Making the Unipolar Moment

U.S. Foreign Policy and the Rise of the Post-Cold War Order

Hal Brands

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781501703423
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In the late 1970s, the United States often seemed to be a superpower in decline. Battered by crises and setbacks around the globe, its post–World War II international leadership appeared to be draining steadily away. Yet just over a decade later, by the early 1990s, America's global primacy had been reasserted in dramatic fashion. The Cold War had ended with Washington and its allies triumphant; democracy and free markets were spreading like never before. The United States was now enjoying its "unipolar moment"—an era in which Washington faced no near-term rivals for global power and influence, and one in which the defining feature of international politics was American dominance. How did this remarkable turnaround occur, and what role did U.S. foreign policy play in causing it? In this important book, Hal Brands uses recently declassified archival materials to tell the story of American resurgence.

Brands weaves together the key threads of global change and U.S. policy from the late 1970s through the early 1990s, examining the Cold War struggle with Moscow, the rise of a more integrated and globalized world economy, the rapid advance of human rights and democracy, and the emergence of new global challenges like Islamic extremism and international terrorism. Brands reveals how deep structural changes in the international system interacted with strategies pursued by Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and George H. W. Bush to usher in an era of reinvigorated and in many ways unprecedented American primacy. Making the Unipolar Moment provides an indispensable account of how the post–Cold War order that we still inhabit came to be.

CHAPTER 1

Roots of Resurgence

Unipolarity is a rare and valuable commodity in international affairs. It refers not simply to a situation in which a leading country has marginally more power than its competitors, but to one in which the leader has a clear and overwhelming superiority. A country that enjoys unipolarity has no near-term challengers for the status of preeminent actor in the international system; it can also do far more than any other country to shape that system to its own benefit. For a country to have unipolarity, then, is to have more than great influence over its own destiny. It is to have an unmatched say in how the broader world works.1

The deepest origins of America’s post–Cold War unipolarity lie not in the close of the superpower conflict in 1989, or in the end of World War II a half-century earlier. They lie in the very opening of U.S. history, generations before. From its birth as a republic, the United States possessed attributes that would enable a meteoric geopolitical rise. It boasted uniquely favorable geography that offered cheap security and abundant chances for territorial enlargement, and a natural resource base that provided the foundations of awesome economic power. It was equally blessed with an energetic and fecund population, a national ideology that both impelled and rationalized American assertiveness, and a political system that generally performed well enough to let the country make the most of its other advantages. From the late 1700s to the mid-twentieth century, these characteristics permitted not just a steady accretion of U.S. power and influence; they underwrote a record of expansion and national aggrandizement that had few historical peers.

This was the long-term backdrop to what might be thought of as America’s first unipolar moment—the period after World War II. By the time the guns fell silent in 1945, the United States was preeminent in virtually all key measures of national might. In economic terms, U.S. output roughly equaled that of the rest of the world combined. In military terms, America accounted for three-quarters of great-power defense spending, and it alone possessed the atomic bomb, an air force with global striking power, and a navy that dominated the maritime commons. In diplomatic and ideological terms, no country emerged from the war with greater influence or prestige. As Melvyn Leffler has written, the United States possessed a preponderance of power.2 In the postwar decades, that power enabled a sustained global activism meant to craft world affairs. America’s Cold War statecraft, said Henry Kissinger, was premised on “the notion of a predominant United States, as the only stable country, the richest country, the country without whose leadership and physical contribution nothing was possible, and which had to make all the difference for defense and progress everywhere in the world.”3

The results of this approach were impressive by any standard, and as Daniel Sargent has written, U.S. policies erected a veritable “Pax Americana.”4 The relatively liberal international economy that emerged in the noncommunist world after World War II was certainly an American project. U.S. money and technology helped rebuild shattered societies in Western Europe and East Asia, and revive them as thriving hubs of capitalist prosperity. The Bretton Woods institutions promoted reconstruction, development, and economic stability within a generally pro-market framework. Washington likewise gave impetus to postwar trade liberalization through its role in the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and by opening its own market to foreign goods, while the dollar sat at the center of world commerce and finance. In sum, the United States spearheaded the creation of a vibrant Western economy from the wreckage left by global war, and served as the leader of the international trade and monetary order. This postwar economic system, Jonathan Kirshner writes, was “successful beyond its most optimistic hopes, ushering in a quarter-century known as the golden age of capitalism, of unprecedented global economic growth and prosperity.”5

The U.S.-led economic order was intertwined with a geopolitical and security order that was equally Washington-centric. Had the Cold War not erupted, America’s postwar geopolitical presence would not have been so extensive; the fact that the Cold War did erupt ensured that this presence soon became nearly global. The United States headed a network of military alliances that provided security and locked in American influence in key regions of the world. The country also maintained unprecedented peacetime military forces meant to provide leverage vis-à-vis Moscow and to substantiate these global commitments. Not least, U.S. officials used their country’s wealth and influence to affect the fate of developing nations from Latin America to Southeast Asia and beyond, in hopes of keeping them beyond the Kremlin’s reach and integrating them into the Western economic and political orbit. From the Marshall Plan to the Alliance for Progress, from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to the nuclear arms race, the outlines of the postwar world bore the imprint of American primacy.

The problem with being on top, however, is that one can only go down from there. America’s postwar dominance was based not only on its own strengths, but on the weaknesses of a world laid prone by wartime devastation. So even as Washington put its power to such productive use after World War II, that power was in relative decline. The economic recovery of U.S. allies in Europe and Asia, the gradual rise of the Kremlin as a full-fledged military and diplomatic rival, and the emergence of a growing and more assertive Third World: these trends meant that, while America’s absolute wealth and capabilities grew following the war, its comparative standing was steadily receding from the imposing heights of 1945. By the late 1960s, Richard Nixon would write that “the postwar period in international relations has ended.” America’s superiority had become less overwhelming; its advantages were not what they had been.6

This theme of decline was particularly pervasive during the 1970s—the decade I analyze in this chapter, and one that constituted a critical inflection point in the trajectory of U.S. power. At the time, the 1970s often appeared to mark the last, dying breath of U.S. primacy. From Vietnam to Afghanistan, from the collapse of Bretton Woods to the oil shocks, American leaders confronted crises that laid bare the limits of U.S. influence and showed a superpower in retreat. More broadly, the decade produced a seeming abundance of evidence to suggest that the underlying strategic currents were unfavorable, and that Washington was inexorably losing its capacity to shape global affairs. No longer did the United States appear to be the colossus of the early postwar years; no longer did its arc seem to point upward. As one Ford-era official said, “it was clear that we were in a new world” in which U.S. supremacy was fading fast.7

This was the impression many informed observers took away from the 1970s, and one that was often echoed in leading scholarly assessments that emerged in that decade and even after.8 With the distance of time, however, we can now see that the history of the 1970s was neither so straightforward nor discouraging as it initially looked. To be sure, the United States was battered by crises during this period, and policymakers often seemed at a loss to deal with those challenges. But even amid such travails, the global system was undergoing profound tectonic changes that would prove immensely beneficial to the United States. The onset of the terminal decline of the Soviet empire, the emergence of a transnational human rights movement and third-wave democratization, and the rise of globalization and other economic transformations—these trends were laying the groundwork for reinvigorated statecraft and a renewed geopolitical ascent. Appearances to the contrary, the 1970s did not represent the twilight of the American age. They were the prologue to America’s post–Cold War unipolar moment.

The 1970s and the Crisis of American Power

Perceptions of U.S. decline were ubiquitous during the 1970s. At home and abroad, the conventional wisdom was that America had passed its apex of global power. Intelligence and diplomatic reports regularly brought news of allies’ decreasing confidence in U.S. authority; adversaries gloated about Washington’s weakness. “The United States is presently seen as suffering setbacks and defeats—giving ground on several fronts,” noted one National Security Council (NSC) appraisal in 1975.9 The shah of Iran privately predicted that the United States might become “a fifth or even a tenth-rate power,” and Marxist guerrilla groups asserted that “the imperialist tiger has begun to show signs of weakness and fatigue.”10 Even top U.S. officials worried about the country’s prospects. Henry Kissinger lamented that “never has America been weaker,” and Richard Nixon mused that the nation might be treading a well-worn path of decadence and downfall. “I think of what happened to Greece and to Rome,” he said; “what is left—only the pillars.”11 This analogy was quite common; observers inside and outside government saw the United States as an empire in decay.12

It is not hard to understand why so many were so bearish about America’s future, for the 1970s were a decade when Washington’s international position often looked to be crumbling. Setbacks and crises were legion, indicators of lost preeminence were all too easy to find. America had hit its “years of middle age and decline,” one observer wrote even as the decade began: wherever one looked, there were signs of how far U.S. influence had fallen.13

Nowhere did that decline seem starker than in the economic realm. Throughout the postwar era, U.S. power had rested on a foundation of economic hegemony. In 1945, America possessed half of the world’s manufacturing capacity and an economy perhaps five times larger than its nearest competitor. It produced half of the world’s steel and oil, controlled the bulk of international financial reserves, and dominated the competition for export markets. “We are the giant of the economic world,” Harry Truman declared in 1947. “Whether we like it or not, the future pattern of economic relations depends on us.”14 In the years that followed, this economic might underwrote the reconstruction of Western Europe and Japan, enabled the provision of foreign aid to countries around the world, and financed the military power that undergirded a global containment policy. In myriad ways, economic primacy was the bedrock of U.S. influence.

By the early 1970s, however, that primacy had eroded significantly. As Japan, West Germany, and other countries rebounded from the devastation of World War II—using U.S. aid and support to do so—the balance of economic power swung dramatically. Whereas Washington had bestrode the world economy in 1945 and commanded 27.3 percent of global GDP in 1950, by 1970 its share had fallen to 22.4 percent.15 America’s share of oil and steel production, international reserves, and world exports declined sharply, as did its trade and payments balances. Meanwhile, Japan’s GDP rose by around 11 percent annually during the 1960s, its portion of world GDP roughly quadrupled between 1950 and 1970, and its manufactures increasingly competed with U.S. products for market share. The European Economic Community also grew rapidly, coming to rival the U.S. economy in size, and West Germany became an economic juggernaut in its own right.16 “While the U.S. continues to be the world’s most advanced economy,” wrote White House adviser Peter Peterson in 1971, “the gap between ourselves and the rest of the developed world has been narrowing.” Treasury Secretary John Connally was blunter: “No longer does the U.S. economy dominate the free world.”17

The collapse of the Bretton Woods international monetary system in 1971 was a symptom of this relative decline. In simplified form, Bretton Woods was a system of fixed but adjustable exchange rates in which countries tied the value of their currencies to the dollar, while the dollar was tied to gold. Since its advent at the close of World War II, this system had been a mechanism for preserving monetary stability within a pro-growth and pro-trade framework. It was no less a symbol of American leadership and power. Bretton Woods represented the U.S. commitment to managing a prosperous and comparatively open world order after the chaos of depression and war. More tangibly, it enshrined the dollar as the preeminent national currency, the primary medium of global exchange, and the anchor of international trade and finance.

This status gave the United States prestige and important benefits, namely the ability to run deficits that would otherwise have been unsustainable. Yet it also carried significant costs. Bretton Woods required the United States to stabilize international monetary relations by pegging its currency to gold at $35/ounce, while also lubricating the system by providing a steady outflow of dollars to foreign countries—all while sending still more dollars abroad via overseas troop deployments and foreign aid. This was the famous Triffin dilemma—that Bretton Woods essentially forced Washington to run a payments deficit to facilitate world growth and liquidity, but that in doing so it ensured that the real value of the dollar would eventually fall out of alignment with its nominal value. In other words, Bretton Woods imposed heavy and conflicting burdens on its leader, burdens that accumulated over time. It was a system that could be maintained only by a truly hegemonic power, and the impressive postwar performance of the Western economy was tribute to America’s ability to play this role.18

As U.S. economic hegemony diminished after 1945, however, the costs of Bretton Woods gradually became too much to bear. By the late 1960s, the outflow of dollars had made the U.S. payments imbalance look dangerously unsustainable, and the system was plagued by chronic instability. Monetary crises were becoming more frequent and severe; Bretton Woods was being held together only through emergency interventions and the use of capital controls in the United States and other countries. Most troubling of all, the threat of a run on the dollar—in which foreign banks cashed in their devalued greenbacks against the limited U.S. supply of gold—hovered ominously. Richard Nixon’s decision to suspend dollar-gold convertibility in August 1971, thereby abandoning the core of the Bretton Woods system, thus represented nothing so much as an admission of American financial overstretch. As IMF officials noted, “The changes in relative economic position among the major countries during the past 25 years have meant that the United States is no longer in a position . . . to assume ultimate and virtually sole responsibility for the functioning of the system.”19

Although the abandonment of Bretton Woods would ultimately benefit the United States, the short-term aftermath merely compounded doubts about its leadership and power. The Western world was in disarray, as Washington and its allies grappled inconclusively—and contentiously—over what should replace the now-defunct system. “European leaders want to ‘screw’ us and we want to ‘screw’ them in the economic area,” Nixon said.20 The leading Western powers eventually and rather fitfully settled on a more flexible system of floating exchange rates, but the cost of this shift, writes Harold James, was “a fair measure of anarchy.”21 The demise of Bretton Woods and its fixed parities threw the world into a period of monetary disorder, fueling ...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Structure, Strategy, and American Resurgence
• 1. Roots of Resurgence
• 2. The Reagan Offensive and the Transformation of the Cold War
• 3. American Statecraft and the Democratic Revolution
• 4. Toward the Neoliberal Order
• 5. Structure versus Strategy in the Greater Middle East
• 6. The Dawn of the Unipolar Moment
• Conclusion: Understanding the Arc of American Power
• Notes
• Index