The Post-American World - Fareed Zakaria [112]
Or take American policy toward Russia. We have never been able to prioritize what exactly our core interests and concerns with Moscow are. Is it the danger of its loose nuclear weapons, which can be secured only with its help? Is it Moscow’s help in isolating Iran? Or its behavior in Ukraine and Georgia? Or its opposition to the missile shield in Eastern Europe? Or its oil and natural gas policies? Or internal human rights conditions in Russia? Recent U.S. policy has been “all of the above.” But to govern is to choose. If we believe that nuclear proliferation and terrorism are the gravest issues we face, as President Bush said, then securing Russia’s nuclear arsenal and preventing Iran from developing nuclear weapons are surely the two issues on which we should be seeking Russian cooperation—above all else.
The United States will especially need to choose with regard to China. China is experiencing the largest, swiftest rise to world power of any country in history—larger and swifter even than that of the United States in the past. It will have to be given some substantial political and even military space commensurate with that power. At the same time, its rise should not become a cover for expansionism, aggression, or disruption. How to strike this balance—deterring China, on the one hand, accommodating its legitimate growth, on the other—is the central strategic challenge for American diplomacy. The United States can and should draw lines with China. But it should also recognize that it cannot draw lines everywhere. Unfortunately, the most significant hurdle the United States faces in shaping such a policy is a domestic political climate that tends to view any concessions and accommodations as appeasement.
To the extent that the United States can learn something from the experience of Great Britain, it is the need to make large strategic choices about where it will focus its energies and attention. Britain did so wisely when it faced the rise of the United States. It was less wise about its own empire. In the early twentieth century, London confronted a dilemma much like Washington’s today. When a crisis broke somewhere, no matter how remote, the world would look to London and ask, “What will you do about this?” Britain’s strategic blunder was to spend decades—time and money, energy and attention—on vain attempts to stabilize peripheral places on the map. For example, Britain should have expended less effort organizing the constitutional arrangements of Dutch farmers in the Transvaal—and thus fighting the Boer War, which broke the back of the empire—and more facing up to its declining productivity and the rise of Germany in the center of Europe.
British elites pored over Roman histories in part because of their fascination with a previous great empire, but also because they were looking for lessons in managing vast swaths of land on different continents. There was a demand, as it were, for people skilled in language, history, and imperial administration. This, however, ended up trumping the need to develop the engineers of the future. Britain’s power and reach also made it intoxicated with a sense of historic destiny, a trend fueled by a Protestant revival. The historian Correlli Barnett wrote (in the 1970s) that a “moral revolution” gripped England in the mid-nineteenth century, moving it away from the practical and reason-based society that had brought about the industrial revolution and toward one dominated by religious evangelicalism, excessive moralism, and romanticism.11
The United States could easily fall into a similar imperial trap. Every crisis around the world demands its attention and action. American tentacles and interests are spread as widely today as were Britain’s at the height of its empire. For those