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The Unipolar Moment Revisited
[1]
Charles Krauthammer [2]
Issue:
Winter 2002-2003 [3]
Essay Types
Essay [4]
"It has been assumed that the old bipolar world would beget a multipolar world with power
dispersed to new centers in Japan, Germany (and/or "Europe"), China and a diminished Soviet
Union/Russia. [This is] mistaken. The immediate post-Cold War world is not multipolar. It is
unipolar. The center of world power is an unchallenged superpower, the United States, attended
by its Western allies."-The Unipolar Moment1
In late 1990, shortly before the collapse of the Soviet Union, it was clear that the world we had
known for half a century was disappearing. The question was what would succeed it. I suggested
then that we had already entered the "unipolar moment." The gap in power between the leading
nation and all the others was so unprecedented as to yield an international structure unique to
modern history: unipolarity.
At the time, this thesis was generally seen as either wild optimism or simple American arrogance.
The conventional wisdom was that with the demise of the Soviet empire the bipolarity of the
second half of the 20th century would yield to multipolarity. The declinist school, led by Paul
Kennedy, held that America, suffering from "imperial overstretch", was already in relative decline.
The Asian enthusiasm, popularized by (among others) James Fallows, saw the second coming
of the Rising Sun. The conventional wisdom was best captured by Senator Paul Tsongas: "The
Cold War is over; Japan won."
They were wrong, and no one has put it more forcefully than Paul Kennedy himself in a classic
recantation published earlier this year. "Nothing has ever existed like this disparity of power;
nothing", he said of America's position today. "Charlemagne's empire was merely western
European in its reach. The Roman empire stretched farther afield, but there was another great
empire in Persia, and a larger one in China. There is, therefore, no comparison."2 Not everyone
is convinced. Samuel Huntington argued in 1999 that we had entered not a unipolar world but a
"uni-multipolar world."3 Tony Judt writes mockingly of the "loud boasts of unipolarity and
hegemony" heard in Washington today.4 But as Stephen Brooks and William Wohlforth argue in
a recent review of the subject, those denying unipolarity can do so only by applying a ridiculous
standard: that America be able to achieve all its goals everywhere all by itself. This is a standard
not for unipolarity but for divinity. Among mortals, and in the context of the last half millennium of
history, the current structure of the international system is clear: "If today's American primacy
does not constitute unipolarity, then nothing ever will."5
A second feature of this new post-Cold War world, I ventured, would be a resurgent American
isolationism. I was wrong. It turns out that the new norm for America is not post-World War I
withdrawal but post-World War II engagement. In the 1990s, Pat Buchanan gave 1930s
isolationism a run. He ended up carrying Palm Beach.
Finally, I suggested that a third feature of this new unipolar world would be an increase rather
than a decrease in the threat of war, and that it would come from a new source: weapons of
mass destruction wielded by rogue states. This would constitute a revolution in international
relations, given that in the past it was great powers who presented the principal threats to world
peace.
Where are we twelve years later? The two defining features of the new post-Cold War world
remain: unipolarity and rogue states with weapons of mass destruction. Indeed, these
characteristics have grown even more pronounced. Contrary to expectation, the United States
has not regressed to the mean; rather, its dominance has dramatically increased. And during our
holiday from history in the 1990s, the rogue state/wmd problem grew more acute. Indeed, we are
now on the eve of history's first war over weapons of mass destruction.
"The true geopolitical structure of the post-Cold War world . . . [is] a single pole of world power
that consists of the United States at the apex of the industrial West. Perhaps it is more accurate
to say the United States and behind it the West." -The Unipolar Moment
Unipolarity After September 11, 2001
There is little need to rehearse the acceleration of unipolarity in the 1990s. Japan, whose claim to
power rested exclusively on economics, went into economic decline. Germany stagnated. The
Soviet Union ceased to exist, contracting into a smaller, radically weakened Russia. The
European Union turned inward toward the great project of integration and built a strong social
infrastructure at the expense of military capacity. Only China grew in strength, but coming from
so far behind it will be decades before it can challenge American primacy-and that assumes that
its current growth continues unabated.
The result is the dominance of a single power unlike anything ever seen. Even at its height
Britain could always be seriously challenged by the next greatest powers. Britain had a smaller
army than the land powers of Europe and its navy was equaled by the next two navies combined.
Today, American military spending exceeds that of the next twenty countries combined. Its navy,
air force and space power are unrivaled. Its technology is irresistible. It is dominant by every
measure: military, economic, technological, diplomatic, cultural, even linguistic, with a myriad of
countries trying to fend off the inexorable march of Internet-fueled mtv English.
American dominance has not gone unnoticed. During the 1990s, it was mainly China and Russia
that denounced unipolarity in their occasional joint communiqués. As the new century dawned it
was on everyone's lips. A French foreign minister dubbed the United States not a superpower but
a hyperpower. The dominant concern of foreign policy establishments everywhere became
understanding and living with the 800-pound American gorilla.
And then September 11 heightened the asymmetry. It did so in three ways. First, and most
obviously, it led to a demonstration of heretofore latent American military power. Kosovo, the first
war ever fought and won exclusively from the air, had given a hint of America's quantum leap in
military power (and the enormous gap that had developed between American and European
military capabilities). But it took September 11 for the United States to unleash with concentrated
fury a fuller display of its power in Afghanistan. Being a relatively pacific, commercial republic,
the United States does not go around looking for demonstration wars. This one was thrust upon
it. In response, America showed that at a range of 7,000 miles and with but a handful of losses, it
could destroy within weeks a hardened, fanatical regime favored by geography and climate in the
"graveyard of empires."
Such power might have been demonstrated earlier, but it was not. "I talked with the previous U.S.
administration", said Vladimir Putin shortly after September 11,
"and pointed out the bin Laden issue to them. They wrung their hands so helplessly and said,
'the Taliban are not turning him over, what can one do?' I remember I was surprised: If they are
not turning him over, one has to think and do something."6
Nothing was done. President Clinton and others in his administration have protested that nothing
could have been done, that even the 1998 African embassy bombings were not enough to
mobilize the American people to strike back seriously against terrorism. The new Bush
Administration, too, did not give the prospect of mass-casualty terrorism (and the
recommendations of the Hart-Rudman Commission) the priority it deserved. Without September
11, the giant would surely have slept longer. The world would have been aware of America's size
and potential, but not its ferocity or its full capacities. (Paul Kennedy's homage to American
power, for example, was offered in the wake of the Afghan campaign.)
Second, September 11 demonstrated a new form of American strength. The center of its
economy was struck, its aviation shut down, Congress brought to a halt, the government sent
underground, the country paralyzed and fearful. Yet within days the markets reopened, the
economy began its recovery, the president mobilized the nation, and a united Congress
immediately underwrote a huge new worldwide campaign against terror. The Pentagon started
planning the U.S. military response even as its demolished western façade still smoldered.
America had long been perceived as invulnerable. That illusion was shattered on September 11,
2001. But with a demonstration of its recuperative powers- an economy and political system so
deeply rooted and fundamentally sound that it could spring back to life within days-that sense of
invulnerability assumed a new character. It was transmuted from impermeability to resilience, the
product of unrivaled human, technological and political reserves.
The third effect of September 11 was to accelerate the realignment of the current great powers,
such as they are, behind the United States. In 1990, America's principal ally was nato. A decade
later, its alliance base had grown to include former members of the Warsaw Pact. Some of the
major powers, however, remained uncommitted. Russia and China flirted with the idea of an
"anti-hegemonic alliance." Russian leaders made ostentatious visits to pieces of the old Soviet
empire such as Cuba and North Korea. India and Pakistan, frozen out by the United States
because of their nuclear testing, remained focused mainly on one another. But after September
11, the bystanders came calling. Pakistan made an immediate strategic decision to join the
American camp. India enlisted with equal alacrity, offering the United States basing, overflight
rights and a level of cooperation unheard of during its half century of Nehruist genuflection to
anti-American non-alignment. Russia's Putin, seeing both a coincidence of interests in the fight
against Islamic radicalism and an opportunity to gain acceptance in the Western camp,
dramatically realigned Russian foreign policy toward the United States. (Russia has already been
rewarded with a larger role in nato and tacit American recognition of Russia's interests in its
"near abroad.") China remains more distant but, also having a coincidence of interests with the
United States in fighting Islamic radicalism, it has cooperated with the war on terror and muted its
competition with America in the Pacific.
The realignment of the fence-sitters simply accentuates the historical anomaly of American
unipolarity. Our experience with hegemony historically is that it inevitably creates a
counterbalancing coalition of weaker powers, most recently against Napoleonic France and
Germany (twice) in the 20th century. Nature abhors a vacuum; history abhors hegemony. Yet
during the first decade of American unipolarity no such counterbalancing occurred. On the
contrary, the great powers lined up behind the United States, all the more so after September 11.
"The most crucial new element in the post-Cold War world [is] the emergence of a new strategic
environment marked by the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. . . . The proliferation of
weapons of mass destruction and their means of delivery will constitute the greatest single threat
to world security for the rest of our lives. That is what makes a new international order not an
imperial dream or a Wilsonian fantasy but a matter of the sheerest prudence. It is slowly dawning
on the West that there is a need to establish some new regime to police these weapons and
those who brandish them. . . . Iraq . . . is the prototype of this new strategic threat."-The Unipolar
Moment
The American hegemon has no great power enemies, an historical oddity of the first order. Yet it
does face a serious threat to its dominance, indeed to its essential security. It comes from a
source even more historically odd: an archipelago of rogue states (some connected with
transnational terrorists) wielding weapons of mass destruction.
The threat is not trivial. It is the single greatest danger to the United States because, for all of
America's dominance, and for all of its recently demonstrated resilience, there is one thing it
might not survive: decapitation. The detonation of a dozen nuclear weapons in major American
cities, or the spreading of smallpox or anthrax throughout the general population, is an existential
threat. It is perhaps the only realistic threat to America as a functioning hegemon, perhaps even
to America as a functioning modern society.
"It is of course banal to say that modern technology has shrunk the world. But the obvious
corollary, that in a shrunken world the divide between regional superpowers and great powers is
radically narrowed, is rarely drawn. Missiles shrink distance. Nuclear (or chemical or biological)
devices multiply power. Both can be bought at market. Consequently the geopolitical map is
irrevocably altered. Fifty years ago, Germany-centrally located, highly industrial and heavily
populated-could pose a threat to world security and to the other great powers. It was
inconceivable that a relatively small Middle Eastern state with an almost entirely imported
industrial base could do anything more than threaten its neighbors. The central truth of the
coming era is that this is no longer the case: relatively small, peripheral and backward states will
be able to emerge rapidly as threats not only to regional, but to world, security."-The Unipolar
Moment
Like unipolarity, this is historically unique. wmd are not new, nor are rogue states. Their
conjunction is. We have had fifty years of experience with nuclear weapons-but in the context of
bipolarity, which gave the system a predictable, if perilous, stability. We have just now entered an
era in which the capacity for inflicting mass death, and thus posing a threat both to world peace
and to the dominant power, resides in small, peripheral states.
What does this conjunction of unique circumstances-unipolarity and the proliferation of terrible
weapons-mean for American foreign policy? That the first and most urgent task is protection from
these weapons. The catalyst for this realization was again September 11. Throughout the 1990s,
it had been assumed that wmd posed no emergency because traditional concepts of deterrence
would hold. September 11 revealed the possibility of future wmd-armed enemies both
undeterrable and potentially undetectable. The 9/11 suicide bombers were undeterrable; the
author of the subsequent anthrax attacks has proven undetectable. The possible alliance of
rogue states with such undeterrables and undetectables-and the possible transfer to them of
weapons of mass destruction-presents a new strategic situation that demands a new strategic
doctrine.
"Any solution will have to include three elements: denying, disarming, and defending. First, we
will have to develop a new regime, similar to cocom (Coordinating Committee on Export
Controls) to deny yet more high technology to such states. Second, those states that acquire
such weapons anyway will have to submit to strict outside control or risk being physically
disarmed. A final element must be the development of antiballistic missile and air defense
systems to defend against those weapons that do escape Western control or preemption. . . .
There is no alternative to confronting, deterring and, if necessary, disarming states that brandish
and use weapons of mass destruction. And there is no one to do that but the United States,
backed by as many allies as will join the endeavor."-the Unipolar Moment
The Crisis of Unipolarity
Accordingly, not one but a host of new doctrines have come tumbling out since September 11.
First came the with-us-or-against-us ultimatum to any state aiding , abetting or harboring
terrorists. Then, pre-emptive attack on any enemy state developing weapons of mass
destruction. And now, regime change in any such state.
The boldness of these policies-or, as much of the world contends, their arrogance-is
breathtaking. The American anti-terrorism ultimatum, it is said, is high-handed and permits the
arbitrary application of American power everywhere. Pre-emption is said to violate traditional
doctrines of just war. And regime change, as Henry Kissinger has argued, threatens 350 years of
post-Westphalian international practice. Taken together, they amount to an unprecedented
assertion of American freedom of action and a definitive statement of a new American
unilateralism.
To be sure, these are not the first instances of American unilateralism. Before September 11, the
Bush Admin- istration had acted unilaterally, but on more minor matters, such as the Kyoto
Protocol and the Biological Weapons Convention, and with less bluntness, as in its protracted
negotiations with Russia over the abm treaty. The "axis of evil" speech of January 29, however,
took unilateralism to a new level. Latent resentments about American willfulness are latent no
more. American dominance, which had been tolerated if not welcomed, is now producing such
irritation and hostility in once friendly quarters, such as Europe, that some suggest we have
arrived at the end of the opposition-free grace period that America had enjoyed during the
unipolar moment.7
In short, post-9/11 U.S. unilateralism has produced the first crisis of unipolarity. It revolves around
the central question of the unipolar age: Who will define the hegemon's ends?
The issue is not one of style but of purpose. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld gave the
classic formulation of unilateralism when he said (regarding the Afghan war and the war on
terrorism, but the principle is universal), "the mission determines the coalition." We take our
friends where we find them, but only in order to help us in accomplishing the mission. The
mission comes first, and we decide it.
Contrast this with the classic case study of multilateralism at work: the U.S. decision in February
1991 to conclude the Gulf War. As the Iraqi army was fleeing, the first Bush Administration had to
decide its final goal: the liberation of Kuwait or regime change in Iraq. It stopped at Kuwait. Why?
Because, as Brent Scowcroft has explained, going further would have fractured the coalition,
gone against our promises to allies and violated the un resolutions under which we were acting.
"Had we added occupation of Iraq and removal of Saddam Hussein to those objectives", wrote
Scowcroft in the Washington Post on October 16, 2001, " . . . our Arab allies, refusing to
countenance an invasion of an Arab colleague, would have deserted us." The coalition defined
the mission.
Who should define American ends today? This is a question of agency but it leads directly to a
fundamental question of policy. If the coalition-whether nato, the wider Western alliance, ad hoc
outfits such as the Gulf War alliance, the un, or the "international community"-defines America's
mission, we have one vision of America's role in the world. If, on the other hand, the mission
defines the coalition, we have an entirely different vision.
"A large segment of American opinion doubts the legitimacy of unilateral American action but
accepts quite readily actions undertaken by the "world community" acting in concert. Why it
should matter to Americans that their actions get a Security Council nod from, say, Deng
Xiaoping and the butchers of Tiananmen Square is beyond me. But to many Americans it
matters. It is largely for domestic reasons, therefore, that American political leaders make sure to
dress unilateral action in multilateral clothing. The danger, of course, is that they might come to
believe their own pretense."-The Unipolar Moment
Liberal Internationalism
For many Americans, multilateralism is no pretense. On the contrary: It has become the very
core of the liberal internationalist school of American foreign policy. In the October 2002 debate
authorizing the use of force in Iraq, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Armed Services
Committee, Carl Levin, proposed authorizing the president to act only with prior approval from
the un Security Council. Senator Edward Kennedy put it succinctly while addressing the Johns
Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies on September 27: "I'm waiting for the final
recommendation of the Security Council before I'm going to say how I'm going to vote."
This logic is deeply puzzling. How exactly does the Security Council confer moral authority on
American action? The Security Council is a committee of great powers, heirs to the victors in the
Second World War. They manage the world in their own interest. The Security Council is, on the
very rare occasions when it actually works, realpolitik by committee. But by what logic is it a
repository of international morality? How does the approval of France and Russia, acting clearly
and rationally in pursuit of their own interests in Iraq (largely oil and investment), confer
legitimacy on an invasion?
That question was beyond me twelve years ago. It remains beyond me now. Yet this kind of logic
utterly dominated the intervening Clinton years. The 1990s were marked by an obsession with
"international legality" as expressed by this or that Security Council resolution. To take one long
forgotten example: After an Iraqi provocation in February 1998, President Clinton gave a speech
at the Pentagon laying the foundation for an attack on Iraq (one of many that never came). He
cited as justification for the use of force the need to enforce Iraqi promises made under post-Gulf
War ceasefire conditions that "the United Nations demanded-not the United States-the United
Nations." Note the formulation. Here is the president of the most powerful nation on earth
stopping in mid-sentence to stress the primacy of commitments made to the un over those made
to the United States.
This was not surprising from a president whose first inaugural address pledged American action
when "the will and conscience of the international community is defied." Early in the Clinton
years, Madeleine Albright formulated the vision of the liberal internationalist school then in power
as "assertive multilateralism." Its principal diplomatic activity was the pursuit of a dizzying array of
universal treaties on chemical weapons, biological weapons, nuclear testing, global environment,
land mines and the like. Its trademark was consultation: Clinton was famous for sending
Secretary of State Warren Christopher on long trips (for example, through Europe on Balkan
policy) or endless shuttles (uncountable pilgrimages to Damascus) to consult; he invariably
returned home empty-handed and diminished. And its principal objective was good international
citizenship: It was argued on myriad foreign policy issues that we could not do X because it
would leave us "isolated." Thus in 1997 the Senate passed a chemical weapons convention that
even some of its proponents admitted was unenforceable, largely because of the argument that
everyone else had signed it and that failure to ratify would leave us isolated. Isolation, in and of
itself, was seen as a diminished and even morally suspect condition.
A lesson in isolation occurred during the 1997 negotiations in Oslo over the land mine treaty. One
of the rare holdouts, interestingly enough, was Finland. Finding himself scolded by his neighbors
for opposing the land mine ban, the Finnish prime minister noted tartly that this was a "very
convenient" pose for the "other Nordic countries" who "want Finland to be their land mine."
In many parts of the world, a thin line of American gis is the land mine. The main reason we
oppose the land mine treaty is that we need them in the dmz in Korea. We man the lines there.
Sweden and France and Canada do not have to worry about a North Korean invasion killing
thousands of their soldiers. As the unipolar power and thus guarantor of peace in places where
Swedes do not tread, we need weapons that others do not. Being uniquely situated in the world,
we cannot afford the empty platitudes of allies not quite candid enough to admit that they live
under the umbrella of American power. That often leaves us "isolated."
Multilateralism is the liberal internationalist's means of saving us from this shameful condition.
But the point of the multilateralist imperative is not merely psychological. It has a clear and
coherent geopolitical objective. It is a means that defines the ends. Its means-internationalism
(the moral, legal and strategic primacy of international institutions over national interests) and
legalism (the belief that the sinews of stability are laws, treaties and binding international
contracts)-are in service to a larger vision: remaking the international system in the image of
domestic civil society. The multilateralist imperative seeks to establish an international order
based not on sovereignty and power but on interdependence-a new order that, as Secretary of
State Cordell Hull said upon returning from the Moscow Conference of 1943, abolishes the "need
for spheres of influence, for alliances, for balance of power."
Liberal internationalism seeks through multilateralism to transcend power politics, narrow
national interest and, ultimately, the nation-state itself. The nation-state is seen as some kind of
archaic residue of an anarchic past, an affront to the vision of a domesticated international arena.
This is why liberal thinkers embrace the erosion of sovereignty promised by the new information
technologies and the easy movement of capital across borders. They welcome the decline of
sovereignty as the road to the new globalism of a norm-driven, legally-bound international
system broken to the mold of domestic society.8
The greatest sovereign, of course, is the American superpower, which is why liberal
internationalists feel such acute discomfort with American dominance. To achieve their vision,
America too-America especially-must be domesticated. Their project is thus to restrain America
by building an entangling web of interdependence, tying down Gulliver with myriad strings that
diminish his overweening power. Who, after all, was the abm treaty or a land mine treaty going to
restrain? North Korea?
This liberal internationalist vision-the multilateral handcuffing of American power-is, as Robert
Kagan has pointed out, the dominant view in Europe.9 That is to be expected, given Europe's
weakness and America's power. But it is a mistake to see this as only a European view. The idea
of a new international community with self-governing institutions and self-enforcing norms-the
vision that requires the domestication of American power-is the view of the Democratic Party in
the United States and of a large part of the American foreign policy establishment. They spent
the last decade in power fashioning precisely those multilateral ties to restrain the American
Gulliver and remake him into a tame international citizen.10 The multilateralist project is to useindeed,
to use up-current American dominance to create a new international system in which
new norms of legalism and interdependence rule in America's place-in short, a system that is no
longer unipolar.
"There is much pious talk about a new multilateral world and the promise of the United Nations
as guarantor of a new post-Cold War order. But this is to mistake cause and effect, the United
States and the United Nations. The United Nations is guarantor of nothing. Except in a formal
sense, it can hardly be said to exist. Collective security? In the Gulf, without the United States
leading and prodding, bribing and blackmailing, no one would have stirred. . . . The world would
have written off Kuwait the way the last body pledged to collective security, the League of
Nations, wrote off Abyssinia."-The Unipolar Moment
Realism and the New Unilateralism
The basic division between the two major foreign policy schools in America centers on the
question of what is, and what should be, the fundamental basis of international relations: paper
or power. Liberal internationalism envisions a world order that, like domestic society, is governed
by laws and not men. Realists see this vision as hopelessly utopian. The history of paper
treaties-from the prewar Kellogg-Briand Pact and Munich to the post-Cold War Oslo accords and
the 1994 Agreed Framework with North Korea-is a history of naiveté and cynicism, a combination
both toxic and volatile that invariably ends badly. Trade agreements with Canada are one thing.
Pieces of parchment to which existential enemies affix a signature are quite another. They are
worse than worthless because they give a false sense of security and breed complacency. For
the realist, the ultimate determinant of the most basic elements of international life-security,
stability and peace-is power.
Which is why a realist would hardly forfeit the current unipolarity for the vain promise of goo-goo
one-worldism. Nor, however, should a realist want to forfeit unipolarity for the familiarity of
traditional multipolarity. Multipolarity is inherently fluid and unpredictable. Europe practiced
multipolarity for centuries and found it so unstable and bloody, culminating in 1914 in the
catastrophic collapse of delicately balanced alliance systems, that Europe sought its permanent
abolition in political and economic union. Having abjured multipolarity for the region, it is odd in
the extreme to then prefer multipolarity for the world.
Less can be said about the destiny of unipolarity. It is too new. Yet we do have the history of the
last decade, our only modern experience with unipolarity, and it was a decade of unusual stability
among all major powers. It would be foolish to project from just a ten-year experience, but that
experience does call into question the basis for the claims that unipolarity is intrinsically unstable
or impossible to sustain in a mass democracy.
I would argue that unipolarity, managed benignly, is far more likely to keep the peace. Benignity
is, of course, in the eye of the beholder. But the American claim to benignity is not mere selfcongratulation.
We have a track record. Consider one of history's rare controlled experiments. In
the 1940s, lines were drawn through three peoples-Germans, Koreans and Chinese-one side
closely bound to the United States, the other to its adversary. It turned into a controlled
experiment because both states in the divided lands shared a common culture. Fifty years later
the results are in. Does anyone doubt the superiority, both moral and material, of West Germany
vs. East Germany, South Korea vs. North Korea and Taiwan vs. China?11
Benignity is also manifest in the way others welcome our power. It is the reason, for example,
that the Pacific Rim countries are loath to see our military presence diminished: They know that
the United States is not an imperial power with a desire to rule other countries--which is why they
so readily accept it as a balancer. It is the reason, too, why Europe, so seized with complaints
about American high-handedness, nonetheless reacts with alarm to the occasional suggestion
that America might withdraw its military presence. America came, but it did not come to rule.
Unlike other hegemons and would-be hegemons, it does not entertain a grand vision of a new
world. No Thousand Year Reich. No New Soviet Man. It has no great desire to remake human
nature, to conquer for the extraction of natural resources, or to rule for the simple pleasure of
dominion. Indeed, America is the first hegemonic power in history to be obsessed with "exit
strategies." It could not wait to get out of Haiti and Somalia; it would get out of Kosovo and
Bosnia today if it could. Its principal aim is to maintain the stability and relative tranquility of the
current international system by enforcing, maintaining and extending the current peace.
The form of realism that I am arguing for--call it the new unilateralism--is clear in its determination
to self-consciously and confidently deploy American power in pursuit of those global ends. Note:
global ends. There is a form of unilateralism that is devoted only to narrow American self-interest
and it has a name, too: It is called isolationism. Critics of the new unilateralism often confuse it
with isolationism because both are prepared to unashamedly exercise American power. But
isolationists oppose America acting as a unipolar power not because they disagree with the
unilateral means, but because they deem the ends far too broad. Isolationists would abandon the
larger world and use American power exclusively for the narrowest of American interests:
manning Fortress America by defending the American homeland and putting up barriers to trade
and immigration.
The new unilateralism defines American interests far beyond narrow self-defense. In particular, it
identifies two other major interests, both global: extending the peace by advancing democracy
and preserving the peace by acting as balancer of last resort. Britain was the balancer in Europe,
joining the weaker coalition against the stronger to create equilibrium. America's unique global
power allows it to be the balancer in every region. We balanced Iraq by supporting its weaker
neighbors in the Gulf War. We balance China by supporting the ring of smaller states at its
periphery (from South Korea to Taiwan, even to Vietnam). Our role in the Balkans was essentially
to create a microbalance: to support the weaker Bosnian Muslims against their more dominant
neighbors, and subsequently to support the weaker Albanian Kosovars against the Serbs.
Of course, both of these tasks often advance American national interests as well. The promotion
of democracy multiplies the number of nations likely to be friendly to the United States, and
regional equilibria produce stability that benefits a commercial republic like the United States.
America's (intended) exertions on behalf of pre-emptive non-proliferation, too, are clearly in the
interest of both the United States and the international system as a whole.
Critics find this paradoxical: acting unilaterally but for global ends. Why paradoxical? One can
hardly argue that depriving Saddam (and potentially, terrorists) of WMD is not a global end.
Unilateralism may be required to pursue this end. We may be left isolated in so doing, but we
would be acting nevertheless in the name of global interests--larger than narrow American selfinterest
and larger, too, than the narrowly perceived self-interest of smaller, weaker powers (even
great powers) that dare not confront the rising danger.
What is the essence of that larger interest? Most broadly defined, it is maintaining a stable, open
and functioning unipolar system. Liberal internationalists disdain that goal as too selfish, as it
makes paramount the preservation of both American power and independence. Isolationists
reject the goal as too selfless, for defining American interests too globally and thus too
generously.
A THIRD critique comes from what might be called pragmatic realists, who see the new
unilateralism I have outlined as hubristic, and whose objections are practical. They are prepared
to engage in a pragmatic multilateralism. They value great power concert. They seek Security
Council support not because it confers any moral authority, but because it spreads risk. In their
view, a single hegemon risks far more violent resentment than would a power that consistently
acts as primus inter pares, sharing rule-making functions with others.12
I have my doubts. The United States made an extraordinary effort in the Gulf War to get UN
support, share decision-making, assemble a coalition and, as we have seen, deny itself the fruits
of victory in order to honor coalition goals. Did that diminish the anti-American feeling in the
region? Did it garner support for subsequent Iraq policy dictated by the original acquiescence to
the coalition?
The attacks of September 11 were planned during the Clinton Administration, an administration
that made a fetish of consultation and did its utmost to subordinate American hegemony and
smother unipolarity. The resentments were hardly assuaged. Why? Because the extremist rage
against the United States is engendered by the very structure of the international system, not by
the details of our management of it.
Pragmatic realists also value international support in the interest of sharing burdens, on the
theory that sharing decision-making enlists others in our own hegemonic enterprise and makes
things less costly. If you are too vigorous in asserting yourself in the short-term, they argue, you
are likely to injure yourself in the long-term when you encounter problems that require the full
cooperation of other partners, such as counter-terrorism. As Brooks and Wohlforth put it,
"Straining relationships now will lead only to a more challenging policy environment later on."13
If the concern about the new unilateralism is that American assertiveness be judiciously rationed,
and that one needs to think long-term, it is hard to disagree. One does not go it alone or dictate
terms on every issue. On some issues such as membership in and support of the WTO, where
the long-term benefit both to the American national interest and global interests is demonstrable,
one willingly constricts sovereignty. Trade agreements are easy calls, however, free trade being
perhaps the only mathematically provable political good. Others require great skepticism. The
Kyoto Protocol, for example, would have harmed the American economy while doing nothing for
the global environment. (Increased emissions from China, India and Third World countries
exempt from its provisions would have more than made up for American cuts.) Kyoto failed on its
merits, but was nonetheless pushed because the rest of the world supported it. The same case
was made for the chemical and biological weapons treaties--sure, they are use less or worse, but
why not give in there in order to build good will for future needs? But appeasing multilateralism
does not assuage it; appeasement merely legitimizes it. Repeated acquiescence to provisions
that America deems injurious reinforces the notion that legitimacy derives from international
consensus, thus undermining America's future freedom of action--and thus contradicting the
pragmatic realists' own goals.
America must be guided by its independent judgment, both about its own interest and about the
global interest. Especially on matters of national security, war-making and the deployment of
power, America should neither defer nor contract out decision-making, particularly when the
concessions involve permanent structural constrictions such as those imposed by an
International Criminal Court. Prudence, yes. No need to act the superpower in East Timor or
Bosnia. But there is a need to do so in Afghanistan and in Iraq. No need to act the superpower
on steel tariffs. But there is a need to do so on missile defense.
The prudent exercise of power allows, indeed calls for, occasional concessions on non-vital
issues if only to maintain psychological good will. Arrogance and gratuitous high-handedness are
counterproductive. But we should not delude ourselves as to what psychological good will buys.
Countries will cooperate with us, first, out of their own self-interest and, second, out of the need
and desire to cultivate good relations with the world's superpower. Warm and fuzzy feelings are a
distant third. Take counterterrorism. After the attack on the U.S.S. Cole, Yemen did everything it
could to stymie the American investigation. It lifted not a finger to suppress terrorism. This was
under an American administration that was obsessively accommodating and multilateralist.
Today, under the most unilateralist of administrations, Yemen has decided to assist in the war on
terrorism. This was not a result of a sudden attack of good will toward America. It was a result of
the war in Afghanistan, which concentrated the mind of h eretofore recalcitrant states like Yemen
on the costs of non-cooperation with the United States.14 Coalitions are not made by
superpowers going begging hat in hand. They are made by asserting a position and inviting
others to join. What "pragmatic" realists often fail to realize is that unilateralism is the high road to
multilateralism. When George Bush senior said of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, "this will not
stand", and made it clear that he was prepared to act alone if necessary, that declaration--and
the credibility of American determination to act unilaterally-in and of itself created a coalition.
Hafez al-Asad did not join out of feelings of good will. He joined because no one wants to be left
at the dock when the hegemon is sailing.
Unilateralism does not mean seeking to act alone. One acts in concert with others if possible.
Unilateralism simply means that one does not allow oneself to be hostage to others. No
unilateralist would, say, reject Security Council support for an attack on Iraq. The nontrivial
question that separates unilateralism from multilateralism--and that tests the "pragmatic realists"-is
this: What do you do if, at the end of the day, the Security Council refuses to back you? Do
you allow yourself to be dictated to on issues of vital national--and international--security?
WHEN FIRST proposed the unipolar model in 1990, I suggested that we should accept both its
burdens and opportunities and that, if America did not wreck its economy, unipolarity could last
thirty or forty years. That seemed bold at the time. Today, it seems rather modest. The unipolar
moment has become the unipolar era. It remains true, however, that its durability will be decided
at home. It will depend largely on whether it is welcomed by Americans or seen as a burden to
be shed--either because we are too good for the world (the isolationist critique) or because we
are not worthy of it (the liberal internationalist critique).
The new unilateralism argues explicitly and unashamedly for maintaining unipolarity, for
sustaining America's unrivaled dominance for the foreseeable future. It could be a long future,
assuming we successfully manage the single greatest threat, namely, weapons of mass
destruction in the hands of rogue states. This in itself will require the aggressive and confident
application of unipolar power rather than falling back, as we did in the 1990s, on paralyzing
multilateralism. The future of the unipolar era hinges on whether America is governed by those
who wish to retain, augment and use unipolarity to advance not just American but global ends, or
whether America is governed by those who wish to give it up-either by allowing unipolarity to
decay as they retreat to Fortress America, or by passing on the burden by gradually transferring
power to multilateral institutions as heirs to American hegemony. The challenge to unipolarity is
not from the outside but from the inside. The choice is ours. To impiously paraph rase Benjamin
Franklin: History has given you an empire, if you will keep it.
1 Editor's note: This quotation, and all subsequent boxed quotations in this essay, are from
Charles Krauthammer, "The Unipolar Moment", Foreign Affairs: America and the World
(1990/91), which introduced the idea of American unipolarity. That essay was adapted from the
first annual Henry M. Jackson Memorial Lecture, September 18, 1990.
2 Kennedy, "The Eagle has Landed", Financial Times, February 2, 2002.
3 Huntington, "The Lonely Superpower", Foreign Affairs (March/April 1999). By uni-multipolar
Huntington means a system with a pre-eminent state whose sole participation is insufficient for
the resolution of international issues. The superpower can still serve as a veto player, but
requires other powers to achieve its ends.
4 Judt, "Its Own Worst Enemy", New York Review of Books, August 15, 2002.
5 Brooks and Wohlforth, "American Primacy in Perspective", Foreign Affairs (July/August 2002).
6 Interview with the German newspaper Bild, translated and reported in the Inter fax News
Bulletin, September 21, 2001.
7 A Sky News pail finds that even the British public considers George W. Bush a greater threat to
world peace than Saddam Hussein. The poli was conducted September 2-6, 2002.
8 See my "A World Imagined", The New Republic, March 15, 1999, from which some of the
foregoing discussion is drawn.
9 Kagan, "Power and Weakness", Policy Review (June 2002).
10 In "A World Imagined", I noted the oddity of an American governing elite adopting a goal--a
constrained America--that is more logically the goal of foreigners: "The ultimate irony is that this
is traditionally the vision of small nations. They wish to level the playing field with the big boys.
For them, treaties, international institutions, and interdependence are the great equalizers.
Leveling is fine for them. But for us? The greatest power in the world--the most dominant power
relative to its rivals that the world has seen since the Roman empire--is led by people who seek
to diminish that dominance and level the international arena."
11 This is not to claim, by any means, a perfect record of benignity. America has often made and
continues to make alliances with unpleasant authoritarian regimes. As I argued recently in Time
("Dictatorships and Double Standards", September 23, 2002), such alliances are nonetheless
justified so long as they are instrumental (meant to defeat the larger evil) and temporary (expire
with the emergency). When Hitler was defeated, we stopped coddling Stalin. Forty years later, as
the Soviet threat receded, the United States was instrumental in easing Pinochet out of power
and overthrowing Marcos. We withdrew our support for these dictators once the two conditions
that justified such alliances had disappeared: The global threat of Soviet communism had
receded, and truly democratic domestic alternatives to these dictators had emerged.
12 This basic view is well-represented in The National Interest's Fall 2002 symposium,
"September 11th One Year On: Power, Purpose and Strategy in U.S. Foreign Policy."
13 Brooks and Wohlforth, "American Primacy in Perspective."
14 The most recent and dramatic demonstration of this newfound cooperation was the CIA killing
on November 4 of an Al-Qaeda leader in Yemen using a remotely operated Predator drone.
Charles Krauthammer, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for commentary, is a syndicated columnist for
the Washington Post and an essayist for Time.
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