The dispensable nation?

• Author: Scowcroft, Brent
• Position: The Realist - United States

WE ARE still slow to recognize how revolutionary the changes sweeping the globe are. The forces unleashed by globalization are as important to determining the shape of the coming age as industrialization was two hundred years ago.

Will the United States remain the "indispensable nation" in global affairs under these new conditions? It depends on what you mean by the term.

There is one form of American indispensability that, thus far, no other power or bloc has demonstrated--not the Chinese, not the Europeans--the ability to mobilize the world community to undertake the great projects of the day. We, the United States, act as the catalyst. Yes, it is true that India can summon some of the other members of the developing world under its banner, and the Europeans have shown that it is possible for the nations of that continent to work together in support of shared goals. But at the end of the day, no other country can rally nations from different parts of the world and from both the developed and developing world to join truly multinational coalitions with a global reach.

But we are not indispensable in the sense that those of us in Washington are the only ones who know what needs to be done for the good of the entire human race, and that the rest of the world can either join us or be against us. And we have discovered over the last decade that it is increasingly difficult for us to build together any meaningful sort of coalition acting on that belief. It doesn't provide leadership and only engenders resistance.

Iran provides an excellent example of this. As long as we maintained the only solution to Tehran's apparent desire for a nuclear-weapons capacity was regime change, nothing happened. As we began to back away from that stance--first acquiescing in the approach taken by the EU-3, then more actively joining with the Europeans to pursue a diplomatic approach, and finally reaching out to the Russians and the Chinese--we have seen progress. We are not there yet, and there is no guarantee that we will succeed. But at the end of the day there is a solid front based on the consensus that Iran must not acquire nuclear arms.

One reason we have had difficulty in assembling coalitions, and why some have begun to talk about the emergence of a "new world order" where countries will seek to bypass the United States, is the fact that we are losing our aura of "specialness", the belief that the United States is a different sort of great power than the...