This is No Time for Unilateralism

This is No Time for Unilateralism

by Joseph Nye
April 14, 2002
Reprinted from the Boston Globe

With signs of economic recovery and our military success in Afghanistan,
some Americans are drawing the wrong foreign policy conclusions. In their
eyes, the United States is number one in a unipolar world and can do as it
pleases. Some celebrate this as the "new unilateralism." In their view, we
have shown that we do not need the rest of the world to succeed. We
are strong enough to go it alone.

But this approach is based on an inadequate analysis of power in
contemporary world politics. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991
ended bipolarity. Since then analysts have debated whether the world is
unipolar or multipolar. Both images are right to some degree, and both are
wrong, because each refers to a different dimension of global power. It
would be more accurate to describe the distribution of power among
countries today as a pattern resembling a complex three-dimensional
chess game. On the top chessboard, military power is largely unipolar. The
United States is the only country with both intercontinental nuclear
weapons and large state-of-the-art air, naval, and ground forces capable
of global deployment.

But on the middle chessboard, economic power is multipolar, with the
United States, Europe, and Japan representing two-thirds of world
product, and with China''s dramatic growth likely to make it a major player
early in this century. On this economic board, the United States is not a
"hegemon." For example, the Bush administration must bargain as an equal
with Europe to obtain a new trade round, and General Electric was unable
to merge with Honeywell when the European Commission objected.

But the situation is even more complicated and difficult for the traditional
concepts to capture. The bottom chessboard is the realm of transnational
relations that cross borders outside of government control. This realm
includes actors as diverse as bankers electronically transferring sums
larger than most national budgets, terrorists transferring weapons, and
hackers disrupting Internet operations. On this bottom board, power is
widely dispersed, and it makes no sense to speak of unipolarity,
multipolarity, or hegemony.

Those who recommend a unilateralist American foreign policy based on
such traditional descriptions of American power are relying on woefully
inadequate analysis. When you are in a three dimensional game, you will
lose if you focus only on the military board and fail to notice the other
boards and the vertical connections among them.

For instance, as the Bush administration seeks to persuade British Prime
Minister Tony Blair to support a campaign against Saddam Hussein in Iraq,
the British press reports that Blair has been weakened politically by our
recent unilateral impositions of tariffs on European steel imports. And
many of these transnational issues cannot be solved unilaterally or by the
use of military power.

The good news for Americans is that the United States will likely remain
the world''s single most powerful country well into this new century. While
potential coalitions to check American power could be created, it is
unlikely that they would become firm alliances unless the United States
handles its hard coercive power in an overbearing unilateral manner that
undermines our attractive or soft power.

As the German editor Joseph Joffe has written, "unlike centuries past,
when war was the great arbiter, today the most interesting types of
power do not come out of the barrel of a gun . . . Today there is a much
bigger payoff in `getting others to want what you want,'' and that has to
do with cultural attraction and ideology and agenda setting . . ."

On these measures, China, Russia, Japan, and even Western Europe
cannot match the influence of the United States. The United States could
squander this soft power by heavy-handed unilateralism.

The bad news for Americans in this three-dimensional power game of the
21st century is that there are more and more things outside the control of
even a superpower, such as international financial stability, controlling the
spread of infectious diseases, cyber-crime and terrorism.

Although the United States does well on the traditional measures, there is
increasingly more going on in the world that those measures fail to
capture. We must mobilize international coalitions to address shared
threats and challenges.

America needs the help and respect of other nations. We will be in trouble
if our unilateralism prevents us from getting it.

Joseph S. Nye is dean of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard
University and co-author of ''''Governance in a Globalizing World.''''