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

The coexistence of what might be described as forces of disorder and order in the world at the same time is nothing new. Indeed, history can be understood as the balance or struggle between them. The best book that I have read on international affairs, and the one that most influenced my own thinking — Hedley Bull’s The Anarchical Society — captures in its title this fundamental truth, namely, that at any moment the world is a blend of restraint and rules (society) and anarchy. History, then, is largely determined by the degree to which the major powers of the era can agree on rules of the road — and impose them on those who reject them.

What side will win today’s struggle? What will be the enduring and defining character of our world? Will society triumph over anarchy? And, if so, what kind of society will that be? If it is too soon to answer such questions, it is not too soon to assert that the most influential factor will be the actions of the United States — the “hyperpower,” in the words of Hubert Vedrine, a former foreign minister of France.

Integrating the World
What is it the United States should be doing? The United States should be using its power and influence to persuade the major powers of the day, along with as many other countries, organizations, corporations, and individuals as possible, to sign up to and support a set of rules, policies, and institutions that would bring about a world in which armed conflict between and within states is the exception; where terrorists find it difficult to succeed; where the spread of weapons of mass destruction is halted and ultimately reversed; in which markets are open to goods and services and in which societies are free and open to ideas; and where the world’s people have a good chance to live out lives of normal span free from violence, extreme poverty, and deadly disease. Our policies must recognize that globalization is a reality, not a choice. As Prime Minister Tony Blair has stated, “We are all internationalists now, whether we like it or not.” But what to do about globalization, how to contend with it, does involve choice. The choice before the United States is between an effective multilateralism and either a gradual return to a world of great power competition or a world overwhelmed by disruptive forces, or both.

To have a chance of succeeding, the United States will need to view other major powers less as rivals and more as partners. Much the same applies to relations with critical medium powers such as Brazil in South America, South Africa and Nigeria in Africa, and South Korea and Australia in East Asia. The United States will have to accept some constraints on its freedom of action. It will have to make a concerted effort to build international consensus on the principles and rules that ought to govern international relations. It will have to use all the foreign policy tools at its disposal and not only or even mostly the military. It will have to get more involved in reforming other societies. Americans will need to rethink some of their traditional ideas about sovereignty. In all of this, the United States will not be able to simply impose its preferences. Power is not the same as influence; to the contrary, power is better understood as potential. The goal of foreign policy is to translate this potential into lasting influence.

There is a precedent for trying to bring about a world in which the leading states of the day do often act as partners. In the early nineteenth century, the major powers of the era met in Vienna and subsequently in other cities to develop understandings — rules of the road, in today’s parlance — about the conduct of international relations. The goal was to devise “international agreement about the nature of workable arrangements and about the permissible aims and methods of foreign policy.” While more modest than that, the resulting “Concert of Europe” helped to keep relative peace for several decades among the great powers — Austria, Britain, France, Prussia, and Russia — then at the heart of the European state system. The arrangements were never institutionalized, much less codified as some form of world government; rather, what emerged were a set of understandings and a commitment to consult in order to avoid the sort of major power conflict Europe had just experienced (the Napoleonic Wars), in large part leaving all five governments better able to contend with the rising pressures for self-determination and greater freedom and opportunity that threatened a world of empires and hereditary elites.

This period following the Congress of Vienna is not the only example of coordination among the major powers of the day. More recently, the Cold War was kept cold (as opposed to going hot) by a series of implicit or informal understandings between the United States and the Soviet Union. Both had a stake in avoiding a nuclear conflict that neither could win; as a result, each avoided any direct armed intervention against the other on the grounds that escalation to nuclear war was all too possible. In addition, it was acceptable to provide military assistance to an ally or client, but not to the point of overwhelming the ally or client of the other. The most dangerous moments of the Cold War came when such “rules” were violated or came close to being violated.

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