The Present Opportunity.

• Author: Garfinkle, Adam
• Position: Column - Editorial

THE IMPRESSIVE depth of insight that has abounded on the pages of The National Interest since its inception is due to its many talented authors and to Owen Harries, the master editor who alternately welcomed and summoned those authors to his designs. After several years away from Mr. Harries' tutelage, all but kidnapped by a retired four-star Air Force general, I have been chosen to carry on his work. Having paid close attention to the magazine's progress in my recent captivity; I want to use the present opportunity of writing in this space to illustrate what can come of a careful reading of these pages. Here, then, is a sketch of the international circumstances in which the United States now finds itself, and what those circumstances suggest for American strategy; it derives in the main from the labors of others, nearly all of them published in The National Interest.

AS SEVERAL commentators have observed, the period since the end of the Cold War has taken its most commonly applied name--the post-Cold War era--from what it is most prominently not: It is not the Cold War. For obvious reasons, this is not a very satisfying state of affairs for describing the affairs of state, but it has led to an edifying game played by a coterie of policymakers, analysts and journalists to "name that era."

The early frontrunner in this contest was the "new world order", a candidate still in vogue in academia, particularly outside the United States. But being merely a rubric for a series of three speeches, only one of which was ever delivered by President George Bush pere, and having so little actual content that it left far too much to the imaginations of cloistered college professors and deadline-panicked newspaper columnists, this contender soon fell out of the running in serious circles.

In due course the field narrowed to three claimants. The first is the "era of globalization", a popular term--as James Kurth argues in this issue [1]--because it points to a cluster of U.S.-promoted technology-driven phenomena that have imposed themselves on international reality in recent years. But much like "new world order" it is variously used and often abused. Not only are many different and sometimes inconsistent meanings attached to it, but reality threatens to tarnish its generally positive gloss. Some thoughtful observers fear that the acceleration in global economic activity wrought by more integrated financial and trade networks may also work in a negative direction, not least because a previous epoch of globalization turned out to come equipped with a powerful reverse gear. [2] So "globalization" has not yet won the competition outright.

The second serious contender is "the unipolar moment" of American primacy, introduced by Charles Krauthammer in l989. [3] A member of TNI's editorial board, Krauthammer has lately returned to this theme, proclaiming a Bush Administration doctrine of unilateralism. [4] It is not clear if; or to what extent, Krauthammer himself favors this approach to U.S. foreign policy, or whether he is merely describing what he sees. (He has promised to clarify the matter in a future issue of The National Interest.) Also unclear is whether the second Bush Administration has such a doctrine, or whether Krauthammer simply presented it with one as he did in the case of the first. Perhaps he will illuminate this question, too.

Either way, this choice of locution--less sonorous variations include "Pax Americana" or "American hegemony"--is very much in the running. Again, however, it is more popular abroad than it is in the United States because, in practical terms, American policymakers do not feel hegemonic. They know that, despite America's preponderance of power in the world as a whole, they cannot easily have their way anywhere--not even in the Western Hemisphere. This is partly because the balance of interests can be as important as the balance of power, so that U.S. preponderance is offset in particular regions by the larger stakes and more focused attention spans of local protagonists.

It is also partly because American primacy is a function of its capacity to provide common security goods and, by so doing, to reassure others of its generally benign intentions. That being the case, as Josef Joffe points out, U.S. attempts to impose itself on others are frequently self-negating. [5] As another TNI board member, Samuel Huntington, has explained more broadly: "The superpower's efforts to create a unipolar system stimulate greater effort by the major powers to move toward a multipolar one", resulting, for the time being at least, in a "uni-multipolar system." This means that the "settlement of key international issues requires action by the single superpower but always with some combination of other states; the single superpower, can, however, veto action on key issues by combinations of other states." [6] In this formulation, American primacy is real enough, but American unipolarity or hegemony is not.

The third candidate is, of course, Francis Fukuyama's declaration of "the end of History." [7] After an initial spasm of mass misunderstanding, it became clear that Fukuyama was no apocalyptic. He was referring to a philosophical legacy, that of Hegel, and he meant something roughly similar to what Daniel Bell had suggested nearly thirty years earlier: the "end of ideology", the end of serious practical argument over first principles of political philosophy. In the 1960s, however, many otherwise intelligent people believed that a homogenizing technological juggernaut would bring about the convergence of capitalist and socialist systems and, in so doing, reduce all questions of value in politics to mere...