in bringing the conflict to a halt, the leading British general in the war is on record as stating that the key to ending the war was the Russian decision to help Washington persuade Belgrade to surrender. But it is precisely this Russian involvement that troubles Hunter. He contends that permitting Moscow to gain any significant role in the resolution of the conflict in effect ended the pretense that NATO, led by the United States, could become the only arbiter of European security.

Hunter's views merit special attention because as the recent U.S. ambassador to NATO, he was the very man who worked to transform NATO into the kind of organization that could launch the war against Belgrade in the first place. Through the new strategic doctrine, which he helped craft, no longer would NATO restrict its concern to defense of the territorial integrity of its member states. It would adopt a new proactive strategy designed to carry democratic order beyond NATO's existing frontiers to the rest of Europe, by force if necessary. But if this is the goal, then as Hunter notes, "A Russia asked to rescue NATO from its own limitation is also a Russia better able to challenge NATO's ambition to be the key arbiter of European security for the 21st century."

What kind of institution NATO is capable of evolving into over the next century would seem to be a subject of interest only to security specialists. But in fact, if NATO cannot be Europe's arbiter, profound consequences flow for any effort to create a Pax Americana in Europe or elsewhere. The American people are profoundly attached to the concept of burden sharing. They will not permit Washington to embark on prolonged military adventures unless the American government can gain two things that only its Western allies can bestow: legitimacy and resources. To put the issue another way, no administration can long sustain public support for a prolonged military engagement unless America's allies bless the effort and help to finance it. If they refuse either or both, the United States is unlikely to stay the course. Any bid for hegemony then becomes folly.

What Hegemony Takes
With these differences in views as background, what can we say about the arguments of those who urge the United States to seize its "unipolar moment" to impose some form of hegemony on the world? What does it take to become the dominant power of this or any other age? There are four characteristics of a hegemonic power: resources, will, strategy and model.

First, military resources are critical. No dominant state in history has been militarily weaker than its neighbors. Rome was stronger than Carthage, China more powerful than its neighbors. The France of Louis XIV and Napoleon was more populous and better armed than other European nations. Germany could make two bids for world supremacy because its military machine was unmatched among the great powers. From this perspective, those concerned about the rise of a Pax Americana should calm themselves -- because the United States is very unlikely to muster the resources needed for world hegemony.

True, one lesson from the Yugoslav war was the American military machine could act with extraordinary power and precision. The United States now commands a military establishment that other powers could not match even if they banded together against the United States. But even those who call for a policy of hegemony, like the editors of the conservative Weekly Standard magazine, understand that such a policy would require even more resources. They call for the military budget to increase by another $80 billion. How likely is that to happen?

And there is another point: The resources a hegemonic power must have at its command cannot be military alone. A dominant state must choose its battles carefully. Successful hegemonic powers probably bribe or persuade more often than they coerce. They are reluctant to dissipate their military power in fruitless adventures. No matter how much one state may tower over others, even a superpower cannot risk being everywhere at once. To preserve its influence and maintain its control, it needs the other components of power: disposable finances and diplomatic presence.

Here the United States is progressively rendering itself less and less capable of imposing on the world a Pax Americana. For reasons related primarily to domestic politics, the United States is unable to play the role it could because its political system will not deliver the financial resources necessary to play in any sustained manner the role of hegemon. In recent years, the United States has been closing consulates and shutting down aid missions. Its embassies look increasingly threadbare. Its aid budget has been repeatedly slashed until the United States is now at the bottom of OECD countries in terms of its per capita commitment. Its foreign assistance budget now stands at less than one-twentieth of its defense budget. And much of the foreign assistance it provides is for strategic purposes related to the Middle East peace process -- it should not really be classified as development assistance at all. In effect, the defense budget remains at Cold War levels while the funds needed for the other elements of power melt away like a snow bank in the hot sun.

These developments force an excessive U.S. reliance on the military instrument. This reliance is suggested not only by the number of aircraft and tanks it deploys but also by the number of military missions it has established in recent years. For example, the number of Special Operation Forces deployed abroad has swelled from 38,000 in 92 countries at a cost of $2.4 billion in 1991 to 47,000 in 143 countries at a cost of $3.4 billion in 1997. Soldiers are in effect replacing diplomats and development specialists.

For a Pax Americana to develop and endure, the United States must play the role not only of the world's sheriff but also of the international system's steward. It must not only order others to behave but also attempt to create the political and economic conditions that will persuade them to behave.

The Will to Lead
Second, a dominant state must manifest a will to lead. A state may have the capacity to lead but not the will. Both Japan and Europe in recent decades are examples of this phenomenon. Each has the capability to play a much larger role in the international system, but the will is absent.

As suggested, American leadership groups are divided on the issue of Pax Americana and the price it would entail. At the end of the Bush administration, the Department of Defense prepared a policy statement calling for the United States to exploit the disappearance of the Soviet Union to impose a U.S.-dominated world order on others. Once leaked, the paper was repudiated as un-American. Our people simply do not see themselves as world hegemons. A world leader, yes; the world's boss, no.

This attitude can be explained partly by national traditions but also by recent history. The military historian John Keegan has written of the First World War that the battle of "the Somme marked the end of an age of vital optimism in British life that has never been recovered." Unlike the British, Americans were never eager imperialists but to the degree they ever were, Vietnam had an impact on American optimism similar to that of the battle of the Somme on British optimism. The words of all recent administrations suggest that the "Vietnam Syndrome" is dead; their actions suggest otherwise. This is the primary reason to doubt that the American actions in the Balkans will ever guide U.S. or NATO policy for any sustained period. Although the president seemed to promise that NATO would act elsewhere to prevent the kind of human rights abuses that were taking place in the Balkans, one suspects that the chances of a NATO operation in the Sudan to end the civil war there or in the Caucasus to resolve the bitter conflict between the Azeris and the Armenians are close to zero.

The problem of summoning the will to intervene abroad is made more difficult by the troubling question of legitimacy. The American people tend to fight best when they feel they have legitimacy for their cause. During the Cold War, both the West and the Soviet bloc sought legitimacy in Article 51 of the UN Charter -- the right of nations to self-defense. Because in the Cold War, all international politics seemed to be a zero sum game, it seemed plausible for policy-makers to contend that a conflict virtually anywhere affected American national security and that a U.S. intervention was therefore an act of self-defense justified under Article 51 of the charter. The United States, for example, used Article 51 to justify its interventions in Grenada and Panama.

With the end of the Cold War, however, the question of what legitimates the use of military force acquires a new character. Now that the United States faces no major international security threat, what justifies the use of force? The answer to that question is not clear, yet it is vital to American administrations to secure that legitimacy. The support of the U.N. Security Council, of course, lends significant legitimacy to a military action. But, given the veto power of the council's permanent members, such support is unlikely to materialize in some cases in which the United States wishes to act (including, of course, Kosovo). In some regions, such as Africa or Latin America, the sanction of a broadly based regional organization like the Organization of American States can help to convey legitimacy. In Europe, no such organization exists. Thus, during the war against Belgrade, the NATO allies were forced to improvise. The secretary general of NATO, when asked in a public meeting to cite the source of legality for NATO's decision to attack another country, replied that 19 democratic countries had endorsed the military action. He went on to suggest that NATO had legitimacy to act anywhere on the globe provided all of its democratic members agreed, though he conceded that such agreement was unlikely. It is doubtful that most NATO members or a majority of Americans would agree with that definition of legitimacy. Yet unless the United States could find some way to gain legitimacy for any bid for hegemony, it is doubtful that any administration would be able to muster sustained public support for its policy.

A Sense of Strategy
Third, the establishment of a Pax Americana would require a clear sense of strategy on the part of American policy-makers. There is no evidence that such a strategy exists. Since the end of the Cold War, the United States has announced sequentially a number of "strategies": the development of a New World Order, assertive multilateralism, the enlargement of the zone of democracy and free markets, the establishment of more predictable and fruitful relations among the major powers, and now humanitarian intervention to prevent ethnic wars.

The United States has gone from one doctrine to another because no administration has been able to develop a strategy to build public support for any of the various doctrines announced. And the reason is clear: All of them were designed to maintain a global role in the post-Cold War world that the American people are uncomfortable with. The electorate does not want to pay the price in dollars or blood of establishing a New World Order or pressing the norms of democracy into countries they scarcely know exist. They are not opposed to more fruitful relations among the major powers, but they are also unwilling to moderate criticism of key powers like China. They are appalled by the barbarism evident in many conflicts around the world, but naively think the U.N. ought to be able to put a stop to such practices without the full support of Washington in the form of paid-up dues and a willingness to participate in U.N. peacekeeping or peacemaking operations. These are not the attitudes of a power that is going to carry out a sustained policy of Pax Americana.

A Model for the World
Finally, a successful hegemonic power must offer a model to others that they will want to emulate. Often this aspect of power is underestimated, but it seems fairly clear that Napoleonic France, Victorian Britain and postwar liberal internationalist America all derived part of their power from the fact that key groups in other societies admired what they had accomplished. Each was able to secure allies within the domestic politics of other countries -- allies who worked to promote the kinds of policies that the admired country wished to see put into effect. For a while, even Nazi Germany enjoyed its foreign admirers, until it became clear that the kind of Germany Hitler wanted to build could prosper only by destroying them rather than cooperating with them.

Clearly, America does offer to many an attractive model, which is an important source of its current power. It is seen as the capitalist democratic power par excellence. Its economy is the envy of the world, its politics inspire others to copy its practices for good and ill, and its higher education system attracts hundreds of thousands of foreign students anxious to study at what is regarded as the fount of modernity.

At the same time, the more the model is seen as hegemonic, the more resistance grows. Thus, American pressure on others to open their economies to global forces is encountering opposition -- witness the recent turmoil in Seattle -- as others learn that globalization can lead to economic instability as well as growth. American demands for political change in areas like human rights also seem to outpace local patterns of change. And in the cultural field, as a Polish cabinet minister once contended to the author, Poland did not get its independence only in order to become a carbon copy of some other society. In his view, the world "may not need more walls, but it does need more fences," by which he meant that Poland wished to be open to the outside world without being submerged by it. Most nations feel the same way.

To sum up, then: foreign fears of a hegemonic America imposing its will on others are misplaced. The U.S may have the raw military power to attempt such a role and some influential Americans call for it but the country has not developed the necessary will, temperament or strategy to succeed as a hegemon. It spends a great deal on international affairs, but does not allocate its resources wisely. It is overcommitted in the military field and undercommitted in the diplomatic field. It proclaims strategic doctrines that are designed more to win the next election than to secure international support. Its leadership groups enjoy the aura of world leadership, but they are unwilling to make any sacrifices themselves in pursuit of leadership. Any quest to establish a Pax Americana that involves sacrifice will therefore lack legitimacy. It will be deprived of the political and moral underpinning that makes a sustained effort at global hegemony possible.

The danger in fact lies elsewhere. The world is unlikely to see a Pax Americana but, depending on political fortunes, it might see an effort to attempt one. The effort would fail -- but with it would also die the commitment to internationalism that is a prerequisite for American leadership. And no one should be in doubt that the loss of that leadership would be extremely harmful.

One can point to a number of examples of the current, very problematical American approach to world leadership. In the negotiations to create an international criminal court, the United States insisted that its citizens be exempt from any possibility of prosecution. Unexpectedly, the rest of the world rejected the U.S. position -- and Washington then declared that it would work to destroy the newly established court. It remains to be seen whether others have the spirit to stand up to American pressure.

During the genocide in Rwanda, U.S. officials made it clear to Canada that they did not look favorably on Canadian efforts to organize a rescue force to intervene in that beleaguered country. The Canadians thereupon ceased and desisted. When Japan attempted to organize a financial rescue package for the hard-pressed Asian states, the U.S. Treasury saw a potential rival to its international financial leadership. It told the Japanese to quit the field. They did. Both decisions were mistakes. They were examples of negative leadership -- the power to say no.

What the world needs is an America that can be more than a negative hegemon, that can do more than just say no. It needs an America that can say yes to important international initiatives that require money and sustained political commitment. The challenge for the next administration will be to develop the domestic base for this country to offer the positive leadership the world requires.

Charles William Maynes is president of the Eurasia Foundation and is the former editor of Foreign Policy magazine. A Foreign Service officer from 1962 to 1971, he served in the Bureau of International Organization Affairs, and in Embassies Vientiane and Moscow. From 1977 to 1980 he was assistant secretary of State for international organization affairs.