Before launching into my substantive remarks, let me take this opportunity to say that I have been associated with AEI for years, stretching back into decades, most explicitly as a member of its Council of Academic Advisers but also in other ways. I have enjoyed and benefited from these involvements. I also recognize that I do not exactly fit the AEI mold, which I conceive to be one of enlightened conservatism and responsible Republicanism. I do consider myself to be a conservative, but an old-fashioned Burkeian sort of conservative rather than a modern Reaganite conservative. In addition, on turning twenty-one in 1948, I registered as a Democrat and cast my first vote for Harry Truman. I remain a registered Democrat, perhaps more out of inertia more than anything else. In the memorable words of Senator David Hill after Bryan’s nomination in 1896, "I am a Democrat still—very still," and two years ago for the first time I voted for a Republican presidential candidate. So, I would like to express my appreciation to Chris and my other AEI friends for welcoming into their ranks this maverick Democrat and old-fashioned and unfashionable conservative.

Six years ago Chris also invited me to deliver a Bradley Lecture and thus provided me with something for which I am profoundly grateful: my first opportunity to hold forth on the clash of civilizations before an informed and critical audience. The article and the book that developed out of that lecture, needless to say, stimulated widespread and intense discussion and controversy. Some of the commentators thought my argument was brilliant and original, but they were few, very few. The most enthusiastic of them was former President Nixon, to whom Chris sent a copy of my lecture, and who thought it was absolutely terrific, but he didn’t have much company. A few other commentators thought my argument was brilliant but not original and sent me lengthy manuscripts in which they said they expressed the same ideas long before I did. Most commentators, however, found my argument wrong, wrong-headed, and dangerous. Five years later, however, I feel vindicated: newspaper headlines almost every day indicate that my thesis on the centrality of culture in today’s world is in large part right on target. Cultural identities, preferences, differences, and similarities are in considerable measure shaping post-Cold War global politics. Also during these five years there have been multiplying expressions by political leaders from the President of Germany to the President of Iran about the need for a dialogue of civilizations, for which I think I deserve some small credit by frightening people as to the dangers of clashes of civilizations.

Let me assure you, however, that I am not here today to reaffirm, to defend, or to elaborate the clash of civilizations thesis. Instead I would like to supplement it by setting forth a different perspective on world politics. I make the point repeatedly in my book that power as well as culture counts in international relations. Unlike culture, of course, power, always has counted. The importance of culture today distinguishes post-Cold War politics from Cold War politics, but power is the everlasting and omni-present constant of all politics. And this evening instead of looking at the distribution of cultures in the world I would like to focus on the distribution of power and on the perspectives states and peoples have on the distribution of power.

Ten years ago as the Cold War was ending and the Soviet empire was imploding, almost everyone saw the emergence of a single superpower world. Since then there has been much debate over how to conceptualize the successor system to the bipolar system of the Cold War. Is it unipolar, as Charles Krauthammer suggested, multipolar as many have argued, or uni-multipolar, as I would suggest? Before answering this question, it would be useful to define what we mean by these terms. Or, at least, I will define what I mean by them. A unipolar world is one in which a single state acting unilaterally with little or no cooperation from other states can effectively resolve major international issues and no other state or combination of states has the power to prevent it from doing so. A multipolar world is one in which a coalition of major powers is necessary to resolve important international issues and, if the coalition is a substantial one, no other single state can prevent the coalition from doing that. A uni-multipolar world, on the other hand, is one in which resolution of key international issues requires action by the single superpower plus some combination of other major states and in which the single superpower is able to veto action by a combination of other states. My central thesis this evening is that global politics has now moved from a brief unipolar moment at the end of the Cold War into one or perhaps more uni-multipolar decades on its way towards a multipolar twenty-first century.

In the existing uni-multipolar world, the global power structure has four principal levels. At the top, of course, the United States is the only superpower with preeminence in every domain of power: economic, military, diplomatic, ideological, technological, and cultural. It is the only country with involvements in virtually every part of the world and with the reach and capabilities to promote its interests in virtually every part of the world. At the second level are major regional powers who are the dominant actors in important areas of the world but whose interests and capabilities do not extend as globally as those of the United States. Those countries vary greatly in importance, activity, and degree of dominance, and include the German-French condominium in Europe, Russia in Eurasia, China and, quite separately, Japan in East Asia, India in South Asia, Indonesia in Southeast Asia, Iran in Southwest Asia, Israel in the Middle East, Nigeria and, separately, South Africa in Africa, and Brazil in Latin America. At a third level are secondary regional powers whose influence is less than that of the major regional powers and whose interests often conflict with the major regional powers. Those include Britain in relation to the German-French combination, Ukraine in relation to Russia, Japan in relation to China, Korea in relation to Japan, Pakistan in relation to India, Australia in relation to Indonesia, Saudi Arabia in relation to Iran, Egypt in relation to Israel, and Argentina in relation to Brazil, with no significant secondary powers existing in relation to Nigeria and South Africa in Africa. Finally, at a fourth level are the remaining countries, some of which are quite important, but which exist in some sense apart from the power structure I have described.

In this uni-multipolar world the superpower is driven to act unilaterally and to attempt to impose its will on other countries, which creates tension and conflict, particularly with the major regional powers. The United States has, among other things, attempted and/or is perceived as attempting unilaterally:

Most importantly, in the perception of other countries the United States has hectored and lectured them on the extent of American power, the success of the American economy, and the superiority of American principles. This was manifested in the boasting of the President at last year’s Denver summit about American economic vitality, the bragging by the Secretary of State that the United States is the "indispensable nation" and that "we stand tall and hence see further" than other nations, and the recent claim by our Deputy Secretary of the Treasury that the United States is the "first nonimperialist superpower," a claim which manages in three words to exalt American uniqueness, American virtue, and American power.

The responses in other societies to these and other assertions of American superiority are as you might expect. This came dramatically to my attention last fall when the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies held a conference involving scholars and experts from all the world’s major countries and regions to discuss the views of their political and intellectual elites on the existing international system. As reported by conference participants, the leaders of countries with at least two-thirds ore more of the world’s people—Chinese, Russians, Indians, Arabs, Muslims, Africans—see the United States as the single greatest external threat to their societies. They do not see America as a military threat; they do see it as a threat to their integrity, autonomy, prosperity, and freedom of action to pursue their interests as they see fit. They see the United States as intrusive, interventionist, exploitative, unilateralist, hegemonic, hypocritical, applying double standards, engaging in "financial imperialism" and "intellectual colonialism," and with a foreign policy driven overwhelmingly by domestic politics, particularly the Israeli lobby.

Let me quote a few of the papers prepared for this conference. For all Indian elites, the Indian scholar reported, "The United States represents the major diplomatic and political threat. On virtually every issue of concern to India, the United States has ‘veto’ or mobilizational power, whether it is on nuclear, technological, economic, environmental, or political matters. That is, the United States can deny India its objectives and can rally others to join it in punishing India." The sins of the West, Indians believe, are "power, hubris, and greed." In the views of Russian elites, the Moscow participant said, the United States subjects Russia to a policy of "coercive cooperation," and all Russians oppose "a world based on a dominant U.S. leadership which would border on hegemony." In similar terms, the Beijing participant argued that Chinese leaders believe that the principal threats to peace, stability, and China are "hegemonism and power politics," by which they mean the United States, whose policies, they say, are designed to undermine and create disunity in the socialist states and developing countries. Japan’s most distinguished diplomat spoke at the conference and argued that after World War II the United States pursued a constructive policy of unilateral globalism, promoting collective goods like security, trade, and economic development. Now, however, it is pursuing a policy of global unilateralism, acting alone to promote its own special interests throughout the world.

Reactions such as these are natural. Americans believe that the world’s business is their business. Other countries believe that what happens in their part of the world is their business not America’s and quite explicitly respond: "MYOB." "Buzz off," or, as Nelson Mandela said, don’t try to tell us who we should be our friends. In a bipolar world, the United States was welcomed by countries as their protector against the other superpower. In a uni-multipolar world, in contrast, the world’s only superpower is automatically a threat to and is seen as a threat by other major powers. One by one the major regional powers are making it clear that they would just as soon not have the United States messing around in the area where they think their interests are predominant. The government of Iran, for instance, strongly opposes the U.S. military present in the Persian Gulf. If, however, the Iranian Revolution had not occurred and if the Shah’s son now ruled Iran, would his view be any different? During the Cold War our presence protected the Gulf against the Soviet domination; now our presence obstructs Iranian domination of the Gulf.

In this uni-multipolar world the central relationship is that between the superpower and the major regional powers. Neither side is entirely happy with this relationship. The superpower would prefer a unipolar world and is continually tempted to act as if it were a unipolar world. The major powers would prefer a multipolar world and believe global politics is moving in that direction. A uni-multipolar world is stable only to the extent that these conflicting pulls can be balanced. In the longer term, they probably cannot be balanced, and, if as seems probable, the superpower cannot create a unipolar world, global politics will gradually evolve in the direction of a multipolar system.

State Department officials, it is reported, have become concerned with what they term "the Hegemon Problem," and they should be concerned. For analysts of international affairs, however, there is another problem, which is: Why isn’t the Hegemon Problem a bigger problem than it is? Realist international relations theory predicts that in a situation with one superpower and several major powers, the major powers will coalesce together to balance and contain the superpower.

One can perhaps identify various possible levels of response to American superpowerdom. At a relatively low level, there are simply feelings of fear, resentment, envy, which clearly are widespread. At a somewhat higher level, resentment may turn into dissent, with other countries refusing to cooperate with the United States. In a wide variety of instances involving the Persian Gulf, Cuba, Libya, Iran, extraterritoriality, nuclear proliferation, human rights, trade policies, this has clearly happened with countries refusing to follow the policies the United States is urging on them. In a few cases, dissent has turned into outright opposition, with countries attempting to defeat U.S. policy. The highest level of response would be collective counteraction, the formation of an anti-hegemonic coalition involving several major powers. An anti-hegemonic coalition is impossible in a unipolar world, because the other states are too weak to mount it. It is unnecessary in a multipolar world because no state is strong enough to provoke it. It is, however, a natural and predicted development in a uni-multipolar world. Yet so far it has not materialized in significant fashion. The fascinating question for a student of international relations is why hasn’t it happened, particularly given the fact that the predominant theory of international relations predicts that it should be happening.

Some incipient anti-hegemonic cooperation does exist. Relations among non-Western societies are, for the moment, in general improving. Gatherings occur from which the United States is conspicuously absent, ranging from the Moscow meeting of the leaders of Germany, France, and Russia, from which our closest ally, Britain, was also excluded, to the bilateral meetings of the heads of China and Russia and of China and India with their ritual denunciations of hegemonism, to the rapproachments of Iran with Saudi Arabia and Iraq, and the highly successful OIC meeting hosted by Iran, which coincided with the disastrous Qatar meeting on Middle Eastern economic development sponsored by the United States and to which almost no one came. Undoubtedly the single most important move towards an anti-hegemonic coalition antedates the end of the Cold War, and that is the formation of the European Union and the creation of a common European currency. Europe must come together on its own, as Hubert Vedrine, France’s foreign minister has said, and create a counterweight to stop the United States from over dominating a multipolar world. Clearly the euro could pose an important challenge to the hegemony of the dollar in global finance. More recently, the Russian foreign minister has promulgated the so-called "Primakov doctrine" to the effect that Russia, China, and Iran must cooperate to counterbalance American hegemony, a doctrine that reportedly has substantial support across the entire Russian political spectrum. Yet the question remains as to why a more broad-based, active, and formal anti-American hegemony coalition has not yet emerged.

Several possible explanations come to mind.

First, it may be too soon. Over time the response to American hegemony may escalate from resentment through dissent to opposition and eventually collective counteraction. The American hegemonic threat is less immediate and more diffuse than the threats of imminent military conquest posed by previous European hegemons to their neighbors. Hence, other powers can be more relaxed about forming a coalition to counter it.

Second, while countries may resent U.S. power and wealth, they also want to benefit from them. The United States rewards countries that acquiesce in its leadership with access to the American market, exemption from sanctions of one sort or another, foreign aid, military assistance, silence about deviations from U.S. norms (as with Saudi human rights and Israeli nuclear weapons), support for membership in international organizations ranging from NATO to the WTO, bribes and White House visits for political leaders, and in a variety of other ways. Given the goodies the United States can distribute, the sensible course for other countries may well be, in international relations lingo, not to "balance" against the United States but to "bandwagon" with it. Over time, however, if U.S. power declines, the benefits to be gained by cooperating with the United States will decline as will the costs of opposing it. Hence, this factor reinforces the possibility that an anti-hegemonic coalition could emerge in the future.

Third, the international relations theory that predicts balancing under the current circumstances is a theory developed in the context of the European Westphalian system established in 1648. All the countries in this system shared what they recognized was a common European culture that distinguished them sharply from the Ottoman Turks and other peoples. They also took the nation state as the basic unit in international relations and posited the legal and theoretical equality of nation states despite their obvious differences in size, wealth, and power. Cultural commonality and legal equality facilitated the operation of a balance of power system, which still often operated quite imperfectly, to counter the emergence of a hegemonic power. Global politics now, however, is multicivilizational as well as multipolar. France, Russia, and China may well have common interests in challenging U.S. hegemony, but their very different cultures are likely to make it difficult for them to organize an effective coalition to do so. In addition, the idea of the sovereign legal equality of nation states has not played a significant role in the traditional international relations of non-Western societies. Hierarchy rather than equality has more often been assumed to be the natural relation among peoples. The central questions in a relationship are: Who is Number One? Who is Number Two? At least one factor that led to the break-up of the Sino-Soviet Alliance at the end of the 1950s, for instance, surely was Mao Tse-tung’s unwillingness to play second fiddle to Stalin’s successors in the Kremlin. Similarly, as Zbigniew Brzezinski has argued, an anti-U.S. coalition between China and Russia is now unlikely because of Russian unwillingness to be second fiddle to a much more populous and economically dynamic China^1. Cultural differences, jealousies, and rivalries are hence likely to be formidable obstacles to the major powers coalescing against the superpower.

Fourth, the principal source of contention between the superpower and the major regional powers is superpower intervention to limit, counter, or shape the actions of the major regional powers in their regions. For the secondary regional powers in those regions, on the other hand, superpower intervention is a potential resource to be mobilized against the threats they see coming from their region’s major power. The superpower and the secondary regional powers will thus often, although not always, have converging interests against major regional powers, and secondary regional powers will have little incentive to join in a coalition against the superpower.

What are the implications of this uni-mulitipolar world for the United States?

First, it would behoove Americans to stop acting and talking as if this were a unipolar world. It is not, and the idea that it can be made one by increasing defense expenditures by fifty percent is an illusion. The American public clearly sees no need to expend effort and resources to achieve that goal. In one poll last year, for instance, only 13 percent of the people said they preferred a pre-eminent role for the United States in world affairs, while 74 percent said they wanted the United States to share power with other countries. Other polls have produced similar results. Public disinterest in international affairs is pervasive, abetted by the drastically shrinking media coverage of foreign events. Majorities of 55 to 66 percent of the public say that what happens in Western Europe, Asia, Mexico, and Canada has little or no impact on their lives. In short, however, much foreign policy elites may ignore it or deplore it, the fact is the United States lacks the domestic political base to create a unipolar world.

Second, while the U.S. cannot create a unipolar world, it is in American interest to maintain for as long as possible its position as the only superpower in a uni-multipolar world. As Josef Joffe has argued, the U.S. should not pursue a British strategy of distancing itself from other powers and then intervening intermittently so as to tip the balance in our favor. Instead, the United States should follow a Bismarckian policy of developing bilateral relationships with the other major powers and making it in their interest for them to cooperate with the it.2 In some measure, the United States has haphazardly been doing this. Maintaining this course, however, will not be easy because in this uni-multipolar world American interests and the interests of the major regional powers often conflict, and the latter are increasingly likely to be assertive in defending and advancing their interests. Hence U.S. ability to secure their cooperation in the courses of action it proposes is declining. Not to mention the fact that at the moment there does not seem to be an American Bismarck in the offing.

In his book published last year, Richard Haass argued that the United States should act as a global sheriff, rounding up posses of other states to deal with major international issues as they arose.3 Haass handled Persian Gulf matters at the White House in the Bush Administration, and his proposal reflects the experience and success of that Administration in putting together a heterogeneous global posse to force Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait. But that was then, and it contrasts dramatically with what happened during the Iraqi crisis last winter. France, Russia, and China opposed the use of force as did all the Arab countries, except Kuwait. The Iraqis are our brothers, and we cannot fight them, as one Jordanian leader said. Four countries were willing to provide warships to join the American forces in the Gulf, and they were our closest cultural cousins: Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. This was an Anglo-Saxon posse not a global one. Efforts at rallying countries to deal with future crises are far more likely to resemble what happened this year than what happened in 1990–1991. Most of the rest of the world, as Mandela said, does not want the United States in the role of global policeman.

Third, as we move in the direction of a multipolar system, the appropriate replacement for the global sheriff is community policing, devolving to the major regional powers primary responsibility for the maintenance of international order in their regions. Haass criticizes this suggestion on the grounds that the other states in a region, what I have called the secondary regional powers, will object to being policed by the leading regional power, and, as I have indicated, their interests often do conflict. Yet the same is likely to be true in the relations between the United States and most major regional powers, and there is no reason why Americans should take upon themselves the primary responsibility for maintaining order if it can be done locally. In addition, while geography does not coincide exactly with culture, there is nonetheless considerable overlap between regions and civilizations, and for the reasons I set forth in my book, the core state of a civilization is in a better position to maintain order among the members of its extended family than is someone outside the family. There also are signs that in some regions, such as Africa, and Southeast Asia, countries are beginning to recognize the desirability of developing collective procedures and institutions for maintaining security.

In the multipolar world of the 21st century, the major powers inevitably will compete, conflict, and coalesce with each other in various permutations and combinations. Such a world, however, will lack the tension and conflicts between the superpower and the major regional powers that is the defining characteristic of a uni-multipolar world. And for that reason the United States could find life as a major power in a multipolar world less demanding, less contentious, and more rewarding than it has been as the world’s only superpower.

1 Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard (New York: Basic Books, 1997), pp. 116-117.

2 Josef Joffe, "How America Does It," Foreign Affairs, Vol. 76 (Sept. - Oct. 1997), pp. 13ff.

3 Richard N. Haass, The Reluctant Sheriff: The United States after the Cold War (New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 1997), chap. 4.