Beyond Dominance

The central idea underlying American grand strategy since the end of the Cold War has been dominance -- the notion that the United States is so powerful and virtuous that it can pretty much remake the world on its own terms. For most of its two terms in office, the Clinton administration pursued a form of soft dominance, in that it sought to legitimize its policies through America's traditional alliances and through the use of international bodies like the International Monetary Fund. The Bush administration has opted for a more explicit form of dominance, arguing that the United States must remain the world's dominant military and economic power, not only to discourage the emergence of other rival powers but also to maintain world order. In pursuing dominance, it has sought to free itself from the constraints of alliances and multilateral institutions, preferring to emphasize the benefits of coalitions of the willing and the ability of the United States to act with maximum freedom, whether it be against rogue states or international terrorist groups.

Dominance may be a seductive idea that has won the support of Democrats and Republicans alike. But as a guiding concept for American grand strategy, it has resulted in bad, and sometimes even reckless, policies that have in the end weakened America's position in the world. There are two fatal flaws with the notion of dominance. The first is that it does not reflect the realities of today's world. The second is that it does not work.

For most observers of American foreign policy, dominance is an inescapable fact given America's overwhelming military, economic, and cultural power. The only question is how the United States uses that power. But this triumphalist view of American dominance rests not only on a misunderstanding of power and influence in today's world, but also on a misconception of America's relative power position vis-à-vis other states. The United States may be the world's most powerful country, but that does not mean that American supremacy or unipolarity is the defining feature of international relations today.

To begin with, military power has limited utility with respect to most international problems and thus yields less influence than it once did. Unlike during the Cold War, America's wealthy allies in Europe and East Asia do not face a specific military threat. Nor do they see one on the horizon, residual worries about China in East Asia notwithstanding. Instead, their security problems arise from the disorder and violence that accompanies failed states and failed development, and from unsettled nationalist and separatist struggles. U.S. military power is largely irrelevant to most of these problems. To be sure, U.S military force was arguably helpful in restoring order in the Balkans in the late 1990s, but European countries have now assumed the overwhelming burden of peacekeeping and nation-building in Bosnia, Serbia, Macedonia and, increasingly, in Afghanistan as well.

The situation in East Asia is more complex in that the American military presence there arguably adds a dimension of security reassurance for China, Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea that still gives the United States leverage in the region. But even in East Asia, there is a growing sense that the United States may no longer be the stabilizing force it once was. China has abandoned its previously confrontational posture toward many of its neighbors, particularly over its territorial claims in the South China Sea (although its stance toward Taiwan still remains worrisome), and has generally assumed a more responsible role in the region, particularly with regard to North Korea. Meanwhile, Washington's new emphasis on preventive war, with its on again/off again tough talk toward North Korea has made many East Asians uneasy.

While America's allies see U.S. military power as less central to their own security, they have actually become more important to our own. Indeed, there has been something of a reversal of security roles over the past decade. The United States now needs the help and security cooperation of Europe, Russia, China, South Korea, and Japan more than they need our military protection. The noted foreign policy analyst Robert Kagan, in his book Of Paradise and Power, attributes the European preference for softer forms of power to Europe's military weakness. That may be so, but it is also a product of two much larger trends. The first is the growing realization on the part of most Europeans that they are no longer vulnerable to any foreseeable conventional military threat, and that they have a more than adequate military capability for achieving their principal regional security goals. To be sure, they could reorganize their militaries to project power better, but they have been reasonably successful in fulfilling their peacekeeping and nation-building missions in the Balkans and Afghanistan. Secondly, they believe, with some justification, that potential threats to European security are best handled by a combination of political, economic, and diplomatic measures tailored to each case: constructive engagement, as with Iran and Libya; conflict resolution and economic support with regard to the Palestinians and Israelis; nation-building and peacekeeping, as in the former Yugoslavia; and economic development and political reform in Eastern Europe and North Africa.

If many supporters of dominance overstate the role of military power in securing world order, they also tend to discount American weaknesses. In addition to bearing burdens for world security, dominant great powers generally export capital, investing in the infrastructure and industries of less developed countries. At the height of its imperial power, in 1913, Britain exported capital on a scale equal to nine percent of its GDP, financing much of the infrastructure of the United States, Canada, Australia, and Argentina. By contrast, the United States imports capital, not just from Europe and Japan but also from capital-poor emerging economies, to the tune of nearly six percent of GDP. Its international debt is approaching 30 percent of GDP, a level normally associated with developing economies, and which will make it vulnerable to the political decisions as well as to the financial problems of other countries in the decades to come.

By investing so heavily in military power, the United States has undercut its international influence in other critical ways. Foreign assistance has been out of favor for years in nearly all political circles in the United States, but it still matters when it comes to building influence in many parts of the world. Washington's spending on foreign assistance is just one-nineteenth of its military budget and ranks last among OECD countries as a percentage of GDP. And U.S. assistance is heavily concentrated in just a few countries: Israel, Egypt, Colombia, and Jordan. The United States does serve as a large market for many economies, which gives it leverage and influence, but it is constrained from using that leverage because it is dependent on the world market for so many essential goods as well as for financing its external deficit. More than 50 percent of the manufactured goods that Americans now buy are made outside the United States, up from 31 percent in 1987, and the United States needs to import nearly $600 billion in capital annually to cover its external deficit.

By virtue of its lopsided investment in military power, the United States does not have very much, in terms of financial assistance, to offer many countries in the world today, or, for that matter, very much to threaten them with either. This is one of the reasons why so many countries on the U.N. Security Council felt safe in defying the United States on the war against Iraq. Nothing exposed the myth of American dominance more than Washington's inability to get the votes of countries like Chile and Mexico, not to mention Guinea and Cameroon.

A GRAND STRATEGY OF DOMINANCE ultimately rests on the simple idea of a unipolar world, the idea that the United States is the only power that counts in the world today. That is why some advocates of dominance are so critical of France's avowed goal of creating a multipolar world, attributing it to France's superpower envy. Yet for all practical purposes, a multipolar world already exists. On a global plane, the United States may appear to be the world's only superpower, spending more than the next 15 countries combined on military power. But viewed at the level of its key strategic relationships with Europe, Russia, China, and Japan, the United States in each case needs them to achieve its foreign policy goals as much or more than they need the United States. In other words, at the bilateral level, the other established and emerging powers of the world enjoy either strategic parity with the United States or a favorable balance of power and interest. The balance is likely to tilt even further in favor of Europe, Russia, Japan, and China in the future -- in part because the American market will become less important to them -- and in part because America's growing dependence on foreign capital will increase its international debt burden, making it more vulnerable to the policies and attitudes of its principal creditors.

Take the case of America's relationship with the European Union. Unipolarists like to focus attention on Europe's military weaknesses and the lack of a unified European foreign policy. But, contrary to conventional wisdom, Europe enjoys an attractive position vis-à-vis the United States in that Washington needs the help and support of Europe more than Europe needs the United States. If looked at objectively, Europe is no longer dependent on the United States for any real security or defense needs. In fact, the European nations of NATO and the European Union now have primacy over their own security and over the security of the immediate European Rim region stretching from Ukraine in the north to the Balkans in the south. As much as certain Europeans might like the United States to do more to help create stability in Ukraine or maintain peace in Kosovo and Macedonia, Washington has essentially removed itself from these security-related concerns. Europe's main security worry vis-à-vis the United States today is of an entirely different nature -- not that Washington will abandon Europe, but that it will use its power in the Middle East in a way that will destabilize the region and create greater Western-Islamic tensions.

But even in this case, Europe may have more influence and leverage over the United States than has been commonly recognized. Even though Washington is trying to build a flexible military structure that is less dependent on its allies, the United States still relies on European bases and infrastructure for non-NATO missions, and it still needs a measure of European support and participation to gain domestic support for those missions. Beyond this, Washington depends upon European Union members for peacekeeping and nation-building tasks, not just in the Balkans but in Afghanistan and most likely eventually in Iraq, and it benefits from European assistance for other U.S. security-related concerns, such as support for the Palestinian Authority. This is not to mention the importance of Europe's active cooperation in stopping international terrorism and nuclear weapons proliferation.

In many ways, Europe is better positioned to pursue a project to build democracy in the Middle East than is the United States. While the United States has had very little success in helping create stable democracies in any part of the world over the last two decades, the European Union has a solid track record when it comes to democracy building, particularly as it relates to the candidate countries of Central and Eastern Europe, its earlier missteps in the Balkans notwithstanding. For much of the last decade, the world has heard repeatedly about the superiority of the American model. But it has been the European Union that has had the most success in exporting democracy and fostering economic reform.

Moreover, as a continent made up of several of the larger creditor economies, Europe has the financial wherewithal to do more in North Africa, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe. While the United States is dependent upon European as well as East Asian capital to fuel U.S. growth and to pay for its international policies, the nations of the European Union continue to export capital to the developing world as well as to the United States. In addition, the European Union now has as much or more influence with other key members of the international community -- such as Brazil, Russia, and Turkey -- than the United States does and often pursues policies that better reflect their interests than American policies do. It thus would be able to enlist them in European projects in a way that the United States has not been able to do.

What is true in the case of America's relationship with Europe is true to a lesser degree with respect to its relationships with Russia, China, and Japan. The United States needs a reasonably strong Russia not just to maintain the safety of its nuclear weapons but to help balance an increasingly powerful China, check Taliban-like extremists and terrorists in Central Asia and the Caspian Sea, help stop nuclear proliferation in Iran, and help stabilize the world oil market. In return, Washington has very little to offer Moscow now that Russia has recovered its economic independence from the International Monetary Fund and has begun to repatriate its own capital, except possibly for its blessing of Moscow's sometimes misguided effort to crush the Chechen separatists and support for Russia's bid for membership in the World Trade Organization.

In recent years, the balance of interest and power with China has shifted to one of mutual dependence. China has neutralized American power in a number of ways: by modernizing its nuclear forces; by adopting a good neighbor policy in East Asia; by stepping up its diplomacy toward the resolution of the North Korea crisis; and by becoming both one of the largest suppliers of consumer goods to the United States as well as one of its biggest creditors. Over the past year, the central bank of China has become the largest purchaser of U.S. Treasury bills and, together with the Japanese central bank, funded 45 percent of the U.S. current account deficit in the second quarter of 2003. China has also become an increasingly important destination for Japanese goods and capital, including for Japanese companies relocating production abroad, and has taken the lead in establishing a free trade zone with the countries of Southeast Asia. This has reduced Japan's dependence on the United States and strengthened the foundations of an emerging East Asian economic community that one day may represent yet another challenge to America's international economic position.

Many advocates of dominance would prefer to ignore these developments because they contradict the appealing notion of a unipolar world. But viewed from the perspective of American strategic relations with Europe and Asia, the central feature of international relations today is not American unipolarity but the once popular notion of interdependence. Elsewhere, the troubled underdeveloped regions of the world, struggling with disorder, bad governance, and arrested development, if not outright poverty, do not seem to be the beneficiaries of American dominance. In these regions, the central challenge is not so much a great power competition for influence than it is the collective weakness of the developed world to do anything about their problems.

THE ULTIMATE LEGITIMATING APPEAL of American dominance -- of American empire, if you will -- is that it is good for the world. Tellingly, however, two of the regions where the United States has enjoyed dominance over the last three decades -- the Middle East and our own neighborhood -- are two of the most troubled areas of the world. The problems of the Middle East are well known: an increasingly bloody conflict between the Palestinians and Israelis; authoritarian Arab governments that are fearful of greater democracy; its ranking near the bottom in regional lists of human development; feudal allies that fund Islamic fundamentalists and that breed bitter and disillusioned young men who dream of destroying the United States and establishing a single Islamic state.

The record of dominance in our neighborhood is no less discouraging. Colombia is the victim of a seemingly endless civil war fueled in part by America's drug habit. Venezuela suffers from deep-seated civil strife and is unraveling economically. Fidel Castro continues to preside over a failed socialist experiment in Cuba, propped up in part by American hostility. Other countries in the Caribbean still struggle with underdevelopment and are too reliant on a shadow economy of drugs, arms, and money laundering. Haiti is one of the poorest and most miserable places on the planet. Mexico might seem to be one of the few bright spots in this picture in light of its progress toward democracy until one considers that the standard of living of 80 percent of its population has fallen over the last 15 years and that it survives only by exporting its people to the United States.

This points to the second problem with dominance as a strategic policy: that wherever it has been tried it has failed. Even the softer form of dominance practiced by the Clinton administration led to bad policies and overreaching. The Clinton administration thought it could remake the international economic order by pushing financial liberalization and other policies known as the Washington Consensus onto the emerging economies of Asia and Latin America. But that effort helped produce the Asian financial crisis, which almost brought down the global economy. As a result of this overzealous and misguided effort, the United States now has less influence in Asia than it did a decade ago and is more dependent on Japan and China for their capital, even though their financial markets remain largely closed to American financial institutions. Meanwhile, the Washington Consensus has been discredited in most parts of the world, especially in those Asian producer-oriented economies that would benefit from some liberal reforms.

The Bush administration has made a similar mistake in waging an unnecessary war in Iraq, tying down a significant portion of its military power, and making American forces an easy target for Islamic extremists as well as for disgruntled Iraqis. The United States may ultimately pay a heavy financial price, as the costs of the occupation will be a drain on American finances for years to come. This will not only constrain needed investments at home but undermine America's ability to finance other important foreign policy goals.

Over the last decade, the United States has benefited from a “foreign policy bubble” -- from an exaggerated sense not only of its power and influence but of its contribution to international peace and security. The Clinton and Bush administrations alike fueled that bubble with endless spin about America's foreign policy accomplishments and the superiority of the American way. But with the Clinton administration's ill-fated program of international financial liberalization, followed by the NASDAQ crash and the revelations of corporate governance scandals, the bubble of American economic dominance burst. And now by showing the limitations of American military power, and its dependence upon other countries to secure Iraq and Afghanistan, the Bush administration may have pricked the bubble of American military dominance as well.

THE ARCHITECTS OF DOMINANCE are correct that American foreign policy works best when it combines high moral goals with real world national interests. But, as we have seen, they are wrong to make dominance the central organizing principle of American grand strategy. In doing so, they are ignoring the foundations of world order that enabled the United States to become a secure and prosperous society while establishing the basis for a lasting peace among the great powers of North America, Europe, and East Asia. The generally peaceful orientation of the foreign policies of today's China, India, and Russia as well as of Europe, Japan, and South Korea is the product not of American military dominance (although America's military power played a role) but of the pull of a global economy and a system of commerce that offered their people middle-class prosperity. These countries have for the most part subordinated ideology and great power ambition to economic development and commercial prosperity, and emerging powers -- including middle-level powers like Malaysia, Indonesia, Turkey, and even Iran -- are beginning to follow suit.

The greatest accomplishment of American foreign policy has been the creation of a system of political and economic cooperation that tied together Europe, East Asia, and the United States into a growing world economy and that has acted as a magnetic pull for other countries. This system, of course, has not been perfect, but it has created the conditions for a great power entente -- a global concert of powers committed to creating wealth and managing international conflict. The central over-arching challenge of the early twenty-first century is how to update the foundations of this system so that it offers a secure place not just for the already prosperous countries of Europe, North America, and East Asia but for emerging powers and struggling developing countries as well.

But to do that successfully, U.S. policy thinkers must put aside such seductive notions as dominance and avoid solitary American military crusades against rogue states and terrorist networks. Instead, it must rediscover its talent for world order building -- for establishing alliances, institutions, and networks of government and non-government actors committed to common international goals. What threatens the American-inspired system is not a rival military power or even a set of potential military powers, but disorder and failed development. And at the heart of the specter of disorder is a growing governance gap that cannot be filled by American power alone.

This governance gap is the result of the growing complexity of world affairs and the global economy, on the one hand, and the weakness of existing international and regional institutions, including such informal organizations as the G8, on the other. Everywhere one looks there are problems that call out not just for international cooperation but for more collective action and resources: failed states in Africa, Asia, and Latin America; separatist conflicts in Central and South Asia, including one that could lead to nuclear war between Pakistan and India; AIDS and other epidemics; pollution and global warming; energy shortages; underdevelopment and recurrent financial crises in the developing world; and global criminal gangs trafficking in arms, drugs, and women. Indeed, the principal problem of world order is the huge gap between the demand for international public goods (from military protection to international development assistance) to help rectify these problems and their supply.

The agenda of dominance has exacerbated this gap in two ways: by denigrating international law and many international institutions, and by discouraging the emergence of other responsible powers willing to bear a greater share of the burden for order keeping and the management of the world economy. As outlined earlier, the defining feature of the international system is not American dominance but multipolarity and the collective weakness of the great powers to deal with the many transnational problems of failed development and failed states. Washington's insistence upon American dominance has provoked three counterproductive reactions on the part of the potential contributors to world order. It has caused countries to resist American power or to free ride on it -- or, even worse, to both resist and free ride. Neoconservatives in the Bush administration do not seem to understand that Europe and, to a lesser degree, Japan, Korea, and Russia are powerful enough to resist many American initiatives that threaten their interests and strong enough to go it alone in their own regions if need be. This is why the United States has lost influence in the two regions that matter most -- in Europe and East Asia -- even as it flexes its military muscles in Iraq, and why the governance gap will grow wider if the United States continues to insist on dominance.

If anything, the troubled American occupation of Iraq should underscore the fact that the United States lacks the resources and order-keeping capabilities to deal with the problems of disorder and failed governance alone. The first principle of American foreign policy, therefore, ought to be to encourage the development of other responsible centers of power and authority capable of working together to expand zones of peace and prosperity and to manage the instability caused by failed governance in the developing world. This, in turn, means harnessing the efforts of the world's other great regional powers -- the European Union, Russia, China, India, Japan, South Korea, Australia, Canada, and Brazil. Many of these efforts will be regional in scope, but they would be part of a larger system of international governance committed to common world-order goals. Indeed, it is only by sharing power and building international institutions, not by insisting on American dominance, that we can hope to close the international governance gap.

THE FIRST STEP TOWARD putting this first principle into practice is to recognize that the answer to rogue states and terrorist groups, like al Qaeda, is not the unrestrained exercise of American military power, but the building of elaborate networks of regional cooperation embracing understandings relating to police and intelligence collaboration, as well as to the exercise of economic and military power. Just as containment and political and economic engagement brought about peace between Europe, Russia, China, Japan, and the United States, a new grand strategy must manage potentially revisionist powers by embedding them in regional security orders that constrain them while offering them the stability and encouragement needed for successful economic development. The most pressing challenges in this regard relate to the suspected nuclear ambitions of Iran and North Korea, and the need for new security arrangements in the Persian Gulf and East Asia.

There are no easy answers for dealing with the nuclear aspirations of these vastly different countries. A rogue-state strategy aimed at isolating and pressuring North Korea and Iran is likely to be counterproductive and ultimately destabilizing for the regions concerned. On the other hand, a policy of engagement would require is to overlook some unpleasant features of both regimes, and in the case of North Korea would smack of giving in to blackmail. The way out of this seeming dilemma is to think of engagement as a part of a larger multilateral process of establishing a new security order involving great power cooperation in each region. The eventual reunification of Korea must be at the core of a regional security order that further establishes cooperation between China, South Korea, Japan, Russia, and the United States. And the peaceful evolution of Iran is central to a new security order for developing the oil resources of the Caspian Sea and the Persian Gulf, and for curbing Taliban extremists in the region. Such a security order in turn requires the cooperation and support of the European Union, Turkey, Russia, the United States, India, and China.

Each region, of course, has its own unique challenges. But in each case American policy should be guided by three overriding ideas. The first is to elevate common economic development objectives over geopolitical rivalry. The second is to create common security arrangements that reduce the relevance of military power and nuclear weapons to each country's security. And the third is to create a true concert of regional powers by internationalizing the American leadership role, by sharing responsibility with Europe and Russia in the Persian Gulf, and with Japan, China, South Korea, and Russia in East Asia.

In the case of the Persian Gulf and the Caspian Sea region, the United States needs to see a reforming and modernizing Iran as part of the solution to regional instability, despite differences over Tehran's support for Hezbollah and some other aspects of Iranian policy. The United States needs to understand that Iran's drive for nuclear weapons is not mainly an anti-American act but a much more complex response to regional relations: a mixture of a desire for greater regional influence; worries about a resurgent and U.S.-allied Iraq, which after all invaded Iran in the 1980s; and concerns about the other nuclear powers that surround it. Finally, the United States also must understand that an effort to establish a new set of security understandings between Iraq and Iran and their neighbors cannot be an American project alone, but must be a regional effort that is supported by the European Union and Russia.

In East Asia, the challenge facing the United States and its regional partners is how to simultaneously manage the nuclear weapons ambitions of North Korea and its possible economic and social implosion. The Bush administration has been correct to address the question of North Korea by means of a multilateral process, but for too long it was wrong to refuse to consider the kind of security guarantees that a paranoid North Korean leadership may feel it needs in order to give up its nuclear weapons program. The administration also failed by not supporting a broader program of economic and political engagement that Seoul and Beijing had suggested. The principal elements of a new framework for the Korean peninsula would entail both a Korean peace agreement with security guarantees for both North Korea and South Korea, and an economic program aimed at opening up North Korea to trade and investment. This in turn would create the foundation for a broader regional security order that would eventually include multilateral arms control and other common security understandings that would constrain future geopolitical rivalry in the region.

THE UNITED STATES, similarly, needs to adopt a new collective approach to the growing rejectionism of the Arab and Islamic worlds to an American-inspired international system of entente and middle-class prosperity. The United States has a very large stake in the outcome of the struggle within many Arab and Islamic societies between the modernists, on the one hand, and the reactionaries (those who oppose modernization) and the revolutionaries (the Osama bin Ladens, who want to create a single theocratic state), on the other. But, an American project to democratize and remake the Middle East, as suggested by the Bush administration and as supported by some neo-liberal hawks, is likely to be counterproductive and possibly even catastrophic for both the United States and the people of the region -- in part, because the United States lacks the legitimacy it needs to promote democracy in this part of the world and in part because it alone does not have the resources or experience to do so.

The challenge is how to support and encourage the modernists without making the United States the issue in such a way that strengthens the reactionaries and the revolutionaries instead. Even under the best circumstances, this will be difficult to achieve. The answer broadly is for the United States to internationalize its Middle East policy -- to reduce America's dominant, in-your-face presence in the region by sharing responsibility with the European Union, NATO, Russia, and the United Nations. In fact, American policy in the Middle East has been most successful when Washington has actively involved its European partners and the United Nations. Such was the case with the progress on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from the Madrid conference in 1991 to the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993, and with the substantial disarmament of Iraq that occurred in the early years of the UN containment and inspections regime.

The first step in this process of internationalization, of course, must involve an early and successful end to the American occupation of Iraq, combined, ideally, with an effort to give the United Nations and the Arab League a larger role in overseeing the transition process. An equally important element of internationalization would involve turning the current American road map for peace, which began as the European-inspired Quartet Plan, into a real international solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Under Washington's leadership, the road map has unfortunately come to replicate all the problems of the American-sponsored Oslo process, enabling Israel to concoct endless excuses for delaying the dismantling of settlements and its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. A better approach would be to turn over the occupied territories, including the Israeli settlements within them, to a UN/NATO trusteeship and to establish an American-led NATO peace force for ensuring security, with the goal of establishing a recognized Palestinian state within six to eighteen months.

Only such a bold internationalist approach is likely to break the grip extremists on both sides have over the current peace process and to ensure Israel's long-term security. There is no way to overstate the importance of a viable Palestinian state to the political future of the Arab world, or to America's hope for normalizing its relationship with the Islamic world. If, in two years, there are still Israeli tanks in Hebron, Ramallah, and other Palestinian towns, any modernization or democratization that occurs in the Arab world will take a decidedly anti-American direction. The United States needs to help Israel understand, by pressure if necessary, that its future lies not with the subjugation of Palestinians in the occupied territories, but as the engine for commerce and economic growth in the Middle East.

This raises the final dimension of internationalizing American policy in the Middle East -- namely, joining forces with the European Union and the world's financial institutions in putting together a program for regional economic development that would take priority over an American effort to democratize Arab societies. As suggested earlier, an American effort at democratization may only further radicalize the region, and force painful policy choices on future administrations. The current deplorable state of democracy in the region is less a function of Arab political culture than of failed development, and thus our first priority must be development and jobs as well as free elections.

The idea of internationalizing American policy in the Middle East will be bitterly resisted by powerful figures in and around the Bush administration. But many of these same figures are responsible for the current failed order in the region. Americans not concerned solely with recycling Saudi petrodollars into arms sales or with perpetuating Israel's occupation of the West Bank should welcome this effort because it would serve American interests better than does the current American monopoly. The United States needs a Europe and Russia that can act as a check on America's worst tendencies in this part of the world. For more than three decades now, American policy has been its own worst enemy -- embracing the shah of Iran in a misguided authoritarian effort at modernization, befriending and building up a power-hungry Saddam Hussein, arming the Afghan mujahidin and Arab Afghanis, cozying up to Central Asian dictators in a failed bid for control of Caspian Sea oil, stroking a calcified and repressive Saudi royal family even as they export Islamic extremism to other parts of the region, and tolerating, if not giving aid and comfort to, the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. This is not to mention the utter failure of the United States to advance democracy and economic development -- despite billions of dollars of aid to Egypt and billions of dollars of arms sales to the Saudi, Jordanian, and Kuwaiti governments. In short, the burden of proof should be on those who resist internationalization and continue to insist on the United States having a free hand in the Middle East.

FINALLY, THE NEXT ADMINISTRATION must fully accept the realities of a multipolar world by recommitting the United States to the vision of the world that Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his advisers had when they proposed the United Nations and the Bretton Woods institutions. Many advocates of dominance bitterly oppose the idea of a multipolar world, citing multipolarity as the cause of war and conflict in earlier periods of international relations. This is not just a selective reading of history but ignores America's own interests. In a multipolar world in which the United States may actually suffer from an unfavorable balance of power in each of its key bilateral relationships, it is in America's interest to try to constrain the freedom of other powers with international law and institutions. Indeed, the United States, being the most global power of all, has the greatest interest in a system of global governance.

An appreciation of the importance of global governance to a world order favorable to American interests requires, above all else, a renewed commitment on the part of the United States to the institutional architecture of world order. The United Nations, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Bank are all still essential, but they are badly in need of updating to reflect today's power relations and to meet today's international challenges. Given the growth of the world economy, the IMF has barely a fraction of the resources it had at its beginning, which helps explain why it has been so ineffective in dealing with the frequent financial crises of emerging economies. The World Bank has become a hodgepodge of feel-good development programs, rather than the catalyst for public investment it was meant to be. Both institutions need to be reshaped to be able to support the extension of middle-class prosperity in the developing world.

Meanwhile, the United Nations struggles with the growing demand for the international community to take on the task of nation-building in countries as diverse as Afghanistan, Iraq, Liberia, Cambodia, and Congo. These institutions will not be reinvented overnight, but the United States needs to devote more time to the questions of global architecture and less time trying to micromanage the remaking of countries that will only resent America's overbearing presence. That global architecture must include not just large multilateral institutions, like the World Bank and the IMF, but also a range of regional and mini-regional organizations. The world has become too complex to be governed either by a single dominant power or exclusively by universal global institutions that in many instances are too big to act effectively or too insensitive to existing regional differences. Indeed, the creation of a new layer of regional institutions holds the key to overcoming many of the problems with today's international organizations. It also holds the key to addressing many of the problems of failed governance and development that afflict so many countries in the developing world.

Recommitting the United States to a project of world order building -- by asking other countries to do more both regionally and globally -- is the best hope for preserving the best features of an American-inspired system of middle-class commerce and great power entente. It is therefore the best way to secure a world favorable to American interests and values.