The terrorist attacks on New York and Washington of Sept. 11, 2001, profoundly changed the US, spawning a new focus on foreign policy. The Bush administration's new national security strategy, issued in September last year, identifies the combination of terrorism, rogue states, and weapons of mass destruction as the primary threat confronting America.
Most people agree with the new focus of American foreign policy, but debate the means by which it is carried out. Is the threat so great that America must act alone, or should the US act only with the support of international institutions, even if that holds the country back? Events in Iraq illustrate this debate, but it has deeper roots.
In his 2000 election campaign, President George W. Bush said about America: "If we are an arrogant nation, they'll view us that way, but if we're a humble nation, they'll respect us."
He was right, but unfortunately many of America's friends saw the first eight months of his administration as arrogantly concerned with narrow American interests, focused on military power, and dismissive of treaties, norms and multilateralism. The administration's peremptory announcement that the Kyoto Protocol on global climate change was "dead" contributed to a reaction from other countries that cost the US its seat on the UN Human Rights Commission.
Sept. 11th supposedly changed all that. Congress finally paid America's UN dues, and the president turned his efforts to building a coalition against terrorism. But the rapid success of the war in Afghanistan led some in the administration and some commentators to conclude that unilateralism works. The columnist Charles Krauthammer, for example, urges a "new unilateralism" where America refuses to play the role of "docile international citizen" and unashamedly pursues its own ends.
The new unilateralists make a mistake in focusing too heavily on military power alone. True, America's military power -- backed up by a budget equivalent to the next eight countries combined -- is essential to global stability, and an essential part of the response to terrorism. But the metaphor of war should not blind us to the fact that suppressing terrorism will take years of patient, unspectacular civilian cooperation with other countries in areas such as intelligence sharing, police work, tracing financial flows and cooperation among customs officials.
Military success in Afghanistan addressed the easiest part of the problem. Al-Qaeda retains cells in some 50 countries. Rather than proving the unilateralists' point, the partial nature of the success in Afghanistan illustrates the continuing need for cooperation. Similarly, it was much easier to win the war in Iraq than to win the peace.
The problem for Americans in the 21st century is that more issues and forces than ever before are outside the control of even the most powerful state. What the attacks of Sept. 11 demonstrated is that the information revolution and globalization have changed world politics in a way that means Americans cannot achieve all their international goals acting alone.
The US lacks both the international and domestic prerequisites to resolve conflicts internal to other societies, and to monitor and control transnational transactions that threaten Americans at home. On many of today's key issues, such as international financial stability, drug smuggling, the spread of diseases, or global climate change, military power is ineffective. Indeed, its use can be counterproductive. America must instead mobilize international coalitions to address these shared threats and challenges.
The willingness of others to cooperate depends in part on their own self-interest, but also on the attractiveness of American positions. That power to attract is what I call "soft power." It means that others want what you want, and there is less need to use carrots and sticks to make others do what you want.
Hard power grows out of a country's military and economic might. Soft power arises from the attractiveness of a country's culture, ideals and policies. Hard power will always remain vital, but soft power will become increasingly important in dealing with transnational issues whose resolution requires multilateral cooperation.
To be sure, no large country can afford to be purely multilateralist, and sometimes the US must take the lead, as it did in Afghanistan. But in Iraq, Bush should have followed his father's example and built a broad international coalition. Now, as his administration returns to the UN to seek a new resolution that will enable other countries to contribute troops and resources for peacekeeping and reconstruction in Iraq, he is paying the price for the way he went to war.
Granted, multilateralism can be used by smaller states to restrict American freedom of action, but this does not mean that it is not generally in American interests. By embedding US policies in multilateral frameworks, America can make its disproportionate power more legitimate and acceptable. Even well intentioned Americans are not immune to Lord Acton's famous warning that power tends to corrupt. Learning to listen to others and to define US interests broadly to include global interests will be crucial to American soft power and whether others see the American preponderance as benign or not.
The paradox of American power is that the largest power since Rome cannot achieve many of its objectives unilaterally in a global information age. America needs to pay more attention to soft power and to multilateral cooperation. That is the real lesson of Sept. 11.
Joseph Nye is dean of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and author of The Paradox of American Power: Why the World's Only Superpower Can't Go It Alone and a former US assistant secretary of defense and director of the US National Security Agency.
Copyright: Project Syndicate
The Donald Trump administration’s approach to China broadly, and to cross-Strait relations in particular, remains a conundrum. The 2025 US National Security Strategy prioritized the defense of Taiwan in a way that surprised some observers of the Trump administration: “Deterring a conflict over Taiwan, ideally by preserving military overmatch, is a priority.” Two months later, Taiwan went entirely unmentioned in the US National Defense Strategy, as did military overmatch vis-a-vis China, giving renewed cause for concern. How to interpret these varying statements remains an open question. In both documents, the Indo-Pacific is listed as a second priority behind homeland defense and
Every analyst watching Iran’s succession crisis is asking who would replace supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Yet, the real question is whether China has learned enough from the Persian Gulf to survive a war over Taiwan. Beijing purchases roughly 90 percent of Iran’s exported crude — some 1.61 million barrels per day last year — and holds a US$400 billion, 25-year cooperation agreement binding it to Tehran’s stability. However, this is not simply the story of a patron protecting an investment. China has spent years engineering a sanctions-evasion architecture that was never really about Iran — it was about Taiwan. The
For Taiwan, the ongoing US and Israeli strikes on Iranian targets are a warning signal: When a major power stretches the boundaries of self-defense, smaller states feel the tremors first. Taiwan’s security rests on two pillars: US deterrence and the credibility of international law. The first deters coercion from China. The second legitimizes Taiwan’s place in the international community. One is material. The other is moral. Both are indispensable. Under the UN Charter, force is lawful only in response to an armed attack or with UN Security Council authorization. Even pre-emptive self-defense — long debated — requires a demonstrably imminent
Since being re-elected, US President Donald Trump has consistently taken concrete action to counter China and to safeguard the interests of the US and other democratic nations. The attacks on Iran, the earlier capture of deposed of Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro and efforts to remove Chinese influence from the Panama Canal all demonstrate that, as tensions with Beijing intensify, Washington has adopted a hardline stance aimed at weakening its power. Iran and Venezuela are important allies and major oil suppliers of China, and the US has effectively decapitated both. The US has continuously strengthened its military presence in the Philippines. Japanese Prime
RSS