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

“Integration” is a word that brings to mind certain images, most often those associated with efforts to bring about a society in which race or religion do not define individual rights or access to services. In its most basic sense, however, it entails the combining or incorporating of parts into a larger whole.

An American foreign policy based upon a doctrine of integration would have three dimensions. First, it would aim to create a cooperative relationship among the world’s major powers — a twenty-first-century concert — built on a common commitment to promoting certain principles and outcomes. Second, it would seek to translate this commitment into effective arrangements and actions. Third, it would work to bring in other countries, organizations, and peoples so that they come to enjoy the benefits of physical security, economic opportunity, and political freedom. The goal would be to create a more integrated world both in the sense of integrating (involving) as many governments and organizations and societies as possible and in the sense of bringing about a more integrated (cooperative) international community so that the challenges central to the modern era could better be met.

Integration is the natural successor to containment, which was the necessary and correct policy construct for the Cold War. Containment — in George Kennan’s formulation, “a commitment to countering the Soviet Union wherever it encroached upon the interests of a peaceful and stable world” — implicitly and correctly rejected two dangerous alternatives: appeasement of the Soviet and Communist threat on the one hand, something that would have led to a diminution of security and freedom and prosperity around the world, and direct confrontation on the other, something that would have been all too dangerous in a nuclear era.

Containment, which survived some four decades of Soviet challenge, could not, however, survive its own success. What is needed as a result is a foreign policy doctrine for both a post-11/9 (November 9, 1989, when the Berlin Wall came down, signifying the Cold War’s end) and a post-9/11 world. A doctrine relevant to this era, however, would seek to bring others in, not keep them out. That a guiding principle is needed cannot be doubted. An intellectual framework furnishes policymakers with a compass to determine priorities, which in turn help shape decisions affecting long-term investments involving military forces, assistance programs, and both intelligence and diplomatic assets. A doctrine also helps prepare the public for what may be required — and sends signals to other governments, groups, and individuals (friend and foe alike) about what the country is striving to seek or prevent in the world.

None of three post-Cold War presidencies has successfully articulated a comprehensive foreign policy or national security doctrine. The first Bush administration spoke of a “New World Order” but never defined it. The Clinton administration wrote of enlarging the circle of democracies but never put this enterprise at the center of a consistent foreign policy. Attempts to ascribe a “Bush Doctrine” to the first term of George W. Bush came up short, as there was less a coherent policy than a mix of counterterrorism, democracy promotion, preemption, and unilateralism. The opportunity exists for our era to become one of genuine global integration. More than any other alternative, integration offers a coherent response to globalization and to the transnational threats that constitute the defining challenges of the era. Ruled out, then, as a national security doctrine is unilateralism. No single country, no matter how powerful, can contend successfully on its own with transnational challenges. Any such effort will fail. It will also have two other adverse consequences: It will stimulate the reemergence of a world defined by a balance of power, and it will erode the economic (and possibly political and military) foundations of U.S. strength that are in part responsible for the opportunity that now exists.

None of this should be construed as an argument against American leadership. But leadership implies followership. Unilateralism is just that: acting alone. Most of today’s pressing problems cannot be met by the United States alone, given the nature of the problems themselves and the realistic limits to American power. To take just one example, critical foreign policy tools such as sanctions will have little impact unless other potential partners of a target government join the United States in a policy of isolation.

The administration of George W. Bush is fond of saying that the United States needs no permission slip from the United Nations or anybody else to act. This is true. No country and certainly no great power would or should allow itself to be so hamstrung. But this in no way negates the point that the United States can only achieve what it seeks in the world if others work with it as opposed to against it or not at all. In the end, the United States does not need the world’s permission to act, but it does need the world’s support to succeed.

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