Superpower America - We Rule!

The worldwide complaint today is that the U.S. is the overwhelmingly dominant nation, setting the rules and making everyone jump to its command. Those down on America offer a bitter complaint about U.S. triumphalism.

Well, since we Americans are condemned to be pilloried for our success, let us at least take a moment to glory in it. By every measure, the extent of America's dominance astonishes.

Militarily? Militarily, there has never in the past thousand years been a greater gap between the No. 1 world power and the No. 2. American military spending exceeds that of the next twenty countries combined. Not even the British Empire at its height displayed the superiority shown by American arms today. Our space power (satellites) are unrivaled. Our technology is irresistible.The United States has nuclear and anti-nuclear superiority, the world's overwhelmingly dominant air force, the only truly blue-water navy, and a unique capability to project raw firepower to every corner of the globe. The result is the dominance of a single power unlike anything ever seen in human history.

Economically? The American economy is at the top of the list and almost twice the size of its nearest competitor. We enjoy, almost uniquely, low inflation, low unemployment, record home ownership, and vigorous growth. Put another way, the state of California's economy alone has risen to become the fifth largest in the world (using market exchange-rate estimates), ahead of France and just behind the United Kingdom.

Culturally? Parents the world over vainly fight the tide of T shirts and low-rider jeans, of our rap and rock music and movies, of video and game software pouring out of America and craved by their children. There has been mass culture. But there has never before been mass world culture. Now one is emerging, and it is distinctly American. Why, even the intellectual and commercial boulevard of the future, the Internet, has been set up in our own language and idiom. Everyone speaks American.

Diplomatically? Nothing of significance gets done without us. Consider one of history's rare controlled experiments. In the 1940s, lines were drawn through three peoples--Germans, Koreans and Chinese--one side closely bound to the United States, the other to our adversary Soviet Russia. It turned into a controlled experiment because both states in the divided lands shared a common culture. Fifty years later the results are in. Does anyone doubt the superiority, both moral and material, of West Germany vs. East Germany, South Korea vs. North Korea and Taiwan vs. China. We decide if NATO expands and who gets in. And where we decide not to decide, as in Cambodia and Rawanda, often held up as an example of how the U.N. and regional powers can settle local conflicts without the U.S.--all hell breaks loose.

Just 20 years ago, Paul Kennedy's The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers became an improbable best seller. People did not buy it to learn about the decline of 17th century Spain, however. They bought it to learn about the decline of late-20th century America, the book's heavily promoted topical hook. Indeed, it touched off an intellectual vogue on U.S. decline. The major theme was that Reagan's grandiose revivalism had turned into a grotesque overreaching--wrecking the economy with irresponsible deficits, overstretching us abroad with a mad anticommunism and generally overplaying the weak hand of a country headed downward.

That was then. Where are the decline theorists and defeatist now? In just two decades their hypothesis has suffered one of the most ignominious refutations ever recorded. After Paul Kennedy saw what America did in the Afghan war--a display of fully mobilized, furiously concentrated unipolar power at a distance of 7,000 miles in the "graveyard of empires" he not only recanted, he stood in wonder: Nothing has ever existed like this disparity of power; he wrote, nothing. . . . No other nation comes close. . . . Charlemagnes empire was merely western European in its reach. The Roman empire stretched farther afield, but there was another great empire in Persia, and a larger one in China. There is, therefore, no comparison.

All right then. We all--American triumphalists and worldwide complainers--agree on the premise: The center of world power is an unchallenged superpower; the United States, attended by its Western allies. Why are we American triumphalists right that this is as it should be?

First, there is the question of justice. We deserve it. Having fought and won in the last three world wars--I, II and the cold war--we have a right to claim the spoils. And we have a right to the dominance afforded us by our conquest of the "evil empire," coming as it did after a long twilight struggle that America carried on at high peril and huge cost. NATO and other such groupings made for a wonderful show of burden sharing and risk taking. But in truth, the burdens of the cold war were shared very unevenly. It was Washington and New York City that were threatened in the Cuban missile crisis, not Paris and London. It was 57,000 Americans who died in Vietnam, not Germans or Japanese. It was America that expended the blood and treasure--up to 10% of GNP in military spending--that stood down the Soviet Empire and destroyed the very idea of communism. Dominance? Arrogance? We got there the old-fashioned way. We earned it.

Second, there is the question of prudence: American hegemony is good for the world. Why? The modern world, interconnected as it is today, can exist in only two states: reasonably structured or chaotic. Chaos in the global system means no leader, no rules, nothing but contending powers and universal vulnerability. We have had experience with chaos: it was known as the 1930s. It was a Hobbesian universe that plunged the world into catastrophe.

Today the risks, the stakes are even higher: It is of course banal to say that modern technology has shrunk the world. But the obvious corollary, that in a shrunken world the divide between regional superpowers and great powers is radically narrowed, is rarely drawn. Missiles shrink distance. Nuclear (or chemical or biological) devices multiply power. Both can be bought at market. Consequently the geopolitical map is irrevocably altered. Fifty years ago, Germany--centrally located, highly industrial and heavily populated--could pose a threat to world security and to the other great powers. It was inconceivable that a relatively small Middle Eastern state with an almost entirely imported industrial base could do anything more than threaten its neighbors. The central truth of the coming era is that this is no longer the case: relatively small; peripheral and backward states will be able to emerge rapidly as threats not only to regional, but to world security.

Which is why America, in the "age of terrorism" is orchestrating the global campaign to denying, disarming, and defending against the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. In a world where the means of mass destruction can be transported in a suitcase, why should we fully entrust our national security, not to mention world security to Kofi Annan and the rest of the U.N. security councel?

The international system must have a structure. And because the international arena, unlike the ordinary national arena, has no cops, no enforcers, no courts with any real power, the structure must be established and maintained by a leading world power. In the 19th century, the high seas were safe and maritime commerce was routine because of the British navy. The U.S. now plays the role of the British navy everywhere. Whom would those chafing under American hegemony prefer instead? China? Iran? The Russian mafia?

The complainers would prefer, naturally, to see power shared equally among the leading nations and the rules arrived at by consensus. How nice. How Utopian. Multipolar systems do not evolve into happy Elks clubs. They break down rudely into rival alliances and coalitions, like the Triple Entente and the Triple Alliance, the Axis of Evil and the Allies, the Warsaw Pact and NATO, that gave us the calamities and the terrors of this century.

Tennyson dreamed of a parliament of man. Dream on. The League of Nations and the United Nations have proved utterly ineffective. Why, even the European Union, an unprecedented club of like-minded friendly neighbors, was in disarray over the Iraq issue and the question of war and peace.

Why? Simple. Put great powers with diverging interests together, and consensus is almost always impossible to reach. And if not consensus, what? Which nation will long subordinate its own sovereignty to the majority vote of a bunch of rivals? Hence the best, if imperfect, guarantee of international order and safety: the dominance of a benign power. For now and for the foreseeable future, America is it--and the world knows it.

American dominance is a blessing because it has given the world a Pax Americana, an era of international peace and tranquillity unseen in this century, rarely seen in human history. The Great Powers have been corralled into the American "zone of peace" or, as with China and Russia, engaged and/or contained. Smaller powers do not dare start regional wars; they have seen what happened to Afghanistan and Iraq (twice). What remains are brushfire wars, most of which the U.S. simply will not strain to quell.

But the world does not live by safety alone. American dominance brings the world something more: the American creed. We are a uniquely ideological nation. We do not define ourselves by race or blood but by adherence to a proposition--DEMOCRACY/FREEDOM--a proposition so humane and attractive that it has, independently of American power, won near universal adherence. From Prague's "velvet revolution" to Tiananmen Square, whose Declaration of Independence--whose Statue of Liberty--do demonstrators for freedom turn to for inspiration?

Individual rights, government by consent, protection from arbitrary power, the free exchange of goods and ideas: we did not invent these ideas. We inherited them. We codified them. And now we propagate them.

The world could do alot worse than be dominated by a country so committed to these values and ideas. America came, but it did not come to rule. Unlike other hegemons and would-be hegemons, it does not entertain a grand vision of a new world. No Thousand Year Reich. No New Soviet Man. It has no great desire to remake human nature, to conquer for the extraction of natural resources, or to rule for the simple pleasure of dominion. Our principal aim is to maintain the stability and relative tranquility of the current international system by enforcing, maintaining and extending the current peace.

The new preemption and unilateralism of the Bush doctrine argues explicitly and unashamedly for maintaining unipolarity, for sustaining America's unrivaled superpower dominance for the foreseeable future. It could be a long future, assuming we successfully manage the single greatest threat, namely, weapons of mass destruction in the hands of aggressive rogue or failed states.

This issue is not one of style but of purpose. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld gave the classic formulation of unilateralism when he said (regarding the Afghan war and the war on terrorism, but the principle is universal), "the mission determines the coalition." We take our friends where we find them, but only in order to help us in accomplishing the mission. The mission comes first, and we decide it.

Contrast this with the classic case study of multilateralism at work: the U.S. decision in February 1991 to conclude the Gulf War. As the Iraqi army was fleeing, the first Bush Administration had to decide its final goal: the liberation of Kuwait or regime change in Iraq. It stopped at Kuwait. Why? Because, as Brent Scowcroft has explained, going further would have fractured the coalition, gone against our promises to allies and violated the UN resolutions under which we were acting. "Had we added occupation of Iraq and removal of Saddam Hussein to those objectives", wrote Scowcroft in the Washington Post on October 16, 2001, "... our Arab allies, refusing to countenance an invasion of an Arab colleague, would have deserted us." The mistake was the coalition defined the mission.

We have learned from our past mistakes, but we still require the aggressive and confident application of unipolar power rather than falling back, as we did in the 1990s, on paralyzing multilateralism. The future of the unipolar era hinges on whether America is governed by those who wish to retain, augment and use unipolarity to advance not just American but global ends, or whether America is governed by those who wish to give it up-either by allowing unipolarity to decay as they pull up the drawbridge to Fortress America, or by passing on the burden by gradually transferring power to multilateral institutions as heirs to American hegemony. The challenge to our unipolarity is not from the outside but from the inside. The choice is ours. To impiously paraphrase Benjamin Franklin: History has given you an empire, if you will keep it. -Dr. Charles Krauthammer