Global Trends

Just as you were talking, you ticked off a number of events which we focus on to say, "A-ha, the world has changed." But, in fact, an international relations theorist like yourself sees more going on behind the scenes than is revealed by a particular event. So let's talk a little about the global trends and whether you see an overthrow of the state system being mistaken for the real emergence of the unipolar world in which the United States is at the top of the heap.

You're asking me to theorize.

To theorize.

To be Ken Waltz?

Yes, to speculate about the broader trends that are going on. Is a new world order emerging?

There are a number of questions concealed in your question. Let me be like an exam at Berkeley or at Harvard. Let me reformulate the question and answer brilliantly. There is surely a new world order distribution of power with the United States on top of the heap. No power ever, perhaps with the exception of Rome, has been on top of the heap like the United States is today. Whatever dimension or currency of power you take, the United States is so far ahead. If you look at the way the United States fought the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, you might without much exaggeration say that U.S. power is several orbits above its nearest competitor.

When Bush asked last year, I think March, 2002, for a supplemental defense appropriation of $48 billion, he was asking for a sum that is twice the annual defense spending of Germany or Italy. If the United States goes on spending and the others don't raise their spending as well, by 2007 the United States is going to spend more on its military than all the rest combined.

All the rest of the world?

Yes, by 2007, if the current proposals are adopted. That speaks of a military clout that, as I said, puts the United States in a different orbit, several different orbits. And if you add to its economic and cultural power, it's even more impressive. In the old days, the conquered Greeks of Rome at least could take solace from their cultural superiority, because Roman upper class families sent their kids to study at Athens U. The thing today is that modern-day Greeks and Greco-Europeans would love nothing better than have their kids study at Harvard, Berkeley, or Stanford. So the Greeks are now sending their kids to "Roman" universities. That's a little twist on the cultural dominance, too. So you have, in Waltzian terms, a concentration of power at the top which is unheard of, unprecedented.

You have, at the same time, the attempts of the lesser nations, as we said before, to counterbalance, to put the ropes back on Gulliver -- not very successful so far. There was an attempt, but they did not succeed in actually containing and constraining U.S. power. But that's a game worth watching because as a Realist, I would always argue that great power will beget counter power. It's just a matter of time. We saw the first attempt this year in the run-up to the Iraq war, on the part of the French and the Germans.

The third feature, perhaps the most interesting feature, has to do with the new challenges to the order and stability of this world. We're now facing very different challenges and certainly challenges which cannot be subsumed under the tenets of classical international law. What we have are two new threats. [We have] conventional states operating with unconventional weapons, or threatening to acquire them, and we have non-state actors operating with non-conventional weapons, such as box cutters, or loads of C4 or dynamite. These two issues cannot be easily taken care of by what we call the Westphalian state system, which was based on absolute sovereignty or non-intervention on the hard shell of national borders. We didn't care what went on inside. We only cared about the behavior of those states.

Now we have a terrorist movement capturing a state like Afghanistan, or we have terrorist movements that don't have an address or a face, so classical deterrence doesn't work. So we have to shift towards prevention. And we have states -- conventional states, conventional totalitarian states like Iraq -- going for non-conventional weapons. The question is, do we have to wait until we absorb the first blow, or can we act preventively?

These are some of the philosophical and other issues which we've seen bubble up in the Security Council. All I would like to say now is that the conventional answers of international law simply do not work in those two cases that I just mentioned: conventional states acting with non-conventional weapons; and non-conventional actors like al Qaeda acting with conventional weapons.

Before we talk about the Bush theory about how to deal with this, I want to go back to something that you were talking about a minute ago, namely this potential new alliance to counter the U.S. Here one confronts the old problem of military power. [Regarding] the potential alliance among the Germans, the French, and the Russians, which tried to make [an impact] in the lead-up to the Iraq war, the bottom line is that there is no evidence that they can get their military act together. Is it correct to say that until that happens, this balancing will go nowhere?

Well, let me step back a bit. We are now living in a world that has shown yet another, not revolutionary, but significant transformation, which is this: the currency of military power had been strongly devalued in the absence of terror, but has suddenly been revalued. The great powers could not really use military power during the bipolar age for fear that even one shot released by an M-16 or an AK-47 might kind of light up an escalatory chain all the way to nukes. We piled up vast amounts of military power, thousands and thousands of nukes, which were unusable. So we had these piles of chips for which we couldn't buy anything as it were.

Suddenly, what happened is that with the end of the bipolar system, those chips suddenly, again, are worth something. In fact, they have been very nicely revalued. Suddenly the use of military force has been quite productive. The United States was very productive when applying force to the Kosovo: Slobo fell. He's now at the Yugoslav tribunal. It was very productive in Afghanistan: the Taliban regime fell and al Qaeda, which had captured that state, hijacked that state, is gone. And force was impressively productive in the Iraq war.

Now, having said that, we now go back to your question. The reason the French and the Germans could only simulate the balance of power again rather than actually playing it out by stopping American power was that they didn't have enough chips on the table. As I said before, the supplemental Bush appropriations was twice the annual spending of Germany. As long as France only has one measly aircraft carrier, as long as the Germans are seriously overstretched by having placed about 10,000 people in Macedonia or Kosovo and Afghanistan, these two nations can't play at the same poker table as the United States, nor can the Russians, by the way, whose army has simply evaporated.

So in a way, the Europeans are trying to have their cake and eat it, too. They want to keep their national armies. On the other hand, in the economic realm, to deal with the threat of globalization or of American economic power, they feel that they have to unite. But they can't put those two things together, right? No French army or German army is ever going to be able to match the United States. Conceivably a European army could, but that's not going to happen.

Well, if you total up the numbers, the Europeans have as large an economy as the Americans do. They have more men and women by now under arms. They probably have more tanks and more everything, if you sum them, if you add them all up between Poland and Portugal. But as we have had so many occasions to note, this is nothing if you can't subsume these resources under a common will. That common will is not there and is harder now after the fissures that opened up in Europe and the run-up to the third Iraq Gulf War. Given those fissures, it's even harder for me to see how that common will can be achieved.

Let's put it this way. In a world in which the discipline of bipolarity has fallen away and has given more freedom to states, of course it has also given more freedoms to all the European states to play their own games and to pursue their own interests. So the answer of Europe speaking with one voice now looks to me even more implausible than it ever did before.

Next page: The Bush Administration and the Iraq War