New balance: what other countries can do about American power.

AuthorClarke, Jonathan
PositionOn Political Books - Taming American Power: The Global Response to U.S. Primacy - Book Review

Taming American Power: The Global Response to U.S. Primacy By Stephen M. Walt W.W. Norton, $27.95

If ever there was a sign that the days of the "axis of evil" and the preemptive belligerence of the 2002 National Security Strategy are drawing to an end, it may be found in this consistently interesting new book Taming American Power by Stephen Walt, the Robert and Renee Belfer Professor of International Affairs at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. A year ago, such a book would have raged at the inadequacies of the administration's policy. Today, the outlook is more forward oriented. Rather than indulging in a head-on confrontation with the "Bush doctrine," Walt implicitly assumes that its failures are now so manifest that its time has passed. The task for mainstream foreign-policy thinkers is thus not to reslay the beast but to design a better policy.

Walt's starting point is the reality of American power. On this, his analysis is conventional. He says that the United States "enjoys an asymmetry of power unseen since the emergence of the modern state system." For many analysts, particularly those attracted to Charles Krauthammer's celebrated "unipolar moment" theory dating from 1990, this is where the debate begins and ends. For them, the question is solely, as Walt puts it, of "what should the United States do with its power?" It is worth pointing out that adherents to this theory are not all conservative, as evidenced by then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright's equally celebrated question in 1993 to then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell. "What are saving this superb military for, Colin, if we can't use it?" Walt shows that this approach has produced a debate that is almost exclusively America-centric, military-dependent, and flat-footed.

Walt's great contribution is to turn this debate around. He is as keen as anyone to forward America's national interest, but he shows that to do so, policy makers need to understand that American power is not the only variable in the international arena, and that analysis needs to include the likely reaction of competitors. He thus frames the key question as "what can other states do about American power?" In doing so, he takes direct aim at those (mainly British) romanticists of empire like Niall Ferguson who assert that the only threat to American power comes from the "absence of a will to power."

In refuting this approach (which Walt does with unfailing courtesy), he updates...

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