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and ensure international cooperation—so that such a war never took place again. America had the moral high ground that came from defeating fascism, but it also had unrivaled power. American GDP made up almost 50 percent of the global economy. Outside of the Soviet sphere, Washington’s lead role in devising new institutions was never really questioned. Today, the world is different, and so is America’s position in it. Were Truman and Marshall and Acheson alive, they would face a wholly new set of challenges. The task for Barack Obama and future presidents is to construct a new approach for a new era, one that responds to a global system in which power is far more diffuse than ever before and in which everyone feels empowered.

The United States does not have the hand it had in 1945 or even in 2000. Still, it does have a stronger hand than anyone else—the most complete portfolio of economic, political, military, and cultural power—and it will not be replaced in the foreseeable future. Perhaps more importantly, we do not need to invent the world anew. The international order established by the United States after World War II is in urgent need of expansion and repair, but not reconception. As the Princeton scholar John Ikenberry has perceptively noted, the Western-oriented system created in the 1940s and 1950s allows for the expansion of global trade, the rise of new powers, and mechanisms of cooperation and conflict management. It cannot always and easily address certain problems, such as great power conflict and internal human rights tragedies, but those are the limits of international relations, not of these particular structures. Simultaneously, the reality of nuclear weapons and deterrence makes it extremely costly—suicidal—for a rising power to try to assert itself militarily against its peers. “Today’s Western order, in short, is hard to overturn and easy to join,” writes Ikenberry.7 That is how modern Japan and Germany have seen their choices and how China and India seem to be viewing their future. They want to gain power and status and respect, for sure, but by growing within the international system, not by overturning it. As long as these new countries feel they can be accommodated, they have every incentive to become “responsible stakeholders” in this system.

The rise of the rest, while real, is a long process. And it is one that ensures America a vital, though different, role. As China, India, Brazil, Russia, South Africa, and a host of smaller countries all do well in the years ahead, new points of tension will emerge among them. Many of these rising countries have historical animosities, border disputes, and contemporary quarrels with one another; in most cases, nationalism will grow along with economic and geopolitical stature. Being a distant power, America is often a convenient partner for many regional nations worried about the rise of a hegemon in their midst. In fact, as the scholar William Wohlforth notes, American influence is strengthened by the growth of a dominant regional power.8 These factors are frequently noted in discussions of Asia, but it is true of many other spots on the globe as well. The process will not be mechanical. As one of these countries rises (China), it will not produce a clockwork-like balancing dynamic where its neighbor (India) will seek a formal alliance with the United States. Today’s world is more complicated than that. But these rivalries do give the United States an opportunity to play a large and constructive role at the center of the global order. It has the potential to be what Bismarck helped Germany become (briefly) in the late nineteenth century—Europe’s “honest broker,” forging close relationships with each of the major countries, ties that were closer than the ones those countries had with one another. It was the hub of the European system. Being the global broker today would be a job involving not just the American government but its society, with all the strengths and perspectives that it will bring to the challenge. It is a role that the United States—with its