STRATEGIES OF OPPOSITION
Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic led a country whose population was 3 percent the size of the U.S. population. Serbia’s GNP was roughly 0.2 percent that of the United States, and it spent roughly $1.6 billion on defense in 1998 (compared with $271 billion spent by the United States). Yet Milosevic did not seem troubled by his Lilliputian stature. When U.S. diplomat Richard Holbrooke met with Milosevic in October 1998 to negotiate the status of Kosovo, Holbrooke tried to impress the Serb leader by bringing along Air Force Lieutenant General Michael Short, who would later command the air war against the Serbs. At their first meeting, Milosevic greeted Short by remarking, “So you are the man who is going to bomb me.” And when Short told the Serbian president that he had “U2s in one hand and B-52s in the other, and the choice [of which I use] is up to you,” Milosevic “just sort of nodded.” Milose-vic was given a detailed briefing describing what an air war would do to Serbia, but he ultimately rejected NATO’s proposals and chose to face war instead.1
This story reminds us that some states sometimes choose to resist U.S. primacy, even against what appear to be overwhelming odds. Countries that align with the United States are sometimes vexing for U.S. policymakers, but the more serious challenges arise from other states that are reluctant to embrace Pax Americana, and especially from those that feel threatened by U.S. primacy and would like to find ways to keep American power in check. If the United States cannot make its position of primacy acceptable to others, the number of countries in this category will grow and the world will be a more contentious and unpleasant place. It would also be a world in which it would be more difficult for the United States to achieve its core foreign-policy goals.
States that oppose U.S. power do so for three main reasons. First, and most obviously, states that regard the United States as fundamentally hostile—and whose basic interests are at odds with ours—will reject alignment with the United States and are likely to adopt a policy of open defiance. The obvious examples here are the so-called rogue states singled out by the Clinton administration, or the three “axis of evil” nations identified by President Bush in his 2002 State of the Union speech.
Second, some states may oppose U.S. policy on a limited set of issues, while trying to maintain good relations with Washington in other areas. As long as the differences do not become too great, such frictions are part of the normal give-and-take of international life. Even in these relatively benign contexts, however, other countries will be interested in finding ways to counter U.S. power, if only to get a better bargain for themselves.
Third, states may also choose to resist the United States because they are worried about the broader implications of American primacy. This motivation may reflect the fear that the United States will use its power to get its way on specific issues today, but it also reflects the broader concern that U.S. power will be used in ways that might harm others’ interests in the future. It is, in short, the general fear of unchecked power in a world where there is no overarching authority that can prevent strong states from acting as they please. As Russian President Vladimir Putin said in February 2003, “We believe here in Russia, just as French President Jacques Chirac believes, that the future international security architecture must be based on a multipolar world. That is the main thing that unites us. I am absolutely confident that the world will be predictable and stable only if it is multipolar.”2 Former European Commission President Romano Prodi explained cooperation between the EU and China in similar terms, saying, “We are building new relationships, and it’s clear it’s a commitment for us and for China. Both of us want a multipolar world in which we have many active protagonists. This is a Chinese priority and it is a European interest.” Or, as South African leader Nelson Mandela put it, South Africa cannot accept one state “having the arrogance to tell us where we should go or which countries should be our friends. . . . We cannot accept that a state assumes the role of the world’s policeman.”3
But how do you stop an eight-hundred-pound gorilla? What can other states do to restrain a country as powerful as the United States? Trying to resist the United States is fraught with peril—as Milosevic, the Taliban, and Saddam Hussein have all learned to their sorrow. The combination of economic, technological, and military resources at America’s disposal does not enable it to do everything, but U.S. power can make it costly for other states to defy its wishes. Even states that have little reason to fear a U.S. invasion have to worry that the United States might punish their defiance in less vivid but still painful ways.
Yet states do defy the United States—and sometimes violently— and the record of the past decade shows that even far weaker states do have options. Just as children routinely disobey their parents, just as slaves sometimes defied their owners, and just as inmates find small ways to evade the rules imposed by their jailers, so too will weaker states in today’s international system employ various methods either to evade U.S. control or to limit the ability of the United States to have its way. These strategies may not undermine America’s dominant position—at least, not in the short term—but they complicate its diplomacy and form much of the context in which U.S. foreign policy must now be conducted. Let us first consider when states are likely to challenge America’s dominant position, and then consider the different strategies they can employ.
When Will Other States Challenge U.S. Primacy?
Given the preponderance of power in America’s favor, why would any state risk courting the direct opposition of the world’s most powerful country? The obvious answer, of course, is when there are profound conflicts of interest between the United States and some other country—conflicts so fundamental that appeasement or accommodation is impossible. But even when serious conflicts are present, other states have to consider whether defying Washington’s wishes is still prudent. Whether resistance makes sense will depend on three major conditions.
1. How Big Is the Disagreement?
States (or nonstate actors) are more likely to reject accommodation and oppose U.S. dominance when there are fundamental conflicts between their foreign-policy goals and those of the United States. During the Cold War, for example, the long rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union was partly based on the balance of power—that is, on the fact that they were the two most powerful states in the system—but also on unbridgeable ideological differences. The American and Soviet visions of an ideal social order were fundamentally at odds, which made it hard to imagine either one voluntarily aligning with the other.
In the post–Cold War world, states that have chosen to defy the United States openly have generally been those whose foreign-policy objectives clashed sharply with U.S. preferences. The most obvious examples were the members of the Bush administration’s “axis of evil”—Iraq, Iran, and North Korea—but several others (e.g., Serbia, Syria, Libya) have defied U.S. pressure as well. Although there were important differences among these regimes, each was committed to foreign-policy objectives opposed by the United States, and several of them were also seeking to obtain weapons of mass destruction, a goal that U.S. leaders have emphatically opposed.
Finally, some states will seek to oppose the United States on particular issues, or will merely be looking for ways to keep U.S. power in check. Thus, Japan and South Korea want the United States to act with restraint in dealing with North Korea’s nuclear ambitions, and France, Russia, China, and several others have openly opposed the Bush administration’s emphasis on preventive war, and especially its decision to launch one against Iraq. States such as these do not oppose the United States on many (or even most) global issues, but they are clearly willing to defy Washington on occasion and to look for ways to give their opposition greater weight.
2. Will the United States Find Out?
States will be more inclined to oppose U.S. dominance when they think they can get away with it. Their ability to do so depends in part on whether the United States is likely to detect what they are up to. Governments cannot punish criminals if they are either unaware that a crime has occurred or do not know who did it, and prison wardens cannot punish inmates whose infractions have not yet been discovered. Similarly, the United States cannot sanction other states when it is not aware of their transgressions or is unable to identify exactly who is responsible.
The ability to detect foreign resistance depends on the relative balance between U.S. surveillance and intelligence capabilities and an opponent’s capacity for concealment and deception. In some cases, of course, defiance is impossible to conceal, as when Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic rejected NATO’s ultimatum at the Rambouillet (France) summit and began forcibly expelling the Albanian population of Kosovo. In other cases, however, defiance of the United States may be deliberately concealed or left inherently ambiguous. States that are trying to develop weapons of mass destruction are likely to conceal their activities, or they will claim that their nuclear programs are intended solely for legitimate peaceful purposes. An even more subtle variation occurs when a foreign government takes a public position in line with U.S. preferences but does not devote much effort or energy to implementing the agreement. Whether such regimes are “cooperating” or not depends on how much cooperation one can reasonably expect, which makes a definitive assessment of their performance more difficult.
In most cases, of course, U.S. officials will be well aware when other states are resisting. Opposition is obvious when foreign leaders publicly complain about U.S. positions, when they take actions that the United States has sought to prevent, or when they encourage other states to join them in defying U.S. wishes. U.S. leaders may underestimate both the scope and the intensity of foreign opposition (if only because some states will be reluctant to declare it openly), but it is unlikely to come as a complete surprise.
3. Will the United States Respond?
Other states are more likely to defy the United States if they believe that America will be unable or unwilling to respond—either because the United States does not have usable options or because the costs of retaliation outweigh the benefits. During the Cold War, for example, the risks of escalation made it more dangerous for the United States to threaten Soviet client states directly. This constraint helps explain why the United States never invaded North Vietnam, why Soviet allies such as Syria and Iraq could resist U.S. pressure, and why India could ignore U.S. opposition to its dismemberment of Pakistan in 1971. But as the recent wars in Serbia, Afghanistan, and Iraq suggest, the ability of the United States to threaten some regimes is greater now, both because potential opponents cannot get help or protection from a rival superpower and because U.S. armed forces are increasingly capable of projecting overwhelming force over great distances. Although the U.S. experience in Afghanistan or Iraq could not be duplicated against more capable foes, there is little question that the direct cost of U.S. military action against opposing states is significantly lower than it once was.
When military force is not an option, the United States can also use economic sanctions or other forms of economic pressure in order to compel obedience. Sanctions are a popular response when leaders feel that they have to “do something,” but they are no panacea. Economic sanctions usually require broad international cooperation to be effective, and they will have little effect when the potential target has minimal ties to the United States. Political scientist Daniel Drezner calls this phenomenon the “sanctions paradox”: Economic sanctions work best against countries where there is a close and potentially long-term economic relationship—because each side has a lot to lose—but these states tend to be close U.S. allies and thus are the states that U.S. leaders are least disposed to punish. Sanctions are more likely to be used against hostile regimes, but such regimes are unlikely to be close economic partners and thus will have less at stake. In other words, economic weapons work best where they are least likely to be employed, and they work least well in the cases where they are most frequently applied.4 U.S. leaders will also be reluctant to employ sanctions when doing so will hurt U.S. firms, and especially if it will give foreign competitors new market opportunities.
Even when the United States does have viable options for countering or punishing foreign opposition, it is not going to respond to every single act of foreign opposition. When choosing whether or not to punish an act of opposition, U.S. leaders have to decide whether the benefits of retaliation will exceed the costs. Will retaliation today deter a new challenge tomorrow, or will it inspire greater resentment and lead to further acts of defiance? Is the issue involved largely symbolic, or are there more vital interests at stake? Will retaliation make it easier for us to achieve other important objectives, or make it more difficult to respond to new challenges elsewhere? Because U.S. policymakers have to weigh both the costs and the benefits of reacting to each act of defiance, other states will sometimes be able to ignore or defy U.S. wishes without facing a direct U.S. response.
When deciding to resist U.S. power, therefore, other states must calculate the probability that the United States will choose to use its power to punish them. Even if they know their actions will be detected, and even if they are aware that the United States has usable options, they may still conclude that the United States is unlikely to react, especially if the costs of retaliation are likely to exceed the expected benefits.
This consideration suggests that other states can affect the probability of a hostile U.S. response by limiting the scope of the challenge, or by carefully “designing around” a particular deterrent warning.5 Weaker states that are worried about U.S. retaliation will try to challenge the United States in ways that undermine its position, but never so much that the United States is compelled to respond with overwhelming force. Even if the United States does react, it may not go all-out if the infraction is fairly minor.
As Thomas Schelling noted some years ago, this is the basic problem of “salami tactics.” When retaliation is costly, weaker actors may be able to evade the rules just enough to get some of what they want, but without going so far that they provoke a harsh response. If a weaker challenger is persistent and clever, it may win a series of concessions by making each incursion just a little too small to justify a response. Each marginal infraction is not worth punishing, but the cumulative effect—if unchecked—can be enormous.6
For the United States, which faces potential challenges virtually everywhere, the problem becomes one of credibility. Can the United States deter a wide range of potential challenges by responding forcefully to a few minor ones? Just as dominant corporations sometimes fight costly “price wars” in order to deter rivals from trying to enter their markets, the United States will be tempted to fight “credibility wars” designed to show challengers what will happen if they defy U.S. wishes.7 This strategy makes sense if the costs are low, and if they do not encourage more and more states to see the United States as the main threat that needs to be thwarted or contained. But this strategy can backfire if the costs of reacting are unexpectedly high, if taking action in one area makes it impossible to react somewhere else, or if the use of force by the United States magnifies foreign resentment and inspires additional acts of resistance.
This point reminds us that the size and scope of resistance matters. U.S. primacy does not prevent weaker states (and nonstate actors) from challenging its power, provided that they can do so without threatening core U.S. interests. From this perspective, al Qaeda’s attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, may have been a strategic blunder. Osama bin Laden and his network had attacked U.S. military targets in the Arab world on several occasions, including the bombing of the USS Cole in October 2000. In response, the United States had arrested several al Qaeda associates, fired cruise missiles at terrorist training camps in Afghanistan and Sudan, and formulated more ambitious plans to capture bin Laden himself. But until September 11 occurred, neither the Clinton nor the Bush administration chose to go all-out against al Qaeda.8 Had al Qaeda continued to operate far from the U.S. homeland, the United States might never have decided to invade Afghanistan (thereby eliminating its main sanctuary) or made a “war on terrorism” the defining focus of its foreign policy. By attacking U.S. soil directly and with such dramatic effect, however, al Qaeda made a forceful U.S. response virtually inevitable.9
States are also more likely to defy the United States when it is already busy elsewhere and thus less able to respond to a new challenge. In any hierarchy, subordinates are more likely to engage in acts of defiance, resistance, or noncompliance when their supervisors are distracted. Workers are more likely to shirk when the foreman is monitoring another part of the jobsite and prisoners in one cell block will have greater latitude when the guards are busy elsewhere. By the same logic, countries that seek to defy the United States will look for moments when the United States is already tied down. Even a state as powerful as the United States cannot devote equal attention and effort to all problems, and the more heavily engaged the United States is in one area, the greater the latitude enjoyed by states in other regions. Unless a particular act of resistance constitutes a clear and immediate threat, it will be harder to move the problem up the bureaucratic agenda when other issues are already dominating policy debates.
In short, states that seek to challenge U.S. primacy will look for windows of opportunity. The temptation to exploit these windows will increase even further when they enable other states to alter the balance of power in some tangible and enduring way. Defying the United States is inherently risky, but it makes more sense to run these risks if the act of defiance itself may place the state in question in a fundamentally stronger strategic position.
Consider three examples. The first is Iraq’s decision to invade Kuwait in 1990. Although this decision is often portrayed as evidence of Saddam Hussein’s reckless expansionism, it is more properly understood as a “rational” response to the combination of threats and opportunities that Iraq faced at that time. Relations between Iraq and Kuwait were already poor, and Iraq’s economic position was increasingly dire. By seizing the defenseless sheikhdom, Iraq could eliminate a key creditor, gain control of oil revenues worth roughly 40 percent of Iraq’s own GDP, and enhance its ability to intimidate neighboring states such as Saudi Arabia. And it could achieve all of these things in a few hours, with little or no risk that its army would be defeated— provided that outsiders did not come to Kuwait’s assistance. There seemed to be little danger of that happening, however, given that the United States was preoccupied with the collapse of the Soviet empire and U.S. diplomats had unwittingly signaled that the United States was not committed to protecting Kuwait. Although the invasion did not work out as Saddam expected, his decision to invade was neither reckless nor surprising.10
An even clearer example of this sort of behavior was North Korea’s decision to restart its nuclear development program in 2003. Relations between Washington and Pyongyang had deteriorated under the Bush administration, and the 1994 “Agreed Framework” halting North Korea’s nuclear program had largely collapsed by the end of 2002. The Bush administration was aware of North Korea’s nuclear ambitions, but its preoccupation with Iraq gave North Korea an ideal opportunity to accelerate its nuclear development activities. With the United States busy in the Gulf, there was less danger of a preventive strike on the Korean Peninsula. Equally important, this window might permit North Korea to acquire enough nuclear material to make it too dangerous to challenge later. In other words, North Korea seized a window of opportunity in order to achieve a small but significant shift in the Asian balance of power.
Much the same logic seems to be guiding Iran’s own pursuit of a nuclear capability. During 2003, coordinated pressure from the United States and the European Union made some progress in slowing—and possibly halting—Iran’s nuclear development program. The invasion of Iraq reinforced this effort at first, because it seemed to suggest that Iran would have to take U.S. military threats seriously. Once the Iraqi insurgency ensnared the United States in a prolonged occupation, however, the threat of additional military action evaporated and Iran returned to a more defiant position. Tehran announced in August 2004 that it was resuming construction of enrichment centrifuges and declared that it would not allow “others to deprive us of our natural and legal rights.” As Gary Samore of the International Institute for Strategic Studies explained: “The US is bogged down in Iraq, the conservatives control the Iranian parliament and Iran does not feel that sanctions are likely. So it has reneged on a key part of [its earlier] agreement.”11 Like the North Koreans, in short, Iran exploited the window of opportunity created by the Iraq debacle in order to press ahead with its nuclear programs.12
The moral of these (and other) stories is simple. U.S. power confers many advantages on the United States and creates many options for U.S. leaders—options that no other state can even contemplate. Yet primacy does not mean that all (or even most) states must invariably accommodate Washington’s wishes. Although the United States enjoys an unprecedented asymmetry of power, other states still have options. If conflicts of interest are large enough, if resistance can be concealed, or if there are good reasons to believe that the United States either cannot or will not respond, then other states do not have to accommodate to U.S. power and can pursue various strategies of opposition or resistance instead. What are the main strategies available to them, when will they be chosen, and how well are they likely to work?
Balancing
According to realist theories of world politics, states respond to unbalanced power by balancing against the dominant country. In the words of Kenneth Waltz: “As nature abhors a vacuum, so international politics abhors unbalanced power. Faced with unbalanced power, some states try to increase their own strength or they ally with others, to bring the international distribution of power into balance.”13 States may balance externally, by combining their capabilities with others, or they may balance internally, by mobilizing their own resources in ways that will enable them to resist stronger states more effectively. Or they may do both. In any case, the goal is the same: to ensure that a more powerful state (or coalition) cannot use its superior capabilities in ways that the weaker side will find unpleasant.
Traditional balance-of-power theory focuses on the distribution of material capabilities, such as population, economic wealth, military power, and natural resources. It predicts that states will normally balance against the most powerful state—i.e., the one with the greatest material resources. Applying it to the current era, balance-of-power theory leads us to expect America’s existing alliances to become more fragile and harder to lead, and predicts that other countries will either mobilize internal resources to counter the U.S. advantage or join forces in order to limit U.S. freedom of action.
The Relative Absence of External Balancing
At first glance, the standard realist view seems to face an immediate challenge. Although there are modest signs of anti-American balancing, there is much less than the theory leads us to expect. To be sure, the end of the Cold War and the arrival of the second Bush administration have been accompanied by growing tensions between the United States and its European allies, with experts on both sides of the Atlantic warning that NATO can no longer be taken for granted.14 During the 1990s, French Foreign Minister Hubert Vedrine repeatedly complained about America’s position as a “hyperpower” and proclaimed that “the entire foreign policy of France … is aimed at making the world of tomorrow composed of several poles, not just one.” German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder offered a similar warning in 1999, declaring that the danger of “unilateralism” by the United States is “undeniable.”15 Schroeder then won reelection in 2002 by openly distancing himself from the United States over the issue of war with Iraq, and even the successful incorporation of several new NATO members in 2003 could not disguise the growing gulf between the two sides of the Atlantic.16
Concerns about American power have also led to tentative efforts at multilateral cooperation against the United States. The European Union is seeking to reduce its dependence on the United States by improving its own defense capabilities, amid continued calls for institutional reforms that will permit Europe to speak with a unified voice in foreign affairs. China and Russia have reacted to U.S. preponderance by seeking to resolve existing points of friction and increasing other forms of security cooperation—a process that culminated in the signing of a formal treaty of friendship and cooperation in July 2001. Although the treaty was not directed at a specific country, it was explicitly intended to foster a “new international order,” and Russian commentators described it as an “act of friendship against America.” Russian President Vladimir Putin has also labored to improve Russia’s relations with India and with Europe, based in part on the explicit desire to “help create a balance in the world.” There can be little doubt as to which state he thinks needs to be balanced against. Even lesser states would like more limits on U.S. primacy: as Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez put it in 2000, “The twenty-first century should be multipolar, and we all ought to push for the development of such a world. So long live a united Asia, a united Africa, a united Europe.”17
The tendency to join forces against U.S. power reached a new peak in early 2003, when a loose coalition of France, Germany, Russia, and several small states combined to deny UN Security Council authorization for America’s preventive war against Iraq. Not surprisingly, the ouster of Saddam Hussein also encouraged increased security cooperation between Syria and Iran, especially after prominent U.S. officials made threatening statements toward both countries.18 And when U.S. President George W. Bush was reelected in November 2004, French President Jacques Chirac responded by saying, “European cohesion is naturally the right way to deal with … the worries or concerns” of the election, adding, “Europe today has more need than ever to reinforce its unity and dynamism.”19
If one is looking for signs of balancing against U.S. power, in short, they are not difficult to find. Yet it is striking how limited these efforts have been. Responses to U.S. primacy pale in comparison to the encircling coalitions that Wilhelmine Germany or the Soviet Union provoked, where most of the other major powers made formal or informal alliances to defeat or contain these powerful expansionist states. U.S. allies have long resented their dependence on the United States and the unsubtle hand of U.S. leadership, but the old cry, “Yankee, Go Home,” is still largely unheard in Europe and Asia. Instead, the United States is still formally allied with NATO (whose membership has grown to twenty-six, with other aspirants in the wings), and it has renewed and deepened its military relationship with Japan. Its security ties with South Korea, Taiwan, and several other ASEAN countries remain intact, even though opinions of the United States have declined sharply in recent years, and an announcement that the Pentagon was planning major troop redeployments in Europe and Asia provoked a decidedly mixed reaction in both regions.20 U.S. relations with Russia are sometimes contentious but still far better than they were during the Cold War, and relations with China improved as soon as the United States started worrying more about terrorism and less about China’s possible emergence as a future peer competitor. Similarly, U.S. ties with India are warmer and deeper than ever before, despite America’s continued embrace of General Pervez Musharraf’s Pakistan. To date, at least, no one is making a serious effort to forge a meaningful anti-American alliance.
Meanwhile, who have been America’s principal adversaries? Instead of America’s facing a combined coalition of major powers united by a common desire to contest U.S. primacy, its main enemies have been a stateless terrorist network and the isolated and oppressive regimes in Cuba, Serbia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Iran, and North Korea. Even taken together, these states possess little power and even less international support.21 With enemies like these, one might ask, who needs friends?
From the perspective of classical balance-of-power theory, this situation seems anomalous. Power in the international system is about as unbalanced as it has ever been, yet balancing tendencies have been comparatively mild. Although a number of states are engaged in various forms of internal balancing (discussed below), there have been only modest efforts at external balancing through the creation of an anti-U.S. coalition. Such efforts do exist, of course, but one has to squint pretty hard to see them. How can we account for this apparent violation of classical international-relations theory?
The anomaly of states failing to balance U.S. power vanishes when we focus not on power but on threats.22 Although the United States is enormously powerful relative to other states, it has not been perceived as a major threat by most other powers. To begin with, the United States profits from its geographic isolation in the Western Hemisphere, which makes it more difficult for the United States to engage in ambitious wars of territorial expansion.23 Moreover, because the other major powers lie in close proximity to one another, they tend to worry more about each other than they do about the United States. Indeed, as discussed in chapter 4, this explains why the United States is still an attractive ally for states in Europe and Asia. U.S power ensures that its voice will be heard and its actions will be felt, but it lies a comfortable distance away and does not threaten to conquer or rule its allies directly.
Much the same logic applies in much of Asia, which is why America’s Asian allies prefer a U.S. presence even though U.S. power dwarfs their own.24 Geographic proximity also explains why it would be exceptionally difficult to construct a cohesive anti-American coalition of Russia, China, and India—unless the United States behaves in an especially bellicose and shortsighted manner. These three Asian giants worry as much about each other as they do about the United States.
Anti-American balancing has also been muted because U.S. intentions have been perceived as comparatively benign, at least until very recently. Although the United States has used force on numerous occasions—and sometimes with less-than-compelling justification— most of the world’s major powers have not seen the United States as an especially aggressive country. Instead of seeking to conquer and dominate large sections of the globe—as the European Great Powers did during their imperial heyday—the United States has generally acted as an “offshore balancer.”25 It has intervened in Eurasian affairs with some reluctance, and only when local powers were unable to maintain a stable equilibrium on their own.
This behavior, however, stands in sharp contrast to U.S. conduct in North America and the Western Hemisphere, where it proceeded to conquer a continent, subjugate the indigenous inhabitants, evict the other Great Powers, and openly proclaim its own hegemony over the region. Not surprisingly, the United States is seen as a hostile power in much of Latin America—where it has intervened on numerous occasions to maintain its hegemony—even though it has enjoyed remarkably good relations with its allies in Europe and Asia. Good fences make good neighbors, and two vast oceanic moats help insulate the United States and much of the world from each other. The United States may be self-righteous, hypocritical, and occasionally trigger-happy, but most states have had little reason to believe that it might try to conquer them. As a result, they have been less inclined to balance America’s daunting capabilities than we would otherwise expect.
Here again, one may draw a useful contrast between Presidents George H. W. Bush and William Clinton, on the one hand, and President George W. Bush on the other. Under the first two, the United States generally acted within the framework of existing security institutions and sought to advance its influence largely by incorporating new states into these arrangements. U.S. power was used defensively—in response to specific acts of aggression—and for the most part only after careful international consultation. By contrast, the second Bush administration was openly skeptical of many existing institutions and willing to initiate the use of force in order to alter the status quo in its favor. As one would expect, this more assertive policy also encouraged other states to begin balancing somewhat more vigorously.
Other states remain reluctant to balance the United States because such a policy is not without risks. Forming a balancing coalition requires trust: each member of a balancing coalition must be confident that its allies will contribute to the common objective (in this case, the containment of American power), and each must be reasonably sure that the others will not defect at the first sign of trouble and leave one isolated against a powerful adversary. This concern gives the United States yet another advantage: Because its power is ample and diverse, and because it is not very dependent on any allies at present, it can play a strategy of “divide and conquer” whenever a countervailing coalition threatens to emerge.
Last but not least, other states are reluctant to form an overt anti-American coalition because such an alliance would still be substantially weaker than the United States itself, at least initially. Although a coalition of medium powers (i.e., Europe, Russia, India, Japan, and China) possesses a combined GDP exceeding that of the United States, as well as a formidable nuclear arsenal, its military capabilities would still trail the United States by a wide margin, and it would be plagued by the rifts and uncertainties that habitually undermine alliance cohesion. Unless U.S. foreign policy becomes even more bellicose, therefore, other states are unlikely to construct a formal anti-American alliance.26
“Soft Balancing”
Instead of forming formal alliances to contain the United States, other states generally have opted for “soft balancing.”27 “Hard balancing” focuses on the overall balance of power and seeks to assemble a countervailing coalition that will be strong enough to keep the dominant power in check. By contrast, soft balancing does not seek or expect to alter the overall distribution of capabilities. Instead, a strategy of soft balancing accepts the current balance of power but seeks to obtain better outcomes within it. In the current era of U.S. dominance, therefore, soft balancing is the conscious coordination of diplomatic action in order to obtain outcomes contrary to U. S. preferences—outcomes that could not be gained if the balancers did not give each other some degree of mutual support. By definition, “soft balancing” seeks to limit the ability of the United States to impose its preferences on others. To practice soft balancing, therefore, other states must coordinate their actions with this aim explicitly in mind.
A strategy of soft balancing can have several objectives. First, and most obviously, states may balance in order to increase their ability to resist U.S. pressure, including the use of military force. In recent years, for example, several states that were directly threatened by U.S. power have shared intelligence information designed to enhance each other’s ability to stand up to U.S. pressure. Serbia received information on U.S. air-warfare tactics from Iraq prior to the war in Kosovo, which helped the Serbs prepare for NATO’s air offensive.28 Other reports suggest that the People’s Republic of China provided fiber-optic technology for Iraq’s command-and-control system, thereby enhancing Iraq’s air defense capabilities. Although commercial benefits may have been the primary motivation for these programs, the potential of complicating U.S. activities in the Middle East and Persian Gulf may have struck the Chinese government as a desirable bonus. Similarly, North Korea is reported to have sold fluorine gas, a requisite material for making uranium hexafluoride, to Iran, a step that is both profitable and further complicates U.S. antiproliferation efforts.29 Nonstate actors (e.g., terrorist groups) have also provided each other with various forms of mutual support, while retaining their own independent identities and political agendas.
Second, joining forces with others is a way of improving one’s bargaining position in global negotiations—whether the issue is trade, regulation of genetically modified foods, environmental safeguards, labor regulations, or even issues of “high politics” like the use of military force. Thus, soft balancing may arise in response to some discrete issue, or it may be used when states are bargaining over the broad institutional arrangements that regulate international behavior. Within the World Trade Organization, for example, a coalition of twenty-one developing countries—led by Brazil, China, India, and South Africa and representing more than half the world’s population—has come together to pressure developed countries to make significant reductions in their farm subsidies and other trade barriers. South African representative Alex Erwin called the move a “historic moment, when we have been able to unify our positions across economies.” This concerted effort paid off in July 2004, when the developed countries were forced to make a series of concessions on agricultural subsidies that paved the way for a new trade round. As Brazilian Foreign Minister Celso Amorim put it, “This is the beginning of the end of all subsidies.”30 A unified stance enhanced the weaker states’ bargaining positions, so the wealthier powers could not get the concessions they wanted without making concessions in exchange.31
Third, soft balancing can also be intended as a diplomatic “shot across the bow,” to remind the United States that it cannot take for granted the compliance of other states. The Sino-Russian “Friendship Pact” of 2001 seems to have been intended for this purpose; by demonstrating that they had other options (even if neither state really wanted to pursue them very far), Russia and China sought to remind Washington that excessive unilateralism could lead to “harder” balancing in the future. In December 2004, in fact, the two countries announced that they would conduct joint military exercises involving land, air, and naval forces, a move that one analyst termed “a symbolic gesture aimed at the United States, intended to show that Russia has other allies.” Similarly, Russia and Iran have quietly expanded their own strategic partnership since 2000, at least partly in response to the increased U.S. presence in the region. As one analyst comments, “Russia and Iran have joined efforts to limit the influence of the United States and its allies (Turkey and Israel) in central Asia and the Caucasus. . . . Iran’s partnership with Russia … is … a strategic response to U.S. efforts to develop influence in the area through its ties with Turkey, Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Uzbekistan.”32
A potentially more significant illustration of this sort of soft balancing is the expanding strategic partnership between the EU and China. Not only is each now the other’s largest trading partner, but Chinese leaders now hold regular meetings with European officials and each now speaks openly of their strategic “partnership.” Plans are underway for military exchanges, several European countries have already conducted search-and-rescue exercises with Chinese naval forces, and other forms of strategic dialogue are increasingly frequent. Perhaps most important of all, the EU is about to lift the arms embargo it imposed after Tiananmen Square—despite strong U.S. pressue to keep it in force—a step that will facilitate China’s efforts to increase its military power. These developments are still relatively modest and are probably not inspired by a desire to balance U.S. power directly, but the trend highlights Europe’s increasing independence from the United States and its willingness to take steps that could complicate U.S. strategic planning in East Asia. Given their shared preference for a more multipolar world in which U.S. power is at least somewhat constrained, it is hardly surprising that Europe and China are beginning to move closer together.33
Fourth, soft balancing is also a way to hedge one’s bets in the face of growing uncertainty about relations with the United States. A classic example of this type of balancing, as Robert Art suggests, is Europe’s gradual effort to create a genuine European defense capability. Although the original motivation for this policy was not anti-American, Europe’s ability to chart its own course in world politics—and to take positions at odds with U.S. preferences—will be enhanced if it becomes less dependent on U.S. protection and able to defend its own interests on its own.34 A more unified European defense force would also increase Europe’s bargaining power within existing transatlantic institutions, which is why U.S. officials have always been ambivalent about European efforts to build autonomous capabilities.
The feasibility of both hard and soft balancing depends in part on each state’s expectations of what other potential balancing partners will do. No state wants to face the United States alone—even in a purely diplomatic context—and soft balancing is therefore more likely to occur when several states are looking to check U.S. power and are confident that the others will be steadfast. Up to a point, therefore, successful soft balancing is self-reinforcing: the more states that are worried about U.S. power and U.S. policy—and the more obvious and deeply rooted their concerns are—then the more willing each of them will be to coordinate a common effort to contain American action.35 In this sense, therefore, soft balancing could also lay the groundwork for more fundamental challenges to U.S. power. States that coordinate positions on minor issues may become more comfortable with each other and thus better able to collaborate on larger issues, and repeated successes can build the trust needed to sustain a more ambitious counter-hegemonic coalition. Thus, successful soft balancing today may lay the foundations for more significant shifts tomorrow.
As already suggested, the Bush administration’s failure to obtain UN Security Council authorization for its 2003 preventive war against Iraq illustrates perfectly the various dynamics of soft balancing. Although there was broad agreement that Saddam Hussein was a brutal tyrant, and broad opposition to Iraq’s weapons programs, the United States was able to persuade only three other states to support its call to arms within the UN Security Council. This failure was partly due to widespread concerns about U.S. power and the Bush administration’s heavy-handed diplomacy, but also because France, Russia, and Germany were able to convince the rest of the Security Council that they were going to hang together on this issue.36
The antiwar coalition did not “balance” in the classic sense (i.e., it did not try to resist U.S. armed forces directly or send military support to Iraq), but its collective opposition made it safer for lesser powers such as Cameroon and Mexico to resist U.S. pressure during the critical Security Council debate. The result was classic soft balancing: by adopting a unified position, these nations were able to deny the United States the legitimacy it had sought and thereby impose greater political and economic costs on Bush’s decision to go to war. Their actions also made it less costly for a state like Turkey to refuse U.S. requests to use Turkish military bases during the war.
Yet the diplomacy of the Iraq war also illustrates the limits of soft balancing. Defeat in the Security Council did not prevent the United States from going to war, and the Bush administration was able to obtain political support (as well as symbolic military participation) from Great Britain, Spain, Italy, Japan, Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, and a number of other countries.37 These successes remind us that NATO expansion has made it easier for the United States to use a divide-and-conquer strategy within the alliance, because expansion has brought in a set of new members who are more interested in close ties with the United States than NATO’s more established members are. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s dismissive remarks about “old Europe” and his praise for “new Europe” were needlessly provocative, but his comment contained more than a grain of truth.
Even so, one should not dismiss soft balancing as purely symbolic. During his European tour in early 2005, for example, President Bush tried to persuade Britain, France, and Germany (the so-called EU-3) to take a harder line toward Iran’s nuclear programs. The Europeans had long favored a diplomatic approach to Tehran, partly to restrain Iran and partly to make it harder for the United States to take unilateral action (such as a preventive military strike). Bush failed to drive a wedge between the three European powers, however, and in the end he chose to endorse their diplomatic efforts without participating in them fully. Thus, “soft balancing” by Britain, France, and Germany forced the United States to adjust its own policies, and made the preventive use of military force less likely, at least in the short term.38
There is an important lesson here. If the United States acts in ways that fuel global concerns about U.S. power—and, in particular, the fear that it will be used in ways that harm the interests of many others—then the number of potential “soft balancers” will grow. This number may increase because the United States takes on several different adversaries at the same time—thereby giving them reasons to help each other—or because third parties conclude that the United States is dangerous and needs to be kept in check through concerted action. And if that number increases, these potential balancers will have more partners from which to choose and greater confidence that other states share their concerns and will be willing to cooperate against Washington. If this trend were to continue, anti-American balancing (both hard and soft) could become more widespread. We may be some distance from such a “tipping point” today, but we cannot discount the possibility entirely.
Fortunately for Americans, the United States has many ways to discourage the formation of hostile coalitions. The United States does not want to give up its position of primacy and cannot alter its geographic location, but it can pay close attention to how others perceive its intentions. Above all, U.S. leaders should seek to convince most states that they have little to fear from U.S. power unless they take actions that directly threaten vital U.S. interests. In other words, the United States can best discourage both soft and hard balancing by making its behavior—and not just its rhetoric—contingent on the behavior of others. States that cooperate with the United States must be confident that they will be heeded and rewarded; states that remain aloof but do not threaten the United States must be left alone; and only those states that actively threaten U.S. interests should fear the sharp end of U.S. power.39
Internal Balancing
As noted at the beginning of this section, weaker states can balance a stronger power either by forming alliances with others or by mobilizing their own internal resources in ways that limit the stronger state’s ability to pressure or thwart them. Although external balancing remains relatively muted for the reasons just discussed, a number of states and nonstate actors are trying to oppose U.S. power through various forms of internal balancing.
When facing a much more powerful opponent, however, the weaker side should not try to beat the stronger power at its own game. If forced to compete with Tiger Woods, for example, most of us should pick virtually any activity other than golf. And if forced to compete with Tiger at golf, we would be better off on a practice green than a driving range. We would almost certainly lose, but at least we’d have a slim chance.
The same logic applies for weak states (and nonstate actors) who find themselves facing the overwhelming power of the United States. Instead of trying to beat the United States at the things it does best, weaker actors will employ some form of asymmetric strategy, seeking to shift the competition into areas where they enjoy a relatively better position. According to the Pentagon’s 2005 National Defense Strategy: “The U.S. military predominates in the world of traditional forms of warfare. Potential adversaries accordingly shift away from challenging the United States through traditional military actions and adopt asymmetric capabilities and methods.”40 In particular, weaker actors should look for specific U.S. vulnerabilities that they can exploit, and should seek to avoid arenas of competition where the United States is particularly strong. They should try to operate in novel ways that the United States has not anticipated—using new weapons, employing different tactics, and attacking unusual or unexpected targets. The objective of this strategy is not to defeat the United States directly; rather, “adversaries employing irregular methods aim to erode U.S. influence, patience, and political will. Irregular opponents often take a long-term approach, attempting to impose prohibitive human, material, financial, and political costs on the United States to compel strategic retreat from a key region or course of action.”41
In the present era of U.S. primacy, states that choose to resist the United States through internal balancing have three broad options. First, they can develop conventional military strategies designed to negate or counter specific U.S. strengths. Second, they can use terrorism—a classic “weapon of the weak”—in order to impose additional costs on vulnerable U.S. targets at home or abroad. Needless to say, this is also a strategy that nonstate actors are likely to adopt, because it requires the fewest resources. Third, they can acquire weapons of mass destruction, in order to gain some measure of immunity from U.S. conventional military capabilities. Let us briefly consider each in turn.
Conventional warfare: exploiting the “contested zone.” Throughout history, weaker adversaries have tried to devise military strategies and tactics that can maximize their own effectiveness while minimizing the effectiveness of their opponents. During the War of Attrition in 1970–71, for example, Egypt did not try to defeat the Israeli air force in direct air-to-air combat. Instead, Egypt and its Soviet patron built a dense network of ground-based air defenses near the Suez Canal, which made it impossible for Israeli aircraft to operate freely in this area. Similarly, guerrilla armies usually avoid direct battlefield engagements with regular army troops until their own strength has grown to a point where they can meet their opponents directly.42
For the foreseeable future, weaker states will try to avoid meeting the United States in the arenas where America enjoys near-total mastery. The United States is unchallenged in several realms of military action, including the military use of outer space, air operations above 15,000 feet in altitude, armored engagements at ranges beyond one or two kilometers, and “blue water” naval battles. According to military expert Barry Posen, these advantages give the United States “command of the commons”: it can use the “common areas” of the globe with near-impunity and deny them to its adversaries more or less completely. These advantages allow the United States to bring military power to bear against a wide array of potential adversaries, and in virtually any corner of the globe.43
At the same time, however, U.S. advantages are much less pronounced in other areas of military competition, such as urban warfare, close-range infantry combat, air operations below 15,000 feet (where antiaircraft weaponry becomes more lethal), and naval operations in shallow waters or along the ocean littoral.44 U.S. superiority declines further when operating in unfamiliar territory, and against adversaries with local knowledge of terrain and weather, and when adversaries can fight on the defensive from concealed positions. The effectiveness of U.S. military power may also be compromised by a reluctance to cause civilian casualties, by legal constraints on the use of force, or by its own sensitivity to U.S. casualties.45 Astute adversaries will therefore seek to avoid meeting the U.S. military in realms where its advantage is greatest; instead, they will try to tailor their own capabilities and tactics so as to force the United States to operate in this “contested zone,” where America’s technological, logistical, and material preponderance will be less decisive.
Not surprisingly, this type of asymmetrical response is increasingly evident on the battlefield. During the Kosovo and Gulf Wars, for example, the Serbs and Iraqis did not even attempt to challenge U.S. air superiority through direct air-to-air combat. Instead, they relied upon surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) and antiaircraft artillery, often employing them in ways specifically intended to complicate U.S. efforts to suppress them. The Serbs proved especially adept at camouflage as well, and their tactics appear to have reduced significantly the lethality of NATO air attacks.46 The Iraqi military learned from its crushing defeat in 1991 and made little or no attempt to meet the U.S. invasion in 2003 directly. Instead, Iraq relied primarily on a combination of harassing attacks, irregular forces (including suicide bombers), and sabotage to resist the U.S. invasion force. These tactics could not prevent the fall of the Ba’ath regime, but they imposed unexpected costs on the occupying forces. Saddam and his associates had also laid the groundwork for a protracted insurgency by dispersing arms and money to loyal subordinates, and this response soon derailed the Bush administration’s original plans for reconstructing Iraq and “transforming” the entire Middle East. Finally, U.S. efforts to destroy or capture Taliban and al Qaeda forces in Afghanistan were thwarted by unexpectedly effective resistance during the battles of Tora Bora and Operation Anaconda. The al Qaeda forces used their superior knowledge of the terrain to negate many U.S. advantages (such as airpower and high-tech reconnaissance capabilities), and eventually forced the U.S. forces into a costly close-quarters firefight. Both battles were at best a draw for the United States—despite its enormous overall superiority—and enabled the al Qaeda and Taliban forces (and possibly Osama bin Laden himself) to escape.47
Internal balancing and an asymmetrical response are also apparent in the military preparations of potential U.S. adversaries. For example, China is not trying to forge a balancing coalition at the present time, but it is increasing its military capabilities and trying to develop a capacity to deal with U.S. military forces in the Far East.48 Chinese military experts have studied U.S. military operations extensively, and have sought to fashion conventional military options that could enable a much-weaker China to hold its own—or at least impose high costs—in a direct confrontation with superior U.S. forces. According to the authors of one Chinese study (entitled Unrestricted Warfare): “We are much poorer than the United States. So we think China needs to begin to adjust the way it makes war. It’s like Mao said to the Japanese: ‘You fight your war and I’ll fight mine.’”49 In addition to contemplating a variety of nonmilitary actions (such as terrorism and environmental degradation), China has deliberately sought to acquire military capabilities (such as anti-ship cruise missiles) that would make it more difficult for the U.S. Navy to operate close to China (e.g., in defense of Taiwan). Chinese military officials also emphasize the need for electronic and cyberwarfare techniques in order to exploit U.S. reliance on information technology; the use of mines, cruise missiles, and submarines to blockade key ports or straits; and the development of sophisticated air defenses that can negate America’s current airpower advantage. Once again, the aim is neither to defeat the U.S. outright nor to challenge the U.S. position as the dominant global power; rather, the goal is “to develop politically useful capabilities to punish American forces if they were to intervene in a conflict of great interest to China.”50
Terrorism. Today, America’s most fervent opponents are not states at all, but rather nonstate groups like al Qaeda. Lacking the resources of an organized polity, such groups are naturally drawn toward the strategy of terrorism. Terrorism is a strategy that weaker actors use because it allows them to avoid the superior armed forces of its stronger opponents, and thus to target the more vulnerable elements of society itself. Deliberate targeting of civilian populations is a classic “weapon of the weak”—rebel groups do not need to use terrorist tactics if they are strong enough to obtain what they want directly. Open societies such as the United States may be especially vulnerable to terrorist action, precisely because it is more difficult for them to impose the laws and procedures that would make terrorism more difficult.51 Hostile forces can also use terrorist tactics (such as suicide bombings) in order to attack U.S. military forces, seeking to penetrate U.S. defenses by masquerading as innocent civilians rather than by openly engaging U.S. forces on the battlefield.
Like other asymmetric strategies, terrorism does not seek to defeat the stronger opponent directly. Terrorism is a political strategy that achieves success by attacking the stronger opponent’s resolve and by encouraging sympathizers to rally to the terrorists’ banner. By increasing the costs faced by a stronger power, and especially by imposing costs on the larger society as a whole, a terrorist strategy seeks to alter the stronger power’s behavior by persuading it that its current policies are too expensive to sustain. For example, in seeking to remove the U.S. military presence from the Arab and Islamic world, al Qaeda attacked U.S. forces in the region as well as the U.S. homeland. These actions sought to persuade the United States to reduce its presence in the region and to catalyze more widespread resistance around the Muslim world.52
It follows that terrorist strategies are more likely to succeed when the target is not defending vital interests (and thus is not likely to be as highly motivated as the terrorists are). It is not surprising, therefore, that terrorism (and especially suicide terrorism) is overwhelmingly directed against what the terrorists perceive as foreign military occupations. The IRA in Northern Ireland, the nationalist rebels in Chechnya or Kashmir, and the various Palestinian groups that have conducted suicide bombings in Israel are all motivated by a desire to force a foreign occupier to withdraw from what they regard as their own territory. And the strategy rests on the belief that native inhabitants care more about regaining their homelands than foreign occupiers care about keeping it.53
The effectiveness of terrorism as an asymmetric balancing strategy will depend in large part on who is able to win the “hearts and minds” of the larger populations from which terrorist movements arise. If the groups that are now using terrorism against the United States can convince others that they are heroes acting in a noble cause, and if they can successfully portray U.S. responses as heavyhanded efforts to preserve injustice, then their efforts are more likely to succeed. If the United States responds in a harsh and indiscriminate manner, therefore, it will merely vindicate the terrorists’ own use of violence and reinforce their image as heroic opponents of foreign oppression. By contrast, if the United States can portray those who use terrorism as criminals driven largely by a selfish desire for power, then a terrorist campaign is more likely to fail.
Weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Instead of trying to counter U.S. conventional forces directly, states that are worried about U.S. military power may decide to acquire military capabilities that would make it difficult-to-impossible for the United States to use its superior conventional forces against them. In particular, they may try to deter the use of U.S. conventional forces by acquiring an arsenal of nuclear, chemical, and/or biological weapons.54
Why would a weak or impoverished state want to acquire WMD? For the same reasons that the United States and the Soviet Union did: to deter potential or actual enemies from threatening its vital interests. That is the main reason why Israel, India, and Pakistan eventually acquired nuclear weapons of their own, and similar motives inspire the pursuit of WMD today.55 In particular, several states have sought (or are seeking) WMD in order to make it more difficult for the United States to use its conventional forces to coerce or overthrow them.56 As Iranian President Muhammad Khatami remarked in April 2003, “They tell us Syria is the next target [after Iraq], but according to our reports, Iran could well follow.” Or as Iranian reformer Mostafa Tajazadeh observed just prior to the war in Iraq, “It is basically a matter of equilibrium. If I don’t have a nuclear bomb, I don’t have security.”57
As these statements reveal, weaker states are aware that a WMD arsenal can offset some—though of course not all—of the advantages that stronger states would otherwise possess. Weapons of mass destruction—and especially nuclear weapons—are extremely effective instruments of basic deterrence, because it is too dangerous to threaten a WMD-owning state with conquest or “regime change.” As a result, states that do acquire significant WMD arsenals will gain considerable protection against the more extreme forms of U.S. pressure. Specifically, states with WMD (and some capacity, however unreliable, to deliver these weapons against U.S. targets) could probably deter the United States from trying to overthrow them by force. A U.S. president might be willing to risk nuclear attack in order to defend the U.S. homeland, or perhaps to protect some vital overseas interest, but no U.S. president is likely to risk a nuclear bomb on American soil simply to overthrow a foreign government that had not attacked us first. Obtaining a WMD arsenal is a classic “asymmetric response”—it cannot negate all the instruments of U.S. power, but at least it can prevent the United States from using its power with impunity. And that, of course, is why states such as Iran and North Korea want them, and why Saddam Hussein wanted them too.
It follows that current U.S. efforts to compel various states to abandon their WMD programs face enormous obstacles. Earlier efforts to halt the spread of nuclear weapons were only partly successful, and they required the United States to offer considerable inducements to would-be proliferators (including security guarantees, access to nuclear technology, and a U.S. pledge—in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty—eventually to reduce its own nuclear arsenal).58 As one would expect, more recent efforts to halt proliferation by threatening suspected proliferators with “regime change” have been counterproductive, because such threats merely increase the target state’s desire to find a way to deflect U.S. pressure.
Terrorism plus WMD. As mentioned briefly in chapter 1, the gravest form of asymmetric response would be a terrorist organization armed with WMD, and especially one that managed to acquire a nuclear weapon. Unlike states armed with WMD, a terrorist group has no obvious “return address.” We know that some of these groups (e.g., al Qaeda) are willing to slaughter large numbers of people, willing to martyr themselves, and are openly interested in acquiring various sorts of WMD. Deterrence is unlikely to work against such groups, and there is every reason to think that these groups would try to use any weapons that they were able to acquire or manufacture.
A terrorist group’s use of WMD against the United States would be the ultimate form of “asymmetric strategy.” If a terrorist group were able to obtain and use a nuclear weapon against the United States, it would almost certainly do more damage than any other adversary ever had. The repercussions for America’s economy, civil liberties, and foreign policy would be incalculable. Biological or chemical weapons in the hands of a terrorist could also inflict grievous harm, although probably not as severely as a nuclear weapon could. For this reason alone, denying anti-American terrorists access to the most destructive weapons technology may be America’s single greatest foreign-policy priority.59 And the fact that we can no longer dismiss this possibility underscores a key fact about the contemporary world: America’s unmatched strength cannot guarantee its security against a number of nominally weak but dedicated and extremely hostile foes.
At first glance, the rest of the world does not appear to be balancing against U.S. primacy. Upon closer inspection, however, there are clear signs that U.S. power is making other states uncomfortable and encouraging them to search for various ways to limit U.S. dominance. At one level, states are forming informal diplomatic coalitions, in order to make it harder for the United States to use its power with impunity. At another level, several states (and some nonstate actors) are mobilizing their own resources and devising particular strategies designed to improve their ability to withstand U.S. pressure. These responses are the typical reaction to unbalanced power, and there is nothing about them that should surprise or perplex us.
Whether such efforts grow in number and in significance, however, will depend largely on what the United States chooses to do. The United States will remain the world’s most powerful country for some time to come; the question is whether other states will view this situation favorably or not. In particular, will most states see U.S. intentions as comparatively benign, or will they believe that U.S. intentions are aggressive? If the latter, then efforts to balance the United States will increase and the United States will find itself increasingly isolated.
Balking
A close cousin of balancing is balking, which is a deliberate decision not to cooperate with a nation’s requests or demands.60 States that balance are trying to improve their position vis-à-vis the United States either by joining forces with others or by mobilizing their own internal resources; states that balk usually do so on their own and may not be trying to improve their relative position at all. Rather, they are merely trying to avoid taking some action that the United States wants them to take, because they do not think it is in their interest to comply. Saddam Hussein was balking when he refused to readmit UN weapons inspectors to Iraq in the late 1990s, and both India and Pakistan balked when the Clinton administration tried to get both countries to refrain from testing nuclear weapons in 1998. Balking is the international equivalent of “just saying no,” and it can be a surprisingly effective way to tame American power.
Balking can take several distinct forms. The simplest form is to refuse to do what the United States asks, in the hope that America lacks either the will or the capacity to compel obedience. An obvious example is Turkey’s refusal to give U.S. military forces access to Turkish bases prior to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, a decision that forced the United States to attack Iraq solely from the south and made the entire operation more difficult.
A second variation is to agree formally to take some action, but to do the absolute minimum necessary as slowly as possible. It is the international equivalent of “dragging one’s feet,” or “working-to-rule.” Thus, Israel says it will dismantle its settlements in occupied territories, but it does so very slowly (while simultaneously expanding others), and the Palestinian leadership promises to crack down on suicide bombers but in fact takes little concrete action against them. This form of balking can be especially effective because it does not involve open or public defiance; rather, the balking parties are acting as if they intend to comply. The onus for any subsequent diplomatic confrontation thus rests on the United States, and U.S. leaders may be tempted to look the other way rather than risk a costly confrontation or let others see that they can be defied openly.
A third form of balking is “free-riding.” In this variant, a state genuinely supports U.S. policy but doesn’t want to contribute its share of the costs. This is akin to “foot-dragging,” except that freeriding states are not trying to thwart U.S. objectives—they are simply trying to make the United States (or others) pay for them. The classic illustration of this form of balking is burden-sharing within international alliances, but it also applies to other forms of collective goods, such as the current effort to control international terrorism, or the various initiatives to improve the global environment.61 Most states would like to reduce the danger of terrorism and protect the global environment, but they would also like someone else—e.g., Uncle Sam—to foot the bill.
Why do states balk? In some cases, they balk because there is a genuine conflict between their interests and those of the United States. For example, the United States has pressed Russia to stop helping Iran build a large nuclear reactor at Bushehr, but the cash-strapped Russian government wants the money and has politely refused repeated U.S. requests. Similarly, South Korea balked when the United States contemplated a preventive strike against North Korea’s nuclear facilities in 1994, because the South Koreans worried that military action might spark a damaging war on the Korean Peninsula. Governments may also balk because domestic opinion opposes cooperating with the United States (as it did in Turkey before the war with Iraq), or because leaders believe they can rally nationalist sentiment by openly defying the world’s only superpower. And states may also balk simply to force the United States to pay a higher price to gain their compliance, or to make sure that the United States does not take them for granted. Finally, by forcing the United States to bear a disproportionate share of the costs of any foreign-policy action, and by making it spend lots of political capital in order to achieve its objectives, balking can be another way to sap U.S. power over the longer term. Here balking borders on balancing, if it becomes a way for weaker states gradually to narrow the U.S. advantage.
And, like “soft balancing,” balking can be self-reinforcing. The more that states balk, the more overextended the United States will become and the easier it will be for other states to balk as well without worrying about U.S. retribution. Balking is an especially effective strategy in an era of American primacy, because even a superpower like the United States cannot force or intimidate all other states into doing its bidding.
States that do not necessarily want to balance the United States still hope to restrain Washington’s ability to use its preponderant power. But instead of forming a direct counterpoise to U.S. power and trying to deter the United States from acting as it wishes, many states now hope to constrain U.S. behavior by binding the United States within an overarching set of international institutions. “Binding” seeks to exploit America’s own commitment to a world order based on effective norms and the rule of law, in order to encourage American restraint and insulate other states from the full effects of U.S. preponderance. Unlike balancers, who in effect pull away from the United States in order to oppose its dominant position, binders embrace the United States in the hopes of ensnaring it in a shared framework of norms and rules.62
The familiar metaphor for binding, of course, is Gulliver lying on the beach, lashed down by a horde of tiny Lilliputians. The Lilliputians are too small to resist Gulliver directly, so they bind him with hundreds of minuscule ropes. The story also suggests the limitations of this strategy: binding worked for the Lilliputians because Gulliver was asleep. It is hard to imagine that they would have succeeded had Gulliver been awake and alert to what they were doing.
The logic of binding rests on the belief that international institutions play a powerful role in sustaining international cooperation. According to the prevailing orthodoxy, states that would like to cooperate can do so more effectively if they establish general rules, norms, and procedures to regulate their interactions.63 These rules make it easier to negotiate agreements, help states determine whether their partners are living up to the specified terms, and can provide mechanisms for distributing the benefits of cooperation more equally. As Michael Hirsh, former chief diplomatic correspondent for Newsweek, puts it: “We are the chief architects of a vast, multidimensional global system that consists of trading rules, of international law, of norms for economic and political behavior…. It is overwhelmingly in our national interest to stay engaged in the global system shaped by these ideas and values, to strengthen it and nurture it.”64
Equally important, international institutions can also confer legitimacy on actions taken by the most powerful states, particularly with respect to the use of force. If weaker states believe that the strongest powers will only use their strength when there is broad international backing (signified, for example, by UN Security Council authorization), they will be less worried about asymmetries of power. Thus, by agreeing to be bound within a set of rules, powerful states can reassure weaker partners that the weakness will not be exploited (or at least not too much), thereby discouraging the formation of countervailing coalitions and making it easier for the dominant power to obtain voluntary compliance. If correct, then the liberal order constructed after World War II can endure in a period of U.S. primacy, because it still confers great advantages on the United States and its partners alike.65
There is little doubt that other states have tried to use existing institutions in order to place limits on the unilateral exercise of U.S. power. Throughout the 1990s, for example, a number of other states sought to confine the resolution of key international problems to existing institutional forums—most notably the United Nations— even when this made it much more difficult to reach an effective solution. As neoconservative pundit Charles Krauthammer complains, this is “the whole point of the multilateral enterprise: to reduce American freedom of action by making it subservient to, dependent on, constricted by the will—and interests—of other nations. To tie down Gulliver with a thousand strings. To domesticate the most undomesticated, most outsized national interest on the planet—ours.”66
As the full extent of U.S. primacy has become apparent, and as the Bush administration has used U.S. power more unilaterally, efforts to “bind” the United States have become both more explicit and less successful. The most obvious example, of course, was the French, German, and Russian effort to use the institution of the United Nations Security Council to prevent the United States from invading Iraq in early 2003. The heart of the dispute was a disagreement about policy: The Bush administration favored preventive war against Iraq while most other states preferred containment. Equally important, however, was a basic disagreement about the role of norms and institutions in legitimating the use of force by Great Powers. As a number of foreign leaders made clear, they sought to reinforce the general principle that the use of force should be regulated by international law and by existing institutions. Not surprisingly, weaker states prefer a world where the dominant world power cannot invade other countries without the formal approval of the Security Council (or some other equally authoritative international body), even if the cause is just. As Jean-Marie Colombani wrote in Le Monde, “While there may be good reasons for wanting to deal with the Iraqi problem swiftly, the manner in which the United States is trying to achieve this—as a chance to disengage itself from the obligations incurred by a newborn international order—is simply not acceptable.”67 Thus, the protracted contest in the Security Council was both an example of soft balancing and an explicit attempt to bind U.S. behavior within an existing international institution. America’s opponents sought to prevent the use of force in this particular instance, while simultaneously strengthening the authority of the UN system.
Yet this incident also showed that binding is not a very effective strategy, at least not in matters of national security. In the end, the United States invaded Iraq without approval from the Security Council, just as it had gone to war in 1999 against Serbia. In both cases, Washington was able to assemble “coalitions of the willing” to provide a thin veil of legitimacy for its actions. In both cases, and especially in the case of Iraq, U.S. leaders made it clear that they did not regard UN approval as a prerequisite for the legitimate use of force. Indeed, the official U.S. National Security Strategy (2002) now declares that the United States “will not hesitate to act alone, if necessary, to exercise our right of self-defense by acting preemptively” against terrorists or other threats. It further asserts that the United States “will take the actions necessary to ensure that our efforts to meet our global security commitments and protect Americans are not impaired by the potential for investigations, inquiry, or prosecution by the International Criminal Court, whose jurisdiction does not extend to Americans and which we will not accept.”68 No matter what one thinks of this particular policy, it illustrates America’s deep reluctance to be bound by institutions, especially when doing so would require it to forego actions it believes to be in its own shortterm interest. International institutions may be good for many things, but controlling the United States in its current condition of primacy is not one of them.
The U.S. attitude toward international law shows similar tendencies. The United States has always taken a somewhat ambivalent stance toward international law, and this ambivalence has grown over the past decade.69 On the one hand, the U.S. government has played a key role in the development of new international legal statutes, and it consistently affirms its commitment to the “rule of law” at home and abroad. But on the other hand, the United States often places significant limits on its own adherence to these same statutes, either by refusing to sign or ratify them or by insisting on special reservations that sharply limit the impact of the statutes on U.S. behavior. Indeed, the United States has made such extensive use of reservations that other states have sought to ban them outright from treaties such as the Ottawa Convention banning landmines or the convention establishing the International Criminal Court. Predictably, the United States has simply refused to ratify these treaties. This policy reduces the impact and effectiveness of the resulting convention, but it also means that the United States may have less and less influence over the emerging international legal environment.70
These trends reveal the inherent limits in the strategy of “binding.” The United States was willing to “bind itself” within various multilateral institutions during the Cold War because it needed allied support and wanted to keep the Soviet Union isolated. Now that the Cold War is over and the United States is perched on the pinnacle of power, however, it is loath to let its allies restrict its freedom of action and less interested in multilateral approaches. Thus, when America’s NATO allies took the unprecedented step of invoking Article V of the NATO treaty (the mutual-defense clause) in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks, the United States welcomed the gesture but rather brusquely rejected the proffered help. One Bush administration official explained the decision to decline assistance from its NATO allies by saying: “The fewer people you have to rely on, the fewer permissions you have to get.”71 It is equally unsurprising that the United States was reluctant to share authority in Iraq following the ouster of Saddam Hussein, even when the postwar occupation proved far more difficult and expensive than its architects had predicted. The United States eventually turned to the United Nations for help, but only to provide a fig leaf of legitimacy for the establishment of a new interim government.
This position is not surprising. Weaker states may want to use institutions to bind the strongest power, but the dominant power will try to use the same institutions to magnify its power and to advance its own interests. Institutions cannot force strong states to behave in certain ways, and when the dominant powers no longer want to be bound, the strategy of binding is not likely to work.
In the end, faith in the binding capacity of existing institutions rests on the hope that U.S. leaders will prefer to keep existing institutional arrangements intact and that they will be willing to restrain their own behavior in order to do so. If U.S. leaders recognize that primacy will not last forever, they may decide it is better to “lock in favorable arrangements that continue beyond the zenith of its power.”72 But why? Once the balance of power changes and the United States is no longer in a position of primacy, then it will be less able to shape the institutional order, and other states will begin remaking that order to suit their own preferences. Thus, the hope that future competitors might one day be bound by existing institutions is not a compelling reason for the United States to accept institutional arrangements whose main purpose is to bind U.S. power today.
Using formal institutions to “bind” the United States is especially ineffective in areas where the U.S. advantage is especially pronounced—such as the use of military power—and where important security interests are at stake.73 Outside the security arena, however, the broad strategy of binding is somewhat more effective. Indeed, a recent survey of U.S. participation in international organizations concludes that there “is more evidence of unilateralism in the area of security than there is in that of economic cooperation.”74 Why is this the case?
First, and most obviously, the United States is bound by institutions that perform a “constitutive” role—that is, by institutions that define some set of activities or social relations. If a particular status or activity has no meaning outside of the institution that establishes it (as the status of “husband” or “wife” is defined by the institution of marriage), then all who participate in this activity will be constrained by the established institutional principles, even if they had no direct hand in creating them. For example, America’s status as an independent, sovereign state depends in part on the general recognition by others that statehood is a meaningful concept that is conferred on some groups (e.g., current UN members) but withheld from others (e.g., the Taiwanese, Kurds, Palestinians, Chechens, etc.). The United States cannot decide the “terms” of sovereignty for itself, or decide on its own which political groups will enjoy this status, although it can withhold its own recognition and encourage others to do the same.
Second, like all states, the United States can be “bound” by others in areas that are regulated by specific norms and procedures, and where it is necessary for participants to follow the rules in order for the activity to take place. Driving a car would be nearly impossible if most drivers didn’t follow traffic laws most of the time, and the same is true for international air travel, postal regulation, the functioning of the Internet, and the conduct of international trade. Once established, the conventions that regulate these activities limit the autonomy of even the most powerful members. Although states can “opt out” of these arrangements, doing so threatens the benefits of sustained cooperation and may even be harmful. Any of us can choose to drive on the wrong side of a busy highway if there is no policeman around to arrest us, but it will rarely be the best or safest way to reach our destination.
Of course, the United States has considerable influence over the design and implementation of most international institutions, and its bargaining position is strengthened by its ability to negotiate bilateral deals (such as bilateral free-trade agreements) when more ambitious multilateral efforts are stymied. U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick warned of this after the breakdown of the WTO talks in Cancun in September 2003: “As WTO members ponder the future, the US will not wait: we will move towards free trade with can-do countries.”75 Yet because other states must consent to the terms, and because U.S. primacy is not as pronounced in the economic arena as it is in military affairs, America’s ability to set the rules in these realms is more limited. The design of the WTO conforms to U.S. preferences in many ways, for example, but the United States was forced to compromise on a number of issues in order to help bring the WTO into existence. The WTO dispute-settlement procedure is not controlled by the United States, and it frequently issues rulings unfavorable to the United States. These are compromises that America must live with, unless it wants to jeopardize the entire regulatory structure of the world trading system. As one commentator observes, “The WTO has greatly increased value for a global trader like the United States. The reduced commercial weight of the United States in the WTO today precludes the option of going it alone.”76 And, as noted above, the United States and the EU could not make substantial progress in the latest round of trade negotiations until they were willing to make genuine concessions to nominally weaker trading partners. In some realms, at least, “binding” can be an effective strategy.
Indeed, building new institutions may even be an effective tactic when the United States refuses to play along. If the United States chooses not to engage in “international rulemaking,” or if other states become convinced that the United States will reject some new convention no matter how it is written, they may decide to go ahead anyway, without further input from Washington. If their efforts succeed, the United States could end up being at least partly bound by “the power of the first draft.” Even if the United States were to join in at a later date, its ability to reshape the existing conventions could be limited by the existing arrangements. The Kyoto Protocol is certainly not the “last word” in the global effort to control greenhouse gas emissions, for example, but it is the “first word.” To the extent that it succeeds (despite its many flaws), its underlying principles are likely to shape subsequent negotiations and limit America’s ability to dictate a radically different approach. Much the same could be said for the Ottawa Convention on landmines and the statute establishing the International Criminal Court (ICC). U.S. opposition to these initiatives has not prevented other states from working to bring them to life, paying less and less attention to U.S. concerns as they proceed. According to one observer of the Rome negotiations on the ICC statute, “The other delegations felt that it would be better to stop giving in to the United States; they believed that the United States would never be satisfied … and ultimately would never sign the Treaty … [so they] decided to go ahead with [the] proposed compromise package.”77 Over time, the basic principles that underlie these conventions may take on a life of their own, gradually molding prevailing legal practice and normative understandings.78 Indeed, this is probably the main reason why the Bush administration has gone to such lengths to weaken and discredit the ICC, for if the ICC becomes a legitimate and effective part of the international legal order, the United States will have even less ability to shape its future evolution, and the costs of remaining aloof will increase.
These examples remind us that the United States is not omnipotent, and that the rest of humanity can and does impose certain constraints on the exercise of American power. Nonetheless, in an era of primacy, the ability of other states to “bind” the United States is limited. Because the United States does not need allies as much as it did during the Cold War, and because U.S. leaders see freedom of action as essential to defending vital U.S. interests, they are less willing to bind themselves within formal international institutions and reluctant to cede autonomy on critical issues of national security. In the more mundane, day-to-day areas of international affairs, however, the United States is bound to abide by a broad set of constitutive and regulatory norms that are easier to follow than to defy or dismantle, even when defiance might be tempting in the short term.
Blackmail
The Oxford English Dictionary defines blackmail as “any payment or other benefits extorted by threats or pressure.” A blackmailer threatens to take some action that the victim would like to prevent, but offers to refrain if the victim complies with the blackmailer’s demand. Although it might seem implausible to think that a weak state could successfully blackmail a country as strong as the United States, it can be an attractive strategy under certain conditions. For one thing, it makes more sense to blackmail a rich country than a poor one—if you can get away with it—for the same reasons that it is more tempting to blackmail a rich person than a poor one. The question is: How can a weak state gain sufficient leverage over the United States so that the latter will give in to its demands?
In order to force the United States to “pay up,” a potential blackmailer has to meet several demanding conditions.79 First, the black-mailing state must be able to take some action that the United States regards as dangerous or threatening—in other words, the blackmailer must have the capacity to harm U.S. interests. Second, the threat must be credible—i.e., U.S. leaders must believe that there is some reasonable chance that the blackmailer might execute the threat if they did not comply. If executing the threat would be equally harmful to the blackmailer, then the threat is less credible and less likely to work.80 By contrast, if carrying out the threat would be in the blackmailer’s interest no matter what the United States did, then the threat will be quite credible and more likely to trigger U.S. concessions. Third, the threatened action must be one that the United States cannot easily prevent via other means. A victim threatened with the exposure of embarrassing evidence (such as compromising photographs) could try to steal the photographs. If this strategy worked, the blackmailer’s leverage would evaporate. Similarly, the United States will not have to make concessions if it can use its own capabilities to prevent a blackmailing state from carrying out its threat— unless meeting the blackmailer’s demands would be easier and cheaper.81 Finally, the blackmailer must be able to convince U.S. leaders that the threat will disappear once its demands are met. If a potential victim believes that paying off the blackmailer will merely invite repeated demands, then giving in may be less attractive than rejecting the demand and suffering the consequences.
Thus, weak states can successfully employ a strategy of blackmail when: (A) they have the ability to do something that the United States does not want; (B) the United States cannot easily prevent it; (C) their demands are not too large; and (D) the United States has reason to believe that complying with the demands will in fact prevent the threat from being carried out.
Since the Cold War ended, the undisputed world champion in the “effective use of blackmail” category is North Korea. North Korea is a tragic failure by most standards: its per capita income is less than $1,000 per year; it is increasingly isolated diplomatically; its people are exposed to recurring famines; and it remains a brutally repressive dictatorship. By contrast, South Korea is a modern industrial power and has gradually moved toward full-fledged democracy. Although North Korea still maintains a large army, its military forces are primitively armed and poorly trained, and would be no match for the South Korean armed forces, especially if the U.S. military were also involved.82
Yet since the early 1990s, North Korea has successfully managed to extort a number of key concessions from the United States, even though U.S. power dwarfs North Korea’s.83 Beginning in 1994, a consortium of the United States, Japan, and South Korea agreed to provide North Korea with two light-water nuclear reactors free of charge, along with a package of economic assistance, fuel, and food aid. The Clinton administration also began steps to normalize relations with North Korea and came close to authorizing an exchange of high-level visits.
Why did the United States agree to these gifts, when far more deserving regimes received far less attention from Washington? The answer, of course, is that North Korea had an active nuclear-weapons program. The package of aid was not a reward for good behavior, it was a payoff inspired by the threat of continued bad behavior.
North Korea’s nuclear blackmail worked because it met virtually all of the conditions identified above.84 First, North Korean acquisition of nuclear weapons was seen as a potentially serious threat to U.S. interests, and especially the broad U.S. goal of limiting nuclear proliferation. If North Korea got the bomb, it might be difficult to prevent South Korea and Japan from following suit, thereby triggering a potentially dangerous arms race in the Far East. Moreover, given North Korea’s long history of provocative behavior, U.S. leaders also worried that its acquisition of nuclear weapons would lead to more aggressive activities on the Korean Peninsula or elsewhere.85 Thus, North Korea possessed the first component of successful blackmail: It could do something that U.S. leaders very much wanted to prevent.
Second, North Korea’s threat to develop nuclear weapons was quite credible. Given the collapse of the Soviet Union, China’s gradual opening to the West, and North Korea’s own economic deterioration, it was easy to imagine why North Korea would want a nuclear “insurance policy” against the threat of regime change. Although there is no evidence that any of North Korea’s neighbors actively sought to bring down the regime—if only because doing so would make them responsible for North Korea’s impoverished population— the government in Pyongyang could not be sure of this, especially since it seems to be afflicted with a healthy dose of xenophobia and paranoia. North Korea had good reasons to want nuclear weapons, in short, so its threat to “go nuclear” had to be taken seriously.
Third, the United States could not easily prevent nuclear acquisition by North Korea through other means (such as military force). Although the United States could have launched preventive air strikes against North Korea’s various nuclear facilities, U.S. planners were not certain they could eliminate the entire program in this way. Equally important, a preventive attack ran the risk of triggering large-scale fighting between North and South Korea. Although the United States and South Korea were virtually certain to win such a clash, the damage to South Korea (whose capital, Seoul, lies within artillery range of the border) might be considerable. Furthermore, a major war would almost certainly lead to the collapse of the North Korean regime, forcing South Korea to begin a massive reunification and reintegration effort under the worst possible circumstances. For these and other reasons, both South Korea and Japan were dead set against preventive military action by the United States. Although the Clinton administration did undertake extensive planning for a possible preventive strike, these various concerns made a diplomatic solution appealing, even if it meant paying off the North Korean government.
Fourth, U.S. leaders also had reasonable grounds for believing that the solution—the so-called Agreed Framework of 1994—would stick at least long enough to make the effort worthwhile. North Korea was in desperate financial straits, which gave Pyongyang an obvious incentive to cut a deal. U.S. negotiators were also careful to build in extensive verification procedures, so that any violation of the Agreed Framework could be detected. The agreement also involved commitments that would take several years to fulfill, thereby giving each side—and especially North Korea—additional incentives to abide by the agreement, for fear of jeopardizing the full package of benefits.
Yet the Agreed Framework broke down in 2002–2003, with each side claiming (with some justification) that the other had failed to fulfill its commitments.86 The Bush administration received intelligence reports suggesting that North Korea had resumed covert weapons-development efforts, and it eventually confronted North Korea with these revelations in October 2002. For its part, North Korea accused the United States of failing to deliver the promised light-water reactors on schedule, and a North Korean official warned in February 2001: “If [the United States] does not honestly implement [the Agreed Framework], there is no need for us to be bound by it any longer.”87 North Korea was also angry when President Bush included it in the “axis of evil” in his 2002 State of the Union speech, and annoyed by additional administration comments suggesting that the United States favored “regime change” in North Korea.88 The new U.S. emphasis on “preemption,” as codified in the 2002 National Security Strategy, was undoubtedly a source of concern for Pyongyang as well. North Korea promptly reverted to its earlier tactics: removing International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) safeguards, restarting the Yongbyon reactor, and eventually declaring that it had already had a nuclear capability and intended to increase it.
The sequel is instructive, because it demonstrates that blackmail is less likely to work if the blackmailer refuses to stay bought. The danger posed by North Korea’s nuclear-weapons program had, if anything, increased since the 1990s—especially given the possibility that the cash-strapped North Korean regime might sell nuclear material to others—and North Korea’s threat to go nuclear was as credible in 2003 as it had been ten years earlier. Similarly, a preventive strike against the North Korean facilities was no more attractive in 2003 than it was in 1993–94, especially given that U.S. military forces were already preoccupied with the invasion and occupation of Iraq.
Yet the U.S. government has been reluctant to play the same game twice. This reluctance was partly due to the presence of a new administration (key officials in the Bush administration had been extremely critical of the Agreed Framework prior to taking office), but it also reflected valid concerns about North Korea’s willingness to keep a bargain once it had been made. Accordingly, the United States responded to North Korea’s resumption of its nuclear program by suspending existing aid programs and rejecting any further concessions. Although the administration eventually agreed to hold talks with North Korean officials, it insisted that these talks be multilateral and gave no indication that it was willing to offer North Korea anything until the nuclear issue was resolved.89
North Korea is not the only example of successful blackmail, merely the most dramatic. Blackmail is also a strategy that allies can employ in order to persuade more powerful patrons to accede to their wishes. The basic logic is the same: A weaker ally threatens to do something that its patron opposes, in the hopes of persuading the patron to give it something in exchange for acceding to the patron’s preferences. During the Cold War, for example, Soviet and American client states were able to extract greater benefits from their respective patrons by threatening to realign or resign, or even by threatening to collapse completely. Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser persuaded the Soviet Union to increase its military support in 1970 by threatening to resign in favor of a pro-American president, and South Vietnamese leaders like Ngo Dinh Diem and Nguyen Van Thieu repeatedly obtained additional U.S. aid by tacitly threatening to go under (and leave Vietnam to the communists) if they did not get more help.90 Because both superpowers were convinced that their interests and prestige were bound up in the fate of these clients, the threats were taken seriously and were often successful in eliciting greater support. Similarly, South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan have used veiled threats to “go nuclear” themselves in order to obtain conventional military support and security guarantees from the United States.
Since September 2001, several other states have exploited the U.S. preoccupation with terrorism in order to extract additional concessions from Washington. Because the United States needed cooperation from Uzbekistan, Pakistan, and Russia in order to wage war in Afghanistan, it has turned a blind eye to human-rights conditions in these countries, and has given economic and political support to each of these governments. The Pakistani case is especially revealing: although Pakistan is actively developing nuclear weapons and President Pervez Musharraf is a military dictator who has done relatively little to rein in Muslim extremists within Pakistan, the collapse of his regime could easily usher in a far more radical government. Thus, the Bush administration has had little choice but to back him to the hilt, despite well-founded concerns about his domestic and foreign policies.
Blackmail can be an effective strategy in some circumstances, but (fortunately) not very often. Successful blackmail is rare because it only works under unusual conditions and because all states are reluctant to acknowledge that they can in fact be coerced into making major concessions. Blackmail is also a high-risk strategy; you can’t get the United States to make significant concessions unless you threaten important U.S. interests, but if you do, the United States may decide it would rather fight than pay.
Among other things, this means that the fear that rogue states might use nuclear weapons (or other WMD) to “blackmail” the United States is far-fetched.91 In order for this form of blackmail to work, the blackmailer must make it clear that it is willing to use its weapons if it does not get its way. But this strategy is feasible only if the blackmailer has WMD and neither the target state nor its allies do, and history suggests that even an overwhelming nuclear advantage is hard to translate into direct political leverage.92 If a nucleararmed rogue state tried to blackmail the United States or one of its allies, the threat would be an empty one, because the blackmailer could not carry out the threat without triggering its own destruction.93 Threatening to acquire WMD can be a credible instrument of blackmail, but threatening to use WMD against the United States or its allies is not.
The United States has an additional incentive to prevent other states (and especially relatively weak states) from using WMD for blackmail or coercion, or as a shield for conventional aggression. Nuclear weapons have been a profoundly defensive force throughout the nuclear age, and this tendency has been an important cause of peace among the major powers.94 To permit a weak rogue state to alter the status quo through the use of nuclear blackmail would reverse this equation and would send a powerful signal that these weapons were in fact an effective instrument of expansion or aggression. The consequences for world politics would be tremendous: Incentives to proliferate would grow apace, revisionist powers would be quick to repeat their efforts to intimidate others, and war as a result of miscalculation would become much more likely. Neither the United States nor the other Great Powers has any interest in allowing such a world to emerge, which means that they have ample reason to help defend any states facing a threat from a nuclear-armed rogue.95
Ironically, blackmail may be easier for allies rather than adversaries. Allies can threaten to take some unwanted action in the hopes of gaining a concession, but without worrying that they will provoke a war, whereas enemies may push the United States over the edge if they push too hard. North Korea’s successful manipulation of nuclear brinkmanship is all the more remarkable in light of this consideration. The United States would probably be delighted to foster regime change in Pyongyang, if it could only think of a way to do it quickly and inexpensively. But because an easy solution remains elusive, the world’s mightiest superpower continues to be tormented by a small country that can build nuclear weapons but cannot reliably feed its own people.
Delegitimation
All political orders depend to some degree on the belief that they are legitimate. When members of a society regard existing arrangements as “natural” (i.e., as the expected or normal state of affairs), they will be less likely to question them or even to imagine that they might be altered. Similarly, when they regard the existing order as desirable (in either material or moral terms), they are unlikely to challenge it. Thus, the belief that kings ruled by “divine right” reinforced monarchical authority: if one’s subjects saw the royal position as an expression of God’s will and believed that aristocratic status reflected “noble” character, then the idea of reordering society along different (i.e., democratic) lines would seem both heretical and impractical. Not surprisingly, therefore, efforts to level traditional social and political hierarchies also entailed active efforts to portray them as unnatural, evil, or corrupt. In order to dismantle the ancien regime, one first had to make it seem unworthy.96
Similar issues arise when one state enjoys a dominant position in the international system. If other states see the existing structure of power as broadly “legitimate” (for whatever reason), they will be less likely to challenge the dominant state and may even regard its position of primacy as “natural” or inevitable. By contrast, if the rest of the world sees the existing distribution of power as inherently unfair, they will look for opportunities to alter it. Similarly, if other states regard the dominant state’s behavior as generally beneficial and consistent with established moral standards, they will be less likely to fear or resent the asymmetry of power in its favor and less likely to want to undermine it.
As the dominant world power, the United States has much to gain from the perception that its privileged position is legitimate. The United States would like to maintain its position of primacy for as long as it can, and with as little effort as possible. It should try, therefore, to persuade others that its present position is morally acceptable, and perhaps even desirable. In other words, U.S. leaders want the rest of the world to see us as Tony Blair does—as “a force for good”—so that other states will accept the U.S. position instead of trying to undermine it.
By contrast, the enemies of U.S. primacy will portray it in much more malignant terms. Instead of seeing America as a benevolent hegemon, those who oppose the United States will seek to depict it as selfish, venal, capricious, lacking in wisdom, devoid of virtue, and generally unsuited for world leadership. In other words, they will try to portray U.S. primacy and U.S. foreign policy as inherently illegitimate, in order to persuade others that U.S. primacy ought to be resisted. A strategy of delegitimation does not seek to challenge U.S. power directly—i.e., by forming a countervailing coalition—instead, the main goal is to undermine the belief that U.S. primacy is either “automatic” or morally acceptable. In essence, delegitimation seeks to make more people resent U.S. dominance, so that they become more willing to take action against it and so that the United States has to work harder to win their support.
But where does legitimacy come from? What characteristics or behaviors make one country’s position “legitimate” in the eyes of other states, and what traits or actions will tend to call into question one’s legitimacy? There are at least four possible sources of international legitimacy, and the struggle to either legitimate or delegitimate U.S. primacy is fought along every one of these fronts.
Conformity with Established Procedures
In politics, actions may be legitimate because they result from a previously agreed-upon process. In a democracy, for example, the authority of political leaders is established by winning a fair election, just as new statutes are legitimate if they emerge from normal legislative procedures. By the same token, the legitimacy of an elected official (or a new law) will be compromised if agreed-upon procedures appear to have been violated or ignored.97
It follows that U.S. primacy will be seen as more legitimate when the United States acts in accordance with established international procedures. To take the most obvious example, the 1991 Gulf War with Iraq was widely regarded as a legitimate use of U.S. power, because the use of force was specifically authorized by the United Nations Security Council. By contrast, the decision to attack Iraq in 2003 undercut the legitimacy of U.S. primacy, because the United States failed to gain Security Council authorization yet went to war anyway.
The more well-established the process is, the greater the expectation that states should follow it. In challenging the new U.S. doctrine of preemption, for example, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan explicity noted that this policy clashed with procedures and principles that the international community had endorsed for more than five decades. In his words, the logic of states that “reserve the right to act unilaterally, or in ad hoc coalitions … is a fundamental challenge to the principles on which, however imperfectly, world peace and stability have rested for the last 58 years.”98 Annan’s challenge to U.S. policy rested on the fact that the world community has an established procedure for legitimating the use of military force, a procedure that the U.S. doctrine of preemption violates.
The desire to delegitimate American dominance also lies at the heart of global complaints about U.S. “unilateralism.” Until recently, the United States had endorsed multilateralism as its preferred approach to addressing many international problems, and especially problems that affect many other states.99 In effect, this approach makes U.S. actions more legitimate by letting others participate in the decisionmaking process and giving them a stake in the outcome. Not surprisingly, therefore, the abandonment of multilateralism in several key issue-areas sparked a chorus of foreign criticism. To be sure, some of the complaints about U.S. “unilateralism” merely reflect opposition to policies that threaten other states’ interests. Thus, other countries complained when the United States imposed tariffs on foreign steel, rejected the Kyoto Protocol, and sought to undermine the International Criminal Court, because these decisions made it more difficult for them to achieve their own objectives.
But at a deeper level, the charge of “unilateralism” is also designed to place the United States in an unflattering light and to nurture further resentment of U.S. power.100 Other states may not be able to stop the United States from pursuing particular policies, but accusing Washington of acting “unilaterally” is a way of imposing additional political costs. This goal helps explain why some states have been willing to develop conventions and protocols on a variety of issues, even when they are aware the United States will reject them, and when they know its rejection will render the agreements largely ineffective. By negotiating, signing, and ratifying the Kyoto Protocol, the landmines convention, the Rome Statute on the International Criminal Court, and so on, the rest of the world is in effect saying to America: “Sure, you can do what you want, and we can’t stop you. But we can make you look bad, and over time, more and more people will yearn for the day when the United States is not so powerful.”101
Positive Consequences
A second source of legitimacy derives from the effects of a particular policy: Actions will be seen as legitimate if they are broadly beneficial for others. From this perspective, U.S. primacy is more likely to be seen as legitimate if it is in fact good for the rest of the world, and especially if U.S. foreign policy decisions are perceived as being a force for good.
As discussed in chapter 2, Americans tend to see the United States as a positive force in world affairs, and U.S. leaders routinely invoke this sort of argument in order to defend America’s current position. Presidents and cabinet officials are fond of reciting the positive benefits that U.S. global leadership has produced, such as the reconstruction and rehabilitation of Germany and Japan, the expansion of the world economy after World War II, the spread of democracy and human rights in the 1980s and 1990s, and the liberation of certain countries or peoples. This line of defense helps legitimate America’s structural position as the dominant world power, by suggesting that world politics would be even nastier if the U.S. position were weaker.102
Similar arguments are also used to defend specific U.S. policies, by arguing that their net effect is positive. Thus, both the Bush and the Clinton administration justified going to war in the absence of UN Security Council authorization by arguing that the net effect of the wars in Kosovo and Iraq had been beneficial. As President Bush told the UN General Assembly in September 2004: “Because a coalition of nations acted to defend the peace, and the credibility of the United Nations, Iraq is free, and today we are joined by representatives of a liberated country. . . . Across Iraq, life is being improved by liberty. Across the Middle East, people are safer because an unstable aggressor has been removed from power. Across the world, nations are more secure because an ally of terror has fallen.”103 Such efforts to defend the legitimacy of U.S. primacy may acknowledge that these actions have had unfortunate consequences (such as the deaths of innocent civilians) but nonetheless maintain that the overall balance of costs and benefits has been positive.104
Just as predictably, of course, U.S. opponents challenge the legitimacy of U.S. primacy by suggesting that the net effects of its actions have been largely negative. In the case of Iraq, for example, critics highlight the failure to find Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, the postwar sufferings of the Iraqi people, and the continued violence within Iraq in order to argue that the social and political costs of the war exceed the benefits claimed by President Bush and his supporters. At a more fundamental level, Islamic radicals such as Osama bin Laden portray America’s global role in wholly negative terms, accusing it of stealing Muslim oil wealth, imposing unjust economic sanctions on Islamic countries, installing military bases within the Muslim world, corrupting Muslim societies, and aiding Israel’s “pillage” of Muslim territories.105 Indeed, al Qaeda spokesman Suleiman Abu Gheith has claimed the right to kill at least four million Americans (half of them children) by arguing that “America is the head of heresy in the modern world … [It] is the leader of corruption and the breakdown [of values], whether moral, ideological, political and economic corruption,” and by arguing that U.S. policies in the Middle East and elsewhere have caused the deaths of at least four million Muslims. For al Qaeda, U.S. primacy is inherently evil and illegitimate, and violent reprisals are therefore justified.106
A less extreme variation on this general theme blames the United States for causing a variety of global problems, or for failing to do enough to address them. U.S. rejection of the Kyoto Protocol is seen as especially damning from this perspective, given that the United States remains the single largest source of greenhouse gases. For critics, therefore, the United States is causing the problem but selfishly refusing to help solve it. Critics also point to America’s niggardly foreign-aid budget, and to economic policies (such as agricultural subsidies and textile tariffs) that have limited the development prospects of some of the world’s poorest nations. Thus, the United States can be damned both for what it does and for what it fails to do.
Finally, a number of world leaders have suggested that the concentration of power in U.S. hands is inherently undesirable—even if some U.S. policies are broadly beneficial to others—and argue that a return to a more “multipolar” distribution of power would be preferable.107 A rapid return to multipolarity may be a vain hope, but such comments reinforce the idea that U.S. primacy is not a good thing and ought to be resisted.
In the broadest sense, the legitimacy of U.S. primacy will depend in part on whether its behavior is that of a responsible fiduciary.108 U.S. primacy will be more acceptable to others if the United States is in fact acting for the greater good, and especially when at least some of the actions for the greater good are not also in the narrow U.S. selfinterest. A trust officer is not supposed to manage an estate so as to maximize the bank’s profits; being a “responsible fiduciary” means managing the estate in order to serve the best interests of the beneficiaries. By the same logic, U.S. primacy will appear more legitimate when others can see that the United States is using its privileged position to do something more than just enhance its own power or well-being.
America’s recent wars provide an ideal set of contrasts. The Gulf War of 1991 was broadly legitimate, both because the United States followed established procedures and because it did not appear to be acting solely in its own self-interest. NATO’s interventions in Bosnia (1996) and Kosovo (1999) offered even clearer examples of fiduciary behavior, insofar as the United States did not stand to gain much for itself in either case. By contrast, the more recent war in Iraq was much less obviously “fiduciary” in nature, because the Bush administration’s initial decisions to monopolize political control, to limit reconstruction contracts to U.S. firms, and to pursue long-term access to Iraqi military bases suggested self-serving rather than altruistic motives.109
The U.S. response to the deadly tsunami that struck South Asia in December 2004 illustrates this issue in another way. Not only was the Bush administration slow to respond to the enormity of the disaster, but its initial pledge of $15 million in emergency assistance was promptly and justly condemned as niggardly by foreigners and Americans alike. To its credit, the administration soon increased its pledge to $350 million and dispatched U.S. military forces to provide immediate help, but the fact that the U.S. government had to be shamed into a higher level of aid diluted the goodwill that the United States might otherwise have garnered. At the very least, the tragedy was a missed opportunity to demonstrate that the United States stood ready to act for the greater good, and thus a missed opportunity to bolster the legitimacy of U.S. primacy.
Conformity with Moral Norms
Actions that produce net positive consequences may still be illegitimate if they violate widely accepted moral principles. The removal of a despot might be wholly desirable, for example, but not if one has to slaughter hundreds of innocent children in order to do it. In other words, the ends do not necessarily justify the means. Even when its actions yield positive results, therefore, U.S. primacy will appear more legitimate if it also appears to conform to prevailing moral norms.
For those who seek to delegitimate U.S. primacy, accusing the United States of acting immorally is an obvious tactic. Recent examples include the efforts of a coalition of international lawyers and human-rights groups to prosecute the United States for war crimes committed during the 1999 Kosovo war and the 2003 war against Iraq, based on accusations that the United States targeted civilians and used weaponry (e.g., cluster munitions, depleted-uranium warheads, etc.) that violated existing laws of war. The United States was also criticized for failing to respond to humanitarian emergencies such as the Rwandan genocide—failures all the more striking in light of U.S. attempts to portray itself as “leader of the free world” and a beacon of hope for oppressed peoples. Both European and Arab critics argue that U.S. support for Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip is inconsistent with the basic principle of self-determination, as well as more specific human-rights norms.
More recently, the U.S. refusal to designate battlefield detainees seized during the invasion of Afghanistan as “prisoners of war” (a decision that left the detainees outside the protections of the Geneva Convention), and its decision to subject them to military tribunals rather than civil prosecution, sparked complaints from many countries, further reinforcing the impression that U.S. policy was at odds with prevailing legal and moral principles.110
Perhaps the most damaging blow to the legitimacy of U.S. primacy, however, was wholly self-inflicted. I refer, of course, to the atrocities inflicted on Iraqi prisoners by U.S. personnel at Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib prison, as well as the subsequent admission that as many as twenty-eight Iraqi and Afghan prisoners may have been murdered by U.S. soldiers. The public spectacle of U.S. soldiers and interrogators employing torture, intimidation, and explicit acts of sexual humiliation—recorded on film and available for viewing around the world—dealt a heavy blow to U.S. efforts to portray itself as a responsible global power with high moral ideals. Moreover, the fact that these actions may have been approved by higher authorities, and the Bush administration’s tardy and ineffective responses to these revelations, reinforced global perceptions that this was far from an aberration.111 Images of an Iraqi prisoner strung up for interrogation quickly became a graphic global icon, which the NewYork Times correctly called, “an ad for martyrdom, made in America.”112 A German TV station aired a documentary showing U.S. soldiers allegedly abusing Iraqi children, which led the head of the Norwegian Parliament’s Foreign Policy Committee to call for “those politically responsible in the United States to step down.”113 President Bush tried to limit the damage by telling two Arabic TV interviewers that the torturers did not represent “the America I knew,” but no senior officials resigned and Bush himself did not offer a formal apology.
Not surprisingly, commentators around the world felt U.S. behavior was abhorrent and the administration’s response inadequate. The Financial Times Deutschland called Bush’s interview “too late, much too late,” and said it would be “impossible to regain moral authority.” A conservative Italian media syndicate called the credibility crisis “devastating.” The South China Morning Post said the scandal was “a stain on reputations too deep to wipe away”; the Philippine Daily Inquirer said that the U.S. presence in Iraq and involvement in the Middle East “had been stripped of all pretensions to legitimacy”; and the Globe and Mail in Canada saw “Bush’s Moral High Ground Slipping Away.” Reaction in the Arab and Islamic world was predictably harsh: Saudi newspapers declared that Bush’s remarks “will convince almost no one in the Arab world that Washington has changed its ways”; a Lebanese journal commented, “Seeing George Bush talk, walk, move his arms, greet, repeat his nonsense, lie, promise, etc., has become torture itself”; and the official Syrian newspaper Tishreen declared, “Any cosmetic strategy will most likely be useless … [because] they are images of the crime of occupation and direct aggression in violation of international law and global legitimacy.”114 Americans may think these judgments are too harsh and hypocritical in themselves, but our opinions are not the issue. For Americans, the problem is that the Abu Ghraib scandal gave opponents of U.S. primacy a powerful weapon with which to challenge U.S. claims to morally legitimate conduct.
Efforts to challenge America’s moral conduct are not confined to foreign policy, of course. Opponents seeking to delegitimate U.S. primacy also focus on America’s various social ills—racial tensions, urban poverty, high rates of crime and imprisonment, etc.—while simultaneously condemning “immoral” U.S. practices such as the death penalty.115 By 2001, European opposition to U.S. reliance upon the death penalty had become so persistent that a group of senior U.S. diplomats issued an open letter calling for an end to executions of the mentally retarded—a practice, they warned, that subjected the United States to “daily and growing criticism from the international community.”116
More recently, the People’s Republic of China has answered U.S. human rights criticisms by issuing its own report on the “Human Rights Record of the United States.” The report documents America’s high crime and incarceration rates, widespread gun ownership, persistent racism, homelessness, election fraud, mistreatment of foreign nationals, and several other social ills, and it emphasizes the “double standards of the United States on human rights and its exercise of hegemonism.” According to Peter Edidin of the New York Times, it “draws a picture of America that approaches caricature. But that doesn’t mean it won’t buttress the negative image of the United States held by its critics around the world.” The Chinese report is a classic example of delegitimation, intended to tarnish America’s reputation as a morally admirable society.117
It is less surprising that U.S. enemies also denounce the United States as a decadent and vice-ridden society worthy only of contempt. Thus, Osama bin Laden describes the United States as “the worst civilization witnessed by the history of mankind” and condemns its practice of usury, consumption of alcohol and drugs, sexual immorality, and gambling, among other vices.118 His purpose is obvious: by portraying the United States as an immoral society, he encourages resistance to U.S. dominance and tarnishes the image of anyone who chooses to collaborate with Washington.
Efforts to undermine the moral stature of the United States can take subtler forms as well. The United States was denied a seat on the United Nations Human Rights Commission in 2001, for example, and the UN General Assembly has repeatedly voted for an end to the U.S. embargo of Cuba.119 These actions are largely symbolic, of course, and unlikely to have much effect on America’s overall power position or on efforts to advance human rights worldwide. But such actions do challenge the idea that the United States is in the vanguard of the human-rights movement, and they give weaker states a symbolic opportunity to “pay Uncle Sam back.”
Global perceptions of America’s moral legitimacy are also shaped by the ways that U.S. policy is described and by the particular rhetoric that foreign commentators use. When a prominent writer such as John le Carré tells readers of London’s Times that “the United States has gone mad,” it can only strengthen the image of the United States as an irrational bully unbound by moral norms. When the normally pro-American and right-of-center Economist asks, “Has George Bush ever met a treaty that he liked?” it reinforces the prevailing image of unfeeling U.S. unilateralism.120 And when a Chinese newspaper editor explains his own country’s wariness by saying that Americans “are too arrogant and high-handed to be tolerated,” he casts doubt on whether it is desirable for the United States to control such a large share of world power.121
These forms of delegitimation have a straightforward purpose. If others can depict the United States as either acting immorally or as being immoral, the less legitimate its position of primacy will appear. And the less legitimate it appears, then the harder the United States has to work to gain support from others.
Consistency with the “Natural” Order
Social hierarchies are more legitimate when inequalities of status are believed to result from conditions that are seen as “natural” and/or immutable. We do not regard it as “illegitimate” or unfair that fifty-year-old tennis players never win Wimbledon, because we know that age inevitably erodes athletic performance. Perceptions of legitimacy can hinge, therefore, on whether existing conditions are consistent with our sense of the “natural” order of things.
To make its own position of primacy more acceptable to others, the United States would like them to see its dominance as the “natural” and inevitable product of particular American traits and virtues. For Americans, the nation’s rise to world power is often portrayed as a direct result of the political genius of the Founding Fathers, the virtues of the U.S. Constitution, the emphasis placed on freedom and individuality, and the dedication and initiative of the American people themselves. In this narrative, it is entirely appropriate that the United States enjoys a position of primacy that no other country has ever reached. Other countries may envy America’s position, and they may even believe that it is not good for the United States to be so powerful, but they should not question that the United States deserves to be where it is.
There is probably more than a grain of truth in this account, but those who question the legitimacy of U.S. primacy might tell a different tale. There is no denying that the United States is number one by a large margin, but this can also be portrayed as stemming from good fortune rather than from U.S. virtues. The Founding Fathers were lucky that North America was a continent rich in natural resources, lucky that the Native American populations were extremely susceptible to European diseases, and lucky to found a country far from the other Great Powers. They were also lucky that the European Great Powers were at war for much of the republic’s early history—which facilitated U.S. expansion across the continent—and fortunate that later wars weakened the other Great Powers and helped destroy their overseas empires. This account of America’s rise does not deny the role of U.S. virtues, but it sees U.S. primacy as a stroke of good luck rather than as a sign of “manifest destiny.”
By emphasizing the contingent nature of U.S. primacy, this counter-narrative encourages others to see it as temporary—as a product of particular historical accidents rather than an immutable condition. It also encourages them to question U.S. global leadership, for if the United States is number one mostly because it was lucky (instead of being unusually virtuous, farsighted, or wise), then there is no reason to regard American advice as better than anyone else’s. U.S. leaders may be able to use the power at their disposal to impose their preferences on others, but this interpretation implies that no one should accept U.S. advice uncritically, just because it happens to come from the world’s most powerful country.
When Will Delegitimation Work?
As discussed in chapter 2, some degree of foreign fear and resentment is inevitable, simply because the United States is so much stronger than any other state. Efforts to delegitimate U.S. primacy are likely to vary, however, depending on how the United States uses its power and how it portrays itself to others. When will the United States be most vulnerable to a strategy of delegitimation, and what conditions will make such efforts especially effective?
First, and perhaps most obviously, U.S. power will appear less legitimate when it is arrayed against groups that are much weaker. No one likes Goliath, and underdogs often gain our sympathy even when they are acting in a provocative manner. Because the United States is objectively so strong and so secure compared with most other states, others expect it to behave with a greater sense of forgiveness and forbearance. Even when it is objectively “in the right,” therefore, an excessive willingness to impose its will on especially weak states is likely to undermine global acceptance of U.S. power.
Second, challenges to U.S. legitimacy will be more telling when they come from authoritative, impartial, or morally distinguished sources. Criticisms from a hostile foreign government can be discounted as mere propaganda, but condemnation from a neutral organization like Amnesty International is likely to carry greater weight. Thus, an October 2004 study in the British medical journal The Lancet, which estimated that the U.S. war in Iraq may have caused 100,000 Iraqi civilian deaths, is potentially more damaging to U.S. legitimacy because its authors are professional epidemiologists with no apparent political axe to grind.122 Similarly, if U.S. conduct is challenged by figures with commanding moral stature (e.g., Nelson Mandela, the Pope, the Dalai Lama, etc.), it is likely to do more damage to global perceptions of the U.S. role than accusations made by the leader of a country like Syria or North Korea. Even figures that we regard as evil (e.g., Osama bin Laden) may possess considerable moral stature with some populations, and their criticisms of the United States will strike a resonant chord wherever that is the case.
Third, the legitimacy of U.S. policy will be compromised whenever the proffered justification for its actions is palpably false. To take the most obvious recent case, America’s legitimacy as a world leader was clearly damaged by the failure to find Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, and the subsequent recognition that its case for war in Iraq was based on distorted intelligence, worst-case analysis, and deliberate deception. When Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz admitted that the administration’s emphasis on Saddam Hussein’s alleged WMD arsenal and links to terrorism was a “bureaucratic convenience,” this confession was quickly trumpeted by critics and did further damage to U.S. credibility. Le Monde declared that the focus on WMD had been a “pretext,” and a Pravda headline announced that Wolfowitz was “confessing the lies.”123 Not only did the United States bungle the postwar reconstruction and leave Iraq in a state of simmering discontent, but the original justification for war turned out to be fictitious. It is hard to build a strong case for America’s global leadership role on such a foundation of falsehoods.
Fourth, the legitimacy of U.S. dominance will be challenged when U.S. behavior fails to live up to America’s own professed ideals, or when the United States insists that others abide by standards that it refuses to accept for itself. As discussed in chapter 2, states (or individuals) that routinely employ double standards cast doubt on the reliability of their future conduct and undermine their own reputations for moral behavior. During the Cold War, racism in the United States was seen as a liability in the struggle against Communism, precisely because racial injustice made U.S. efforts to portray itself as the “land of the free” look hollow and thus undermined the U.S. image in Africa, Asia, and elsewhere.124 Today, foreign critics are quick to highlight inconsistencies in what America asks of others and what it reserves for itself. According to Qazi Hussain Ahmad, head of Pakistan’s Jamaat-e-Islami movement, “The most enduring factor of the U.S.–Islamic world relations is the sheer inconsistency between the high moral ideals that the United States advocates and the practice of successive U.S. governments in their relations with the Islamic world.”125 Similarly, there is an obvious contradiction between U.S. insistence that other states abandon their own nuclear programs and its own plans to build strategic missile defenses and to develop a new generation of nuclear weapons. As Iranian newspaper columnist Amir Mohebian argues, “The Americans say in order to preserve the peace for [their] children [they] should have nuclear weapons and [we] should not.”126 Foreign governments have also noted the contrast between America’s insistence that other states establish “the rule of law” and the Bush administration’s readiness to discard existing legal principles when dealing with suspected international terrorists. Needless to say, the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison have been a vivid example of U.S. hypocrisy, a fact not lost on foreign observers. As a Lebanese commentator put it (expressing a view widely echoed by others), “Everything that was said about dictatorship and Saddam’s bloody rule will have to disappear before the sadistic American practices against prisoners, at a time when Washington has not stopped for even one day from shelling the Arabs with slogans of democracy and human rights.”127
Last but by no means least, legitimacy in world politics also operates at the level of diplomatic “style.” Just as unpopular monarchs are often condemned for their ostentation, venality, and arrogance, U.S. officials can undermine America’s legitimacy by being insensitive to foreign concerns or by treating their foreign counterparts with contempt. While Teddy Roosevelt counseled that one should “speak softly, but carry a big stick,” some U.S. officials seem to believe that “speak loudly and shake a big stick” is the more effective approach, with predictable results. Genuine disagreements are inevitable in world politics, and sometimes diplomatic confrontations must be brutally frank. It does little good and much harm, however, when U.S. representatives treat their foreign counterparts dismissively, as both Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright were prone to do.128 The United States may be able to get away with it for the time being, but such behavior is not going to make other societies happier about U.S. primacy.
Why Legitimacy Matters
But does any of this really matter? As long as the United States remains the world’s dominant power, is it really a problem when U.S. actions appear illegitimate in the eyes of others? Doesn’t this sort of resentment go hand in hand with being the world’s sole superpower? Foreign nations may resent U.S. primacy and regard the U.S. position as undesirable and even illegitimate, but what can they do about it? In the end, isn’t the preservation of U.S. power the only truly important objective? Challenges to U.S. legitimacy and complaints about U.S. behavior simply don’t matter very much, as long as the United States is strong enough to impose its will when it has to, and as long as other states remain unwilling to challenge us directly.
This view is an article of faith among advocates of a muscular U.S. foreign policy that pays scant heed to the opinions of others.129 It is also dangerously shortsighted. As many commentators have noted, even the world’s strongest superpower cannot go it alone in every arena. In virtually every important policy realm, in fact—international trade, counterterrorism, human rights, nonproliferation, dealing with failed states or global environmental problems, and so on—effective solutions will require global cooperation.
Why, then, does legitimacy matter? It matters because America’s ability to elicit active cooperation from other states is impaired when others see the U.S. position of primacy—and the policies the United States is using that position to pursue—as undesirable, shortsighted, or morally dubious. In particular, foreign governments will find it more difficult to support U.S. policy when their own populations regard the United States (and its actions) as inherently illegitimate or questionable. If international diplomacy were confined to the maneuvers of foreign offices and ruling elites—as it was in the classical era of European “cabinet diplomacy”—then public perceptions of international legitimacy might not matter very much. Today, however, most governments—and especially the governments of the most powerful states—must maintain popular support in order to keep themselves in power. And because people around the world have far greater access to information—through media, the Internet, the activities of NGOs, and so forth—their views on America’s international conduct cannot be dictated from Washington.130
As a result, ruling elites who might themselves favor U.S. positions will find their freedom of action constrained by public skepticism or by outright opposition. In the fall of 2002, for example, German Prime Minister Gerhard Schroeder won reelection by distancing himself from key elements of U.S. foreign policy—and especially the simmering confrontation with Iraq—a position that resonated strongly with the German electorate. Schroeder was not being disloyal; he was simply responding to the opinions of his electorate. What else do we expect democratic leaders to do? Public opposition to the war in Iraq made it unwise for the Turkish government to permit U.S. troops free access to Turkish territory and military facilities, despite repeated U.S. efforts to obtain this permission and a U.S. offer of substantial economic assistance. And public opinion later drove Spanish and Philippine leaders to withdraw their own troops from the occupation forces. In Asia, public resentment of the U.S. military presence in South Korea and concerns about U.S. diplomacy in the region have complicated U.S. efforts to obtain a “united front” against North Korea’s resurgent nuclear program. One could go on, but the basic point should be clear: The less legitimate U.S. primacy appears to others, the more resistance the United States will face and the more difficult it will be to attain any of its foreign-policy goals.
Finally, America’s tarnished image may also affect the competitive position of U.S. firms in overseas markets. Surveys by the Global Market Institute suggest that anger over U.S. foreign policy has deterred significant numbers of foreign consumers from buying U.S. brands, with several prominent companies noting declining sales in key foreign markets. According to Keith Reinhard, chairman of the advertising firm DDB Worldwide, “Foreigners are transferring their anger at the U.S. government to anger at the U.S. and anger at U.S. business.” Although definitive evidence of widespread consumer backlash is still lacking, it is clearly a growing concern for corporate America and yet another reason to worry about the legitimacy of American primacy.131
Delegitimation is a subtle and slow-moving strategy. It does not confront U.S. power directly, and it does not prevent other nations from cooperating with the United States when their interests are aligned with ours. Nor does it prevent the United States from bargaining, cajoling, and compelling others to do what it wants. But it does make everything more difficult. If U.S. primacy were seen as broadly legitimate, then other states would be more likely to join forces with the United States willingly and enthusiastically, based on the belief that doing so is “the right thing to do” and that it will be popular at home. When the United States is viewed negatively, however, and when its position of primacy seems unfair, unnatural, and undeserved, then foreign governments will face greater opposition if they are perceived to be too close to us. Because the United States is so powerful, it will still be able to get its way on many issues. But it will not be nearly as easy.
Conclusion
The strategies outlined above are not mutually exclusive, and states are likely to combine several of them in order to tame U.S. power. Soft balancing can make efforts to bind the United States more effective, and informal types of military cooperation (such as the exchange of information about U.S. military practices) can make it easier for weaker states to mobilize their own resources and develop effective asymmetric responses. Efforts to make U.S. primacy appear illegitimate will be more effective if they involve many diverse voices, and even efforts to blackmail the United States are likely to be facilitated if a blackmailer can gain foreign support.
Nor is the use of these strategies confined to avowed enemies of the United States. As noted throughout this book, even close U.S. allies are concerned about the concentration of power in U.S. hands, and some of them may try to use subtle versions of these different strategies either to limit U.S. autonomy or to gain particular advantages for themselves. U.S. allies can engage in subtle forms of balking or blackmail, for example, by withholding diplomatic support for some U.S. initiative unless or until the United States provides them with whatever it is that they want. Similarly, weak U.S. allies can extract concessions by threatening to collapse, as Afghan President Hamid Karzai did in order to get additional NATO and U.S. aid in February 2003.132
In the broadest sense, therefore, what is at stake is the basic character of the international political environment. For the foreseeable future, the United States is going to be the world’s dominant military and economic power. If most states see its position as broadly beneficial and its actions as generally legitimate, then the United States will be operating in a comparatively permissive international environment. Such a world will not be free from conflict, but it will be one where U.S. preferences are broadly shared by others and where the United States will find it relatively easy to defend its vital interests and to advance its most important values.
Alternatively, if most states see U.S. primacy as a challenge and regard U.S. policies as “part of the problem” rather than “part of the solution,” they will gravitate toward the strategies outlined in this chapter. If they do, then the United States will face an increasingly resistant international system rather than a largely permissive one. The United States will still get its way on many issues, and would still be the dominant world power, but it will find itself opposed on more and more occasions, and U.S. citizens are likely to see the world (and be seen by it) in a much more negative light.
For most of us, the first possibility offers a far more appealing vision. The primary task of U.S. foreign policy, therefore, is to ensure that Americans can live in a world that generally embraces U.S. values and welcomes the benevolent use of U.S. power, rather than a world that is constantly searching for opportunities to undermine, irritate, and restrain it. In chapter 4, I consider what states will do if they choose to accept U.S. primacy and turn it to their advantage.