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The U.S.: Managing Global Responsibilities
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19067 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
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1 / 1991 |
2,937 Words |
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Joseph S. Nye, Jr.
Joseph S. Nye, Jr., is director of the Harvard Center for
International Affairs and author of Bound to Lead: The
Changing Nature of American Power. |
In our planet's geology, the great tectonic plates shift slowly until a tension builds that we experience as an earthquake. World politics is sometimes similar. For the last 40 years, the world order rested on a seemingly stable bipolar structure of power that followed World War II. However, economics and political strains were building beneath the surface. The first earthquakes were felt with the Eastern European revolutions of 1989. Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait was another significant shake. And it is unlikely that all the tremors are over. The "Second Russian Revolution" is still in its early stages. The shape of a new world order remains open and fluid.
The decline in Soviet power has been accompanied by the economic consolidation of Europe and the rise of Japanese economic power. Early in the 1980s, the Reagan administration welcomed Japan's increased power as a contribution to containment of the Soviet threat. But by the end of the decade, 56 percent of the American public believed that economic competitors like Japan posed a greater threat to our national security than did military adversaries like the Soviet Union. The contrast between the beginning and end of the 1980s was dramatic.
Visions Of The Future
Despite a widespread sense that the world is changing and that containment of Soviet power is no longer sufficient as a strategy, there is little agreement upon appropriate goals of the future or strategies to deal with the new conditions they assume. Predictions and preferences often become intertwined in the opposing visions. Some people cling to the past and believe that Mikhail Gorbachev's replacement by a hardliner would lead to a restoration of the familiar bipolar conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union. While his replacement cannot be ruled out, and while a newly repressive Soviet regime would still control impressive military forces, the net effect would probably accelerate rather than arrest the Soviet economic decline of the past decade. Thus a return to bipolarity is unlikely.
Others, more fashionably, speak of a multipolar world. Japan and Germany, losers of the Second World War, have shown impressive gains in strength. But if the current view of multipolarity conjures up hopes of a return to a nineteenth-century (or 1930s) system with shifting alliances among a number of roughly equal powers, there will be disappointment, for that is not likely in the post-Cold War world. Japan remains one-dimensional in its economic power, and even a reunited Germany's economy is only
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