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Power has always been a slippery thing, especially in the postcolonial world.
Much ink has been spilt in search of the cause of “the paradox of American power” – why it is that the most powerful nation in the history of the world often seems oddly impotent. All that ink has been wasted on explanations that are, well, wrong. The paradox of American power finds its true parentage in the nature of political power itself and the rise of nationalism in the modern world. And until U.S. policymakers understand that paradox, American foreign policy will remain misguided.
The United States is incredibly powerful by the numbers: It spends more on defense than the next twenty states combined. Remember that emergency spending package for Iraq? At $87 billion, that was twice the British annual defense budget. The figures are such that Dartmouth professors Stephen Brooks and William Wohlforth could write with justification in Foreign Affairs, “If today’s American primacy does not constitute unipolarity, nothing ever will.”
The paradox of American power is that the U.S. is often unable to induce preferred behavior. Washington’s enemies – Hanoi, Belgrade, Kandahar – typically remain intransigent in the face of the Superpower’s demands. Its allies – France, Turkey – are unruly. States in dire need of U.S. protection, – Taiwan, South Korea, and sometimes Israel – can nonetheless be quite rude, knowing that Washington would hardly abandon them for discourtesy. When the U.S. replaced leaders in the third world during the Cold War, American-installed leaders often turned against their patron.
And why did past empires seem to do so much better? The Romans were able to fan out from tiny Tuscany to rule the known world from London to Lebanon. A handful of British officers were able to hold the Indian subcontinent. In contrast, beyond its westward manifest destiny on its continent, America has been quite feeble as an empire. It could not even retain such possessions as Cuba and the Philippines. To be fair, the U.S. didn’t always feel the urge to imperialize. Sometimes it even felt the exact opposite. My point is that, even when it wants to impose its will, it often cannot.
The path out of this maze runs through the nature of political power. Power over another is the ability to induce that other to behave as desired. Power is not simply something the “powerer” exercises over the “poweree.” Rather, as Michael Walzer wrote in Dissent, “[H]egemony… rests on consent” or acquiescence.
There are three types of acquiescence, corresponding to the German sociologist Max Weber’s notions of traditional, charismatic, and rational domination – if one forgives my loose appropriation of Weber’s terms. Traditional domination is the kind of power that Britain held over New Zealand so that the hapless Dominion charged gallantly into both world wars.
The second form of power, charismatic domination, is most rare in international relations. In fact, I am hard pressed to think of any state that has ever deferred to Washington out of a love for Hollywood.
By far the most common form of political power, and the form on which the U.S. chiefly relies, is rational domination. To exercise this form of power, the powerer creates an incentive scheme with the proverbial carrots and sticks so that acquiescence yields the most reward or least cost, leading the poweree to choose acquiescence as the rational course. Notice that under this Weberian scheme, there is no analytical difference between imposing one’s will with sticks and winning another over through carrots, although there may be a moral one. We threatened Iraq, and we tried to seduce Turkey.
Alas for empires, the world has changed drastically in the past two hundred years or so. The rise of nationalism has made nations prize their independence that much more. Twentieth century European history is in large part a story about the assertion of national identities. Many non-Western cultures, after throwing off the yoke of colonialism, have been nursing their injured pride like a childhood trauma and guarding their national sovereignty with jealous vigilance and a tinge of paranoia. Correspondingly, it has become much harder to induce acquiescence, and rational domination has been gradually undermined. American power is oddly impotent for the same reason the Europeans lost their empires. Hawks such as Charles Krauthammer of the Washington Post like to boast of America’s convincing lead in the traditional measures of state power. But we live in an age when their importance has diminished.
It will be a highly sophisticated foreign policy indeed that can turn other nations’ pride and paranoia to our advantage – make no mistake: it’s much more complicated than “winning hearts and minds.” But until Washington recognizes the new realities of the postcolonial world, until it understands its own power and gets over false dichotomies such as unilateralism versus multilateralism or coercion versus persuasion, U.S. policy cannot even begin to approach the necessary level of sensitivity and sophistication.
Disturbingly, the counter-insurgency war in Iraq becomes something of a microcosm for American power in general: The fundamental engine of Iraqi insurgency is national pride, perhaps what the medieval Arab historian Ibn Khaldun called “group feeling.” And the American G.I., backed by the world’s most powerful military, can kill anyone who attacks him. But what he really wants – but may be unable to do – is to convince the insurgent not to attack in the first place. It is much easier to break a neck than to bend it.
WILLIAM HAN IS A SENIOR POLITICAL SCIENCE MAJOR IN BERKELEY COLLEGE.