Synopsis
An assessment of how the United States dominant position may be effectively reconciled with the urgent need, in the 21st century, to achieve a new world order. Kissinger examines America's present and future relations with Russia, China, Europe, the Middle East, and other areas in the world. He covers areas such as globilization, military intervention, free trade and the eroding of the planet's natural environment.
Extrait
Chapter One: America at the Apex: Empire or Leader?
At the dawn of the new millennium, the United States is enjoying a preeminence unrivaled by even the greatest empires of the past. From weaponry to entrepreneurship, from science to technology, from higher education to popular culture, America exercises an unparalleled ascendancy around the globe. During the last decade of the twentieth century, America's preponderant position rendered it the indispensable component of international stability. It mediated disputes in key trouble spots to the point that, in the Middle East, it had become an integral part of the peace process. So committed was the United States to this role that it almost ritually put itself forward as mediator, occasionally even when it was not invited by all the parties involved -- as in the Kashmir dispute between India and Pakistan in July 1999. The United States considered itself both the source and the guarantor of democratic institutions around the globe, increasingly setting itself up as the judge of the fairness of foreign elections and applying economic sanctions or other pressures if its criteria were not met.
As a result, American troops are scattered around the world, from the plains of Northern Europe to the lines of confrontation in East Asia. These way stations of America's involvement verge, in the name of peacekeeping, on turning into permanent military commitments. In the Balkans, the United States is performing essentially the same functions as did the Austrian and Ottoman empires at the turn of the last century, of keeping the peace by establishing protectorates interposed between warring ethnic groups. It dominates the international financial system by providing the single largest pool of investment capital, the most attractive haven for investors, and the largest market for foreign exports. American popular culture sets standards of taste around the world even as it provides the occasional flash point for national resentments.
The legacy of the 1990s has produced a paradox. On the one hand, the United States is sufficiently powerful to be able to insist on its view and to carry the day often enough to evoke charges of American hegemony. At the same time, American prescriptions for the rest of the world often reflect either domestic pressures or a reiteration of maxims drawn from the experience of the Cold War. The result is that the country's preeminence is coupled with the serious potential of becoming irrelevant to many of the currents affecting and ultimately transforming the global order. The international scene exhibits a strange mixture of respect for -- and submission to -- America's power, accompanied by occasional exasperation with its prescriptions and confusion as to its long-term purposes.
Ironically, America's preeminence is often treated with indifference by its own people. Judging from media coverage and congressional sentiments -- two important barometers -- Americans' interest in foreign policy is at an all-time low.1 Hence prudence impels aspiring politicians to avoid discussions of foreign policy and to define leadership as a reflection of current popular sentiments rather than as a challenge to raise America's sights. The last presidential election was the third in a row in which foreign policy was not seriously discussed by the candidates. Especially in the 1990s, American preeminence evolved less from a strategic design than a series of ad hoc decisions designed to satisfy domestic constituencies while, in the economic field, it was driven by technology and the resulting unprecedented gains in American productivity. All this has given rise to the temptation of acting as if the United States needed no long-range foreign policy at all and could confine itself to a case-by-case response to challenges as they arise.
At the apogee of its power, the United States finds itself in an ironic position. In the face of perhaps the most profound and widespread upheavals the world has ever seen, it has failed to develop concepts relevant to the emerging realities. Victory in the Cold War tempts smugness; satisfaction with the status quo causes policy to be viewed as a projection of the familiar into the future; astonishing economic performance lures policymakers to confuse strategy with economics and makes them less sensitive to the political, cultural, and spiritual impact of the vast transformations brought about by American technology.
Coinciding with the end of the Cold War, the combination of self-satisfaction and prosperity has engendered a sense of American destiny that expresses itself in a dual myth: On the left, many see the United States as the ultimate arbitrator of domestic evolutions all over the world. They act as if America has the appropriate dem-ocratic solution for every other society regardless of cultural and historical differences. For this school of thought, foreign policy equates with social policy. It deprecates the significance of victory in the Cold War because, in its view, history and the inevitable trend toward democracy would have by themselves brought about the disintegration of the Communist system. On the right, some imagine that the Soviet Union's collapse came about more or less automatically as the result of a new American assertiveness expressed in the change in rhetoric ("the Evil Empire") rather than from bipar-tisan exertions spanning nine administrations over almost half a century. And they believe, based on this interpretation of history, that the solution to the world's ills is American hegemony -- the imposition of American solutions on the world's trouble spots by the unabashed affirmation of its preeminence. Either interpretation makes it difficult to elaborate a long-range approach to a world in transition. Such controversy on foreign policy as takes place is divided between an attitude of missionary rectitude on one side and a sense that the accumulation of power is self-implementing on the other. The debate focuses on an abstract issue: whether values or interest, idealism or realism, should guide American foreign policy. The real challenge is to merge the two; no serious American maker of foreign policy can be oblivious to the traditions of exceptionalism by which American democracy has defined itself. But neither can the policymaker ignore the circumstances in which they have to be implemented.
THE CHANGING NATURE OF THE INTERNATIONAL ENVIRONMENT
For Americans, understanding the contemporary situation must begin with the recognition that its disturbances are not temporary interruptions of a beneficent status quo. They signal instead an inevitable transformation of the international order resulting from changes in the internal structure of many of its key participants, and from the democratization of politics, the globalization of econo-mies, and the instantaneousness of communications. A state is by definition the expression of some concept of justice that legitimizes its internal arrangements and of a projection of power that determines its ability to fulfill its minimum functions -- that is, to protect its population from foreign dangers and domestic upheaval. When all these elements are in flux simultaneously -- including the concept of what is foreign -- a period of turbulence is inevitable.
The very term "international relations" is, in fact, of relatively recent vintage, since it implies that the nation-state must inevitably be the basis of its organization. However, this is a concept that originated in Europe only in the late eighteenth century and was spread around the world largely by European colonialism. In medieval Europe, obligations were personal and traditional, based neither on common language nor on a single culture; they did not interpose the bureaucratic machinery of a state between the subject and the ruler. Restraints on government derived from custom, not constitutions, and from the universal Catholic Church, which preserved its own autonomy, thereby laying the basis -- quite unintentionally -- for the pluralism and the democratic restraints on state power that evolved centuries later.
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, this structure collapsed under the dual impact of the Reformation, which destroyed religious unity, and of printing, which made the growing religious diversity widely accessible. The resulting upheaval culminated in the Thirty Years' War, which, in the name of ideological -- at that time, religious -- orthodoxy, killed 30 percent of the population of Central Europe.
Out of this carnage emerged the modern state system as defined by the Treaty of Westphalia of 1648, the basic principles of which have shaped international relations to this day. The treaty's foundation was the doctrine of sovereignty, which declared a state's domestic conduct and institutions to be beyond the reach of other states.
These principles were an expression of the conviction that domestic rulers were less likely to be arbitrary than crusading foreign armies bent on conversion. At the same time, the balance of power concept sought to establish restraints by an equilibrium that prevented any one nation from being dominant and confined wars to relatively limited areas. For over two hundred years -- until the outbreak of World War I -- the state system emerging from the Thirty Years' War achieved its objectives (with the exception of the ideological conflict of the Napoleonic period, when the principle of nonintervention was, in effect, abandoned for two decades). Each of these concepts is under attack today, to a point where it is forgotten that their purpose was to limit, not expand, the arbitrary use of power.
Today the Westphalian order is in systemic crisis. Its principles are being challenged, though an agreed alternative has yet to emerge. Noninterference in the domestic affairs of other states has been abandoned in favor of a concept of universal humanitarian intervention or universal jurisdiction, not only by the United States but by many West European countries. At the United Nations Millennium Summit in New York in September 2000, it was endorsed as well by a large number of other states. In the 1990s, the United States undertook four humanitarian military operations -- in Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo; other countries took the lead in two, in East Timor (led by Australia) and Sierra Leone (led by the United Kingdom). All of these interventions except Kosovo had United Nations sanction.
Simultaneously, the heretofore dominant concept of the nation-state is itself undergoing metamorphosis. True to the dominant philosophy, every state calls itself a nation but not all are such in terms of the nineteenth-century concept of a nation as a linguistic and cultural unit. Of the "great powers" at the turn of the new millennium, only the democracies of Europe and Japan fulfill that definition. China and Russia combine a national and cultural core with multiethnic attributes. The United States has increasingly equated its national identity with multiethnicity. In the rest of the world, states with mixed ethnic composition are the rule, and the cohesion of many of them is threatened by subject ethnic groups seeking autonomy or independence on the basis of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century doctrines of nationalism and self-determination. Even in Europe, falling birthrates and growing immigration are introducing the challenge of multiethnicity.
Historic nation-states, aware that their size is insufficient to play a major global role, are seeking to group themselves into larger units. The European Union represents the most sweeping expression of this policy thus far. But similar transnational groupings are emerging in the Western Hemisphere in such institutions as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and Mercosur in South America, and in Asia in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). The idea of a rudimentary free trade area has made its appearance in Asia under joint Chinese and Japanese sponsorship.
Each of these new units, in defining its identity, is driven, sometimes subconsciously, often deliberately, to do so in distinction to the dominant powers in its region. For ASEAN, the foils are China and Japan (and, in time, probably India); for the European Union and Mercosur, the foil is the United States, creating new rivalries even as they overcome traditional ones.
In the past, transformations of far lesser magnitude have led to major wars; indeed, wars have occurred with considerable frequency in the present international system as well. But they have never involved the current great powers in military conflict with each other. For the nuclear age has changed both the significance and the role of power, at least as far as the relationship of the major countries to one another is concerned. Until the beginning of the nuclear age, wars were most often sparked by disputes over territory or access to resources; conquest was undertaken to augment a state's power and influence. In the modern age, territory has lost much of its significance as an element of national strength; technological progress can enhance a country's power far more than any conceivable territorial expansion. Singapore, with literally no resources other than the intelligence of its people and leaders, has a much higher per capita income than much larger and more favorably endowed countries. And it uses this wealth in part to build up -- at least locally -- impressive military forces to discourage the designs of covetous neighbors. Israel is in a similar position.
Nuclear weapons have rendered war between countries possessing them less likely -- though this statement is unlikely to remain valid if nuclear weapons continue to proliferate into countries with a different attitude toward human life or unfamiliar with their catastrophic impact. Until the advent of the nuclear age, countries went to war because the consequences of defeat and even of compromise were deemed worse than those of war; this kind of reasoning led Europe to consume its substance in the First World War. But, among nuclear powers, this equation holds true in only the most desperate circumstances. In the minds of most leaders of major nuclear powers, the devastation of nuclear war is likely to appear more calamitous than the consequences of compromise, and perhaps even of defeat. The paradox of the nuclear age is that the growth in nuclear capability -- and hence the acquisition of vast total power -- is inevitably matched by a corresponding decline in the willingness to use it.
All other forms of power have been revolutionized as well. Until the end of the Second World War, power was relatively homogeneous; its various elements -- economic, military, or political -- complemented one another. A society could not be militarily strong without commanding a similar position in other fields. In the second half of the twentieth century, however, the various strands seemingly began to diverge. Suddenly a country could become an economic power without possessing a significant military capacity (Saudi Arabia, for example) or develop vast military power despite an obviously stagnant economy (witness the late Soviet Union).
In the twenty-first century, these strands are likely to merge again. The fate of the Soviet Union demonstrated that one-sided emphasis on military power is impossible to sustain -- especially in an age of economic and technological revolution linked by instant communications that bring the vast gaps in the standards of living into living rooms worldwide. In addition, in a single generation, science has made leaps that exceed the accumulated knowledge of all previous human history. The computer, the Internet, and the growing field of biotechnology have invest...
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