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The empire-makers of 2002 weakened America’s covert empire because, at a critical level, they didn’t understand how it worked. As Ivo Daalder and James Lindsay note in “America Unbound” (Brookings; $22.95), a new history of Bush’s foreign policy, Administration hawks believe that American global supremacy is possible not only because America is a uniquely just nation but because others around the globe see it as such. The current unipolar state of the world is the best evidence of this: because most countries see American power as being more benign than not, they acquiesce in it. But this acquiescence isn’t irreversible.
In ways that many hawks have been slow to realize, the demise of the Soviet Union has had a paradoxical effect on America’s role in the world. What has made the United States more powerful militarily has made it weaker politically. For half a century, American policymakers had been accustomed to habits of deference from democratic allies in Europe and Asia. Yet fear of the Soviets was responsible for much of that deference. That’s why, in the decade after the Cold War, the makers of our foreign policy recognized that America could best protect its supremacy by making sure that smaller countries felt, even in some small measure, that they had been “dealt in.” This was one function of those balky international organizations, and not the least important objective of international diplomacy.
The current Administration has, of course, taken a different tack. As Fareed Zakaria observed last year, after speaking to government officials in dozens of countries around the world, almost every country that has had dealings with the Bush Administration has felt humiliated by it. America isn’t powerful because people like us: our power is a product of dollars and guns. But when people think that America’s unique role in the world is basically legitimate, that power becomes less costly to exert and to sustain. People around the world have respected and admired American power because of the way America has acted. If it acts differently, the perceptions of American benevolence can start to ebb—and, to judge from any public-opinion poll from abroad over the last year, that’s essentially what has happened. When it comes to political capital, too, this is an Administration with a weakness for deficit spending.
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