The Frugal Superpower

"In Fareed Zakaria’s book, the final chapter is on the United States. He points out that the greatest threat to the United States in the current world, and the world we’re heading into, lies not outside, but inside, in the failure of good fiscal management, in a failure to have effective and responsible political institutions to deal with America’s challenges. Michael Mandelbaum’s book, which is somewhat shorter and a bit less classic than some of the others on the list, is still a very good place to end. It is an extended essay on precisely this challenge, and how it relates to foreign policy. What he argues is that the world order that the United States has fostered rested on an extraordinarily powerful economy and, in effect, a great surplus of power. The United States used its power, by and large wisely, to provide certain kinds of public goods for the world at large. Right now, Mandelbaum argues, the United States is on a track of fiscal irresponsibility that will constrict its freedom of action down the road, and limit its ability to continue to provide those public goods that have benefited both itself and the world more generally. The Mandelbaum book is a cautionary tale about the consequences of American domestic mismanagement and what the implications may be for American foreign policy – and the liberal world order that American policy has so lovingly created and maintained – in the decades to come. Mandelbaum was a student of Huntington and Hoffman (as was Zakaria. I picked all Harvard authors – we disagree on the different issues, but we think of them in similar ways). For him, American hegemony has largely been a good thing. We’re now beginning to erode the domestic foundations of that hegemony, and unless we get our act together at home the world is going to have to learn to fend for itself more. Also, to the extent that realists – as opposed to liberal institutionalists – are correct, that world, with a somewhat lower profile United States, may be a little more untidy than the one we have seen so far. So the message from Mandelbaum is, in effect, “All you who want to see a more restrained America, you’re about to get your wish, because we can’t afford to act the way we have acted!” Now we will test whether that is actually a good thing or, as Mandelbaum worries, a not so good thing. The Libyan operation displays elements of all the books that I’ve described. Thucydides would understand the Libyan crisis because tyrants face rebellions all the time, and tyrants tend to deal with those rebellions in rather harsh ways. Huntington would understand the pull of the United States to get in and the pull to stay out. He would understand why there was a strong impulse in the Obama administration to intervene, to live up to the ideals that the United States claims to support. Hoffman would be a good primer on how to think about humanitarian intervention. It would also explain why the administration placed such a strong emphasis on institutional support – the UN, the Arab League and so forth, because, for a liberal institutionalist like Hoffman, that’s a key source of legitimacy. Zakaria and Mandelbaum would say, “OK, now you have an issue, because in the world that we’re living in, the United States doesn’t really have a huge amount of disposable power or freedom of action and so it may not want to get involved in peripheral conflicts in a particularly extensive way”. So in the post-American world – in which the United States is unable, or unwilling, to take a dramatic role in dominating world order, preferring to, in the words of an administration official recently quoted in The New Yorker ,“lead from behind” – you end up, perhaps, getting what you’ve got in Libya, which is a United States that is primus inter pares . The United States is in Libya, but it is by no means so committed to the operation that it’s going to take a dominant role and see it through to a successful completion. Libya presents a very good case study of all the various forces. For Europeans who want to take a more leading and aggressive role in foreign policy – beware of what you wish for, you just may get it! For those who don’t want the United States to intervene so much – well, you’ll get people like Gaddafi staying in power. For people who want the United States to go in, the choices and costs are much more nuanced and more complex than people often discuss. And you can see why a somewhat halfway policy, this far, and no further, was ultimately settled on, and why it’s been so unsatisfactory to so many. Again though, if you ask yourself, “What specific alternative would you prefer?” you can see why the administration has ultimately backed a halfway policy, as opposed to either doing absolutely nothing, or taking on full responsibility for the political future of Libya, as some would like to see."