Higher Realism

A New Foreign Policy for the United States

Seyom Brown

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317258148
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

For dealing with an increasingly chaotic and violence-prone world, Higher Realism offers a grand strategy that rejects the imperial thrust of recent U.S. foreign policy as well as the conventional "realist" approach of focusing only on U.S. interests. The emerging world order is one in which many powers of various sorts-states and nonstate actors, large and small, allies and adversaries-have an essential role. Seyom Brown calls this the emergent international "polyarchy, " and argues that neither the assertive interventionism of the neoconservatives nor the cool, nonideological geopolitics of the conventional realists is the appropriate response. Instead, responsive to how U.S. interests have become inextricably bound up with world interests, Brown proposes a foreign policy of higher realism centered on cooperation to ensure the security and well-being of all. Brown defines and analyzes those common interests in the environment, peace and security, health and economic vitality, human rights and democracy, and transnational accountability. He faults the arrogant assumption that what is good for the United States is ipso facto good for the world, insisting rather that U.S. policies for global development must respect religious and cultural diversity. Brown's approach transcends the traditional dichotomies of realism versus idealism and self-interest versus altruistic morality. The recommended programs and policies are designed to help a new U.S. presidential administration reformulate a foreign policy that will ensure national security and promote international well-being: higher realism in philosophy and practice.

CHAPTER ONE

The Emergent Global System

The security and well-being of the people of the United States can be seriously jeopardized if there is a mismatch between the ideas of those responsible for U.S. foreign policy about how the world works and the actual structure and behavior of the global system. Yet such a mismatch has, by and large, prevailed since the end of the Cold War.

To be consistent with the emerging realities, the formulation and the conduct of U.S. foreign policy must be freed of a number of fantasies and fallacies that have distorted views on the part of high officials and influential analysts about the distribution of power in the system and its appropriate uses.

First is what can be called the Double-O Delusion of omnipotence and omniscience: the belief that because of its great military strength and economic wealth, the United States has the power to prevail over any adversary or combination of adversaries that might temporarily attempt to prevent it from exercising its will and, further, that the success of the United States in achieving such military and economic primacy comes from being wiser than the others about the best way to organize human societies—nations, as well as the world community. Next is the Polarity Fallacy: deducing that the world is unipolar from the assumption that during the Cold War, the world was bipolar (except for the nonaligned countries) and from the fact that by the 1990s, the Soviet Union had opted out of its global rivalry with the United States.

The Double-O Delusion and the Polarity Fallacy were fused and reflected in both the assertive globalization pursued by the Clinton administration and the Bush administration’s neoconservative agenda that gave us Operation Iraqi Freedom. Although most countries have adjusted their policies to the reality that there is now only one superpower, they have not bought into the fantasies of a post-Cold War Pax Americana, nor have many been drawn into the gravitational field of the presumed unipolar system.

Lately, policymakers and analysts in the United States and around the world have revived the concept of multipolarity to describe the emergent structure of international relations. But as I will show in this chapter, neither unipolarity nor multipolarity exists in fact.

The emergent global system of diffuse power and crosscutting relationships is more aptly conceptualized as a polyarchy. Recognizing the emergent Polyarchy for what it is—complex, disorderly, and volatile, such that today’s close friend may be tomorrow’s enemy—is a prerequisite for effective efforts to rid twenty-first-century world politics of its dangerous dysfunctional tendencies. Accordingly, analysis of these emergent global realities is the starting point for the foreign policy of Higher Realism.

Pax Americana and the Double-O Delusion

The expectation of global peace ultimately materializing from U.S. promotion of market democracy around the world—the vision of neoconservatives and neo-Wilsonians alike—draws on the model of nineteenth-century “Pax Britannica.” Britain, with its technologically advanced and ubiquitous navy, aspired not only to rule the waves but also to foster a free-trading global economic system highly favorable to the industrially superior and raw material-importing country. The Pax Britannica vision held that what was good for England was good for the world, since free markets and global commerce, protected by the Royal Navy, would “lift all [economic] boats” as the Adam Smith/David Ricardo predictions of product specialization on the basis of comparative advantage were at last permitted to materialize. The British convinced themselves (falsely, as it turned out) that as long as Britain was willing to absorb the costs of protecting free international commerce, most of the other countries would hop on the free-trade bandwagon and accept British hegemony.

The post-Cold War champions of Pax Americana in both political parties in the United States also hold that the globalization of the system of market democracies requires the leadership of an omnipotent and omniscient hegemon willing to take on the economic and political burdens of fostering and maintaining the system. “If we have to use force,” explained Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, “it is because we are America! We are the indispensable nation, and we see further into the future.”¹ In the wake of 9/11, a new urgency and rationale—the war against terrorism—was added to the Pax Americana mission. As articulated by Vice President Dick Cheney, “America has friends and allies in this cause, but only we can lead it.… The United States and only the United States can see this effort through to victory. This responsibility did not come to us by chance. We are in a unique position because of our unique assets, because of the character of our people, the strength of our ideals, and the might of our military and the enormous economy that supports it.”²

Looking beyond Iraq, although failure in Iraq could produce an isolationist backlash, foreign policy spokespersons in both parties have regarded continuing U.S. primacy, particularly in the military sphere, as the indispensable condition for sustaining such a Pax Americana. U. S. military capabilities, strategies, and deployments, averred the Bush administration’s basic national security strategy paper, are used to “create a balance of power that favors human freedom.”³ The new “forward strategy of freedom” was justified by the proposition that “in every region of the world, the advance of freedom leads to peace.”⁴

The forecast of global peace flowing from a Kantian world of market democracies protected and instructed by the U.S. hegemon is based on the assumption that the successor to Cold War bipolarity is unipolarity. But this, too, is an illusion.

The False Promise of Unipolarity

Seeing one of the two power centers of the Cold War bipolar system collapse, its sphere of control disintegrate, particularly in Eastern Europe, and its satraps around the world left without a big-brother military ally and economic patron, many analysts, policymakers, and pundits deduced that the successor system, as long as the power of the United States remained intact, was unipolar.⁵ By the standard (material) measures of power, this should still be the case. With a defense budget greater than the combined military budgets of the next fifteen countries, the United States fields the strongest and most technologically sophisticated conventional forces in the world, with military deployments in over 100 countries and over 6,000 nuclear warheads in its strategic nuclear arsenal.⁶ The gross national product (GNP) of the United States—running well over $13 trillion a year—is 20 percent of the world’s combined GNP.⁷ And although it spends about two-tenths percent of its GNP on official development assistance—one of the lowest percentages among the affluent countries—this still amounts to a larger absolute amount of foreign aid (running at about $27 billion a year) than is provided by any other country.⁸

But how much effective influence over others does this great differential in material power confer? True, the United States, the only remaining superpower, is the most influential single actor, and its cooperation or opposition can often determine the fate of policies and programs of others around the world. But being the only superpower is not the same as having effective power over most others in the system. Some forms of power—military, economic, ideational, or the power that comes from diplomatic/political skill—may have an impact on some actors more than others, affected in each case by a multitude of material, cultural, and historical factors. These various types of power are often neither fungible nor fully additive into a kind of Gross National Power that when posed against the power of another state will overcome its resistance, like a magnet pulling on a piece of metal.

In other words, super power does not simply translate into polar power, in the sense of the impact exerted by the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. The bipolarity of the Cold War system inhered not just in the existence of two countries more powerful than any of the rest but also in the massive gravitational pull (geostrategic and ideological) each superpower had on others.⁹ Each superpower’s influence over the international behavior of its allies and clients was so great that it was indeed appropriate to regard the whole system, except for the determinedly nonaligned countries,¹⁰ as in a condition of two-sided polarization.

Ironically, since the demise of its superpower rival (and largely because of its demise), the United States has been less able to influence other nations to accede to its will than it was during the Cold War, even when applying its putative hegemonic weight—either benignly, through providing economic, security, and prestige benefits to those who cooperate, or coercively, through imposing punitive economic or political sanctions or wielding military power. Except in certain specifically defined post-9/11 counterterrorism projects, few countries have been all that ready to coalesce under the U.S. banner—the “bandwagoning” response to a hegemon’s exertions of power. Rather, as became dramatically and painfully evident in the U.S. failure to gain United Nations Security Council backing for Operation Iraqi Freedom, many influential actors in the international community, including countries the United States used to count as loyal allies, are resisting being pushed around or bought off when their interests, values, or grand strategies diverge from those of the hegemon. For the most part, however, the resistance has taken the form of “balking” (the dynamics of which will be elaborated later, along with the polyarchy concept) rather than efforts to form a balancing coalition against the United States.

The Mirage of Multipolarity

If not the hegemonic peace conceptualized by the unipolarists—a world in which the United States, the omnipotent regent, dispenses rewards and threatens sanctions to maintain order in and among its otherwise unruly wards—could we see a revival of the traditional system of great-power alignments, power balancing, and concerts?¹¹ Perhaps there can yet be a multipolar equilibrium among the great powers, analogous to the multipolar systems of the past, in which power balancing among a number of major states (possibly five but as many as a dozen) was the key to international stability or a breakdown of world order and peace.¹²

The emerging twenty-first-century geopolitical reality, however, looks quite different from traditional multipolarity. Only two contemporary “great powers” are potential sources of serious threats to international peace and security in the near future: China, if it resorts to military means to take over Taiwan or becomes too aggressive in prosecuting its claims in the South China and East China Seas, and possibly Russia, if, emboldened by its new energy-based muscularity and resenting the post-Cold War constriction of its sphere of influence, it attempts to reassert dominance over former Soviet-controlled areas.¹³ In the more distant future, Japan, if it converts its hefty “self-defense” forces into an all-purpose military and particularly if it develops its own nuclear arsenal, could come into military confrontation with Russia or China in ways that threaten overall peace and security.¹⁴ The European Union (EU), which may be considered a great power when further consolidated, could progressively intensify both its economic and its diplomatic rivalry with the United States. Yet such economic and political conflicts as do emerge between the EU and the United States are highly unlikely to escalate to the level of threats of force, let alone war, unless they are preceded by some fundamental discontinuities in domestic and world politics.

The sources of internationally destabilizing actions are more likely to be middle powers such as Saudi Arabia and Iran (each seeking regional hegemony, with or without nuclear weapons) or nuclear-armed India and Pakistan in a new war over Kashmir or Israel and its neighbors— particularly if their conflicts interfere with the industrial states’ access to important economic resources or geostrategic locations. The greatest worry in regard to North Korea may be an implosion of its governing regime resulting from an inability to satisfy the basic needs of its people; should that occur, both its international marketing of nuclear-weapons components and its temptation to raise diversionary tensions with South Korea or Japan are potential serious threats to international peace and security. Failed or failing states—such as Zimbabwe, Bangladesh, Afghanistan (if current stabilization efforts collapse), or even Kosovo after the departure of the security forces of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)—could catalyze dangerous regional instabilities. Moreover, the entire system can be destabilized by wars initiated and conducted by nongovernmental actors: violent political movements, terrorist networks, and criminal syndicates.

In the system maturing before us, the precipitating events more than ever (except perhaps in medieval Europe) are also likely to come in a variety of forms besides the movement of military forces across borders—terrorism, subnational and transnational ethnic wars, failed domestic political systems, collapsing economies, contraband in weapons and drugs, and ecological disasters.¹⁵ Rivalries or concerted action among the great powers might be important in exploiting or countering various of these threats to international peace and security, but more often than not, the sources of war and peace will lie elsewhere than in the great-power competition.

In short, in contrast to the great-power multipolar systems of the past, there are now a much larger number and a greater variety of actors, both states and nonstate actors, that can shake up the system. The major threats to system equilibrium are not primarily territorial expansion, a tipping of the balance of power through the addition or subtraction of allies, or dramatic augmentation of one or another of the great powers’ military capabilities. Opposition to the policies of a great power will rarely result in power balancing through the formation or tightening of countervailing alliances. More likely, opposition will come as irritating, even defiant, acts of noncooperation—what I call balking—such as the refusal of France, Russia, and China to vote with the United States on important Iraq resolutions before the Security Council or the refusal of Turkey to allow its territory to be used as a base for the invasion of Iraq.

The Emergent Polyarchy

The structure of world politics that has evolved since the end of the Cold War still features the global hegemony of the United States (not unipolarity) but, increasingly, within a polyarchic field of actors—nation-states, terrorist networks, subnational groups, transnational religions, multinational enterprises, and global and regional institutions. These communities and organizations are often in intense competition for resources and for the support and loyalty of their constituents, many of whom are members of several competing entities at the same time. Hardly any countries or political movements are unidirectionally aligned in their major international relationships, either with one another or with the United States. The cross pressures to which countries are subject in the emergent polyarchic system also make for volatile alignments and antagonisms. Allies on one issue may be adversaries on another issue; today’s closest partner may well be tomorrow’s most determined rival and vice versa, depending on the matter at hand.

The fact that many NATO countries and members of the Gulf War coalition of 1991 were at odds with the United States over how to deal with Saddam Hussein in 2003 was less an anomaly than an expression of the emergent Polyarchy. Unlike the Cold War system (or its hypothetical multipolar or unipolar successors), which assumed a high degree of congruence between primary security communities, trading blocs, and ideological coalitions, today’s world society features a good deal of incongruence—not as an aberration but as a systemic characteristic. Trading partners, such as Canada and the United States, may be adversaries on military and a...