The Post-American World - Fareed Zakaria [115]
4. Order à la carte. Among scholars and practitioners of international relations, there is one predominant theory about how and why international peace endures. It holds that the most stable system is one with a single dominant power that maintains order. Britain and the United States have played this role for two hundred years. In each case, the hegemon was the dominant economic and military player, becoming the market and lender of last resort, home to the world financial center, and holder of the reserve currency. In politico-military terms, each secured the sea lanes, balanced against rising threats, and intervened when it thought necessary to prevent disorder. Although both made many mistakes, the stability of the system and the success of the world economy and the open societies it created are an extraordinary legacy of Anglo-American hegemony.
What if that hegemony is waning? America no longer has the only large market in the world. The dollar is unlikely to retain its totemic position forever as the reserve currency, yielding to a basket that is largely composed of euros and dollars but includes other currencies too. In certain areas—the South China Sea, for example—U.S. military force is likely to be less relevant than that of China. In international negotiations, America will have to bargain and compromise with others. Does all this add up to instability and disorder?
Not necessarily. Two hundred years of Anglo-American hegemony has in fact created a system that is not as fragile as it might have been in the 1920s and 1930s. (When British power waned, America was unwilling to step in, and Europe fell through the cracks.) The basic conception of the current system—an open world economy, multilateral negotiations—has wide acceptance. And new forms of cooperation are growing. Anne-Marie Slaughter has written about how legal systems are constructing a set of transnational standards without anyone’s forcing them to do so—creating a bottom-up, networked order.13 Not every issue will lend itself to such stabilization, but many will. In other words, the search for a superpower solution to every problem may be futile and unnecessary. Smaller work-arounds might be just as effective.
The United States should embrace such an ad hoc order. Richard Haass, the former head of Policy Planning at the State Department, has creatively called for “à la carte multilateralism.”14 No one institution or organization is always right, no one framework ideal. The UN might work for one problem, NATO for another, the OAS for a third. And for a new issue like climate change, perhaps a new coalition that involves private business and nongovernmental groups would make the most sense. International life is only going to get messier. Being accommodating, flexible, and adaptable is likely to produce better results on the ground than insisting on a pure approach based on the notion that the only way to solve international problems is the way we have solved international problems in the past, in decades when the state was unusually strong. A more organic international system in which problems are addressed through a variety of different structures and solutions can create its own kind of layered stability. It is not as appealing as a more formal structure of peace, rooted in and directed through one or two central organizations in New York and Geneva. But it might be a more realistic and durable order.
The search for order is not simply an American problem. If the rise of the rest also brings about a rise in national pride and interest and assertiveness, it has the potential to produce disorder everywhere. At the same time, this rise is happening in a world in which peace and stability pay great rewards—giving China, India, and even Russia large incentives to