Monthly Archives: February 2006

The New Rome Meets the New Barbarians
Joseph Nye – Dean of Kennedy School of Government
from the Economist (article)
Notes:

• Bush Sr.: post 9/11: “We can’t go this alone”
• Afghanistan may show that unilateralism works “just fine”
• US not on the decline, but it’s not invincible either
• “Realists” debate US staying power, citing China, Nye not convinced.
• Realist quest for new enemy is beside the point, there are new power structures now…
• “Three kinds of power” — Described as 3-D chess board (3 levels)
• Is the world uni-polar? Multi-polar? No, US is millitarially dominant, but this isn’t everything anymore
• 1) Millitary power – top of game – uni-polar with US as only dominant playar
• 2) Economic power – middle of game – multi-polar
• “economic power is multi-polar, with the United States, Europe and Japan representing 2/3 of world product, and with China’s dramtic growth likly to make it the fourth big player. On this economic board, the United States is not a hegemon, and must often bargain as an equal with Europoe.”
• 3) Transnational relations – bottom of game
• Power is decentralized, not conforming to geopolitical boarders
• Bankers/stocks transfer money in amounts larger than government’s
• Terrorists
• “On this bottom board, power is widely dispersed, and it makes no sense to speak of uni-polarity, multi-polarity, or hegemony.”
• “When you are in a three-dimensional game, you will lose if you focus only on the top board and fail to notice the other boards and the vertical connections among them.”
• US is in the lead, right now, of all three teirs. Mostly due to US-centric IT head-start.
• Other Pro’s
• Cultural attraction/ideology
• Agenda-setting
• Economic incentives
• “Soft Power” becoming more important than “hard power”. TNC’s and NGOs can wield a lot of this. –D: even if the TNC/NGO is *in* the US
• Example: trans-border landmine abolition groups.
• Millitary power is “like oxygen”, we have to maintain it, but it will not achieve all the goals required to defend American interests or produce safety.
• So what should our foreign policy be?
• We tend to retreat (see Hegemony on the Cheap), but isolationism doesn’t help
• “Multilateralism can be used by smaller states to tie the United States down … but this does not mean that a multilateral approach is not generally in America’s interests”
• “No large power can afford to be purely multilateralist” but we should be on many issues, and pursue unilateral action. This combination is “crucial” to state’s longevity.
• Have to work with other states to control/influence NGO/TNC/etc
• Kissenger: test of history for this generation will be whether they can turn the current predominant power into an international consensus and widely-accepted norms that will be consistend with American values and interests. Cannot be done unilaterally
• Rome fell from internal decay and “thousand cuts” from external sources. Nothing points to internal decay atm, but thousands of external sources is extremely possible in this new age.
• Conclusion? America will remain in charge, but ironically “the largest power since Rome cannot achieve its objectives unilaterally in a global information age.”

Hegemony on the Cheap: Liberal Internationalism from Wilson to Bush
Colin Dueck
dueck.pdf

Notes

• Most presidents have “liberal” perspective
• Bush Foreign Policy influenced heavily by liberalism
• (meanint democratic government + open markets)
• not altruistic (helps US interists)
• Woodrow Wilson
• ends (goals) not backed up with means ($), traditional of US liberal policy
• Goals of Roosevelt (UN)
• 5 major powers policing their sphere of influcence democratically*
• *USSR no go, opts for millitary regime
• response to USSR = containment
• nuclear deterenc used as cheaper alternative to many troops abroad
• “liber intent BUT limited spending? <- how to reconcile?
• Argues Vietname was actual liberal policy
• could be converted to, and won by, democracy
• “In Vietnam, America’s willingness to sustain serious costs on behalf of a liberal strategy of containment and nation building was tested to the breaking point“
• “In the end, the United States proved neither willing nor able to bear the costs of meeting its commitments to Saigon — commitments that had been deeply informed by liberal internationalist assumptions“
• Result of desparity between ends/means re: vietnam: Nixon/Kissinger toned down Wilsonian rhetoric*
• Kissinger: “We will judge other countries, including Communist countries, on the basis of tehir actions and not on the basis of their domestic ideologies“
• Carter/Reagan criticized this type of toning-down
• Collapse of USSR reinforces Wilsonian ideas, but widened the ends/means gap further
• “In the end, the relative weakness of the Soviet Union gave US policy makers considerable room for error. However, the upshot was that Americans misattributed their victory in the Cold War to the unique virtues of the Wilsonian tradition, which only led to a continuing gap between ends and means in the conduct of American foreign policy.“
• Clinton
• increased humanitarian aid involvement but not expansion of military
• new emphasis on peacekeeping, peacemaking, and nation building
• “… president was ultimately forced to act, if only to protect the credibility of the United States. The result was a series of remarkably halfhearted, initially low-risk interventions, which only reinforced the impression that the United States was unwilling to suffer costs or casualties on behalf of its stated interests overseas.“
• Maybe not a demonstration of bad policy, rather instead the geopolitical stakes were low*
• * “But from a classical realist perspective the answer would have been to avoid putting America’s reputation on the line in the first place…“
• Bush
• at first immidiate increase in defense spending to catch up
• criticized “open-ended deployments” … etc
• no nation building!
• looks like Realism!
• later (post 9/11)
• more idealistic
• NSS-2002 preventitive millitary action, democracy and human rights are “non-negotiable demans”, democratic freedom, and open markets
• Iraq
• Thinking/Justification – Democracies would trigger more Middle-East democracies
• Dangerous precedent: Wilsonian liberal goals plus preventative first strike war????
• could actually do the opposite of spreading democracy, instead eroding sympathy for US
• Afghanistan not a very good preceden (proxy war + low troop involvement = Al Qaeda escape)
• Iraq gives the Bush administration a revelation on how much money and troops (or “blood and treasure“) is required for nation-building
• In sum, Bush is highly influenced by IR liberalism, but only the worst parts of it
• “The problem is not that the president is departing from a long tradition of liberal internationalism; it is that he is continuing some of the worst features of that tradition. Specifically, in Iraq, he is continuing the tradition of articulatin and pursuing a set of extremely ambitious and idealistic foreign policy goals, without providing the full or proportionate means to achieve those goals. In this sense, it must be said, George W. Bush is very much a Wilsonian“
• “Neither a unilateral or multilateral foreign policy will succeed if Americans are unwilling to incur the full costs and risks that are implied in either case … they cannot have hegemony on the cheap“

These notes are for my reference. I “blog” them so that they are in a database and I can more easily search them when writing papers, reveiwing for tests, or just generally remembering the things which I’ve read previously. They are made public because others may find them helpful. If, for any reason, you object to these notes being made publically available, contact me an I wil remove them from public view.