Goodbye US Hegemony?

Up-comer Parag Khana, a fellow at the New America Foundation, has a large piece on the decline of US Hegemony in the NYTimes Magazine today. It's a piece more interesting in its description than prescription. What it describes is a 21st century dominated by a 'Big Three' - Europe, United States, and China - each vying for enlarged spheres of influence, and competing for the favor of a swath of 'second-world' countries like Brazil, India, Iran, and Turkey. At one point, Khana admits, "The new multicolor map of influence — a Venn diagram of overlapping American, Chinese and European influence — is a very fuzzy read. No more “They’re with us” or “He’s our S.O.B.” Mubarak, Musharraf, Malaysia’s Mahathir and a host of other second-world leaders have set a new standard for manipulative prowess: all tell the U.S. they are its friend while busily courting all sides." This is not a failure of Khana's analysis, I think it captures the fluidity of contemporary international relations very well. Even the idea of a 'Big Three' over-states the the case, as Europe is not obviously unified as a state-like power, and because depending on the issue area, such as trade policy, other large, conglomerate powers might be relevant (like the India-Brazil-China spoilers at the international trade negotiations).

Khana suggests a few initiatives for the US, in this new fluid, tripolar world, but they seem oddly out of step with the structural transformations he describes: 'channel your inner J.F.K.' 'talk about global interests' 'Pentagonize the State Department.' Much of this is Washingtonese, where buzzwords no longer summarize a policy so much as substitute for it. After all, if American hegemony is in decline because its economic influence is in decline, nothing less than revamping its industrial base is adequate. It is only at his fourth point that Khana starts to come face-to-face with the issues never quite addressed in the piece: "make the global economy work for us." Khana is never quite clear whether he believes a) international competition is necessary or the product of bad diplomacy and b) whether American hegemony would be a good thing or whether a trilateral world order is better. I suspect that is because Khana, like many foreign policy experts in Washington, does not want to ask the deeper question about whether there really is enough to go around, or whether the structure of world affairs forces nations into conflict with each other. Read between the lines and the essay speaks for itself. Ultimately, a redesigned hegemonic structure, in which the Big Three cooperate to carve up the world, while engaging in friendly competition within the structure of a global triumvirate, is more or less the best choice in the face of an inevitably unequal global distribution of power. All the hard questions wash away in a paragraph of feel good common-sense. But why exactly should there be Big Three in the first place? What about other principles, like equality and self-determination? Real reflection on international affairs seems to me to require more than just an examination of the available hard and soft power opportunities, even if they are a starting point. Surely researching and writing about foreign policy can be done independent of the advice one wants to give to the next president.