The US After Unipolarity (IDEAS Special Reports)

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In alone, the Obama government dropped at least 26, bombs.

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During the eight years of the Obama mandate, his government not only ordered numerous air attacks, but also reached a record in the sale of arms since the Second World War, attaining , million dollars [2]. All this allows us to understand a most important but little known occurrence, that took place on 9th of January , and that we believe to be central.

If there were a trial for bad practice in social sciences, many of the sacred monsters would be shaking. This is not a vulgar irony, but a profound reflection that we must all undertake, from the social sciences and the university realm, on the evolution and events of the world system. For almost two decades, the Global Trends Report of the National Intelligence Council [3] has given rise to strategic conversations inside and outside of the US Government.

Since the First Global Trends Report was launched in , a new report is published every four years after the US elections. Global Trends constitutes an important and strategic report on the evaluation of intelligence services of the forces—and elections—that will shape the world during the coming two decades.

1 Introduction

The latest edition of the report " Global Trends: Paradox of Progress" of the National Intelligence Council, presented on January 9th , explores trends and scenarios for the next twenty years. Critical to its insight and policy-relevance have been meetings worldwide with a wide range of interlocutors—including government officials, scholars, business people, civil society representatives, and others—in workshops and exchanges.

There they have examined the perspectives of the economy, demographics, ecology, energy, health and governability, identity and geopolitics and it is vital to understand their consequences for the peace and security of the world. In general lines, the report of January 9th alerts us about a "close, obscure and difficult" [4] future, due to the increase of hostilities among Nations at levels that have not been seen since the Cold War; as global growth decelerates, the post Second World War "order" is being eroded, and as nationalisms in the framework of globalization are accentuated.

The uncertainty about the United States, together with a "West that looks inwards" and the weakening of international human rights and standards of conflict prevention, have induced Russia and China to put US influence to the test", says the report. There's a problem loading this menu right now.

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Amazon Rapids Fun stories for kids on the go. Amazon Restaurants Food delivery from local restaurants. Undergirding this strategy is the view that a rule-based international order — especially one where the United States uses its political weight to derive congenial rules — is an order that most fully protects American interests, conserves its power, and extends its influence into the future.

During the s, the United States continued to pursue this liberal grand strategy. Both the first Bush and Clinton administrations attempted to articulate a vision of world order that was not dependent on an external threat or an explicit policy of balance of power. Bush the elder talked about the importance of the Euro-Atlantic community and articulated ideas about a more fully integrated Asia Pacific region.

In both the Atlantic and Pacific regions the Bush strategy was to offer a positive vision of alliance and partnership that was built around common values, tradition, mutual self-interest, and the preservation of stability. The Clinton administration attempted to describe the post-Cold War order in terms of the expansion of democracy and open markets.

The United States after unipolarity: the United States and international economic governance

What emerged was a liberal vision of order. Democracy provided the foundation for global and regional community. Trade and capital flows were seen as forces for political reform and integration. These two grand strategies are rooted in divergent, and in some ways antagonistic, intellectual traditions, but over the last fifty years they have worked remarkably well together. The realist grand strategy created a political rationale for establishing major security commitments around the world. The liberal strategy created a positive agenda for American leadership.

The United States could exercise its power and achieve its national interests but do so in a way that helped deepen the fabric of international community. American power did not destabilize world order; it helped create it. The creation of rule-based agreements and political-security partnerships were both good for the United States and for a huge part of the rest of the world. The result by the end of the s was a global political formation of unprecedented size and success — a transoceanic coalition of democratic states tied together through markets, institutions, and security partnerships.

Importantly, this American system is tied together in a cooperative security order. This was a very important departure from past security arrangements within the Atlantic area. The idea was that Europe and the United States would be part of a single security system. Such a system would ensure that the democratic great powers would not go back to the dangerous game of strategic rivalry and balance of power politics.

In helped, of course, to have an emerging Cold War with the Soviet Union to generate this cooperative security arrangement. But the goal of cooperative security was implicit in the other elements of Western order. Without the Cold War, it is not clear that a formal alliance would have emerged as it did. Probably it would not have taken on such an intense and formal character.

But a security relationship between Europe and the United States that lessened the incentives for these states to engage in balance of power politics was needed and probably would have been engineered. A cooperative security order, embodied in a formal alliance institution, ensured that the power of the United States would be rendered more predictable Risse-Kappen, Power would be caged in institutions, thereby making American power more reliable and connected to Europe and to East Asia.

This American system is built on two historic bargains that the United States has made with the rest of the world. One is the realist bargain and grows out of its Cold War grand strategy. The United States provides its European and Asian partners with security protection and access to American markets, technology, and supplies within an open world economy. In return, these countries agree to be reliable partners who provide diplomatic, economic, and logistical support for the United States as its leads the wider Western postwar order.

The other is a liberal bargain that addresses the uncertainties of American power. East Asian and European states agree to accept American leadership and operate within an agreed-upon political-economic system. In return, the United States opens itself up and binds itself to its partners. The United States makes its power safe for the world and in return the world agrees to live within the American system. These bargains date from the s but continue to undergird the post-Cold War order.

The result has been the most stable and prosperous international order in world history. Three features of this order make American power more stable, engaged, and restrained. First, America's political institutions — open, transparent, and organized around the rule of law — have made it a relatively predictable and cooperative hegemon. The pluralistic and regularized way in which American foreign and security policy is made reduces surprises and allows other states to build long-term, mutually beneficial relations.

The United States was deeply ambivalent about making permanent security commitments to other countries or allowing its political and economic policies to be dictated by intergovernmental bodies. Networks and political relationships were built that — paradoxically — made American power more far-reaching and durable but also more predictable and malleable.

The classic formulation of this logic is Hirschman On the logic of security binding, see Schroeder For more recent formulations, see Deudney and Ikenberry Despite the postwar legacy of liberal hegemony and Western security community, unpolarity — particularly when combined with the new strategic thinking triggered by September 11 — does make more plausible the logic of American empire.

In shaping world order, power and liberalism are a much more potent mixture than simply the exercise of crude material power alone. But the question remains whether the resulting American-led order is an empire. Realist scholars depict international relations as the interaction of sovereign states who maneuver in a world of anarchy.

In the classic Westphalian image, states maintain a monopoly on the use of force domestically, while order at the international level is maintained through a diffusion and equilibrium of power among states. For an important reinterpretation of the Westphalian settlement, see Krasner Krasner argues that the norms of Westphalian sovereignty actually emerged long after and departures from it lace the entire history of the state system.

Today, however, there is a partial inversion of this Westphalian logic. Now the United States has a quasi-monopoly on the use of force at the international level and states are increasingly less sovereign. The domestic institutions and behaviors of states are increasingly open to global — that is, American — scrutiny. The rise of American unipolar predominance and the simultaneous unbundling of state sovereignty are a new world historical development. In historical terms, this is a radically new distribution and manifestation of state power, and so it is not surprising that the world is rethinking and worrying about the new rules and institutions of global order.

Echoing this view, the Italian scholar Vittorio Emanuele Parsi argues that the international system has undergone a transformation in the last decade — only to be intensified since September 11 — as profound as any since the Peace of Westphalia. Parsi identifies two epochal shifts. For five hundred years, the security of states was maintained by ensuring the absence of an overarching power in the international system.

With the rise American unipolarity, stability and peace are guaranteed by the wielding of power by a single superstate. The disparities of power are so great that counterbalancing by the other great powers is impossible. The other grand transformation is the shift in security threats, which makes the Westphalian flip even more provocative and potentially destabilizing. This is the rise of non-state terrorism. Private transnational groups and religious fanatics can now, or will soon be able to, gain access to violence capability that previously only some powerful states could possess.

As many analysts have observed, this alters how the United States and other major states think about their security. The most profound implication is that it makes security among countries within the American system more divisible. That is, whereas during the Cold War all the states in the system experienced a more or less common threat — which reinforced security cooperation and made security indivisible — the new fragmentation and privatization of security threats means these countries experience threats in very different ways. Incentives for security cooperation are eroded.

This transformation has the added effect of making American power and its use of force more controversial and contested. Together these two shifts give the United States the capacity and necessity — but only a few would say the authority — to police international order and unilaterally project force into the affairs of vulnerable yet threatening sovereign states. These new twin logics, of course, were grandly embraced by the Bush administration in its National Security Strategy.

In this vision, the United States will increasingly stand aloof from the rest of the world and use its unipolar power — most importantly, its military power — to arbitrate right and wrong and enforce the peace. In a Hobbesian world of anarchy, the United States must step forward as the order-creating Leviathan. The United States will refuse to play by the same rules as other states; this is the price that the world must pay for the unipolar provision of security.

The Bush administration also warns other great powers not to challenge America's military preeminence. Indeed, in the Bush view, no one should want to try: The rise of post-Cold War unipolarity does alter America's position with other states. Increased power advantages give the United States more freedom of action. It is easier for Washington to say no to other countries or to go it alone. Growing power — military, economic, and technological — also gives the United States more opportunities to control outcomes around the world.

But unipolarity also creates problems of governance. Without bipolar or multipolar competition, it is not clear what disciplines or renders predictable US power. Other countries worry more than in the past about domination, exploitation, and abandonment. They may not be able to organize a counterbalancing alliance but they can resist and undermine US policies. Moreover, when countries confronting the United States are democracies, their leaders may have electoral incentives not to bend to American pressure.

The first feature of the shift from bipolarity to unipolarity is that it entails greater power advantages for the lead state. The United States has new latitude for withholding cooperation. The cost of nonagreement is lower for the United States than for other states, so this confers bargaining advantages on the United States.

There are also new opportunities for other states to free-ride on the American provision of global public goods, particularly security protection and the underwriting of economic openness. Unipolarity, in this sense, is a welcome development for weaker states — to the extent that the United States provides those public goods. But it also opens up a new set of distributive conflicts between the United States and other states. It is here that temptations emerge for the leading state to move from multilateral agreements to specific bilateral deals that allow it to renegotiate the sharing of costs.

More generally, the growing disparities of power between the United States and other major states generate incentives for the unipolar state to renegotiate the old security and economic bargains. This, of course, is the dynamic that emerges after a hegemonic transition, when a new leading state emerges in the international system and wields its newly acquired power to reshape the rules and institutions of international order.

Finally, to the extent that the unipolar state anticipates that its power advantages will wane in the near future, it has incentives to embed in the international order rules and institutions that will lock in some of its advantages in the out-years when it is in a relatively weaker position.

This is the dynamic I discuss in Ikenberry The other feature of unipolarity is the disappearance of a competitor pole. One immediate implication of this is that the absence of alternative options gives the unipolar state bargaining advantages. If other states could threaten to form an alternative and opposing coalition, this would create incentives for the United States to compromise and accommodate its interests to those of weaker states.

But another implication of the disappearance of a rival pole is that one benefit of aligning with the United States also disappears — or is radically reduced — namely, the benefit of security protection.

Other countries do not need the United States as much as they did. Front-line states in the Cold War struggle with Soviet communism are no longer front-line states. This means that the bargaining position of the United States should decline: It might, however, be more correct to say that the need for security protection declines and that there are new variations across regions in the security needs of other states.

Some states will still need and want American security protection and others will not. At the same time, because the United States itself also does not confront a bipolar or multipolar rival s , it too will be less willing to provide public goods of security protection and security-driven economic cooperation. And indeed, American unipolar power today is experiencing a legitimacy problem.

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