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Understanding America's Contested Primacy

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Understanding America's Contested Primacy C E n t E r for Strat E g i C a n D B u D g E t a r y a S S E S S m E n t S Understanding America’s Contested Primacy Dr. Eric S. Edelman Understanding america’s contested Primacy Dr. Eric S. Edelman 2010 © 2010 Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. All rights reserved. About the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments The Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA) is an independent, nonpartisan policy research institute established to promote innovative thinking and debate about national security strategy and investment options. CSBA’s goal is to enable policymakers to make informed decisions on matters of strategy, security policy and resource allocation. CSBA provides timely, impartial and insightful analyses to senior decision mak- ers in the executive and legislative branches, as well as to the media and the broader national security community. CSBA encourages thoughtful participation in the de- velopment of national security strategy and policy, and in the allocation of scarce human and capital resources. CSBA’s analysis and outreach focus on key questions related to existing and emerging threats to US national security. Meeting these challenges will require transforming the national security establishment, and we are devoted to helping achieve this end. About the Author Ambassador Eric S. Edelman retired as a Career Minister from the US Foreign Service on May 1, 2009. He has served in senior positions at the Departments of State and Defense as well as the White House where he led organizations providing analysis, strategy, policy development, secu- rity services, trade advocacy, public outreach, citizen services and con- gressional relations. As the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy (August, 2005–January 2009) he oversaw strategy development as DoD’s senior policy official with global responsibility for bilateral defense relations, war plans, special operations forces, homeland defense, missile defense, nu- clear weapons and arms control policies, counter-proliferation, counter- narcotics, counter-terrorism, arms sales, and defense trade controls. Dr. Edelman served as US Ambassador to the Republics of Finland and Turkey in the Clinton and Bush Administrations and was Principal Deputy Assistant to the Vice President for National Security Affairs. In other assignment he has been Chief of Staff to Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott, special assistant to Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Robert Kimmitt and special assistant to Secretary of State George Shultz. His other assignments include the State Department Operations Center, Prague, Moscow, and Tel Aviv, where he was a member of the US Middle East Delegation to the West Bank/Gaza Autonomy Talks. Dr. Edelman has been awarded the Department of Defense Medal for Distinguished Public Service, the Presidential Distinguished Service Award, and several Department of State Superior Honor Awards. He received a B.A. in History and Government from Cornell University and a Ph.D. in US Diplomatic History from Yale University. He is a visit- ing scholar at the Philip Merrill Center for Strategic Studies at the Johns Hopkins University and a senior associate of the International Security Program at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University. Acknowledgments The author would like to thank his CSBA colleagues, Andy Krepinevich, Evan Montgomery, and Jim Thomas for their extremely useful critiques that significantly improved the organization and argument of this mono- graph. Professor Joseph Nye at Harvard University and historian Andrew Roberts also provided valuable comments and encouragement. Special thanks go to Charlotte Brock for serving as a superb rapporteur for the workshops that underpinned the analysis and for outstanding edito- rial and production assistance. CSBA colleagues Julie Lascar and Eric Lindsey provided invaluable and repeated assistance in the preparation and production of the final version. I would also like to thank Cutting Edge for their design. The analysis and findings presented here are solely the responsibility of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments and the author. contEntS ix Executive Summary 1 Introduction 17 chapter 1. The Declinist Persuasion 31 chapter 2. Assessment of Great Powers 67 chapter 3. Assessment of the United States 75 conclusion © the Economist newspaper Limited, London (February 6 2010) ExecutivE SummAry In November 2008, the National Intelligence Council released Global Trends 2025 which argued that “the international system — as constructed following the Second World War — will be almost unrecognizable by 2025 owing to the rise of emerging powers, a globalizing economy, a historic transfer of relative wealth and economic power from West to East, and the growing influence of non-state actors. By 2025 the international system will be a global multipolar one with gaps in national power continuing to narrow between developed and develop- ing countries” [emphasis in original].”1 This conclusion represented a striking departure from the NIC’s conclusion four years earlier in Mapping the Global Future 2020 that unipolarity was likely to remain a persistent condition of the international system. Between the two reports America’s zeitgeist had clearly shifted under the impact of persistent difficulty in the counterinsurgency wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and increased questioning of United States global leadership (at home and abroad), the seemingly inexorable rise of the newly emerging econ- omies (suggestively labeled as the BRICs by Goldman Sachs analysts), and the global economic downturn and recession in the United States. The overall impact was the creation of a new conventional wisdom that foresees continued decline of the United States, an end to the unipolar world order that marked the post-Cold War world and a potential departure from the pursuit of US primacy that marked the foreign policies of the three presidential administrations that followed the end of the Cold War. The debate over unipolarity and continued US primacy is not merely an aca- demic debate. Perceptions of US power will guide both American policymakers 1 Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World, National Intelligence Council, November 2008, NIC 2008–003, www.dni.gov/nic/NIC_2025_project.htm, see the transmittal letter by NIC chair, C. Thomas Fingar and pp. vi, xi. x center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments and other nations as they consider their policy options. Primacy has underpinned US grand strategy since the end of the Cold War because no other nation was able to provide the collective public goods that have upheld the security of the inter- national system and enabled a period of dramatically increased global economic activity and prosperity. Both the United States and the global system have ben- efitted from that circumstance. The arguments for US decline are not new but before they harden into an un- challenged orthodoxy it would be good to carefully examine many of the key as- sumptions that undergird the emerging conventional wisdom. Will the undeniable relative decline of the United States, in fact, lead to the end of unipolarity? Do the BRIC countries really represent a bloc? What would multipolarity look like? How does one measure national power anyhow, and how can one measure the change in the power distribution globally? Is the rise of global competitors inevitable? What are some of the weaknesses that might hamper the would-be competitors from staying on their current favorable economic and political trajectory? Does the United States possess some underappreciated strengths that might serve as the basis for continued primacy in the international system and, if so, what steps would a prudent government take to extend that primacy into the future? The history of straight-line projections of economic growth and the rise of challengers to the dominance of the United States has not been kind to those who have previously predicted US decline. It is not necessarily the case that the United States will be caught between the end of the “unipolar moment” of post- Cold War predominance and a global multipolar world. The emerging interna- tional environment is likely to be different than either of the futures forecast by the NIC in Mapping the Global Future in 2004 or Global Trends 2025 in 2008. It would seem more likely that the relative decline of American power will still leave the United States as the most powerful actor in the international system. But the economic rise of other nations and the spread of nuclear weapons in some key regions are likely to confront the US with difficult new challenges. The revived notion of America’s decline has once again brought to the fore a question about the purposes of United States power and the value of US inter- national primacy. Seeking to maintain America’s advantage as the prime player in the international system imposes costs on the US budget and taxpayer. It is certainly fair to ask what the United States gets from exerting the effort to remain number one. It is also worth considering what the world would look like if the United States was just one power among many, and how such perceptions might affect the strategic and policy choices national security decision-makers will face over the next twenty-odd years. Primacy both allows the state to advance its own specific policy objectives and gives it greater freedom of action in the pursuit of those ends. Throughout most of the twentieth century American presidents have considered it to be in the US interest to seek a “liberal world order” comprised of an international economic understanding America’s Contested Primacy xi system characterized by openness, free trade and free flows of investment, and an international political arrangement characterized by a growing number of liberal democratic states. The theory behind the continued adherence to a strategy of maintaining primacy has been that only the security provided by a strong power or group of powers can underpin the liberal economic and political order that is conducive to economic growth, representative government and international peace and prosperity.
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