Chapter Five: Power, influence and leadership

Abstract

The struggle not just to define but also to preserve American power is no modern phenomenon: questions of intervention and projection have dominated the nation's politics from the days of the Founding Fathers. Then, as now, the old centres of power were shifting. Nor is economic stress an unfamiliar factor for policymakers. As another presidential election looms, America's role in global affairs and security has emerged as one of the campaign's great battle lines.

But in 2012, domestic political and economic problems are compounded by the ongoing financial crisis in Europe, which, together with the overstretch and fatigue from two wars, has sapped the strength of America's chief allies. While it may urge its NATO partners to shoulder more of the security burden, the US finds them less willing and occasionally unable to share the strain. This Adelphi examines the myriad challenges America must confront if it is to uphold and spread its values and interests.

Notes

For this and the following quotations, see ‘Remarks by the President on the Defense Strategic Review’, 5 January 2012, http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2012/01/05/remarkspresident-defense-strategic-review.

See ‘Sustaining U.S. Global Leadership: Priorities for 21st Century Defense’ (Washington DC: Department of Defense, January 2012); and, ‘Defense Budget Priorities and Choices’ (Washington DC: Department of Defense, January 2012).

See, for example, Baker Spring, ‘Obama's Defense Budget Makes Protecting America Its Lowest Priority’, Heritage Foundation Backgrounder no. 2658, 1 March 2012, http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2012/03/obamasdefense-budget-makes-protectingamerica-its-lowest-priority.

The Military Balance 2012 (London: Routledge for the IISS, 2012), p. 44.

‘Fiscal Year Budget Request 2013: Overview’, (Washington DC: Comptroller, Department of Defense, February 2012) pp. 1–2.

The Military Balance 2012, p. 45.

Ibid., p. 32.

Fred Kaplan, ‘Paul Ryan's Risky Ideas’, Slate Magazine, 5 April 2012, http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/war_stories/2012/04/budget_chairman_paul_ryan_would_let_the_military_make_its_own_budget_.html.

See Office of Management and Budget, ‘Outlays by Superfunction and Function 1940–2017’ (Washington DC: US Government Printing Office, 2010), http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/budget/fy2013/assets/hist03z1.xls.

This is not a new argument in the field of international political economy. Charles Kindleberger sketched the requirements for hegemonic stability in his 1975 study of the Great Depression. See Charles P. Kindleberger, The World in Depression, 1929–1939 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1975). Specifically, Kindleberger argued that a successful hegemon must have the abilities to underwrite the system by acting as an open market for distressed goods, to enforce the rules impartially, to provide moral leadership, and to act as a lender of last resort. Over time, like-minded scholars have emphasised the importance of psychological factors as well. See, for example, George A. Akerlof and Robert J. Schiller, Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009).

The late 1960s and early 1970s witnessed an important flourishing in the study of power. Classical realists like E.H. Carr or Hans J. Morgenthau had focused on the exercise of power as a function of wealth and capabilities. See E.H. Carr, The Twenty Years Crisis, 1919–1939 (London: PaperMac, Second Edition, 1995 [1946]), pp. 97–134; Hans J. Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Second Edition, 1958 [1954]), pp. 93–152. But the writers of the late 1960s and early 1970s were more concerned with the possibility that groups without obvious endowments could nevertheless force changes to the status quo. Traditional concepts of power were set aside in favour of new relational notions that underscored the importance of managing interdependence, manipulating uncertainty and redefining the possible in a changed world.

Kagan, The Return of History and the End of Dreams; Fareed Zakaria, The Post-American World (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2008); Dominic Wilson and Roopa Purushothaman, ‘Dreaming with BRICs: The Path to 2050’, Global Economics Paper, No. 99 (New York: Goldman Sachs, 1 October 2003); Goldman Sachs Economics Group, BRICs and Beyond (New York: Goldman Sachs, 2007), http://www.goldmansachs.com/our-thinking/brics/BRICs-and-Beyond.html.

Friedman, The World Is Flat; Zakaria, The Post-American World.

Jagdish Bhagwati, Termites in the Trading System: How Preferential Trading Agreements Undermine Free Trade (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).

Richard N. Cooper, The Economics of Interdependence: Economic Policy in the Atlantic Community (New York: McGraw-Hill for the Council on Foreign Relations, 1968) pp. 260–4. Cooperation is never easy, but it is more effective than trying to go it alone and it is more durable than trying to compel others. This is the central insight in Hannah Arendt's work On Violence. Arendt uses the notion of violence to distinguish between power and coercion. Her basic point is that power lies in collective action: ‘The extreme form of power is All against One, the extreme form of violence is One against All.’ What she reveals with this distinction is the importance of legitimacy and acceptance – not for any given actor or groups of actors, but for the underlying rules of the game. Actors do not possess power by dint of their resources, rather they are ‘empowered by a certain number of people to act in their name’. Once this group withdraws its support, the power itself withers away. See Hannah Arendt, On Violence (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1969), pp. 42–4.

Mancur Olson, The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971).

Spencer Ackerman, ‘America's Global Outlook, at an Inflection Point’, Washington Independent, 28 May 2010, http://washingtonindependent.com/85916/americasglobal-outlook-at-an-inflectionpoint. Many thanks to John Gans for bringing this to my attention.

The National Security Strategy of the United States of America (Washington DC: The White House, May 2010), p. 2.

Ibid., p. 41.

Erik Jones, ‘Shifting the Focus: The New Political Economy of Global Macroeconomic Imbalances’, SAIS Review, vol. 29, no. 2, Summer–Fall 2009, pp. 61–73.

See, for example, Lester Thurow, The Zero-Sum Society: Distribution and the Possibilities for Economic Change (New York: Penguin, 1981 [1980]); and Mancur Olson, The Rise and Decline of Nations: Economic Growth, Stagflation, and Social Rigidities (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982).

This is a recurring theme in the writings of Financial Times columnist Martin Wolf. See Martin Wolf, Fixing Global Finance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009).

This data is taken from the United Nations and is available upon request.

Recent scholarship suggests this has always been the case, even during the period between the two World Wars. See Bear F. Braumoeller, ‘The Myth of American Isolationism’, Foreign Policy Analysis, vol. 6, no. 4, October 2010, pp. 349–71.

The transcript of these debates is available online at http://www.debates.org/pages/trans2004a_p.html.

From a speech by former Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Brussels, 10 June 2011, available at http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2011/06/10/transcript-of-defense-secretarygatess-speech-on-natos-future/.