At the insistence of our allies, the war in Iraq has become as much a test of the international system as of Saddam Hussein, as much a question of a new world order as of a new, democratic Iraq. The battle between American primacy and multipolarity is nearing an end--and what is to come is a world that no one ever imagined.
The diplomatic maneuvering preceding war in Iraq marks the unambiguous end of the post-cold-war world. No one can say with absolute certainty how the "post-Iraq world" will be ordered, but the fundamental contradiction of the period between 1989 and 2003--the disparity between the reality of American global primacy and the formally multipolar structure of various international institutions, most notably the United Nations and NATO--has been exposed for the sham that it has been. Ironically, the French have done us a favor by forcing the world to confront the facts of the case.
The French quite skillfully made the Bush administration's decision to "go to the UN" a referendum not on Saddam Hussein, the Ba'ath regime in Iraq, or even the persistent political and security problems of the larger Middle East. Rather, over the past nine months, the decisive issue has morphed into a referendum on American power and leadership. France's stated intention has been to present itself--nationally, through the European Union, and in other international bodies--as a "counterweight" to the United States "hyperpower." In achieving this, President Jacques Chirac, Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin, and the French diplomatic corps have acted with tremendous tactical skill, outfoxing President George W. Bush, Colin Powell, and the State Department at every turn. Given the disparity in military and economic power between Paris and Washington, France's achievement is all the more remarkable.
However, the victory of Paris is almost certain to be Pyrrhric and short-lived. The French counterweight, though it has produced an earthquake at the United Nations, is, in the end, also a featherweight of so-called soft power set against the heavy-metal hard power of the United States. War in Iraq, whatever the immediate outcome, will produce a new set of geopolitical realities in the Persian Gulf and the French role in that balance will be lessened. As part of the larger war on terrorism in the Islamic world, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, in conjunction with U.S. and allied actions in Central and Southeast Asia, are having a profound effect on a huge portion of the planet where French power is negligible. The locus of conflict and the focus of international concern are shifting farther away from France, from Germany, and from western Europe. Chirac and German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder are indeed gamblers whose bluff has been called; President Bush's call to "lay the cards on the table" reveals just how weak the French cards are. Outside the UN Security Council, those cards have almost no value whatsoever.
Soft Power
The French gambit, naturally, has a theoretical logic to it. The idea is that soft power--expressed through international trade regimes, law, and organizations such as the United Nations--is interchangeable with hard power-actual wealth, military strength, and the like.
The theory has been given perhaps its fullest exposition by Joseph Nye of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, a former Pentagon official in the Clinton administration. Soft power, writes Nye in The Paradox of American Power, is an "indirect" way to exercise power.
A country may obtain the outcomes it wants in world politics because other countries want to follow it, admiring its values, emulating its example, aspiring to its level of prosperity and openness. In this sense, it is just as important to set the agenda in world politics and attract others as it is to force them to change through the threat or use of military or economic weapons. . . . [Soft power] co-opts people rather than coerces them.[1]
To Nye, this is the power to set a political agenda and the framework of debate. "If I can get you to want to do what I want," he writes, "then I do not have to force you to do what you do not want to do." Soft power is the ability to entice and attract, and its success is measured by acquiescence or imitation.
The emergence of this theory of soft power has helped to solve one of the major social-science paradoxes of the past decade: the failure of a new nation or coalition to emerge as a balancer against American hegemony. Even so firm a believer in America's preeminence as Charles Krauthammer at first foresaw only a transitory unipolar moment, and a whole school of "neorealist" scholars predicted the inevitable demise of U.S. geopolitical primacy. Strategy journals regularly featured articles with titles like "The Unipolar Illusion: Why New Great Powers Will Arise" and "From Preponderance to Offshore Balancing: America's Future Grand Strategy."[2] But by the end of the 1990s, even academics had begun to doubt the reality of realist theory, and in a groundbreaking article, William Wohlforth made a comprehensive argument that "to describe this unprecedented quantitative and qualitative concentration of power [in the hands of the United States] as an evanescent 'moment' is profoundly mistaken."
The scholarly conventional wisdom holds that unipolarity is dynamically unstable and that any slight overstep by Washington will spark a dangerous backlash. I find the opposite to be true: unipolarity is durable and peaceful, and the chief threat is U.S. failure to do enough. Possessing an undisputed preponderance of power, the United States is freer than most states to disregard the international system and its incentives. But because the system is built around U.S. power, it creates demands for American engagement. The more efficiently Washington responds to these incentives and provides order, the more long-lived and peaceful the system.[3]
As so often happens in the academy when theory collides with reality, it is reality that must yield. Unable to explain why no one seemed willing to employ traditional tools of international politics--in the form of military force or economic restrictions--to constrain the global leadership of the United States, increasing numbers of scholars have argued that the rest of the world, and Europe in particular, had turned to "soft balancing," employing soft power to limit the American exercise of hard power.
French diplomacy over the past six months has seemed to fit this theory like a Frenchman fits his t-shirt. By ensnaring the administration in the disarmament dead-end in the United Nations, the French drove a wedge between America and the world, "softly balancing" what they could not otherwise influence. The French seized the opening when President Bush listened to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and the other "hawks" at the Pentagon and was too dismissive of diplomacy and, particularly, of European sensibilities.
Unfortunately for the theory, however, the exercise in soft power seems to have had no appreciable balancing effect. French maneuvering has not induced the Bush administration to want to do what Jacques Chirac wished it to do--leave Saddam Hussein in power--or to acquiesce to Dominique de Villepin's desires. France's vision of a multipolar world order holds little attraction for Americans and is unlikely to entice anyone outside the McGovern wing of the Democratic Party to imitate it.
Indeed, Russia and China, the other two members of the Security Council's Axis of Veto, were quick to distance themselves from the French folly. Russian president Vladimir Putin expressed his regrets to President Bush about the U.S. decision to remove Saddam, but emphasized that there was no irreparable damage to relations. Like Boris Yeltsin before him, Putin essentially shrugged at American actions he did not care for--as with NATO expansion, the ABM Treaty, and the wars in the Balkans, the Russian objections to getting rid of Saddam and the Ba'ath Party were not serious enough to provoke an enduring split with the United States. Putin understands that the return to great power will be a long road, and his first purpose is to make Russia prosper economically. Even should Russia wish to oppose America again in the future, a premature attempt to do so would abort the effort.
Beijing, still in the throes of a leadership transition while the world is whirling around it, seems flattered to have been asked its opinion about Iraq. Like Putin, Hu Jintao is probably breathing a huge sigh of relief that President Bush did not demand a vote at the UN; it was one thing to stand near while France brandished its UN veto, quite another to have had to "lay its card upon the table" had Bush forced the issue. Chinese strategists find their game plan for patiently accumulating great power entirely overcome by events since September 11-everywhere they turn, they see new American outposts. Beijing has become more cautious as the Bush administration has asserted its global leadership.
Even Germans, their genuine revulsion from violence and war cynically exploited by Gerhard Schroeder, are awaking with morning-after regrets. The prospect of abandonment by the Americans, or even the "repositioning" of the U.S. garrison in Germany to the east, is frightening; following France has been a disaster that threatens the union of Europe that was to safely bind Germany to the rest of the continent.
France's soft-power vision holds even less attraction for other European leaders. England's Tony Blair has transformed himself from Britain's Bill Clinton--triangulating his way to electoral success--into a modern-day Churchill--a genuinely heroic leader seemingly ready to sacrifice his career for his moral and political beliefs. The contrast with Little Englanders like Robin Cook, whose resignation speech matched mendacity with vanity, could hardly be greater. A resolve similar to Blair's is found in José María Aznar of Spain, Silvio Berlusconi of Italy, and especially among the leaders of "New Europe," such as Václav Havel, former president of the Czech Republic, and Alexander Kwasneiwski of Poland. These Eastern and Central Europeans perhaps understand the price to be paid for a division between the United States and Europe, and even more for a French-led EU meant to be a counterweight to American power.
Present at the Creation
Having become a test of American power and purpose in the world, war in Iraq will have consequences not simply for Saddam and his regime, or the Iraqi people, or the security balance in the Persian Gulf. A U.S. victory--measured also by the planting of the seeds of liberty and democracy in Baghdad--will define the start of a truly new world order; to steal Dean Acheson's famous phrase, we are present at the creation. What, exactly, we are creating we do not know. It will be necessary to create international institutions that reflect the new realities, and they may even be called the United Nations and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. But if so, those organizations will have to be fundamentally transformed to reestablish the link between the right to make international law and the responsibility to enforce it.
In fact, the world that is now suffering its birth pangs in the skies over Iraq and on the ground there is even more likely than the one it grew out of to be a unipolar world, marked by an even greater degree of American primacy and leadership than before. It may further accelerate the stunning spread of democracy and political liberty that has occurred since the collapse of the Soviet empire. We appear to be moving at last from the post-cold-war era--a time defined negatively by what it is not--to the time of an enduring Pax Americana.
Notes
1. Joseph S. Nye, The Paradox of American Power: Why the World's Only Superpower Can't Go It Alone (Oxford University Press, 2002), 8-9.
2. Both these articles were written by Christopher Layne and published in International Security, in the Spring 1993 (vol. 17, no. 4) and Summer 1997 (vol. 22, no. 1) issues; the works of Kenneth Waltz have made similar arguments.
3. William Wohlforth, "The Stability of a Unipolar World," International Security 14, no. 1 (Summer 1999): 7, 8.
Thomas Donnelly (tdonnelly@aei.org) is a resident fellow at AEI.
