American primacy is destined to be one of the defining features of international politics for years to come. David Held and Mathias Koenig-Archibugi have assembled essays on the topic by a high-powered stable of scholars. Michael Cox, one of the most prolific and penetrating analysts of American power today, kicks off the volume with a learned tour d'horizon of scholarly debates on whether empire is a useful concept to apply today, whether the United States is one, and whether its primacy will endure. Michael Mann and Mary Kaldor present skeptical views on the latter issue. Mann briskly makes his case that as strong as it is militarily, the United States lacks the other wellsprings of power any self-respecting empire needs. And Kaldor goes on to disparage the real utility of the one kind of power that everyone in the book agrees the United States possesses in abundance. High-technology military force, she argues, “rarely confers a decisive advantage in conflicts between armed opponents” (p. 187).
Zhiyuan Cui offers a Chinese perspective on the Bush Doctrine that is in keeping with the critical tone of the other contributors. He also chronicles China's tentative “balancing” efforts in international institutions and financial affairs. Abdelwahab El-Affendi reinforces Mann's and Kaldor's skepticism about the utility of U.S. military power, stressing its “amazing ineffectiveness” in the Middle East (p. 253). Joseph Nye and Robert Cooper consider the relationship between hard and soft power, together providing a counterpoint to Robert Kagan's famous essay on “Power and Weakness,” also included in the volume. Nye's main point is that the struggle against terrorism takes place mainly on the “transnational chessboard” of international politics, where traditional military power is least useful and soft power—preference shaping, agenda setting, legitimacy—is most important. Cooper reminds readers that “hard power begets soft power” (p. 176). “If you want to exercise soft power,” he notes (perhaps having in mind those Europeans who want to do just that), “you must have something to offer—a recipe for success, resources to help others get there, and probably armed force to protect them on the way.”
G. John Ikenberry and Thomas Risse set forth liberal perspectives on American primacy, highlighting what Risse calls the “three I's”: multilateral institutions, deep economic interdependence, and broadly shared liberal identities. According to Ikenberry, these three features of the Western order, together with the democratic domestic institutions of the United States, will work to “reinforce restraint in the exercise of American unipolar power” (p. 107). Risse makes a conditionally optimistic argument that the United States and its chief European allies can strike a new transatlantic bargain that will see them through the challenges of American unilateralism, diverging domestic political dynamics, and transnational terrorism. What is needed, he claims, is not a European counterweight to U.S. power but merely a Europe with a clear liberal voice, a plausible strategy for how to deal with new security threats, and the willingness to bring both to bear in U.S. domestic deliberations on foreign policy.
The editors stress the diversity of the views they assembled, and the claim is surely warranted as far as scholarly assessments are concerned. Neither they nor any of the contributors, however, note the remarkable fact that notwithstanding this diversity in approach, the fundamental conclusion is the same: that U.S. power is either relatively ineffectual or tightly constrained, or both. This is clearest for Mann, Kaldor, and El-Affendi, who dwell on America's obvious difficulty in translating its military prowess into preferred outcomes. But even Ikenberry and Nye, seemingly the most bullish, end up stressing constraints. For Nye, the problem is that the chief challenges of the day cannot be settled with the kind of capabilities in which the United States excels. Ikenberry insists that U.S. unipolar power can only be effective if it is bound by constraining multilateral rules.
Events since these essays were written in late 2003 or early 2004 appear to buttress the consensus. The United States remains bogged down in Iraq and seems to be experiencing fiscal overstretch, and Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice is busily seeking to reestablish Washington's multilateral credentials. It is nonetheless worth asking whether this turn of events actually vindicates the shared scholarly assessments contained in this book. Counterinsurgency has never been easy—neither for Russia in the nineteenth century, when it fought in the Caucasus for two generations, nor for the British in the Boer War, nor for all the other great powers, including the United States itself in the Philippines or Vietnam. America's difficulties in Iraq are important, but they hardly constitute evidence of something new about international relations that makes power especially powerless. Washington's fiscal overstretch, moreover, is fundamentally the result of domestic, not international, priorities, and the Bush administration's new multilateralism may tell us more about its troubles in Iraq than the binding power of multilateral rules.
Are old-fashioned state-centric capabilities really as “powerless” as these authors suggest? They might be, but there are grounds for skepticism. The authors here generally follow the common practice of determining the utility of power by assessing active attempts by the United States to use it. This inevitably leads to selection bias against evidence of the indirect, “structural” effects that U.S. power may have on international affairs that are not dependent upon active management. Things that do not happen—counterbalancing, great-power arms racing, hegemonic rivalry, security dilemmas among Asian powers, decisions by Japan and others to nuclearize, and so on—are as important as those that do. Not only are nonevents downplayed in comparison to salient events that appear to demonstrate the powerlessness of power, but patterns of events that do go the unipole's way are often missed. Washington's failure to have its way in the United Nations is featured; its quite different experience in the International Monetary Fund is not. And even in the United Nations, the focus on highly contested issues, such as the attempt at a second resolution authorizing the invasion of Iraq, fails to note how the institution's whole agenda has shifted to address concerns (e.g., terrorism) that the United States particularly cares about.
This is fine collection of essays that exemplifies the many different intellectual pathways to the conventional scholarly wisdom about constraints on American power. Readers seeking a challenge to their views will likely have to look elsewhere.
