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Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

The U.S. and the Multipolar Future

Nikolas Gvosdev discusses the future of military interventionism in the context of the debate over U.S. decline: The concern over “decline” is not that the U.S. is about to stop being a superpower; it is that future likely adversaries are not going to be the pushovers the U.S. has gotten used to for the past […]

Nikolas Gvosdev discusses the future of military interventionism in the context of the debate over U.S. decline:

The concern over “decline” is not that the U.S. is about to stop being a superpower; it is that future likely adversaries are not going to be the pushovers the U.S. has gotten used to for the past 20 years. U.S. advantages on the field aren’t going to disappear, but they will be reduced. As a result, the costs for U.S. action will be raised, and this may very well place clear limits on the willingness of any administration, Democratic or Republican, to be as interventionist as their predecessors have been.

Insofar as this means that the U.S. will start fewer unnecessary wars in the years and decades to come, this seems to be a good development. It’s clear why “anti-declinists” wouldn’t like this, since many “anti-declinists” want the U.S. to act the part of a global hegemon and to use force regularly, but it will be increasingly difficult to do so. Gvosdev cites a recent argument by Ian Bremmer:

It is not that America is in decline so much as the global pie of capabilities, especially economic and military capabilities, is growing — and dispersing to all corners of the globe.

Perhaps relative decline would be more palatable if it weren’t constantly being linked by “anti-declinists” to the specter of a collapsing international order or the prospect of a “Chinese century.” What doesn’t make much sense about “anti-declinist” fearmongering along these lines is that relative decline isn’t something that the U.S. can avoid by making certain policy choices rather than others. It’s certainly possible to sap and exhaust U.S. resources in the fruitless quest to reclaim an unsustainable position. We have spent the last decade doing just that.

The U.S. can react to a multipolar world by demonizing and vilifying other major powers and by punishing them when they fail to fall in line on every international issue, which seems to be the preferred response of the most vocal “anti-declinist” presidential candidate, or it can attempt to find common interests with these other powers. The latter seems advisable, not least because a multipolar world is one in which the demands on and costs to the U.S. are fewer. One passage from Christopher Layne’s review of Gaddis’ George F. Kennan is relevant here:

Kennan was a rarity among U.S. policy makers and grand strategists during the last seventy years. He appreciated that multipolarity favored the United States because, in a world of several great powers, others could assume many of the strategic burdens that otherwise would weigh on the dominant power.

As Gvosdev says, “the temptation to act as if the U.S. still exists within a unipolar moment remains,” but this is something that needs to be consistently and strongly discouraged. It isn’t 1945. It isn’t even 1991. It’s long past time that we recognized what this means for how the U.S. conducts itself in the world.

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