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

Once he realizes how terrible this alternative world would be, and understands the special role he had played in making his own world what it was, he returns to his life and finds that, lo and behold, he is able to find a solution. With a little luck but also with the forces of good in the town that he had supported and encouraged, he solves his fiscal crisis and lives happily ever after.
    It is, of course, a Hollywood ending. In the real world, things do not have to end well. Empires and great powers rise and fall, and the only question is when. But the when does matter. Whether the United States begins to decline over the next two decades or not for another two centuries will matter a great deal, both to Americans and to the nature of the world they live in. Perhaps if Americans had a clearer picture of what might come after the American world order, they would be more inclined to continue struggling to preserve the world they have made, or at least to ensure that changes in the system do not undermine the order from which they, and others, have so greatly benefited.
    What would this require? Above all, it would mean working to shore up all three pillars—politics, economics, security—of what has made this age, with all its brutalities, a golden age for humanity. We have a tendency to separate politics, economics, and security—“ideals” from “interests,” support for democracy from defense of security—but in the American world order they have all been related.
    Start with the reality that a liberal world order will only be supported by liberal nations. The expectation that an authoritarian China or Russia will lend assistancein supporting democratic governance and liberal economic principles—and the two are intimately related—is folly. Americans and other liberal peoples who benefit from and support the present world order therefore have an interest in pressing for greater democratic and liberal reforms in the world’s authoritarian nations, including the two great-power autocracies. This is not because it’s just what Americans do, because supporting democracy is consistent with their principles and makes them feel good about themselves. The far more important reason is that the future of the liberal world order may depend on it. If it is true that the United States may eventually have to share global power with a richer and more powerful China, it will make a very big difference to the future world order whether China remains autocratic or begins to open up politically as well as economically. Would even a democratic Chinese superpower pose challenges for the United States? Of course it would. American influence would necessarily diminish relative to China’s. But at least a democratic China could be more easily trusted to uphold the liberal world order in which Americans could continue to thrive. It would be more akin to the transition between British and American dominance in the twentieth century. Just as the British could safely cede power to a rising United States, and just as the United States has repeatedly tried to cede power across the Atlantic to a unifying and peaceful democratic Europe, so Americans could have an easier time ceding some power and influence across the Pacific to a rising democratic China.
    More broadly, Americans also have an interest in whether the global trend is toward more democracies orwhether the world begins to experience that great “reverse wave” which has yet to arrive. They have a stake in the outcome of the Arab Spring, whether it produces a new crop of democracies in a part of the world that has known mostly autocracy or whether old autocratic ways, or new theocratic ways, triumph instead.
    In their economic policies, Americans need to continue promoting and strengthening the international free-trade and free-market regime. This, of course, means setting their own economy back on a course of sustainable growth. It does mean, as Friedman and others suggest,