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March 11, 2007
Michael Lind in an article at Democracy Now entitled What next? US foreign policy after Bush argues that the goal of American intervention in the two world wars, according to presidents Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D Roosevelt, among others, had been to replace a dangerous global balance-of-power system with a "concert" of power, in which the great powers collaborated to preserve international peace. However,
When the cold war ended, however, the concert-of-power strategy was hardly discussed. Centrist liberals as well as conservatives, over-impressed by American military power, sincerely believed that the US could and should be the world's policeman indefinitely. In this vision, shared in different ways by the administrations of Bill Clinton and George W Bush, there was no room for the two most powerful states of Europe (Germany and Russia) or the two most powerful states of Asia (Japan and China), except as American satellites. Germany and Japan would continue to be economic but not military great powers, dependent on the US for protection. And under both Clinton and Bush, Russia and China were frozen out of the US-centred international system.
What then is meant by a "concert of power" as opposed to a hegemony strategy?
Lind says that his argument in his The American Way of Strategy, is to abandon our ill-conceived post-cold-war policy of unilateral world domination.
The world is, or soon will be, fully multipolar, thanks to the rise of China and other power centres, including India and the EU. We have a choice between competitive multipolarity (in the form of endless arms races and balance-of-power struggles among the US, China and other great powers) and cooperative multipolarity (in the form of a concert uniting the US, China, Japan, India, Russia and the major European powers). A concert-of-power strategy need not depend on the Security Council. Nor need there be a single global great-power concert. There can be regional concerts, in which the US participates along with local great powers.
He adds that the leadership in either US political part is unlikely to abandon the hegemony strategy for a more enlightened concert-of-power one in the near future. Many liberal Democrats, as well as Republicans, are committed to the idea that the US has both the power and the obligation to police the world without consulting the other great powers.
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