America's New Balancing Act

For the last dozen years scholars of international politics have pondered a puzzle--why is no one ganging up against the United States? Throughout modern history countries have regularly resisted a rising global power. The world mobilized against Napoleon's France, imperial and Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union. But for more than a decade the United States has been the world's sole superpower and, far from countering it, most countries have courted Washington. Yet if events of the last two weeks are any guide, the ultimate honeymoon may be drawing to a close.

On July 15 Russia and China signed a "friendship treaty," their first accord since 1949, and declared their joint opposition to America's plans for a missile defense. A few days later 178 countries voted for a global-warming treaty with the United States alone in dissent. Next, 148 countries pushed to move forward with enforcement measures to ban germ warfare despite American objections. Now, these actions hardly constitute an anti-American alliance. But they are signals. Countries are behaving not like balancers (they don't have the power to do so yet) but rather like spoilers, sticking a thumb in America's eye.

It is a big shift from the past decade when American hegemony was almost welcomed by the world. The Soviet Union had been defeated, socialism was discredited and the American economy was performing at warp speed. The rest of the globe was adjusting to a new globalized age and looked to the United States as a guide. But over the last year, we have been returning to a more normal experience, where great power is viewed with suspicion and envy.

I asked Henry Kissinger, who has studied the balance of power for decades, whether he thought that the Bush administration's actions had contributed to the change in atmosphere. Kissinger has just written an elegant new book, "Does America Need a Foreign Policy?" (No points for guessing the answer.)

"The matter-of-fact acceptance of our hegemony is wearing off," Kissinger said. He blames the shift in mood partly on "center-left governments in Europe that find it difficult to deal with a conservative administration," but also acknowledges that there has been "tactical clumsiness" on Washington's part.

On global warming, China policy and missile defense, Kissinger argues that while often right on substance, the administration was being unnecessarily bellicose and unilateral. Even though he supports missile defense, he argues that the administration will have to sign a new treaty with Russia. "They cannot [get stability] with a series of unilateral statements. The only reason that the Russians are negotiating is to build a binding, legal framework."

What did he make of the fact that the administration had criticized or withdrawn from five treaties in its first seven months? Kissinger has sympathy for the administration's skepticism. "The multilateral approach often paralyzes American foreign policy," he said. "But I am also deeply uneasy with a hegemonic approach to diplomacy. The U.S. should not be afraid of the process of translating its convictions into consensus. We have to find a balance between abdicating our convictions to multilateral institutions and imposing them on the world by fiat." I would put it less delicately. If with our power we cannot preserve our interests in an international negotiation, we should probably get out of the negotiating business.

There are some in the administration who would argue that the United States is so powerful that it need not worry about opposition abroad. We can do what we want and the world will have to lump it. This is often true. But such an attitude will sow the seeds for an inevitable and powerful backlash against America.

"We will be the dominant power in the 21st century," says Kissinger. "No groups of states will be able to prevent this. But our challenge is to see if we can translate our power into an acceptance of some kind so that every foreign-policy issue does not become a test of our strength, which will drain us domestically and breed resentment abroad. We must move from imposition to consensus."

Forging such a consensus in the past was the key to America's success abroad. In an essay in the current National Interest, the German columnist Josef Joffe argues that "the genius of American diplomacy was building institutions, from the U.N. to the IMF, from NATO [to] the WTO... They advanced American interests by serving those of others." These policies created a more peaceful and prosperous world but they also demonstrated that Washington was a different kind of superpower.

Kissinger argues for "a [similar] generosity of spirit and concept. We will benefit from it. It will legitimize our power and perpetuate its impact. When we built the Atlantic alliance in the late 1940s, Europe was very weak. And yet we gave it a status and a degree of participation [in the alliance] that went beyond what it could have demanded for itself. This should be one of our objectives with Russia, to give it a greater role than it could extract but less than it might seek... And I would say the same about China." (These are strange times, when Henry Kissinger sounds more humble than George W. Bush.)

Joffe, a conservative (like Kissinger), advises the administration to translate its instincts on economics into foreign policy--engage in supply-side diplomacy. Supply common goods and services for the rest of the world and it will have produced a demand for American leadership. And it won't even need to send out tax-rebate checks.