That was a beautiful day!
Says it all.
While France is a "hyper-pissant."
The author seems to have missed the point that the "collective response" approach (a la the UN) has FAILED UNEQUIVOCABLY WHEREVER IT HAS BEEN ATTEMPTED.
But there are a couple of issues I'll be thinking about. First, that the author is on the right track with the "hard power / soft power" dichotomy, but the bulk of the references to international relations in the article revolved around hard power. In fact, it is the soft power that will prove more significant, IMHO. We are, in essence, trying to set up a worldwide system, a structure for relations, rather than a government, and the sort of thing that is evolving may best be illustrated by the fact that I'm typing on a Sony computer and I have a Nokia phone on my belt. Nor is this restricted to large multinational corporations - these two grew up within the system that predates them.
Will Gulliver remain a giant? For the time, but in age one shrinks and the others grow. The trick is to set up a system wherein we may shrink comfortably and the others grow without attempting to do so by picking the bones - this sort of thing is not a zero-sum game and never has been; it's just that that's the easiest model for the unsuccessful to understand.
Lots of issues - more later - gotta go...
I'd dispute that the 'Rumsfeld strategy' and the cooperative strategy are mutually exclusive. The first reflects our military policy and the second our economic policy. They are complementary.
Another quibble is that 'international opinion' is not de facto legitimate. If the global elite consensus is venal, short-sighted, foolish, and undemocratic, as is quite often the case, we have no obligation to accept it.
We 'dominate' because we value freedom and rationality. Our republican government has a strong democratic counterweight while permitting individual rationality to prevail over mob rule. We are threatened by tyranny and irrationality and the folly it generates.
When the rest of the world accepts human rights (freedom), we will have little need to dominate them. That's the only way out of the current situation -- to derail the most dangerous and irresponsible states while encouraging freedom elsewhere to reduce the incentives for bloody confrontation.
The author mentions "public goods," an economic notion of a good that one person can benefit from while not taking away from another. Television broadcasts, for example, or national defense.
Unfortunately, he neglects to note that when there are public goods people tend to free-ride. And so not only can other powers get away with lower defense spending in the Pax Americana, they far more importantly can be secure that global malefactors will target their ire entirely at the hegemon. When Al Qaeda or North Korea wants to upset the international order, they don't threaten France or Britain, they threaten the U.S. The flip side of being the global cop is having a unique set of enemies that second-tier powers don't have to worry about. This is what Sept. 11 has taught us.
The only way the U.S. can accept this unique burden is to have unique freedom to attack its unique enemies. This is the essence of the "pre-emption" strategy we've heard so much about. The U.S. government, to fulfill its most elementary obligation of defending its citizens, can't afford to be constrained by the Security Council, the ICC, etc.
But this is unacceptable to second-tier powers, who have their own national interests to defend, interests that an unconstrained US will be able to override. They are compelled to tie Gulliver down. This clash between the interests of the hegemon and of the second-tier powers is irreconcilable in the existing system. Sooner or later, most of the second-tier powers, perhaps even Britain, will find it necessary to oppose the U.S.
In short, the present situation – unchecked U.S. dominance outside the international legal framework combined with its inability to protect its security within it – cannot stand.
There are only three ways out of this conflict as I see it:
1. Remake the international order. International disputes will have to be moved out of arenas where the likes of France and Russia can stifle the U.S. Since some second-tier powers, e.g. India and Japan, feel cheated in the existing system, the U.S. might be able to draw them on board for some modification of the international security system.
2. Coalitions of the (anti-American) willing. This is the drive France and perhaps Russia have launched. For all the U.S. might, it couldn't possibly defy the will of most of the planet's other powers, secondary though they be. A more aggressive coalition of secondary powers would force the U.S. to back down, in the process drawing away some of the anger of global malefactors toward them.
3. Little America. U.S. withdrawal without being forced to from some of the global policing job, allowing (indeed forcing) secondary powers to assert their interests in their spheres. I rate this as much less likely, but if enough attacks on the U.S. result from the existing unstable system, I could see us leaving the Middle East and East Asia to fend for themselves.
But no matter how it turns out, we are living in interesting times.
That was a beautiful day!
This commentary was rather interesting.
Another kind of balancing, let's call it 'surreptitious balancing', had begun much earlier, in the mid-1990s, when the US regularly found itself alone and on the other side of such issues as the ABM Treaty or the International Criminal Court. Au fond, all of these duels were not about principle, but power. If the United States wanted to scratch the ABM Treaty in favor of Missile Defense, Europe, China and Russia sought to uphold it on the sound assumption that a better defense makes for a better offense, hence for richer US military options than under conditions of vulnerability.
And so with the International Criminal Court (ICC). In the end, even the Clinton team correctly understood the underlying thrust of the ICC. Claiming the right to pass judgment on military interventions by prosecuting malfeasants ex post facto, the Court might deter and thus constrain America's forays abroad. All the Liliputians would gain a kind of droit de regard over American actions.
I disagree that the United States was firmly against the ICC or that Clinton had any idea what the underlying thrust of it was, accepting he wasn't trying to undercut the United States in total. The man signed on to it on our behalf. Even as later at December 2000, he didn't have clue one. The following president didn't come out against the ICC until May of 2002, one month after it was certain to be ratified.
This article also ignores numerous very important internal issues that plague the United States. What an enemy can't do from abroad, a nation can do to iteself through ignorance.
Sounds French. And if you said that to someone on the street you would earn a knuckle sandwich.
Yoda pursues his second career as a political analyst.
I think Europeans (and Canadians and many Austrailians) fail to see this because they have either lost faith in the specialness of liberty or have become hostile to it.