America's Great-Power Opportunity. Ali Wyne

Pyrrhic Victory?

      In a September 11, 1990 address before a joint session of Congress, President George H. W. Bush famously proclaimed that “a new world order” was within reach: “A world where the rule of law supplants the rule of the jungle. A world in which nations recognize the shared responsibility for freedom and justice. A world where the strong respect the rights of the weak.”¹³ The August 1991 NSS sustained that prospect, declaring that Americans had “an extraordinary possibility … to build a new international system in accordance with our own values and ideals, as old patterns and certainties crumble around us.”¹⁴ A few months later, delivering his first State of the Union address since the formal dissolution of the Soviet Union, President Bush spoke in language befitting the profundity of the moment: “[I]n the past 12 months, the world has known changes of almost biblical proportions.” He went on: “A world once divided into two armed camps now recognizes one sole and preeminent power, the United States of America.”¹⁵

Not all US observers greeted the end of the Cold War with comparable exuberance. In June 1990 a professor at Hofstra University asserted that West Germany and Japan, not the United States, were the true victors, because they had avoided “the treadmills of the arms race and occasional ‘small’ wars.”¹⁶ In August, as the disintegration of the Soviet Union was gaining momentum, John Mearsheimer warned that the world would rue the Cold War’s conclusion; that outcome would eliminate the three factors that, in his judgment, had accounted for the absence of a third world war, among them Washington’s and Moscow’s comparable military capabilities and their possession of a vast nuclear stockpile each.¹⁷ Testifying before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in February 1993, James Woolsey cautioned that, while the United States had “slain a large dragon,” it now lived “in a jungle filled with a bewildering variety of poisonous snakes.” He assessed that those lower-grade threats were more difficult to monitor and counter than the ones posed by a clear antagonist.¹⁸ A year later, Robert Kaplan hazarded that the Cold War’s conclusion would unshackle a range of destructive forces that had been overshadowed by, or at least framed within, an overarching struggle between nuclear-armed adversaries. He specifically envisioned “worldwide demographic, environmental, and societal stress, in which criminal anarchy emerges as the real ‘strategic’ danger.”¹⁹

      One concern loomed especially large: had the United States won a Pyrrhic victory? While the implosion of the Soviet Union had eliminated the principal threat to US vital national interests, the central basis for defining America’s role in the world had now disappeared. The editor of Foreign Policy warned in early 1990, for example, that observers “could disagree about the importance for victory in the Cold War of the Western position in Laos or Zaire, but at least all knew they were discussing the same problem. As the Cold War ends, therefore, American foreign policy will lose more than its enemy. It will lose the sextant by which the ship of state has been guided since 1945.”²⁰

An especially compelling—and perhaps unexpected—formulation to this effect came from George Kennan. On February 15, 1994 the Council on Foreign Relations held a party in New York City to celebrate the 90th birthday of the celebrated diplomat and author. Kennan would have been well within his rights to offer a triumphant address at the Council. He was, after all, the foremost avatar of containment—a doctrine that, although interpreted and implemented differently by eight presidents, had endured throughout the Cold War. But he struck a measured, cautionary tone. Kennan acknowledged that the world had entered into a period “marked by one major blessing: for the first time in centuries, there are no great-power rivalries that threaten immediately the peace of the world.” He feared, though—presciently, in retrospect—that, having spent more than six decades dealing with frontal challengers such as Japan, Germany, and the Soviet Union, the United States would struggle to adapt to “a world situation that offers no such great and all-absorbing focal points for American policy.”²¹

      Some observers expressed even greater anxiety, warning that the absence of an external antagonist might not only deprive US foreign policy of its anchor but also, more fundamentally, deprive Americans of their identity. In early 1992, commenting on a slew of recently published books that had urged the United States to mobilize against Japan’s seeming economic ascendance, Robert Reich posited that “[t]he central question for America in the post-Soviet world … is whether it is possible to rediscover our identity, and our mutual responsibility, without creating a new enemy.”²² Samuel Huntington articulated that question starkly in late 1997: “If being an American means being committed to the principles of liberty, democracy, individualism, and private property, and if there is no evil empire out there threatening those principles, what indeed does it mean to be an American, and what becomes of American national interests?”²³

      But concerns over the prospect of strategic disorientation—and attendant calls for strategic discipline—did not command as much attention as they deserved, perhaps because they seemed incongruous with the realities of America’s post-Cold War inheritance. Josef Joffe observed in mid-1997 that “the United States isn’t just the ‘last remaining superpower.’ It is a continent-size ‘demonstration effect.’” While predicting that the twenty-first century would witness Russia’s convalescence and China’s military modernization, he concluded that, for the time being, Washington resembled “a gambler who can play simultaneously at each and every table that matters—and with more chips than anybody else.”²⁴

It would be an exaggeration to say that the United States exercised hegemony after the Cold War; indeed, a number of searing episodes challenged its seeming omnipotence. In October 1993 the Battle of Mogadishu left eighteen Americans dead and seventy-three wounded, raising doubts about the country’s ability to intervene militarily without sustaining fatalities. Shaken by that outcome, the Clinton administration was determined not to repeat it when, less than a year later, the Hutu government and its allies began slaughtering Rwanda’s Tutsi minority, even moderate Hutus, and up to a million Rwandans died in just under 100 days. The United States was criticized once more for inaction in July 1995, when Bosnian Serbs massacred some 8,000 Muslims in Srebrenica, marking the worst atrocity in Europe since World War II.

The Search for a New Anchor

      Even as these horrors raised questions about America’s willingness to deploy military force where it did not have vital national interests at stake, they did not change the prevailing perception that it was far and away the world’s foremost power. Indeed, as Richard Haass summarized shortly before the turn of the century, during the 1990s Washington had accumulated sufficient military and economic strength as to be not quite sure how to apply it: “What to do with American primacy?” was the question.²⁵

      An answer appeared to come with the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, which made it seem self-evident that counterterrorism should be—or perhaps had to be—the new ballast for US foreign policy. In his 2002 State of the Union address, President George W. Bush declared that the United States would commit itself to “the pursuit of two great objectives. First, we will shut down terrorist camps, disrupt terrorist plans, and bring terrorists to justice. And, second, we must prevent the terrorists and regimes who seek chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons from threatening the United States and the world.” The president warned that America’s counterterrorism efforts had only begun.²⁶ Vice President Dick Cheney supported that judgment in early 2004, venturing that fighting al-Qa’ida and other terrorist organizations would burden the United States indefinitely.²⁷

      While counterterrorism proved to be the Bush administration’s central focus, it did not ultimately gain enough traction to serve as an enduring basis for US foreign policy. The prospect of a terrorist organization’s acquiring a nuclear weapon was—and remains—sobering, but it did not represent the kind of existential threat to the United States that the Soviet Union did. Elite and public opinion increasingly questioned the strategic rationale for open-ended interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the notion of a “global war on terrorism” lumped together the distinct threats posed by state actors such as Iran, Iraq, and North Korea and by non-state actors such as al-Qa’ida.