Second, there is the question of prudence: American
hegemony is good for the world. Why? The modern world, interconnected
as it is today, can exist in only two states: reasonably structured or
chaotic. Chaos in the global system means
no leader, no rules, nothing but contending powers and universal vulnerability.
We have had experience with chaos: it was
known as the 1930s. It was a Hobbesian universe that plunged the world
into catastrophe.
Today the risks, the stakes are even higher:
nuclear, biological and chemical weapons, along with ballistic missiles,
concentrate power and shrink distance. They
grant, for the first time in history, relatively insignificant players
the power to destroy cities and nations.
In such a world, chaos is simply unacceptable. (7)
The international system must have a structure.
And because the international arena, unlike the ordinary national arena,
has no cops, no enforcers, no courts with any real
power (for example, the Rwandan and Bosnian war-crimes tribunals),
the structure must be established and maintained
by a leading world power. In the 19th century, the high seas were safe
and maritime commerce was routine because of the
British navy. The U.S. now plays the role of the British navy everywhere.
Whom would those chafing under American hegemony
prefer instead? China? Iran? The Russian mafia?
(8)
Who, for example, is orchestrating the global
campaign to detect, control, intercept and eliminate
"loose nukes"? In a world
where the means of mass destruction can be transported in a suitcase, would
you feel safer if that job were entrusted
to Kofi Annan? To Japanese industrialists? To France? (9)
The complainers would prefer, naturally, to see
power shared equally among the leading nations and the rules arrived at
by consensus. How nice. How Utopian. Multipolar systems
do not evolve into happy Elks clubs.
They break down rudely into rival alliances
and coalitions, like the Triple Entente and the Triple Alliance, the Axis
and the Allies, the Warsaw Pact and NATO,
that gave us the calamities and the terrors of this century. (10)
Tennyson dreamed of a parliament of man. Dream
on. The League of Nations and the United Nations
have proved utterly ineffective. Why, even
the European Union, an unprecedented club of like-minded friendly neighbors,
is in disarray over the question of coinage,
let alone war and peace. (11)
Why? Simple. Put great powers with diverging
interests together, and consensus is almost always impossible to reach.
And if not consensus, what? Which nation will long
subordinate its own sovereignty to the majority vote of a bunch of
rivals? Hence the best,
if imperfect, guarantee of international order and safety: the dominance
of a benign power. For now
and for the foreseeable future, America is it--and the world knows it.
(12)
American dominance is a blessing because it has
given the world a Pax Americana,
an era of international peace and tranquillity
unseen in this century, rarely seen in human history. The Great Powers
have been corralled into the American "zone
of peace" or, as with China and Russia, engaged and/or contained. Smaller
powers do not dare start regional wars; they
have seen what happened to Iraq. What remains
are brushfire wars, most of which the U.S. simply will not strain to
quell. (13)
But the world does not live by safety alone.
American dominance brings the world something more: the
American creed. We
are a uniquely ideological nation. We do not define ourselves by race or
blood but by adherence to a proposition--a
proposition so humane and attractive that it has,
independently of American power, won near universal adherence. From
Prague's "velvet revolution" to Tiananmen Square,
whose Declaration of Independence--whose Statue of Liberty--do demonstrators
for freedom turn to for inspiration? (14)
Individual rights, government
by consent, protection from arbitrary power,
the free exchange of goods and ideas: we did not
invent these ideas. We inherited them. We codified them. And now we propagate
them. (15)
The world could do worse than be dominated by
a country so committed to these ideas that it cannot help trying to foist
them on everyone else. The foisting often gets heavy-handed
and crude. The human-rights reports written by the State Department
every year are a perfect expression of American zeal, the kind of obsessive
do-goodism that recalls the temperance movement
of the early 20th century. Yet even this exercise, clumsy and arrogant
as it is, is useful. It makes tyrants abroad
think twice before beating up their dissidents. Many heroes around the
world owe their lives to American avy-handedness.
(16)
Of course, nothing is forever, certainly not
American dominance. The time will come when the U.S. will subside to
become but one of many Great Powers. It is inevitable,
but it is not imminent. Writing in Foreign Affairs in the winter of
1990-91, I imagined that the "unipolar moment" would
probably last no more than a decade or two. I was too pessimistic.
Almost a decade has passed, and America's stature has only increased.
Nonetheless, the multipolar world is inevitable.
I venture a prediction: it will be more violent, more unstable and less
free than today's world. Indeed, future historians
will write about this time, these years at the turn of the millennium,
as a Golden Age of unusual international tranquillity,
order and freedom. The unipolar moment, the American moment. Long
may it last. (17)