Posted on 01/26/2004 11:39:55 AM PST by quidnunc
What used to be called the "post-Cold War world" has gone through three distinct periods.
First, the "Long 1990s", beginning with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and ending with the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, marked a time of drift and, at least in international politics, American confusion and indecision.
The second, from 9/11 until the March 19, 2003, invasion of Iraq, was a period of transition, during which the Bush administration struggled to fashion a response to events that destroyed its illusions that the world's problems could be "managed" by a small knot of confident and competent pragmatists, acting in the spirit of humble realpolitik.
The invasion of Iraq marked the start of the third period, a new era of Pax Americana, distinguished by the energetic exercise of U.S. power not simply to protect the status quo of American global preeminence but to extend the current liberal international order, beginning in the Middle East.
The collapse of the Soviet empire left the United States as the world's "sole superpower." After decades of Cold War competition, and centuries of struggle among Europe's great powers, the notion of an extended American peace seemed counterintuitive, to put it mildly. Even at the moment of triumph, essayist Charles Krauthammer anticipated no more than a "unipolar moment," a blink in time.
Strategic "realists," committed to the proposition that international politics is a Hobbesian struggle for power, naturally assumed that other nations would find some way to counterbalance the dominance of the United States.
Liberal idealists, who tend to be highly suspicious of American power, looked to international law and institutions to constrain the unilateral or otherwise energetic exercise of U.S. power, particularly military power.
The 1990s were a deeply disappointing decade for political scientists of various stripes, as potential challengers to U.S. preeminence stumbled or fell out of the competition completely.
-snip-
(Excerpt) Read more at aei.org ...
Is their a requirement that we excerpt this one?
What has begun is the real test of the Pax Americana, the active employment of American power to promulgate liberal political principles and thereby fashion an enduring peace.
I like the sound of that. However, it is not an American Empire. It is a world reshaped to conform to American ideals of government. The Age of Dictatorships is over, it is now the Age of Democracy.
Fine. What about the moon, which just means 'month.' Let's change that name to America, too. What about the sun, which just means means, uh, hmmm, 'sun.' Change that to America, too and the whole solar system could be America.
The Stability of a Unipolar World by William C. Wohlforth
Pretty powerful stuff!
The PDF document is :here
The early part follows:
______________-_____________________________________________
The collapse of the
Soviet Union produced the greatest change in world power relationships since
World War II. With Moscow´s headlong fall from superpower status, the bipolar
structure that had shaped the security policies of the major powers for
nearly half a century vanished, and the United States emerged as the sole
surviving superpower. Commentators were quick to recognize that a new
“unipolar moment’ of unprecedented U.S. power had arrived! In 1992 the
Pentagon drafted a new grand strategy designed to preserve unipolarity by
preventing the emergence of a global rival.2 But the draft plan soon ran into
controversy, as commentators at home and abroad argued that any effort to
preserve unipolarity was quixotic and dangerous.3 Officials quickly backed
away from the idea and now eschew the language of primacy or predominance,
speaking instead of the United States as a “leader’ or the “indispensable
nation.“4
The rise and sudden demise of an official strategy for preserving primacy
lends credence to the widespread belief that unipolarity is dangerous and
unstable. While scholars frequently discuss unipolarity, their focus is always
on its demise. For neorealists, unipolarity is the least stable of all structures
because any great concentration of power threatens other states and causes
them to take action to restore a balance.5 Other scholars grant that a large concentration of power works for peace, but they doubt that U.S. preeminence can endure!
Underlying both views is the belief that U.S. preponderance is
fragile and easily negated by the actions of other states. As a result, most analysts argue that unipolarity is an “illusion,’ a “moment’ that “will not last long,’ or is already “giving way to multipolarity.“7
Indeed, some scholars question whether the system is unipolar at all, arguing instead that it is, in Samuel Huntington´s phrase, “uni-multipolar.“´
Although they disagree vigorously on virtually every other aspect of post-Cold War world politics, scholars of international relations increasingly share this conventional wisdom about unipolarity. Whether they think that the current structure is on the verge of shifting away from unipolarity or that it has
already done so, scholars believe that it is prone to conflict as other states seek to create a counterpoise to the overweening power of the leading state.
The assumption that unipolarity is unstable has framed the wide-ranging debate over the nature of post-Cold War world politics.
Since 1991 one of the central questions in dispute has been how to explain continued cooperation and the absence of old-style balance-of-power politics despite major shifts in the distribution
of power.´
In this article, I advance three propositions that undermine the emerging conventional wisdom that the distribution of power is unstable and conflict prone.
First, the system is unambiguously unipolar. The United States enjoys
a much larger margin of superiority over the next most powerful state or, indeed, all other great powers combined than any leading state in the last two centuries. Moreover, the United States is the first leading state in modern international history with decisive preponderance in all the underlying components
of power: economic, military, technological, and geopolitical.*´ To
describe this unprecedented quantitative and qualitative concentration of power as an evanescent “moment’ is profoundly mistaken.
Second, the current unipolarity is prone to peace.
The raw power advantage of the United States means that an important source of conflict in previous systems is absent: hegemonic rivalry over leadership of the international system.
No other major power is in a position to follow any policy that depends for its success on prevailing against the United States in a war or an extended rivalry. None is likely to take any step that might invite the focused enmity of the United States. At the same time, unipolarity minimizes security competition
among the other great powers. As the system leader, the United States has the means and motive to maintain key security institutions in order to ease local security conflicts and limit expensive competition among the other major powers.
For their part, the second-tier states face incentives to bandwagon with the unipolar power as long as the expected costs of balancing remain prohibitive.
Third, the current unipolarity is not only peaceful but durable! It is already a decade old, and if Washington plays its cards right, it may last as long as bipolarity.
For many decades, no state is likely to be in a position to take on
the United States in any of the underlying elements of power. And, as an offshore power separated by two oceans from all other major states, the United States can retain its advantages without risking a counterbalance.
The current candidates for polar status (Japan, China, Germany, and Russia) are not so lucky. Efforts on their part to increase their power or ally with other dissatisfied states are likely to spark local counterbalances well before they can create a
global equipoise to U.S. power.
The scholarly conventional wisdom holds that unipolarity is dynamically unstable and that any slight overstep by Washington will spark a dangerous backlash.r2
I find the opposite to be true: unipolarity is durable and peaceful,
and the chief threat is U.S. failure to do enough.13 Possessing an undisputed preponderance of power, the United States is freer than most states to disregard the international system and its incentives. But because the system is built around U.S. power, it creates demands for American engagement. The more efficiently Washington responds to these incentives and provides order, the more long-lived and peaceful the system.
To be sure, policy choices are likely to affect the differential growth of power only at the margins. But given that
unipolarity is safer and cheaper than bipolarity or multipolarity, it pays to invest in its prolongation. In short, the intellectual thrust (if not the details) of the Pentagon´s 1992 draft defense guidance plan was right.
I develop these propositions in three sections that establish my central argument: the current system is unipolar; the current unipolarity is peaceful; and it is durable. I then conclude the analysis by discussing its implications for scholarly debates on the stability of the post-Cold War order and U.S. grand
strategy.
Lonely at the Top: The System Is Unipolar
Unipolarity is a structure in which one state´s capabilities are too great to be counterbalanced. I4 Once capabilities are so concentrated, a structure arises that is fundamentally distinct from either multipolarity (a structure comprising three or more especially powerful states) or bipolarity (a structure produced when two states are substantially more powerful than all others). At the same
time, capabilities are not so concentrated as to produce a global empire. Unipolarity should not be confused with a multi- or bipolar system containing one especially strong polar state or with an imperial system containing only one major power.15
Is the current structure unipolar ?
The crucial first step in answering this question is to compare the current distribution of power with its structural predecessors. The more the current concentration of power in the United States
differs from past distributions, the less we should expect post-Cold War world politics to resemble that of earlier epochs. I select two cases that allow me to compare concentrations of power in both multipolar and bipolar settings: the Pax Britannica and the Cold War. i6 Within these two cases, I highlight two specific periods -1860-70 and 1945-55-because they reflect the greatest concentrations
of power in the system leader, and so have the greatest potential
to weaken the case for the extraordinary nature of the current unipolarity. I also include a second Cold War period in the mid-1980s to capture the distribution
of power just before the dramatic changes of the 1990s.
QUANTITATIVE COMPARISON
To qualify as polar powers, states must score well on all the components of power: size of population and territory; resource endowment; economic capabilities; military strength; and “competence,’ according to Kenneth Waltz.17
Two states measured up in 1990.
One is gone.
No new pole has appeared:
2 - 1 = 1.
The system is unipolar.
The reality, however, is much more dramatic than this arithmetic implies.
After all, the two superpowers were hardly equal. Writing in the late 197Os, Waltz himself questioned the Soviet Union´s ability to keep up with the United States I8 The last time the scholarly community debated the relative power of the United States was the second half of the 198Os, when the United States was widely viewed as following Great Britain down the path of relative decline.
Responding to that intellectual climate, several scholars undertook quantitative analyses of the U.S. position. In 1985 Bruce Russett compared the U.S. position of the early 1980s with that of the British Empire in the mid-nineteenth century .
His conclusion: “The United States retains on all indicators a degree of dominance reached by the United Kingdom at no point’ in the nineteenth century.l´
See the original document for much of the support arguments~!
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