Anyone instructed in international relations during the last two centuries would know about the centrality of the balance of power. But the recent emergence of the United States as the dominant world power constitutes a radical change from that condition. The key question we now face is whether to preserve this dominance, or whether to view it as a danger to ourselves and others.
As a neoconservative and neo-Reaganite, labels Norman Podhoretz places on me and that I accept, my own answer is obvious: preserving our dominance will not only advance our own national interests but will preserve peace and promote the cause of democracy and human rights. Since America’s emergence as a world power roughly a century ago, we have made many errors, but we have been the greatest force for good among the nations of the earth. A diminution in American power or influence bodes ill for our country, our friends, and our principles.
What might threaten our leading role? I am less sanguine than Podhoretz may be and than Henry Kissinger clearly is about the People’s Republic of China. Just as during the cold war the problem was not Russia but Soviet Communism, in the PRC today the problem is rule by a Communist elite whose interests contradict those of its own people—and ours. As the strategist Coral Bell notes in the Fall 1999 issue of the National Interest, items at issue in the "possible collision course" between Washington and Beijing include the survival of Taiwan, the fate of North Korea, the U.S. alliance with Japan, the American naval and troop presence in East Asia, the prospect of a missile-defense umbrella over Japan and Taiwan, and PRC human-rights violations, not least in Tibet. With all these very much in mind, the PRC has increased its military spending by half during a decade when the rest of the world has used the post-cold-war calm to reduce defense expenditures. Chinese rulers are rushing to build a modern force that can dominate East Asia, and are supplying pariah states around the world with the latest missile and nuclear technology.
The Chinese regime, like all Communist regimes, is fundamentally insecure because it does not rest on popular support. Although it is trying to win a measure of legitimacy by improving living standards and allowing some additional personal autonomy, this will not work: as always with "goulash Communism," whatever the local recipe, people will like the goulash but not the Communism. The recent crackdown on the apparently harmless Falun Gong movement and the continuing refusal to allow freedom of religion demonstrate how limited personal autonomy is likely to be and how extraordinarily insecure the government feels. As in the Soviet case, the regime will seek military power and success as a means of improving its legitimacy—and of cowing both its own people and its Asian neighbors.
In the Chinese case, however, there is a key difference Podhoretz does not mention: American business is pro-Chinese in a way in which it was never pro-Soviet. Too little money was at stake in Russia. By contrast, the corporate community has persuaded itself that, despite current setbacks, there are vast fortunes to be made even in a Communist China. Consequently, those promoting a tough line toward China's human-rights violations and its aggressive foreign policy face resistance not only in Beijing but in the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. As reaction to the recent agreement on Chinese membership in the World Trade Organization suggests, this is already causing division within the Republican party between the business community and all stripes of conservatives.
Pointedly acquitting Henry Kissinger of the"scurrilous charge that his ideas about China have been shaped by the commercial interests some clients of his consulting firm have there," Podhoretz also assures us that realists like Kissinger will advocate containment of the Chinese if the latter "show signs of developing imperial aspirations." But what "signs" do we need, beyond the extraordinary buildup of conventional ground and naval forces as well as strategic nuclear forces, and China's renewed threats to Taiwan? To say that this suggests no "imperial aspirations," not even in Asia, is reminiscent of the line (properly dismissed by Kissinger and Podhoretz alike) that Soviet expansionism in Eastern Europe was "really" defensive and was motivated by fear of the West.
An issue to which few commentators other than Podhoretz have devoted adequate attention is changing notions of sovereignty. Commenting on Kosovo, he writes: "I find it hard to quarrel with the emerging idea that the principle of sovereignty should no longer embrace the right of political leaders to butcher their own people." Coral Bell, too, points to the "new norms," especially concerning human rights and the environment, that "legitimate great-power intervention in the crises of lesser powers to a degree seldom envisaged in previous diplomatic history," and optimistically concludes that "Washington's current and immediate future generations of diplomatic strategists have as large an opportunity (and as complete a set of tactical choices) before them as those of 1946-47." But there are real dangers here in addition to opportunities. These "new norms" can be invoked to challenge American power as easily as to justify its use.
If, for instance, a single judge in Spain can force the seizure of General Pinochet in London against the wishes of both the Spanish and Chilean governments, what have we wrought? Can a system in which sovereignty may be breached not only by great powers but by any ambitious jurist really survive, and—a no less urgent question—can it be counted on to protect the rights of Americans? The new International Criminal Court, which treats sovereignty as a mere formality, presents similar difficulties. A long list of treaties now regulates matters once thought to be questions of domestic law.
Podhoretz likens our situation to that of 1919. I lean to Coral Bell's comparison of the coming decade (or the next presidential term) to the fateful period of 1946-47. Whichever analogy one prefers, in this period, as Podhoretz notes, we will surely face painful decisions about when and where to intervene. But I come out as he does: better to face those decisions than the far worse ones we will encounter if we let our position slip away. Whether the current generation of politicians and strategists is up to the task before them, we shall soon find out.
