With U.S. leadership failing on the global stage, who or what can replace it?
It is becoming apparent to many observers around the world that U.S. leadership is inadequate to the challenges facing our planet. U.S. leadership has always been a mixed bag, even in the best of times, due to the highly aggressive nature of our foreign policy and too-frequent willingness to flout world opinion on important matters, including war and the global environment.
While U.S. military aggressions around the world, starting in the late 19th Century and steadily expanding over time, have been an unfortunate aspect of our nation’s development of massive economic, political and cultural power, the U.S. has often played an important role in creating and maintaining international institutions of peace. We have also played major roles in fighting back even more aggressive powers.
The U.S. was in fact, the key power that saved Europe, and perhaps the rest of the world, from Hitler’s Germany and the nightmare world order that would have been created if Hitler had won that conflict.
There is a reasonable argument that World War II was perhaps the United States’ last just war. It is ironic that Eisenhower, our first post-world war president, is so well-known today for his iconic final speech as president in which he warns the American public about the “military-industrial complex.” It’s ironic for two reasons: 1) Eisenhower himself presided over the dawn of U.S. hyper-interventionism and aggression (see Kinzer’s book The Brothers on this history) before he, apparently, had some second thoughts as he left office; 2) The military-industrial complex is as strong today as it ever was during the Cold War, with the U.S. total military budget well over $1 trillion each year (when all pots of money are included) — and much of that money going directly to contractors or to arms manufacturers. And, yes, money is indeed the root of all evil.
In the wake of the second world war, the U.S. and her allies (including primarily Britain and France) created the United Nations system, to provide a system for international law and mediation to hopefully avoid additional catastrophic wars, and also the system for international trade, which eventually evolved into today’s World Trade Organization and its associated treaties and norms.
The first line of the UN Charter, which is the foundational document for the entire United Nations system (like a constitution is the basis for a nation’s laws) states that its purpose is “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind.”
This is a lesson that we seem to be fast forgetting.
The U.S. ratified the UN Charter, by an almost unanimous vote in 1945, which made it a ratified treaty by the U.S. Senate and thus the “supreme law of the land” in the U.S., per the U.S. Constitution’s Article VI.
The UN Charter allows military action by nations in only three cases: 1) when attacked; 2) when an imminent attack is known; 3) when the UN Security Council approves it. Despite the UN Charter being the law of the land in the U.S. our leaders regularly break these and many other laws regarding when military force is permitted. They also regularly break the U.S. War Powers Act passed in 1973 to limit the power of the president to wage war without direct involvement by Congress.
The world has indeed avoided, for over 70 years now, another global conflict on the scale of either of the world wars from last century. That is no small achievement and the U.S. and our role in maintaining a semblance of world order deserves much credit for this.
But the price for avoiding global conflicts has been high, and growing higher each year, particularly when a know-nothing can win the highest elected office and proceed to do his best to shred every aspect of the international system that the U.S. and its allies have created.
While world wars have been avoided, the U.S. itself has become the most violent aggressor on the world stage, in many conflicts around the world over the decades since World War II, including most importantly the Vietnam War and the Iraq War(s), where millions have died directly and indirectly due to U.S. actions.
With the vacuum of U.S. leadership growing wider by the moment, and a growing consensus that the U.S. political system is not up to the task of global leadership even in the best of times (most progressives were no fan of Obama’s global leadership, which included expanding illegal drone wars around the world and tepid leadership on climate change, at best), who could or should replace the U.S.? And if the U.S. can’t be replaced, what is to be done?
As bad as U.S. leadership has been over the last century, I have little doubt that Chinese or Russian global leadership, should they come to replace the U.S., would be even worse.
This is the conundrum for people who want to see a better world: it really is a choice of two (or three) evils and then discerning which one is actually the lesser evil. China’s Xi Jinping is a smarter version of Trump, who has already secured the ability to maintain his leadership for life and has gathered all the organs of Chinese national power into his own arms. China is not likely to be any salvation at the global level for what ails the world, except perhaps on the environment where Chinese leadership is in fact coming around in a very serious way.
It is also worth noting that China has waged only one, relatively small, war in the last fifty years: against Vietnam in 1979. During this same time period, the U.S. has waged literally dozens of wars, large and small.
But I fear that as China rises to the fore on the global stage, as they will by sheer inertia if nothing else, the “hawks” within China’s leadership will increasingly gain power and seek to exercise China’s growing military might around the world. China’s handful of foreign military bases, in Djibouti, Tajikistan and a few other countries, will surely be joined by many others as China becomes more confident on the global stage.
Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. So while China has been relatively benign as a regional power, in terms of its reticence to use military power, I have little doubt that that reticence will diminish as China becomes more powerful and the U.S. becomes weaker.
Russia is not, by itself, a serious threat to U.S. hegemony, as China is. However, Russia, working with China and other nations, is a serious threat. Russia and China have already agreed to conduct a growing amount of major trade in non-US dollar transactions, constituting a growing threat to the U.S.-dominated international financial system.
Russia’s leader, Vladimir Putin, again a smarter version of a Trumpian mentality, has also secured for himself an apparent lifetime position as leader of the increasingly non-democratic Russia. While Russia’s economy is 1/10th the size of the U.S. economy (China’s economy is arguably already larger than that of the U.S.), its military is still powerful and its bag of cyber-tricks is growing. It also has massive hydrocarbon resources, which count for a lot in global power calculations, as discussed below.
So don’t count Russia out of the running for renewed global leadership.
But Russia or a Russia/China axis replacing U.S. global leadership would surely be even worse than the highly flawed run of U.S. leadership over the last century.
We are back to the question: if not the U.S., who?
I addressed this question a decade ago in the piece below and its analysis and recommendations remain highly relevant for today. The short answer: the U.S. should use its remaining years of global hegemony to strengthen and improve rather than weaken global institutions, like the United Nations and World Trade Organization, in order to prevent the ability of Russia or China to supersede the U.S. as global hegemon and lead to a worse world system than we already have.
We have, unfortunately, been going in the opposite direction under Trump. He is weakening global institutions in every way he and his team can find. But perhaps the major step backwards that Trump is leading will itself lead to two even bigger steps forwards, as the world realizes again the lessons of World War II, and why the int’l legal and trade systems were created back in the 1940s and 50s.
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The Unipolar Moment Reconsidered: Hydrocarbon power and world politics
This essay was first published in 2010 but it is perhaps even more relevant in 2020, given the new assertiveness of Russia and China on the world stage and President Trump’s aggressive actions against Iran and other countries.
Columnist Charles Krauthammer wrote in 2004 that the predominance of U.S. power in the world after the fall of the Soviet Union was a “staggering development in history, not seen since the fall of Rome.” Krauthammer and his fellow neoconservatives famously concluded from this disparity in power that the United States needed to adopt an aggressive foreign policy agenda to enhance and continue its dominance in the “New American Century.”
This conclusion was the wrong lesson from history and from any reasonable and compassionate view of the desirable future arc of humanity. Rather than consolidate and expand U.S. power in the 21st century, with a mix of military, economic and cultural coercion — the neocon strategy — the United States should instead seize what is still our unique unipolar moment and work toward a truly multilateral and multipolar world.
The last two centuries have been dominated by one nation — the hegemon, which comes from the Greek for “leader.” Britain was the first global hegemon, and indeed the “sun never set on the British empire.” Britain’s dominance was fueled, literally, by coal, which allowed the industrial revolution to work its magic first in Britain. This led to great economic might, which was translated into military might. With a sense of cultural superiority, the “White Man’s Burden,” the British empire was ruthless in its domination of areas of the world as far-flung as North America, India, Jamaica, Gibraltar and Australia. Britain at its peak, however, never comprised more than 10 percent of the global economy.
The United States, fueled by coal and oil, which was first found in Titusville, Pa., in 1859, an expansive and ever-growing territory that spanned a whole continent, and a sense of “American exceptionalism,” was the successor to the British empire, reaching 19 percent of global economic output in 1913, at the verge of World War I, and 35 percent at the height of World War II. The United States is now about 20 percent of the global economy, its share shrinking as other nations grow rapidly. The United States’ historical wealth of oil, coal and natural gas allowed it to grow to such a dominant economic and military position that it is truly deserving of being called an empire.
As a global empire, the United States spends as much on its military as the rest of the world combined. If Britain was the first global hegemon, the United States became the first hyper-hegemon. We keep about 800 military bases in 160 nations. There is no place immune from our power and, increasingly, no place immune from our surveillance. We are now expanding and enforcing our empire with increasingly inhumane robotic drone attacks in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan and other countries, creating a whole new generation of bitter enemies.
There are chinks in our armor, however. Clearly. The neocon agenda was made real after the 9/11 attacks, with the Bush administration launching ill-fated invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and the Obama administration expanding the Afghanistan war into Pakistan. These military responses are exactly the wrong lesson to be learned from history and will do nothing in the long run to improve humanity’s lot on a limited planet.
The longer-term threat to U.S. dominance is economic. The United States is by far the largest economy today, although down to a “mere” 20 percent of world economic output from its World War II peak. Economic threats loom not far over the horizon, however. China surpassed Germany as the third largest economy in the world in 2007 and will likely surpass Japan as the second largest this year. The United States remains, however, almost three times as large as China and Japan in economic terms.
But China is set to surpass the United States [it probably already has in 2020] as the leading economy in 15 to 20 years, based on Goldman Sachs projections, and by 2050 the United States and India will probably be about half the size of the Chinese economy.
Goldman Sachs projections of global economic growth by 2050.
With economic might comes military might. As Martin Jacques writes in When China Rules the World (2009), China is best described as a “civilization-state” because of its history as a unitary civilization in essentially the same borders for about 2,000 years and a 5,000-year cultural history going back even further. It has exercised its power beyond its borders, as a “tributary state” that collected tribute from surrounding nations without subjecting them to the same type of control that Western colonial powers perfected. Until recent decades, however, China limited its influence to East Asia.
More recently, China has become increasingly aggressive in securing the resources it needs to continue its rapid double-digit growth, using its largely state-controlled companies like the China National Offshore Oil Corp. to snap up oil resources around the world. China knows full well the role that energy plays in economic growth and national power.
Less discussed as a challenger to U.S. dominance is Russia. Isn’t Russia old news, with its influence minimized since the fall of the Soviet Union? Well, yes and no. Russia is projected by Goldman Sachs to be the world’s sixth largest economy in both 2025 and 2050. However, beyond “mere” GDP comparisons, Russia’s influence will be magnified in coming years because of its huge hydrocarbon resources. Russia is now the world’s largest producer of oil, surpassing Saudi Arabia. Russia produced almost 10 million barrels per day of oil in 2009, beating the Saudis by about 800,000 barrels. The United States was third, with about 8.5 million barrels per day and Iran a distant fourth.
But Russia’s natural wealth goes far beyond oil. Russia is the world’s largest natural gas producer, producing more than 20 percent of the world’s demand in 2009. The United States was second and Canada a distant third. Long-term, Russia has by far the biggest natural gas reserves of any country. As the world decarbonizes, which means in the electricity sector switching to natural gas and renewables from coal, natural gas production will become an increasingly important component of national power. We’ve already seen this story unfurled in Europe over the last few years as Russia has used its natural gas supplies to exert control over neighboring countries like Ukraine and Belarus.
Russia is not dominant in coal production; China is by far the biggest producer of coal. The United States is second. But China and the United States use all of their own production, and Australia and Indonesia are the largest coal exporters, so the net hydrocarbon export situation is surprisingly not changed much by looking at coal in addition to oil and natural gas.
Net hydrocarbon exports of selected countries — million tons of oil equivalent. (Energy Information Administration graphic)
This energy dynamic can be summed up nicely by comparing net hydrocarbon exports. This measure subtracts from total hydrocarbon production what each country consumes itself. The nearby chart, compiled with Energy Information Administration data, compares the world’s largest economies and the world’s major hydrocarbon producers. It is an interesting alternative view of what constitutes national power. It’s more difficult to predict what the future holds for this dynamic because as nations like Saudi Arabia and Russia continue to grow they consume more of their own products.
The Export Land Model attempts to project how quickly major exporting nations cease to export oil due to increased domestic consumption and declining production, demonstrating how quickly net exporters can become net importers, as China did in recent years with coal and the United Kingdom did with oil. However, the long-term trends in heavily import-dependent nations like the United States, Japan, China, etc., are exacerbated because these countries’ hydrocarbon wealth has long since peaked and it’s all downhill moving forward.
It looks, then, like China and Russia are the key U.S. competitors in coming decades. Do we want a unipolar world dominated by either Russia or China as the new hegemon? My answer is a resounding “no.” These nations are not models for an enlightened human future, to say the least. And nor is the current U.S. empire. These are not, however, the only choices.
The United States should, in these remaining years of global dominance that constitute the “unipolar moment,” use its influence to create a truly multipolar and multilateral world order. What does this mean?
A multilateral world is one in which no single power, no matter how dominant economically or militarily, can dominate geopolitically or bully others into submission by whatever means used historically. A multilateral world is one in which no hegemon is possible or required. A multilateral world is one in which international organizations like the United Nations wield real power, designated and determined by its members, but in a far more egalitarian and democratic manner than is currently the case.
The U.N. Security Council, the key body in the U.N. system, has 15 members, five of them “permanent.” The P5, as they are known, are essentially the World War II victors: the United States, Britain, China, Russia and France. The P5 wield veto power over any decision before the Security Council. No other nations enjoy this privilege. The other 10 nations on the Security Council rotate through each year and all decisions must be approved by a majority vote. The United States has historically wielded its veto power far more than any other country, demonstrating its influence in this key international forum, as is the case with all other similar forums like the International Monetary Fund, World Trade Organization andWorld Bank.
Conventional wisdom holds that it is futile to expect the P5 to give up its veto power or to extend this veto power to other nations. Conventional wisdom has, however, been proven wrong time and time again. This is how change happens. And an egalitarian international order won’t happen by itself — it must be dreamed of first, with the hard slog in the middle and the desired outcome at the end.
As Gandhi said about his movement for nonviolent overthrow of India’s British overlords: “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”
We will tackle some of the most serious problems we’ve ever faced in the coming decades, including peak oil, climate change, the rise of China and Russia, and others. If we are to forge a path to progress in international and human affairs at the same time that we tackle these momentous problems, we must ensure that a multipolar and multilateral world is our goal — not a world with continued U.S. domination because, simply put, U.S. domination will not last much longer.
