In Defense of Hegemony

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It is hard to recall a time when the world felt as irritated with the conduct of American foreign policy as it does now. You have to think back — way back, all the way back to the days of Madeleine Albright. Remember her? By the time Albright left her job as Secretary of State early this year, she had amassed a lifetime's supply of foreign resentment. Her charm was more often perceived as abrasive, her diplomacy tone-deaf. Officials from Paris to Pyongyang recoiled from her exhortations that they embrace American values and pay fealty to the U.S. as the world's "indispensable nation." To some Europeans, Albright was the swaggering embodiment of U.S. hegemony, representing what French President Jacques Chirac last year called America's "attempt at domination in international affairs."

George W. Bush thought he had learned the lesson. He pledged to replace triumphalism with "humility." Under his watch, America would mind its own business, butt out of places it didn't belong, and even slash its nuclear arsenal without asking anything from Russia in return. Bush vowed not to browbeat others into accepting melioristic, multilateral treaties; as a testament to his sincerity, he pulled out of a few himself. And yet all this restraint has pleased no one. In Europe, Bush's unilateralist aloofness is as reviled as Albright's moralist bluster. The left, which only a few years ago railed against American hyperpuissance, now attacks the Administration for abandoning its global responsibilities. A recent cartoon in Le Monde featured a caricature of Uncle Sam snoozing at his desk, phone off the hook, while all around him people blow each other to bits.

Americans might conclude that Europeans have either gone soft on U.S. hegemony, or are just being hypocritical. But both conclusions are wrong. To Europeans, Albright and Bush, for all their apparent differences in style and substance, represent two currents of the same noisome American impulse — what British peer William Wallace identifies in the current Foreign Affairs as American "exceptionalism." It's a belief in a special destiny, Wallace writes, that is "deeply rooted in the national myth." And it can either lend U.S. leaders "the confident assumption that America's allies will accept the self-evident authority of U.S. leadership" — or tempt them to pull up stakes and pursue national interests with little regard for what the rest of the world thinks.

Either way, exceptionalism boils down to the same simple prescription: America first. It's not a partisan thing. Americans' "sense of distance from the outside world," as Wallace puts it, makes them indifferent to the web of multilateral treaties and international governing bodies that Europeans regard as a fact of life. Bush's pullout from the Kyoto Protocol infuriated ordinary Europeans, but it was largely ignored, if not gently applauded, by Middle America. Bill Clinton did not share the current Administration's disdain for the international community; but he did refuse to sign an international treaty banning land mines and effectively declared that American troops would never again serve under U.N. command after the misadventure in Somalia. Whoever is in power in Washington, unilateralism — or put another way, America first-ism — is here to stay.

But unilateralism isn't always a zero-sum game. Take the land-mine treaty: Clinton refused to sign it for fear of jeopardizing the security of U.S. troops on the Korean peninsula, a force that has helped keep peace in the region for close to 50 years. Or take the current imbroglio over Iraq: the U.S. and Britain aren't likely to win international support for "smart" sanctions against Baghdad, but even opponents of such measures would like to see the Iraqi regime weakened by them. Or consider the most unpopular, unilateralist U.S. policy of all: missile defense. An American shield against ballistic missiles — especially a globally deployed, sea-based system — would make the U.S. more willing, not less, to come to the aid of allies in peril, since adversaries would not be able to dissuade the U.S. from intervening by threatening to rain missiles on American cities.

What Europe will come to realize is that the real danger is not the likelihood that America will act alone. It is instead the Bush Administration's apparent inclination — on climate change, in the Middle East, against ethnic cleansing — not to act at all. The only thing worse than a hectoring hegemon is a dormant one. What the President needs most from Europe is a wakeup call, a rattling of bones, an urging to err on exceptionalism's overbearing side. To be sure, that's a tough task for proud Europeans to embrace, and most would prefer that someone else deliver the message. If only Madeleine Albright were still around.