Kori Schake
MY FAVOURITE expression of America’s dynamism comes from the country’s former poet laureate, Robert Pinsky: “American culture”, he observed, “seems so much in process, so brilliantly and sometimes brutally in motion, that standard models for it fail to apply.” What pessimists about American power overlook is the protean regeneration that is the country’s essential nature.
The United States has a government created by people who distrusted government, and is a great power whose people would prefer to remain uninvolved in the world. Those anomalies make it difficult to sustain international commitments, especially involving countries not constituted along similar domestic lines. And yet America is the architect of a durable political, economic and security order that has made it and others safer and more prosperous.
The debacle in Afghanistan will require demonstrations of greater commitment elsewhere, but it doesn’t call into question the order itself. In fact, that America and its allies persevered in Afghanistan for 20 years despite very slow progress may even deter some challengers.
The global order should not be taken for granted. Its genius is that it benefits not just America and its allies but every country that plays by its rules. And it is especially beneficial to middle-sized and smaller powers. They would have little ability to protect their interests in an environment where the strongest weren’t constrained by rules and institutions. That makes the system more stable and cost-effective than those that other hegemons have established, such as French dominance of Europe in the Napoleonic era or even Spain with all its plunder from the New World. While the rules prevail, everyone prospers.
The world is confronted with a historic challenge. It is happening economically, diplomatically, militarily, technologically and more. But at its core, it is philosophical, contesting the Hegelian belief that as people grow wealthy, they demand more political rights. That idea seemed to explain how the world’s most sustainably prosperous countries were free societies. The rise of China, where there is economic well-being without an open society, calls that into question.
Yet it would be wrong to regard the tension as a great-power competition. Instead, it is a situation in which America and the vast majority of other countries are attempting to sustain a mutually beneficial order against a country that seeks to overturn it for its sole advantage. The UN Convention on the Law of the Sea illustrates the distinction: China is a signatory, but routinely violates it; America has not ratified the convention yet not only abides by its terms, but also assists other countries in upholding it.
Although China benefits enormously from orderly global trade, it is still willing to abuse its terms to penalise Australia and Japan for pursuing foreign policies with which it disagrees. Russia may share China’s ambition of an international order favouring authoritarianism, but it lacks the economic heft to create systemic change. If America cannot or will not uphold the international, rules-based system, the likeliest outcomes will be either a frayed, more chaotic world, or one dominated by China. Either outcome would be less peaceful and prosperous.
Certainly, American power has ebbed relative to the growing economies of the global south that America’s rules-based order helped bring about, as well as from the country’s own mistakes, such as the Iraq war and the chaotic departure from Afghanistan. Yet tales of American decline fail to capture the country’s capacity for reinvention and rejuvenation, from creating Silicon Valley to electing a black president. Critics underestimate how difficult it is for other countries to get right what America already has right.
The United States has both high- and low-skilled labour through immigration and social acceptance, university systems that generate technical and scientific innovation, deep and diverse capital pools for investment, reliable commercial law and recourse through the courts, and a political system responsive to public concerns. Washington is designed to be at a stalemate unless there is a broad political consensus. It’s a regrettable byproduct of beneficial democratic features: congressional elections every two years that make the chamber closer to public attitudes, less centralised party control that provide wider avenues for newcomer participation (Donald Trump, for example), and a federal system that enables policy experimentation by the states.
Allies and enemies alike are right to question whether America’s capacity for regeneration is enough this time to fix its myriad problems. The country seems to luxuriate in performative politics. The culture wars have evolved into stark ideological divisions over everything from mask-wearing to army recruiting commercials to the integrity of the presidential election in 2020. Governing amid social diversity is difficult and social media’s immediacy and pervasiveness complicates everything.
Yet such challenges have always typified the American experience, and are perhaps to be expected for a country “so brilliantly and sometimes brutally in motion”, in Mr Pinsky’s words. The Black Lives Matter protests illustrated injustices in America, but also showed the breadth of solidarity and demand for improvement. The protests inspired demands for changes around the world—fitting for a country that sees its values as universal.
The past three American presidents have argued for less international involvement, evoking the idea of “nation-building at home”. But it is not a binary choice; the aims are complementary not contradictory. America needs an international order that prevents trouble so that it can focus on domestic challenges, and strengthening the country domestically boosts its influence internationally. The alternatives to the rules-based order are costlier and more dangerous than sustaining what exists: shielding ourselves against a hostile or chaotic order would require more expense and effort. America should strengthen the current system. Three steps for this stand out.
First, close the “strategy-resources” gap. For the past 20 years, America has tolerated a chasm between its ambitions and the money it commits to achieve them: financing wars through debt and allowing dedicated social programmes to outpace funding. Its defence posture is predicated on an annual 3-5% increase in real spending that has not materialised. President Biden’s defence budget doesn’t even keep pace with inflation. We’re tempting adversaries to test whether we can do what we say we will. It is past time to buy a wider margin of safety, either by increasing military spending (perhaps to 6% of GDP from 3.7% today) or giving the Defence Department latitude to spend differently (such as by eliminating non-defence elements—like cancer research—from its budget).
Second, smarten up diplomacy. American diplomats are typically generalists on whom the State Department spends a fortune for language training. Instead, the country needs to hire language speakers and put the emphasis on teaching strategy: the arts of nuclear deterrence, successful negotiation and diplomatic history. Moreover, creativity should be encouraged. For example, faced with a lack of transparency in China, the American embassy started tweeting Beijing’s air quality on an hourly basis, which pressed the government to take environmental policies more seriously.
Third, stop imperiling dollar supremacy. So much of the latitude America enjoys in order to run high deficits comes from issuing the global reserve currency. It has been lucky that, so far, the alternatives like the euro or yuan are inferior. But the rise of “secondary sanctions” (imposed on individuals and organisations outside a country under sanctions) creates incentives for the development of new payment mechanisms to skirt the dollar zone—the very system that keeps America’s debt affordable. A plan to end deficit spending and exercising restraint in using the financial system as a weapon when imposing sanctions needs to be a national-security priority.
Americans are experiencing a crisis of confidence over whether their democracy can handle its challenges, and they question the universality of their values. They are also questioning the use of military force after failures in Iraq and Afghanistan. However leaders like Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping embrace no such introspection. They imprison political activists, build surveillance systems, suffocate dissent and constrain business.
It is true that many people would not want a society as brilliantly and brutally “in motion” as America, but they probably do wish for a government that is fair and accountable. America should not lose faith that the truths it holds to be self-evident genuinely are just that. Sustaining an international system is hard work. No dominant power has had as much voluntary co-operation from allies as America. With collaboration and creativity, the country may grow even stronger in the 21st century.
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