A Second American Century?

Last week's handover of the Panama Canal neatly brackets the American Century. It begins with Theodore Roosevelt conceiving the canal and, with it, America ascending to the rank of Great Power. It ends with America so great a power, so serenely dominant in the world, that it can give away T.R.'s strategic jewel with hardly a notice.

But if the 20th century was the American century, the 1990s--bracketed by demonstrations of overwhelming American power in Kuwait and Kosovo--were the supreme American decade. How supreme? No other nation has exercised such military, economic, diplomatic and cultural reach since Rome. And Rome's world was little more than the Mediterranean.

The American triumph in the '90s came as a rude surprise to some. Only a decade ago, Paul Kennedy's The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers ushered in the conventional wisdom that America, suffering from "imperial overstretch," was in decline. With the collapse of the Soviet Empire, it was assumed that the world would go from cold war bipolarity to multipolarity. After all, was not Japan flourishing, Europe unifying, China rising?

Remember that late-'80s joke: The U.S. and Russia waged a cold war for half a century. Who won? Japan.

Well, it did not turn out quite that way. Japan went into economic decline. The U.S.S.R., then Russia, collapsed. Europe entered a decade of economic stagnation and diplomatic fecklessness (as displayed in the Balkans until the U.S. cavalry arrived). And China, though rising, remains decades away from being able to pose a global challenge to the U.S.

As everyone now recognizes, the world at the turn of the 21st century is not multipolar but unipolar. America bestrides the world like a colossus. Such hegemony is rare in history because coalitions of rival powers invariably rise to challenge and cut down the big guy. Two centuries ago, Russia, Prussia, Britain and Austria rallied together to defeat Napoleonic France's bid for European hegemony. The miracle of the '90s has been the dog that didn't bark: Where is the opposition, where are the coalitions of second-rank states rising to challenge Pax Americana?

The main reason for the absence of a serious challenge to American hegemony is that it is so benign. It does not extract tribute. It does not seek military occupation. It is not interested in acquiring territory--indeed, it specializes in giving it up, as shown in the Philippines and Panama. Economically, the world has prospered under the open trading system the U.S. supports. And culturally, America is a hit. Arnold is a universal icon. Latvians like their Levi's. And everyone loves McDonald's.

Well, not everyone, and there's the rub. Americans, happy in their getting and spending, are largely oblivious to their massive world influence. But others are not, particularly foreign elites. Some chafe, like the French Minister of Culture who called Disneyland Paris a cultural Chernobyl. Some rant, like the Malaysian Prime Minister who rose at the U.N. in September to denounce "the true ugliness of Western capitalism...backed by the military might of capitalism's greatest proponent."