Geopoliticians like GUTs–Grand Unified Theories–that reduce the complexity of world events to a simple underlying concept. For the last ten years the world’s favorite GUT has been “the decline of America.” For the ten years before that it was “America’s unilateral moment.”
GUTs are always oversimplified; sometimes they are useful. Right now, the reigning GUT is unusually off target. The turbulence in world politics and world markets is real and it definitely heralds the start of a new stage in world history, but to call this the decline of the United States is to miss the real drama of our times.
What we are seeing today isn’t the collapse of American power; it is something subtly but vitally different. In the 1970s, at a time when the collapse of the Bretton Woods economic system and America’s humiliating withdrawal from Vietnam made the thesis of American decline even more convincing than it is today, the United States developed a new strategy for coping with the changes afoot. That strategy was ‘trilateralism’. The world, people reasoned, was no longer unipolar. America’s era of supremacy had passed. What was needed now was a new kind of coalition: the United States would develop closer ties with the two other main pillars of the world’s economic and political orders: western Europe and Japan. By coordinating policies a bit better, and by treating its most important Cold War allies a bit more equally, the United States could continue to lead the international system even as it adjusted to the post-Bretton Woods, post-Vietnam world.
Trilateral Dynamics
This worked pretty well, and the world embarked on the Trilateral Era. Between them, the EU, the United States and Japan accounted for about 80 percent of the world economy in 1980. Bound together already by the Cold War alliance system, these countries were home to the world’s most dynamic manufacturers, the world’s largest consumer markets, and the world’s most powerful financial institutions. If the trilateral powers agreed on something, they could generally make it stick.
For the United States, the results were better still. The trilateral powers had interests that were broadly aligned with ours; it was not difficult to work out common approaches to many of the economic issues of the day. And while many observers thought that the United States would have to yield more and more power to its trilateral partners as the US continued to decline relative to the others, things didn’t work out that way. Trilateralism didn’t lead to further US decline; it halted and even reversed the process. As the leader of a resurgent Cold War alliance, the United States saw the Soviet Union and its empire fall apart during the Reagan administration. Meanwhile, the United States proved better able to handle the post-Bretton Woods economic environment — more turbulence, more innovation — and watched Japan’s once-surging economy fall into a generation long period of stagnation. Trilateralism turned out to be a transitional stage between two eras of American supremacy, rather than the beginning of American decline.
The ‘unipolar’ moment of the 1990s was produced by three distinct conditions. First, the collapse of the Soviet Union removed America’s only true great power rival from the scene. Second, the emerging powers (China, India, Brazil, Turkey) were not yet strong enough to present a counterweight even potentially to the trilateral system. Third, US predominance within the trilateral coalition continued to grow as Europe was preoccupied by tasks of expansion and governance and Japan continued to stagnate. Indeed, the rise of China, gradually forcing Japan back into a closer dependence on the United States, actually reinforced the American predominance.
Whose Decline?
In the last decade, the phenomenon widely seen as America’s decline is better understood as a crisis of trilateralism. Despite the wars in the Middle East, the United States remained the world’s greatest military power and its economy continued to do better than the economies of its trilateral partners. Nevertheless, despite America’s continued power, the trilateral bloc as a group was in relative decline. Europe continued struggling with, and failing to solve, its internal problems of governance and cohesion. Japan remained gripped by stagnation and its political system was less and less able to cope with its internal, much less its external challenges. The decline of Europe and Japan meant that the trilateral strategy was slowly becoming unworkable. Meanwhile, the rise of China, India, Brazil and Turkey changed both the economic and political dynamics of the world. As the collapse of the Copenhagen climate talks graphically revealed, general agreement among the trilateral countries is no longer enough to set policy for the world.
The United States is like the largest single party in a multi-party parliament. In the 1970s we assembled a trilateral coalition with the Europeans and the Japanese that gave us an overall majority for the coalition government. Today the United States remains the biggest party with more or less the same number of seats as before, but the Europeans and the Japanese are no longer strong enough to give the coalition a majority. The United States is now trying to form a new coalition — keeping the old partners but auditioning new ones for the next stage.
At the same time, both to enhance their bargaining position with the US and to check out the alternatives, a number of countries are experimenting with the creation of an opposition coalition. Could Russia, Turkey, Brazil and Iran cobble something together that could effectively block US initiatives? Could China be lured over to their side?
At the moment this looks like a doomed enterprise. China isn’t interested — although it doesn’t mind keeping its options open — and the gaps between the interests of the other countries are too wide (and their power is too small) to make this coalition appealing.
The Quest for a New Coalition
The Obama administration’s diplomacy so far is perhaps best explained as an effort to check out the potential to bring new partners into the old coalition. China and the United States share a lot of interests and we can count on their active support (or at least passive acquiescence) on a wide range of issues, but both China and the United States prefer to keep our relationship informal. China won’t join the coalition, but while it may keep its options open for the future it doesn’t want to see the government fall. Iran so far has turned the US down flat; that leaves India, Russia, Turkey and Brazil as the countries to work with.
India is the most natural new member of the coalition and for a number of years I have believed that building a new relationship with India is America’s most important strategic task in next couple of decades–a point eloquently made by C. Raja Mohan in the current issue of The American Interest focusing on the new Asian order. We are well on the way, but there are some short term problems. The urgent need to work with Pakistan on Afghan and nuclear issues creates huge headaches for American policy in South Asia. More broadly, for the sake of regional stability, the US must find a way to square its strategic interest in deepening the relationship with India and in promoting India’s emergence as a great power with Pakistan’s security concerns. This won’t be easy or accomplished in one day; their issues are as contentious and explosive as the Arab-Israeli dispute (and both are the products of Britain’s hasty retreat from its responsibilities after World War Two). The surge in Afghanistan has sharpened the Obama administration’s dilemma and narrowed its choices; US-Indian ties are taking a back seat for now but will sooner or later return to center stage.
Russia is the next most important potential new partner for the US, and one can quibble with the details, but the administration’s interest in pushing the ‘reset’ button with Russia makes a lot of sense from this perspective. While Russia is another country in long term decline, it remains a presence on the world scene and in addition to its Security Council vote it brings some important assets to the table in Central Asia. The real interests of the United States and Russia are in fact broadly aligned. We both want geopolitical stability in East and West Asia; we don’t like terrorism and worry about fanatical religious renegades. The two main things Russia seems to want in the world — a veto over Ukraine’s direction and the prestige that comes from a special relationship with the US grounded in its Cold War past and its nuclear arsenal — are things that the US either can’t prevent or doesn’t mind conceding. There are and will be points of friction, and there is not much trust or love on either the Russian or the American side in this relationship, but a pragmatic adjustment and arrangement makes sense.
Turkey is more problematic. Rapid political and economic change both inside Turkey and in its neighborhood vastly complicate the task of creating a new framework for deeper US-Turkish cooperation. The EU’s failing power is part of the problem: EU membership looks both less likely and less attractive to Turkey than it used to, and this is setting off some important, slow moving changes in Turkey’s political culture whose full impact will take some time to play out. Turkey is reviewing its options, weighing the possibilities of closer relations with Russia, Syria and Iran against its Kemalist tradition of western-oriented policy. For now, Turkey is a complicating factor in American foreign policy rather than a coalition partner. That could well change as the new Turkish political establishment gains experience, but for now the United States needs to be looking at damage control rather than new partnership options as it looks at its Turkish policy.
Brazil, despite its ambitions, at the moment lacks both the heft and the will to join a new and broader international coalition. It longs to play a global role independent of the United States, and in the present political climate in Latin America, its regional and global aspirations both suggest that Brazil has more to gain in opposition to the US than as an ally. Gestures toward Iran, for example, reinforce the Brazilian government on the left in the run-up to the election and strengthen relations between other anti-US countries like Argentina and Venezuela. Brazil at the moment can do little to help the United States outside Latin America and it has little incentive to help us inside the hemisphere.
Looking Ahead
The next stage in America’s career as a world power is unlikely to be as easy as the Trilateral era. The emerging powers we need to bring into the coalition can be demanding and difficult partners, and their economic interests and political values do not always align with ours in the relatively simple and easy ways that European and Japanese interests did in the past. And since we don’t want to throw Europe and Japan under the bus, we will have to continue attending to the interests and concerns of the old partners even as we bring new ones into our councils.
But while the new coalition is likely to be turbulent and fractious, it is more likely than not that the United States will eventually work something out. Our general global program of geopolitical stability, cultural tolerance and economic integration and development remains the only realistic approach to global issues that meets the needs of the other great powers, and a coalition headed by the United States remains the best and indeed the only practical way to guide the world in the direction that most of the key actors and large forces want it to take.
The world’s political and economic systems are getting more complex and less governable all the time, but the United States and its closest partners remain, for the foreseeable future, the only forces on the stage with much chance of keeping things on something like an even keel. Of the two tasks — building a new international coalition and leading that coalition to effective action on behalf of the international community — the second is the most difficult; President Obama and his successors will not have trouble keeping busy.