America has a great opportunity to change the world. Will it do it?

Richard Haass, a top State Department official in George W. Bush's first term and now president of the Council on Foreign Relations, has just published "The Opportunity: America's Moment to Alter History's Course."  Haass argues that if containment was the foreign policy of choice for the post-Cold War era, then multilateralism and integration should be the policy for the post-9/11 world. He was invited on the “Today” show to discuss the book. Here is an excerpt.

The Opportunity to Define an Era

The current world situation seems depressing, at times overwhelming. Terrorism is now a part of the fabric of modern life; at best we live with it, at worst we will die from it. It is a question of “when” and not “if ” the United States will suffer from another major act of terrorism, possibly one involving a weapon of mass destruction. North Korea and Iran have made substantial strides in producing nuclear explosive material and, in the case of North Korea, in developing nuclear weapons. Peace in the Middle East between Israelis and Palestinians remains distant. A large proportion of the world’s population is mired in poverty, with nearly 3 billion people, close to half the population of the planet, subsisting on $2 a day or less. Their plight is often exacerbated by HIV/AIDS and other infectious diseases. Darfur (in Western Sudan) is but the most recent in a long line of tragedies highlighting the reality that the greatest threat to many individuals around the world stems from the actions of their own governments and their fellow citizens. Protectionism has made a comeback as efforts to extend free trade continue to run up against special interests in Europe, the United States, and elsewhere. And, after impressive battlefield victories, the United States has found it extraordinarily difficult to stabilize either Afghanistan or Iraq. Iraq in particular has proved to be an expensive war of choice, one that has triggered an intense debate in the United States and around the world over American foreign policy and how the United States should use its immense power. Indeed, not since Vietnam, the last costly war of choice fought by the United States, has American foreign policy proved to be as controversial and as unpopular either at home or abroad.

Yet despite these and other difficulties, this continues to be a moment of rare opportunity for the United States and for the world. The United States, working with the governments of the other major powers, can still shape the course of the twenty-first century and bring about a world that is to a striking degree characterized by peace, prosperity, and freedom for most of the globe’s countries and peoples. Opportunity, though, is just that. It represents possibility, not inevitability. This explains in part why we live in a time variously described as the post-Cold War or post-9/11 world. Such descriptions tell us where we have been, not where we are, much less where we are heading. Only when we see what the United States and the world make of this opportunity will the current era earn its name. This could turn out to be an era of prolonged peace and prosperity, made possible by American primacy successfully translated into influence and effective international arrangements. Or it could turn out to be an era of gradual decay, an incipient modern Dark Ages, brought on by a loss of control on the part of the United States and the other major powers and characterized by a proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (WMD),failed states, and growing terrorism and instability.1 Still a third possibility is that this period will come to be viewed as another interwar era, or more precisely an inter-Cold War era, bracketed by the half-century struggle with the Soviet Union on the one hand and another such competition on the other, most likely between the United States and China.

At the heart of the opportunity is the fact that we live at a time when the prospect of war between states is less common than has been the case for several centuries and in which the prospect of conflict between this era’s major powers is remote. President George W. Bush made just this point in his introduction to his administration’s 2002 National Security Strategy: “Today, the international community has the best chance since the rise of the nation-state in the seventeenth century to build a world where great powers compete in peace instead of continually prepare for war.” It is difficult to exaggerate the significance of this development. It represents a fundamental departure from the past several hundred years of history, throughout which the defining struggle in the world was largely one between and among major powers. The twentieth century, for example, was dominated by a struggle between essentially liberal countries (led by Great Britain, France, and the United States) and militarized tyrannies (Germany and Japan in the first half of the century, the Soviet Union in the latter). This struggle was punctuated by three world wars, two of which were intensely hot, the third mostly (and mercifully) cold. There were existential threats to the United States and its allies, but these threats emanated from great power rivals.

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