Conventional wisdom holds that a power transition is underway between the United States and China. Many esteemed observers argue that much as Britain gracefully, if begrudgingly, accepted its displacement by the U.S. in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the U.S. should concede China’s ascent to preeminence.
But what if this advice is predicated on a flawed presumption? Specifically, what if the successor to a U.S.-led system is not a Chinese-led one, but one without an anchor? Several phenomena make the latter possibility seem more likely:
— (Relative) U.S. decline;
— The American public’s growing aversion not only to military intervention, but also to engagement abroad more generally;
— Incremental efforts by a number of powers, particularly China and Russia, to challenge key precepts of the prevailing system; and
— The absence of a country or coalition that could replace the U.S. in its current capacity.
How concerned should we be about the prospect of an anchorless world? The answer depends in part on how essential one believes U.S. power is to the maintenance of a “liberal international order.” Many analysts argue that it is integral, perhaps even irreplaceable. In January 2012 Zbigniew Brzezinski ventured that U.S. decline, whether precipitous or protracted, could yield a “phase of rather inconclusive and somewhat chaotic realignments of both global and regional power, with no grand winners and many more losers, in a setting of international uncertainty and even of potentially fatal risks to global well-being.” [1] In December 2012 the National Intelligence Council warned that “[a] collapse or sudden retreat of U.S. power would most likely result in an extended period of global anarchy where there would be no stable international system and no leading power to replace the U.S.” [2] In his latest book, published this April, political scientist Randall Schweller contends that without “America’s preponderant power, international politics will shift from order to disorder.” [3]
Other commentators are less concerned. According to Ian Buruma, a professor of democracy, human rights, and journalism at Bard College, the premise that “without a benevolent hegemonic power to police the world, chaos will ensue and more malevolent forces will take over,” “has the familiar whiff of the late stages of empire.” While noting the “mayhem” that followed the collapse of the British Raj, he suspects that “prolonged imperial rule could have made ethnic tensions worse.” [4] Buruma has expressed such skepticism before. In early 2012, for example, he questioned the presumption that “the world order would collapse without ‘American leadership’. France’s King Louis XV allegedly declared on his deathbed: ‘Après moi, le déluge’ (After me, the flood). This is the conceit of all great powers.” [5] Another perspective in this vein comes from Barry Posen, director of MIT’s Security Studies Program and author of a new book, Restraint: A New Foundation for U.S. Grand Strategy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014). At “The New Internationalism,” a conference jointly hosted last month by the American Conservative and the American Prospect, I asked him how concerned he is about the possibility of disorder in the coming decades. He replied:
A world with a small number of great powers is not a world that can’t organize things….Oligopolies work…so why not an oligopoly [of great powers]? Why not cooperation, where interests overlap, in the context of competition, where they don’t? When the problem is presented as a binary problem — either the American-led world order or anarchy — to me this seems like an overdramatization of the outcome. People are rightfully concerned that the world could go to hell in a handbasket…but I don’t think that’s inevitable or even likely….[In addition] I kind of have a soft spot for nuclear weapons: they make great-power relations a little bit different than they’ve been in past anarchies. The principal powers are not really in a position to prey directly on one another. It’s wildly risky.
A world without an anchor should not be confused with one in which the U.S. is impotent in international affairs. Indeed, for reasons Bruce Jones explores in his new book, Still Ours to Lead: America, Rising Powers, and the Tension Between Rivalry and Restraint (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 2014), it retains an unrivaled capacity to shape the contours of global order. If, however, it undertakes to freeze that order’s current configuration or, worse, to constrict the rise of its principal competitor, China, it could squander that opportunity.
Notes
[1] Brzezinski, Strategic Vision: America and the Crisis of Global Power (New York: Basic Books, 2012): p. 75
[2] Global Trends 2030: Alternative Worlds (Washington, DC: National Intelligence Council, December 2012): p. 105
[3] Schweller, Maxwell’s Demon and the Golden Apple: Global Discord in the New Millennium (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014): p. 9
[4] Buruma, “America’s Late Imperial Dilemma,” Project Syndicate (6/6/14)
[5] Buruma, “American Funk,” Project Syndicate (2/7/12)
