Psychology of a Superpower

Security and Dominance in U.S. Foreign Policy

Christopher Fettweis

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780231547413
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: American Government
• Index: Politics & International Relations

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States was left as the world's sole superpower, which was the dawn of an international order known as unipolarity. The ramifications of imbalanced power extend around the globe—including the country at the center. What has the sudden realization that it stands alone atop the international hierarchy done to the United States? In Psychology of a Superpower, Christopher J. Fettweis examines how unipolarity affects the way U.S. leaders conceive of their role, make strategy, and perceive America's place in the world.

Combining security, strategy, and psychology, Fettweis investigates how the idea of being number one affects the decision making of America's foreign-policy elite. He examines the role the United States plays in providing global common goods, such as peace and security; the effect of the Cold War's end on nuclear-weapon strategy and policy; the psychological consequences of unbalanced power; and the grand strategies that have emerged in unipolarity. Drawing on psychology's insights into the psychological and behavioral consequences of unchecked power, Fettweis brings new insight to political science's policy-analysis toolkit. He also considers the prospect of the end of unipolarity, offering a challenge to widely held perceptions of American indispensability and asking whether the unipolar moment is worth trying to save. Psychology of a Superpower is a provocative rethinking of the risks and opportunities of the global position of the United States, with significant consequences for U.S. strategy, character, and identity.

1

UNIPOLARITY AND THE SYSTEM

Lost amid the Sturm und Drang of 2016, with Brexit, ISIS, and Donald Trump dominating the headlines, was a much more positive geopolitical event. Its underappreciation was to be expected, since peace generates fewer headlines than war. On June 22, Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos shook hands with the FARC rebel commander Rodrigo Londoño-Echeverri, ending the longest-running civil war in the world and with it the last active armed conflict in the Western Hemisphere.1 Only deep unfamiliarity with Colombia could produce full confidence in the peace; civil war has been an omnipresent fact of life for most of the country’s history, and earlier episodes of optimism have proven short-lived. But the agreement has already survived its first roadblock—a substantial roadblock, rejection by Colombian voters—and entered into force after passing through the Congress in late November. At least for now, in the middle of 2017, the guns are silent in Colombia. And with that, for the first time since at least the 1600s, and possibly for the first time ever, an entire hemisphere is at peace.2

The remarkably undercelebrated end to the Colombian civil war is just the latest data point for what the Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker has called the “New Peace,” the current era of unprecedented inter- and intranational stability.3 Although war is hardly gone from the globe, and although a number of high-profile conflicts still rage across the Middle East, there is more peace in 2017 than at any other time in history. Why has conflict declined to historically low levels? What accounts for the post–Cold War peace, and how long is it likely to last? Surely no questions are more important for either the theory or practice of international relations, and few are harder to answer. However, only by understanding the causes of the New Peace can we extrapolate its likely future and plan accordingly.

Of the many possible explanatory variables, none is more controversial than the suggestion that hegemonic stability is at work. The possibility that the United States—wittingly or not—has essentially established a global Pax Americana is generally overlooked by the major scholarly works on the subject. This stands in stark contrast to the policy world, where the many positive aspects of unipolarity and/or U.S. hegemony are articles of faith rarely discussed and never seriously questioned. The scholar and public intellectual Michael Lind spoke for many when he wrote that “in my experience, most members of the U.S. foreign policy elite sincerely believe that the alternative to perpetual U.S. world domination is chaos and war.”4 One of those is certainly Robert Kagan, who noted that “Pinker traces the beginning of a long-term decline in deaths from war to 1945, which just happens to be the birthdate of the American world order. The coincidence eludes him, but it need not elude us.”5 A virtually unanimous foreign-policy community views U.S. power as an obvious force for good in the world, a sine qua non of peace and stability. Rarely are the theoretical, empirical, and psychological foundations of that widespread belief explored.

This chapter examines the relationship between unipolarity and armed conflict. It reviews the evidence commonly used by hegemonic-stability enthusiasts to connect U.S. actions with systemic peace and questions its foundation. The United States was very active in the waning years of the Colombian civil war, after all, and all sides seem to agree that Washington’s “Plan Colombia” played an important role in bringing the conflict to an end.6 Is that just one example of the role the United States plays in the system as a whole? Can we thank Uncle Sam for the New Peace?

THE NEW PEACE

The suggestion that the world is more peaceful than ever would surprise those who get their conflict information from the media or their leaders. After all, not many predicted it would happen. As the Cold War drew to a close, it was far more common to run across arguments about how the removal of bipolar balance would lead to an increase in violence. The Cold War rivalry at times was a force for stability, according to this school of thought, since the superpowers balanced each other and controlled their allies. Expectations of systemic instability led John Mearsheimer to argue that the West would “soon miss the Cold War.”7 Since a unipolar order would be accompanied by a marked increase in conflict, the West had “an interest in maintaining the Cold War order, and hence has an interest in the continuation of the Cold War confrontation,” Mearsheimer wrote. “Developments that threaten to end it are dangerous.”8 If the bipolar order wound down, he predicted, subsequent decades would “probably be substantially more prone to violence than the past 45 years. Many observers now suggest that a new age of peace is dawning; in fact the opposite is true.”9 Christopher Layne concurred, concluding that “the coming years will be ones of turmoil in international politics.”10 Nuno Monteiro updated these arguments two decades later, suggesting that the unipolar world is not peaceful and unlikely ever to be so.11 As evidence, he pointed to the repeated U.S. misadventures in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and elsewhere.

This is a curious conclusion to have reached in 2014, for surely Monteiro must have been familiar with the mountains of empirical evidence suggesting the opposite was true. The facts were, and remain, unequivocal on this point: Mearsheimer and Layne were (and Monteiro is) not just wrong but spectacularly wrong. The last twenty-five years have seen a steady decline in all kinds of armed conflict.12 Great-power war has been absent for more than a half-century, and now all interstate warfare is at historic low levels, as are intrastate wars such as civil and ethnic conflicts.13 By almost any measure the world has become significantly more peaceful, with measurable declines in coups, repression, the chances of dying in battle, border alterations, conquest, genocide, and other forms of violence against civilians.14 Peace settlements have proven to be more durable over time, and fewer new conflicts are breaking out than ever before.15 Whether these trends represent a fundamental change in the rules that govern state behavior or a temporary respite between cataclysms remains to be seen, but there is no doubt that—thus far at least—the post–Cold War era has been far more stable and peaceful than any that preceded it.

All this is happening in a world with far more states (the League of Nations had fifty-eight members at its peak; the UN today has 193) and people (the global population has more than tripled since World War II) than ever before. Rather than fuel Malthusian competition for resources or Kaplanesque anarchy, runaway population growth has been accompanied by a drastic decline in violence. Furthermore, while some statistics regarding the rate of battle deaths take population growth into account, none attempt to capture the greater number of years people are living. Today people live, on average, about twenty years longer than they did in 1950.16 Citizens of the twenty-first century have nearly 30 percent more time to experience warfare. Yet the odds of being killed in conflict still decline.

The New Peace is not without its skeptics and critics, the arguments of whom will be addressed below. Although it is now widely (if grudgingly) acknowledged in the academy, popular perceptions about warfare certainly do not match empirical reality. Anxiety and unease about the state of the world remain high. The bloody mess in Syria in particular has blinded many observers to the broader security trends, which remain essentially unchanged. When the current era—as dangerous as it may seem—is compared to any other, the verdict is clear: This is a golden age of peace and security, one in which fewer people are dying in warfare than ever before. The decline in violence is as empirically incontrovertible as is unipolarity. Whether the two are related, however, remains an open question, one that is hotly debated and vitally important for both the theory and practice of international relations.

OBJECTIONS TO THE NEW PEACE

Is the New Peace an illusion? Before addressing the U.S. role in bringing about an era of (relative) international stability, we will divert a bit to address the arguments of those unconvinced by the steadily accumulating evidence. There is little point in discussing unipolarity and the New Peace if the latter does not really exist. Those only interested in the role played by U.S. hegemony can skip the next two sections. There will be no quiz.

Skeptics have raised five objections to the idea that any peace is particularly new or particularly significant. First, some have asserted that it is simply too soon to know whether these trends in armed conflict are statistically anomalous. Bear Braumoeller has suggested that a minimum of 150 more years needs to pass before we can say with confidence whether war is actually declining.17 His work focuses on major, great-power wars, however, and excludes both minor and internal conflicts. While the New Peace is a relatively new phenomenon, perhaps too new to convince everyone, it is also so pervasive across so many measures of violence, and so potentially important, that surely it deserves serious consideration, even at this early stage.

Second, a number of scholars object to the assertion that “peace” is merely the absence of war. Johan Galtung seems to have been the first to make a distinction between “negative peace” (the absence of war) and “positive peace” (the “integration of human society,” or the presence of justice, cooperation, equality, and/or other indicators).18 The New Peace is a phenomenon of the former, leading some to suggest that its importance is exaggerated. This line of reasoning, which figures most prominently in the discipline of peace studies, suggests that the absence of violence has the potential to create complacency or even complicate efforts to address the world’s various injustices.19 While one might reasonably argue that “negative peace” has value in itself, especially given the alternative, substantial evidence suggests positive peace is on the rise as well. A major new study on the subject has concluded that a number of important indicators of human progress are, in aggregate, waxing.20 The current era thus contains good news for every definition of peace, even if substantial global problems remain unsolved.

Third, the last few years have been marginally more violent than the ones that preceded them, leading some to suggest that the New Peace might be ending.21 While the exact numbers are in some dispute, and even though they dropped in 2015 and again in 2016, it is true that Syria has provided a bloody exception to global trends.22 Pinker has noted the uptick in battle deaths but also has pointed out that the overall numbers—both in absolute terms and especially in relative—remain far below those of the 1960s, 1970s or 1980s, “when the world was a far more dangerous place.”23 Furthermore, the other significant trends that help define the era remain unchanged.24 Variation occurs during the New Peace, but it is variation at an extremely low level, insignificant in comparison with past experience.

The fourth objection to the New Peace holds not that the statistics are wrong but that they are not capturing the reality of modern armed conflict. According to this argument, the form taken by post–Cold War violence is different from earlier versions, which makes it harder to detect by traditional measures. In her influential New and Old Wars, Mary Kaldor warned of the rise of “new wars,” which are less organized, less structured, and more deadly for civilians than those that came before.25 By her widely repeated estimate, new wars result in eight civilian deaths for every one combatant, a much higher ratio than in any previous era. Old wars may be on the decline, in other words, but perhaps new wars, which are deadlier for the innocent and more disruptive to society, have taken their place.

Time and scrutiny have not been kind to Kaldor’s ideas. A number of researchers have found that the ratio of civilian-to-combatant casualties has not changed markedly over time.26 If anything, the wars of the post–Cold War era have been less deadly for civilians than those that came before.27 Kaldor has now backed off some of her 1999 claims, especially the eight-to-one civilian-to-combatant casualty ratio.28 Proponents of the “new wars” thesis are surely correct when pointing out that civilians suffer horrifically ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. Unipolarity and the System
• 2. Unipolarity and Nuclear Weapons
• 3. Unipolarity and Perception
• 4. Identifying the Enemy Image
• 5. Unipolarity and Strategy
• 6. Unipolarity and Grand Strategy
• Unipolarity and Its Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index