The World America Made by Robert Kagan Read Free Book Online Page A

centuries. That order was far from perfect: it produced many wars, an aggressive imperialism, and the widespread oppression of nonwhite races, but it also produced the conditions for an era of great human advances. By the late nineteenth century British control of the seas and the balance of great powers on the European continent together had provided the relative security and stability to allow a growth in prosperity, a modest if tenuous expansion of personal freedoms, anda world knit closer by the revolutions in commerce and communication we today call globalization. It kept peace among the great powers for almost four decades after the Napoleonic Wars, and for another four decades after the wars of German unification. It was so successful that many concluded at the dawn of the twentieth century that mankind had reached a summit of evolution and that major war and tyranny had become obsolete.
    Yet with the outbreak of World War I, the age of settled peace and advancing liberalism—of European civilization approaching its pinnacle—collapsed into an age of hyper-nationalism, despotism, and economic calamity. The once promising spread of democracy and liberalism halted and then reversed course, leaving a handful of outnumbered and besieged democracies living nervously in the shadow of their newly fascist and totalitarian neighbors. Suddenly it was a world filled with predatory leaders sitting atop predatory powers. The collapse of the British and European orders in the twentieth century did not produce a new dark age—though if Nazi Germany and imperial Japan had won the war, it might have—but the cataclysm it did produce was, in its own way, no less devastating.
    Would the end of the present American order have less dire consequences? That is a question worth asking now, as so many contemplate the prospect of American decline. A surprising number of American intellectuals, politicians, and policy makers greet that prospect with equanimity. There is a general sense that the end of the era of American preeminence need not mean the end of the present liberal international order. The expectation, if not assumption,is that the good qualities of that order—the democracy, the prosperity, the peace among great powers—can transcend the decline of American power and influence. Even with diminished American power, the political scientist G. John Ikenberry writes, “the underlying foundations of the liberal international order will survive and thrive.” 2 And there is an accompanying view that American decline is in any case already a fact of life, so whether it is a good thing or a bad thing, there is nothing we can do about it.
    Against this backdrop, it is worth exploring to what degree the present world order depends on American power and its unique qualities. What would it mean for the future if the international order were no longer shaped primarily by the United States and like-minded allied nations? Who or what would take America’s place? And there is another set of questions, equally important: Is America really in decline? Or are Americans in danger of committing preemptive superpower suicide out of a misplaced fear of declining power?

IT’S A WONDERFUL WORLD ORDER
    I N THE END, THE decision is in the hands of Americans. Decline, as Charles Krauthammer has observed, is a choice. It is not an inevitable fate—at least not yet. In
It’s a Wonderful Life
, George Bailey finds himself in a terrible crisis—a fiscal crisis, as it happens—with his bank about to be ruined and his family sent into poverty. He decides that the world would be better off without him and therefore to take his own life. But he is stopped by an angel who takes him on a Dickensian tour of what his town would have looked like had he never been born. The town, now dominated by the greedy banker, is rougher and seedier, more brutal, and also sadder. People who had been good and generous have turned nasty and selfish. Others havebeen ruined.