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By Root 1175 0

personalities and policies, about which much has been written, the condition that made such errors possible was, ironically, America’s immense power. Americans firmly believe in the virtues of competition. We believe that individuals, groups, and corporations perform better when they are in a competitive environment. When it comes to the international arena, we have forgotten this fact. Ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States has walked the world like a colossus, unrivaled and unchecked. This has had its benefits, but it has also made Washington arrogant, careless, and lazy. Its foreign policy has at times resembled General Motors’ business strategy in the 1970s—an approach driven by internal factors, with little sense of the broader environment in which it was operating. It didn’t work so well for GM, and it hasn’t for the United States.

We didn’t start out careless. Most politicians and policy experts, American and foreign, were slow to embrace unipolarity. In 1990, as the Soviet Union was collapsing, Margaret Thatcher expressed a commonly held view that the world was moving toward three regional groups, “one based on the dollar, one based on the yen, one on the Deutsche mark.”1 George H. W. Bush, steeped in the bipolar order, never acted like the head of the sole superpower. He took a cautious approach to the historic changes in the global system. Rather than triumphantly claiming victory in the Cold War, his administration carefully consolidated the gains of Soviet collapse, always aware that the process could either reverse or end in violence. In waging the first Gulf War, Bush was highly attentive to building an international coalition, getting United Nations approval, and sticking to the mandate that gave the war its legitimacy. With the United States beset by a recession and mounting deficits, Bush sent his secretary of state, James Baker, around the world hat in hand to raise funds for the war. His great foreign policy achievement, German unification, was won not through unilateral force but through collaborative diplomacy—even though the United States held all the trump cards at the time. Germany was unified within the Western alliance, and 340,000 Russians quietly left East Germany—all with Moscow’s acquiescence.

Some did recognize that, with the Soviet Union in tatters, the United States was the only “pole” left standing. But they assumed that unipolarity was a passing phase, a “moment,” in one columnist’s phrase.2 Talk of American weakness dominated the 1992 presidential election. “The Cold War is over: Japan and Germany won,” Paul Tsongas said throughout his campaign for the Democratic nomination. Henry Kissinger, in his 1994 book Diplomacy, predicted the emergence of a new multipolar world, a view held by most scholars. Europeans believed that they were on the path to unity and world power, and Asians spoke confidently of the rise of “the Pacific Century.”

Despite these claims, foreign problems, no matter how distant, always seemed to end up in Washington’s lap. When the crisis in the Balkans began in 1991, the president of the European Council, Jacques Poos of Luxembourg, declared, “This is the hour of Europe. If one problem can be solved by the Europeans it is the Yugoslav problem. This is a European country and it is not up to the Americans.” It was not an unusual or an anti-American view; most European leaders, including Thatcher and Helmut Kohl, shared it. But several bloody years later, it was left to America to stop the fighting. When Kosovo erupted later that decade, Europe immediately let Washington take the lead. The same pattern emerged in the East Asian economic crisis, East Timor’s struggle for independence, successive Middle East conflicts, and Latin American debt defaults. Other countries were often part of the solution, but, unless America intervened, the crisis persisted. And at the same time, the American economy was in its longest boom since World War II, actually increasing its share of world output as Europe and Japan stagnated.

When Bill Clinton came into office