Introduction

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.

On 1 December 2009, near the end of his first year in office, President Barack Obama travelled to the US Military Academy at West Point, New York, to announce the deployment of another 30,000 troops to Afghanistan. The president's speech followed a difficult and bruising interagency debate among participants from the White House, the Pentagon, the State Department and intelligence agencies on whether to expand the Afghanistan war into a fully resourced counter-insurgency campaign, or – in effect – to cut American losses by reverting to a narrower, targeted campaign of attrition against Islamist terrorists based mainly in Pakistan.

By escalating, Obama appeared to be siding with the more ambitious counter-insurgency advocates. But this appearance was possibly deceiving. For his speech at West Point contained striking notes of caution, restraint and limits – limits of both time and purpose – regarding the American mission in Afghanistan. He told the cadets:

As president, I refuse to set goals that go beyond our responsibility, our means, or our interests. And I must weigh all of the challenges that our nation faces. I don't have the luxury of committing to just one. Indeed, I'm mindful of the words of President Eisenhower, who – in discussing our national security – said: ‘each proposal must be weighed in the light of a broader consideration: the need to maintain balance in and among national programs’.1

The Eisenhower quotation was a telling expression of Obama's small-c conservatism, characterised by a concern with restoring a balance between international commitments on the one hand, and American capabilities and resources on the other. Over the course of Obama's first term, the administration has undertaken a degree of strategic retrenchment. It has made good on Obama's promise to withdraw from Iraq, started to draw down in Afghanistan, outlined modest but still significant cuts to defence spending, put the United Kingdom and France ostentatiously to the fore as leaders of a NATO intervention in Libya, and signalled a strategic ‘pivot’ from land wars in the Middle East to what some analysts described as an ‘offshore balancing’ posture relying on naval and air power and on regional allies.

The retrenchment comes in the midst of a global economic crisis, with attendant pressures for budgetary austerity. Cutting government spending, including defence spending, during a savage economic slump is not a rational short-term response to the collapse of economic demand. The long-term pressures on US government spending are real enough, however, and tied to the overall strength of the US economy. ‘Over the past several years,’ said Obama in the same West Point speech, ‘[we've] failed to appreciate the connection between our national security and our economy.’ From the outset of their administration, moreover, the president and his advisers took pains to emphasise the relationship between current and future resources and various kinds of deficits: a fiscal deficit and strategic over-commitment embodied in two wars; a moral deficit embodied in the George W. Bush administration's official sanction of torture, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, the invasion of Iraq and close ally Israel's occupation of the West Bank; and an attention deficit caused by the United States' overcommitment in the Middle East – to the detriment of other interests and concerns, especially the key strategic theatre of the Asia-Pacific.

There are cycles to American ambitions in the world. The current sense of American overstretch and exhaustion in some respects seems reminiscent of the 1960s and early 1970s, a time of deepening realisation that the Vietnam War was a strategic quagmire. It was during the process of the Vietnam escalation that the Southern Democratic Senator J. William Fulbright decried what he saw as ‘the arrogance of those who would make America the world's policeman’.2 Fulbright's cri de coeur was the prelude to a period of fierce and sometimes violent national polarisation about many things, including America's proper global role.

In the current phase we have not seen the mass demonstration, riots or domestic terrorism that the US experienced in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In other respects, however, the American body politic seems even more polarised today than it was in Fulbright's time. As the president proposes to reconfigure US strategy, the Republican candidates for president, including Mitt Romney (at the time of writing the presumptive nominee), label him a practised ‘appeaser’. If Romney becomes president in 2013, he will probably be constrained by the same economic austerity and general warweariness as that which has affected Obama. Nonetheless, Romney and other Republicans do not acknowledge – at least not explicitly – that America became overstretched in the first decade of the twenty-first century, and they have promised an aggressive and unapologetic re-assertion of America's pre-eminent place in the world.3 Obama, for his part, is hardly proposing that America withdraw from its global responsibilities. Obama's America would not abdicate the policeman's role, though it might pursue narrower ambitions and would certainly try, as in the 2011 Libyan operation, to enlist others to join and sometimes even lead the force.

What are America's real responsibilities, real limitations and real options as a world power in the twenty-first century? The options can be explored in the context of a long-standing and ongoing debate involving three different categories of arguments. One category is idealistic and expansionist; it rests on the belief that the United States must lead because it is the only power with the capabilities and values to do so. A second is more pragmatic or realist; it argues that American leadership should be by example, where possible, and should focus more narrowly on the national interest where there is any requirement to resort to force. A third is more limited and more pluralist; it insists that the United States act only sparingly, and that it should retrench in its commitments both to replenish its resources against uncertain future requirements and to adapt to the challenge of promoting collective action in a more multi-polar world.

These voices often overlap and intermingle. When we start assigning them to real people, we find that many speak from different perspectives at the same time. Nevertheless, it is important to sketch out these logical types if only to make sense of the conversation taking place.

Idealism

When Robert Kagan published his Policy Review essay on ‘Power and Weakness’, he crystallised the presumption that the United States must police the world because it is uniquely competent to do so.4 Kagan's constituted an important idealist argument not least because it offered a plausible secular case for American ‘exceptionalism’. The United States, according to Kagan, was more likely than its European allies to pursue military solutions to global security problems, not due to innate cultural or moral differences, but because America's immensely greater military capacities conditioned the national psychology about when it was proper and useful to employ force.

In other writings, Kagan has emphasised American historical traditions that make it a natural champion of universal liberty.5 But it was Kagan's key insight that the ‘exceptional’ role of America in the world had structural, more than moral or cultural, causes. That role also had positive moral consequences, he contended, because the world was a dangerous place that required a benign hegemon ready to use military force. The European Union, a ‘postmodern’ paradise of law and peaceful integration, constituted a triumph of human progress – a ‘blessed miracle’ in Kagan's formulation – but this miracle was only possible because the United States stood ready as global security guarantor.

This argument was well-suited to its moment. Writing in the summer of 2002, Kagan not only tapped a rich vein of American self-confidence coming off the successful campaign against the Taliban government in Afghanistan, but also the widespread frustration with perceived European foot-dragging in dealing with Saddam Hussein. More importantly, perhaps, Kagan's argument was neither exclusively Republican nor even essentially right-wing.

President Obama's rhetoric about America's global responsibilities is not far removed from the Kagan version of exceptionalism. Other Democrats have made similar claims, most obviously when their party controlled the White House. Then Secretary of State Madeleine Albright's assertion that the United States is the ‘indispensable nation’ is a good example.6 Like Kagan's, Albright's claim resonated with the moment. Americans were bouncing from the success of the 1995 Dayton Peace Accords to the ultimatum implicit in the 1999 negotiations at Rambouillet. Despite the scandal that beset President Bill Clinton, American self-confidence in the world was high. Moreover, many Americans were frustrated with perceived European fecklessness in dealing with Slobodan Milosevic as Yugoslavia disintegrated.

Kagan and Albright came to the same conclusion but from different intellectual starting points. Kagan is an intellectual who reanimated and redefined neo-conservatism.7 Albright comes from a more classical realist tradition, albeit one interwoven with a strong commitment to the preservation of international norms and the protection of human rights. They both came to believe that the United States had a unique combination of attributes – the ability to distinguish between right and wrong, the capability to influence events on the ground, and the responsibility to make things happen. Europeans have a hard time understanding how anyone can have such delusions of omnipotence. American adherents to this worldview respond by pointing to what might have happened if the United States were not around.

Realism

Not everyone shares that perspective. Former national security adviser Brent Scowcroft has emerged as an icon of a more restrained interpretation of America's world role. Drawing upon his experience in the George H.W. Bush administration, he has argued consistently that the United States should avoid overt triumphalism, that it should husband its resources and discriminate when picking fights.8 Such modesty has its roots in America's failure to predict the end of the Cold War and in the recognition that cooperation with the Soviets was crucial in bringing about the transition to post-communism. Scowcroft was a principal in the decision not to capture Baghdad during the first Gulf War as well. He was conscious of the US' power to overthrow Saddam Hussein but equally aware of the huge degree of uncertainty surrounding such an action and the costly commitment it would likely entail.

Realism, in this rendering, should not be confused with the school of international-relations theory that goes by the same name. Realism, rather, is a foreign-policy attitude and proclivity. It is mindful of American limits, of the dangers of over-extension, and the problem of unintended consequences. Though he sometimes espouses a version of exceptionalist idealism, President Obama also fits the realist category, and when he ran for president he expressed admiration for the foreign-policy realism of Scowcroft and other members of the George H.W. Bush administration, including James Baker and Colin Powell. Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger were accomplished American realists in this sense – the opening to China being their great realist achievement.

The contemporary argument for American foreign-policy realism extends beyond the strictly material domain of power politics. Hence realists such as Scowcroft recognise that the United States can deploy a wide arsenal of power resources. The ‘soft power’ argument promulgated in Joseph Nye's writings is one illustration; Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilisations is another.9 The distinction between these examples is that, whereas Nye has emphasised the powerful forms of attraction embedded in the American economic and social model, Huntington forced us to consider that other models may have attractions of their own.

The idealism of the neoconservatives close to the George W. Bush administration drowned out the voices of realism soon after Islamic fundamentalists attacked New York and Washington on 11 September 2001. The attacks were seized upon to argue that the threat to American security was existential. All that remained was for the most dangerous people to gain access to the most dangerous weapons; as then Vice President Dick Cheney insisted, even a 1% probability of such an outcome would be unacceptable.10

Realists had to wait until the passion of the moment had settled and the United States woke up to a vastly expanded set of foreign military commitments. Then Secretary of State Colin Powell was the manifestation of that predicament. He warned all along that ‘you own it if you break it’ and yet he could do little to dissuade an administration determined to uphold its ideals and to follow its convictions.11

The realist perspective continued to evolve in the shadow of 9/11 and through the recent history of global economic turmoil. Meanwhile, the focus narrowed down to how the United States can get the most leverage out of the assets at its disposal. Hence, for example, the ‘smart power’ commission organised by the Center for Strategic and International Studies brought together realists from all parts of the US foreign-policy community, including Nye and Powell's State Department deputy, Richard Armitage.12 The Princeton Project on National Security, led by G. John Ikenberry and Anne-Marie Slaughter, ploughs the same furrow.13 The conclusion of both groups was that the United States should act flexibly within its constraints in order to make the most of its global leadership. This was the ethos that was adopted by the Obama administration.

Pluralism

The question is whether flexibility is enough to avoid a creeping over-commitment. Many of Obama's critics both on the right and on the left believe it is not. Their reasoning is that both idealists and realists in American foreign-policy debates underestimate the scope of the changes taking place in the world. The perspective here is informed less by the experience of a single lifetime in public policy and more by a healthy respect for much longer-running dynamics. Paul Kennedy's 1987 Rise and Fall of Great Powers is the best-known expression of this perspective.14 His analysis of diplomatic history over five centuries in Western Europe suggests a logic of overstretch that is almost inevitable.

According to this pluralist view, the natural distribution of power in the world is inevitably plural. American hegemony is unnatural, unsustainable and corrosive to both the American domestic political economy and the international system. Imperial pretensions are dangerous, and even if a degree of American ‘exceptionalism’ is acknowledged, it is not seen to diminish that danger. In addition to Kennedy, the pluralists have included George F. Kennan, Charles de Gaulle, David Calleo and Robert Skidelsky. Pluralists are highly attentive to economic power and may have a greater tendency to discount military power. Hence, the fact that the European Union has long been an economic peer of the United States is accorded greater significance by David Calleo than it is by Robert Kagan.

Within this perspective, the challenge is not to avoid decline, but rather to manage it. A succession of books stretching back to Calleo's America and the World Political Economy (co-authored with Benjamin Rowland) and Robert Gilpin's U.S. Power and the Multinational Corporation suggest how this may be accomplished.15 Such writers argue for a recalibration of alliance politics and a reconsideration of free-market economics. They believe other countries should be required to shoulder much of the burden of world order – even if this means that some countries must be allowed to fail in these enterprises. And they are much more interested in the distribution of benefits from international commerce than they are persuaded by the nostrum that liberalisation enhances welfare for the world writ large.

This perspective is not an abdication of American leadership. Rather, it is a call for the United States to expend the energy required to lead only where it matters most, lest American leadership should allow other countries to become dependent upon having easy access to American power as a resource. Indeed, by withholding security and forcing other countries to look out for their own interests, the US government not only slows the process of creeping over-commitment, but also exercises a form of influence that otherwise would not be available.

Stakes

The long-historical sweep of the so-called ‘declinist’ argument is both a strength and a shortcoming. It is a strength insofar as it has forced all voices in the debate about America's world role to reflect on the lessons of history. It is a weakness insofar as the more distant consequences of decline are so easily overshadowed by current events. Urgency and importance do not always fit on the same scale. When Muammar Gadhafi threatened to slaughter protesters in Benghazi in 2011, what mattered was the prospect that, unless decisive action was taken, a large number of civilians would be wiped out. The long-run consequences of creeping over-commitment pale significantly in such a context.

Even less obvious ‘ticking bomb’ situations can have a similar effect of focusing attention on the present, whatever the lessons of the past. Indeed, the pluralist argument only gets a full hearing when the long-run future suddenly looks imminent. The relative ascendance of Germany and Europe in the late 1960s and early 1970s focused popular attention on the declinist thesis; the rise of Japan in the 1980s tightened the focus again; the sudden emergence in the early twentyfirst century of China as a major economic power triggered a third wave of declinist concern.

The threat that most easily grabs American attention is the threat to prosperity rather than security. The shock of terrorist attacks on New York and Washington on 9/11 was unusual in this regard. Most Americans accept that the United States is the pre-eminent military power and few imagine that a rival in Europe, Asia or elsewhere will rise up to challenge that dominance. Rogue states may take control over weapons of mass destruction; terrorist groups may perform random acts of violence; and conflicts between other countries, such as Israel and Iran, for example, could threaten vital American concerns. But such developments would not constitute the rise of a security challenger comparable, for example, to Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union.

Economic challenges are more plausible than threats to American military predominance and, in many ways, even self-evident. They can be seen in the transfer of manufacturing jobs overseas. They are implicit in the growth of sovereign wealth funds and foreign-held US government debt. And they manifest in unprecedented current-account deficits and in the ubiquitous ‘made in China’ or ‘made in Japan’ labels attached to consumer goods. The economic and financial crisis that set in with such ferocity in 2007 and 2008 may not have created the sense of economic apprehension, but it certainly exacerbated it. It also strengthened suspicions that efforts to safeguard US prosperity would depend upon a reconsideration of the country's world role.

Whenever there is an open debate about American decline, there is a debate about globalisation lurking in the background: prosperity and security are inextricably interconnected. This is true in straightforward terms of guns and butter or technological superiority, but it is evident in the soft-power context as well. The wealth of the United States is an important source of its attraction for the rest of the world. It is a principal achievement of the American political and social model. And it legitimates a faith in free markets, which other countries might otherwise view as too inequitable.

In turn, the attraction of the American economic and social model makes it easier for the United States to convince other countries to cooperate. If they work with the US, they may share in American prosperity. American prosperity makes it more likely that other countries will contribute to American security as well. The Atlantic Alliance was founded on the Marshall Plan and not just the rejection of communism. It implied a ‘compromise of embedded liberalism’ in which countries were encouraged to pursue their own domestic priorities within a cooperative international regime.16

By extension, anything that undermines American economic prosperity affects American security by chipping away at its global leadership. The end of prosperity is also The End of Influence, as argued in a 2010 book by Stephen Cohen and J. Bradford DeLong.17 And without influence, the United States is more likely to find itself acting alone. This means that if American prosperity is being undermined by a creeping over-commitment abroad, the problem is more likely to worsen than it is to correct itself. The more American prosperity is weakened, the more difficulty the US will face bringing other countries along with it and the more likely it will be to overextend itself abroad. Cooperation gives way to competition, and competition has little to offer in dealing with violent conflict. Hence, a United States committed to its own global leadership may find itself caught in a vicious circle. The more it tries to act as the global policeman, the more it will damage its very ability to carry out that role.

All three perspectives are valid expressions of historical realities and core American traditions. Any American president will be challenged to shape a version of American leadership that respects the constraints of this three-way argument between idealists, realists and pluralists. The resulting policies should respect and maintain the United States' unique capacity to promote security and world order; it should make intelligent use of America's many different capabilities and assets; and it should avoid doing damage to the economic prosperity that is ‘the wellspring’ of American power.18

The Obama administration's approach to Afghanistan and Libya suggests how this new strategy for American leadership might evolve. While the Obama administration has made progress in redefining a more sustainable world role, it has also uncovered significant vulnerabilities in its initial strategy which need to be given thorough consideration. The American people can appreciate economic constraints, but they have a hard time connecting those constraints to the effects on US global leadership, and they are also confused by the inability of the Obama administration to bring other important international actors along. This is a potent source of criticism. More than ever in recent memory, the success of US foreign policy depends upon the performance of other countries. The scale of its interdependence is much greater and the sensitivity of its domestic policy to failure is heightened as well. Hence, while Obama's approach should be praised, there are grounds for caution in that other countries will have to play their part if the United States is to succeed in redefining its world role.

It is useful for our purposes to offer a brief overview of the current debate, in which there are three dominant themes: redistribution, restraint and restoration.

The argument about redistribution centres on China, but can be extended to include any number of emerging powers. Fareed Zakaria and Thomas Friedman are among the best known contributors to the line of analysis, whereby these new powers will fundamentally reshape world order.19 Yet it would be careless to presume that one or more of these newly emergent powers will assume the mantle of global hegemony. China is the obvious candidate, but others could be mooted.20 The problem is that none of the imagined new superpowers is either interested or able to assume the role once played by the United States. This suggests that no-one will take responsibility for the global system; world order will collapse down to a G-zero in Ian Bremmer's terminology or, as Charles Kupchan puts it, it will become no-one's world.21

Of course, leadership is not the same as order and the structures created by the United States when it was relatively more powerful continue to guide interaction at the global level. This is the point made most powerfully by G. John Ikenberry, but it has a pedigree stretching back to Robert Keohane and before.22 Ikenberry suggests that ‘the underlying principles of liberal international order’ will survive, and that the United States could be able to renegotiate ‘for an ongoing leadership role in the management of the system’.23 The concern raised by this argument is whether the United States retains the resources to play even this more modest role. This is where the issue of restraint becomes important.

The relative decline of the United States coincided with a tightening of constraints on the country's material wealth. The US economy is not only losing its predominance in terms of domestic output, but it also has much weaker claims on the rest of the world's wealth.24 The implication, as Michael Mandelbaum argues, is that the US government no longer has the ability to provide unlimited public goods at the global level; it must make difficult decisions about the composition and use of the US military as well; and it must balance these claims against other more purely domestic concerns.25 Moreover, as the constraints on the US economy have tightened, the ability of the US political system to act decisively has diminished.26 Its international competitiveness has weakened.27 And its influence in the rest of the world has waned.28

This debate about the restraints on American resources has shaken the country to its core. It challenges not only American self-conceptions but also more traditional notions of power. In the past, the United States was always able to rise to the challenge, so perhaps it can adapt to this latest redistribution of global power.29 The notion of inexorable decline, Kagan argues, is based on an unsound extrapolation of the current economic crisis.30 Moreover, the US possesses a wide range of assets that stretch beyond physical resources and industrial innovation to include a fundamentally and universally appealing way of life. These are the building blocks of Joseph Nye's ‘soft power’. Such attributes should not be so easily degraded or overshadowed. The power of American ideas and ideals should continue to shine. The challenge is to rediscover the determination and self-confidence that are essential to American global leadership.31

Here is where the doctrine of restoration, as Richard Haass called it in a recent issue of The American Interest, becomes important.32 The basic idea is one that is already central to the policies of Barack Obama's administration. Yet for it to succeed, the United States must decide to make a determined effort. This requires more than just a simple assertion of American exceptionalism or a claim to the uniqueness of America's world role. It requires a clear calculation of priorities.33 The most important is to strengthen the domestic economy – which is the ‘wellspring’ of American power.34

The critical element in this restoration theme is how the United States shares responsibility with other significant actors at the global level. If the United States is to restore its leadership, then it will have to restore both its authority and its legitimacy as well. The reality is that too many of the problems to be faced are too large for the United States to tackle alone. The United States must mobilise other countries to work with it, or it will over-reach is resources, sacrifice its credibility and ultimately fail. This prospect is what sets out the real stakes in the debate.

Notes

‘President Obama's Address on the War in Afghanistan’, New York Times, 1 December 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/02/world/asia/02prexy.text.html.

J. William Fulbright, The Arrogance of Power (New York: Random House, 1966).

‘An American Century: A Strategy to Secure America's Enduring Interests and Ideals,’ A Romney for President White Paper (7 October 2011).

Robert Kagan, ‘Power and Weakness’, Policy Review, June and July 2002, pp. 3–28.

Robert Kagan, Dangerous Nation (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006).

The original quote was made on NBC's ‘Today Show’ on 19 February 1998. Albright was responding to Matt Lauer's question about whether she would be willing to use force against Saddam Hussein. Her answer was as follows: ‘It is the threat of the use of force and our line-up there that is going to put force behind the diplomacy. But if we have to use force, it is because we are America; we are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future, and we see the danger here to all of us.’ That transcript is available at: http://www.cryptome.org/jya/see-far.htm.

Francis Fukuyama, America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007). See also James Mann, Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet (New York: Viking, 2004).

The iconic illustration of this attitude was General Scowcroft's 4 August 2002 interview on CBS's ‘Face the Nation’ when he made the case against war in Iraq. The transcript of that interview can be found at: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/08/05/ftn/main517523.shtml.

The latest recent contribution from Nye is Joseph S. Nye, Jr, The Future of Power (New York: Public Affairs, 2011); for Huntington, see Samuel P. Hungtington, The Clash of Civilisations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Touchstone, 1997).

See Ron Suskind, The One Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside America's Pursuit of Its Enemies Since 9/11 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006).

Powell's faith in the so-called ‘Pottery Barn rule’ was reported in Bob Woodward, Plan of Attack (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), p. 150.

See: http://www.csis.org/program/smart-power-initiative.

See: http://www.princeton.edu/~ppns/.

Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (New York: Random House, 1987).

David P. Calleo and Benjamin M. Rowland, America and the World Political Economy: Atlantic Dreams and National Realities (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1973); Robert Gilpin, U.S. Power and the Multinational Corporation: The Political Economy of Foreign Direct Investment (New York: Basic Books, 1975).

This is an allusion to John Gerard Ruggie, ‘International Regimes, Transactions, and Change: Embedded Liberalism in the Postwar Economic Order’, International Organisation vol. 62, no. 2, Spring 1982, pp. 379–415.

Stephen S. Cohen and J. Bradford DeLong, The End of Influence: What Happens When Other Countries Have the Money (New York: Basic Books, 2010).

The reference to ‘the wellspring’ is taken from the Obama administration's May 2010 National Security Strategy. See http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/rss_viewer/national_security_strategy.pdf.

Fareed Zakaria, The Post-American World (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2008); Thomas Friedman, The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century (New York: Picador, 2007).

Henry Kissinger, On China (New York: Penguin, 2011).

Ian Bremmer, Every Nation for Itself: Winners and Losers in a G-zero World (New York: Portfolio, 2012); Charles A. Kupchan, No One's World: The West, the Rising Rest, and the Coming Global Turn (New York: Oxford University Press for the Council on Foreign Relations, 2012).

G. John Ikenberry, Liberal Leviathan: The Origins, Crisis and Transformation of the American World Order (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011); Robert O. Keohane, After Hegemony: Cooperation and Discord in the World Political Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984).

Ibid., pp. 334, 335.

Barry Eichengreen, Exorbitant Privilege: The Rise and Fall of the Dollar and the Future of the International Monetary System (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).

Michael Mandelbaum, The Frugal Superpower: America's Global Leadership in a Cash-Strapped Era (New York: Public Affairs, 2010); Michael O'Hanlon, The Wounded Giant: America's Armed Forces in an Age of Austerity (New York: Penguin, 2011); Rachel Maddow, Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power (New York: Crown Publishers, 2012).

Jack Goldsmith, Power and Constraint: The Accountable Presidency after 9/11 (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2012).

Edward Luce, Time to Start Thinking: America in the Age of Descent (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2012).

Cohen and De Long, The End of Influence.

Thomas L. Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum, That Used to Be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011).

Robert Kagan, The World America Made (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012).

Joseph S. Nye Jr, The Future of Power (New York: Public Affairs, 2011).

Richard N. Haass, ‘The Restoration Doctrine’, The American Interest January/February 2012.

Robert Kagan, The World America Made (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012).

‘National Security Strategy’, (Washington DC: The White House, May 2010), p. 2.