The End of American Global Preeminence?

The dismantling by the Trump administration of venerable foreign policy agencies such as the USAID, and the hobbling of venerable multilateral institution such as NATO, the World Health Organization, the UN, and many others, seems unquestionably to have brought to a sudden, and shocking, end the exercise of American power on the global stage. I write at some length about many of these institutions, and the vigorous support of them by Americans and global partners, in my book. I give primary attention to what American multilateralism meant for post-WWII Dutch reconstruction and renewal. But the work of these institutions and practices carried similar consequences for nations and communities around the world, for decades after the end of World War II. 

The shield used to promote the Marshall Plan, recognizable to millions of Europeans in the years after World War II.

Unfortunately, our coarsened contemporary political dialog seems to understand global power solely in terms of military capability. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of actual power. Military power has its uses, but as the bloody twentieth century has shown, American military power is seldom—by itself—geopolitically determinative. Far more successful in shaping the postwar world have been a host of economic, technological and scientific, intellectual, and cultural institutions which have knit countries together—imperfectly to be sure—in common cause. We call these arrangements “multilateralism” and they are marked, generally, by cooperation and mutual interest. American leadership in and through such organizations has been marked and vital. It is these multilateral organizations, institutions, and practices that are currently being systematically dismantled in an act of political destruction that the historian Timothy Snyder (no relation) has described as “superpower suicide.”
 
So sudden has been the dismantling of American multilateralism, that I wonder if very many Americans understand, even in part, how American power was established in the first place, how it was sustained, and what it has meant for themselves and for millions around the world.

Prior to the Second World War the US was a formidable state power, but in no sense a global superpower. Its economic output had surpassed its nearest rival, the United Kingdom, though the economy of the entire British empire would still dwarf the United States. Economic prowess aside, the US was generally not considered a near geopolitical rival by the leading European states, its activities largely confined to the Western Hemisphere. While the American navy was an increasingly global force, its army was paltry by European and Asian standards, and not until World War II would its land forces be considered noteworthy by the European powers.
 
Acquisitions during the War of 1898 with Spain and the US pursuit of influence within China (the so-called “Open Door” policy) made the Americans latecomers to European-style “great game” colonialism. American geopolitical arrears began to reverse themselves during World War I as the European powers consumed themselves in the maelstrom. The United States emerged from that war greatly enhanced in geopolitical terms. The relative power of the Americans would not be fully expressed until World War II, however, after which the United States would emerge as the premier power in the world in nearly all phases: economic, technological, certainly militarily, and even cultural. The atomic bomb is in this sense emblematic of American preeminence in nearly every field.
 
Word War II was a turning point. No state had ever achieved the absolute power the Americans held and maintained for decades thereafter, no state has ever had the global reach of the Americans, and few powers have even achieved the relative regional supremacy the US routinely exercised in most corners of the globe over the last 80 or so years.
 
This bestriding global power emerged in part due to the wartime expansion of American industrial might. While the war laid waste to vast swaths of competitors’ physical plant, industrial capacity, and human capital in the rest of the world, American industry boomed to fill the demand. But American power was not merely the accidental result of wartime contingency. It also resulted from careful investment, deep political commitment, and a widely-shared will to cultivate the organizations, institutions, and practices that projected power around the globe. Some of those institutions were built during the war and developed later. Many were the result of decades of investment during the Cold War.
 
US Economic Multilateralism. During the war American factories roared to life after years of relative depression-era idleness, becoming what FDR called “the arsenal of democracy.” American plants poured out the tanks, planes, ships, trucks, munitions, and supplies that brought victory over the Axis powers abroad. After the war the United States became the workshop of the world, but this was never a matter purely of technological advances. American industrial supremacy also rested on worker solidarity and buy-in in an era of burgeoning trade union strength. Industrial might both required and led to deep changes within American society that would unfold over the coming decades as minorities and women sought, and won, places on the assembly line. Those victories were and are partial, of course, but they were also real. American industrial preeminence could not have emerged without them.
 
The Americans’ vastly expanded physical plant and vastly improved competitive position meant that the United States emerged as both a preferred supplier of substantial amounts of industrial and consumer goods and services elsewhere and a preferred market for export output from other producers. American officials used this leverage to push for free trade policies and integrated markets around the world, a posture that was, in the main, quite successful. It was an approach that was inherently multilateral; trade cannot work otherwise. The United States sought, and won, economic concessions because it comprised a market—both an export market and an import market—to which foreign produces wanted and needed access. Trump administration tariffs are increasingly rendering this signal fact of postwar economic life obsolete.
 
American economic power was on display early, in the series of multilateral agreements established at Bretton Woods in 1944. Here dozens of world powers agreed on a basic framework for postwar international economic activity that centered on free trade, and which would seek in the coming years the lowering of trade barriers. The Americans also won the acceptance of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency, guaranteeing a privileged position for the US currency which carried tangible benefits to American investors and consumers for decades. Establishing a basic framework, Bretton Woods also established a vocabulary and a set of norms around which global economic relations have pivoted ever since. Those norms have been largely undone in recent years.
 
American economic dominance gave American officials, in turn, substantial diplomatic weapons. Economic dominance meant that the United States could extract concessions in some areas in exchange for favored economic treatment from rivals and allies in other areas. That is, American economic dominance could be transformed into beneficial or punitive economic diplomacy: aid or sanctions. The effectiveness of both rested on the US using its massive economic leverage to produce a world of prosperity that nations would want to join. That is, without free trade, neither the stick of sanctions nor the carrot of aid would matter much. Aid was never as extensive as many Americans think, it was never a free gift, and, when it was successful, was always accompanied by very strong administrative oversight, as with the Marshall Plan and later USAID programs (as I will explain in a subsequent post).
 
Science. WWII saw vast leaps forward in military technologies such as radar and sonar. Inarguably the greatest consolidation of research prowess during the war was the Manhattan Project, the nationwide race to engineer the splitting of the atom into a workable bomb. The Manhattan Project undertook to produce two variants of fissile material from two different isotopes, fashion the necessary detonation systems, and construct workable bombs. The Manhattan Project was part of the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) headed by Vannevar Bush. After the war Bush advocated for an expansion of federally-backed science with the creation of the National Science Foundation in 1950. The NSF joined its sister organization, the National Institutes of Health, and together created a new model for basic research in which government funding would be met by commitments from universities which provided laboratory space, manpower, and expertise. In this way, private/public partnerships were formed, the wisdom of such arrangements proven by the enormous output of American science in the decades that followed. American scientists have produced wonders from the space race to disease eradication to agricultural productivity and so much more. Many of the technological developments we take for granted, and which we mistakenly assign to the private sphere, emerged from this government-backed  science, including GPS, mobile phone technology, the internet itself, and so much more.
 
Americans joined scientific prowess to multilateral institutions such as the World Health Organization and agencies of the UN, along with private NGOs, and while these efforts have never been complete and always subject to political interference, they have produced tangible, and at times, miraculous results. Polio, once a great scourge, has been eradicated from the US and most parts of the globe. The Peace Corps has delivered life-saving medicines, technologies, and hygiene practices to communities all over the world. Until it was largely shuttered by the Trump administration last year, PEPFAR, one of President George W. Bush’s signal policies, saved millions of lives throughout Africa. These efforts have always been undervalued and underfunded, but they also produced real, lasting, and tangible benefits for millions of people around the world and contributed to goodwill among otherwise hostile nations.
 
Education. The United States has always possessed top-rank private institutions, such as the Ivy League universities; the American system expanded mightily with nineteenth century land-grant colleges and universities. But over the course of the twentieth century American public institutions of higher education became the greatest knowledge generating and dispersal machine in the world. Not only American citizens but students from around the world flocked to American institutions, sharing expertise, knowledge, systems, and patents across national borders. The Fulbright program is representative of these relationships, contributing American prestige and American leadership to a global educational system that allows participants to share knowledge and best practices in every field of human endeavor. It is the epitome of American-led global multilateralism.
 
As a byproduct of American global hegemony, the United States holds interests in every part of the world, in every area of human life, from agriculture to industrial development to the environment to human rights. These interests have produced a rich tapestry of think tanks and foundations, as well as a vast proliferation of area studies programs, new majors, language training, and much more in US universities. But the Trump administration has unaccountably cut funding for many of these. Now that the United States is embroiled in a war with Iran, for example, it no longer has the expertise of the Wilson Center on which to draw in formulating approaches to a country and a region of enormous complexity.
 
American culture. Beginning during the war, but vastly expanded after was a network of American information and cultural institutions that beamed American culture around the world. The Office of War Information and the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs were joined after the war by the Voice of America, the State Department, Radio Free Europe, the United States Information Agency, and more. Never propaganda agencies in the Orwellian sense, these institutions brought American music, film, painting, and literature to a global audience, creating markets for American artists but also implicitly carrying a message about American prosperity and American democracy: You too can be like us. This so-called “soft power” has opened up new relational terrain in geopolitical affairs, increased international understanding and goodwill, and consequently lowered the need for or threat of armed conflict. These institutions, too, have been largely shuttered.  
 
Alliances. The postwar world was a great era of multilateral alliance building. Most of these alliances were established against the backdrop of the Cold War, such as NATO and the South East Asian Treaty Organization (SEATO), which joined older alliance systems including the US-backed Organization of American States. These alliances are often structured via the occupation of physical bases and outposts within member states in arrangements that allow for the geographical projection of American military power. Though the exact number is classified, some estimates have put the number of US bases around the world at more than 800.
 
Yet now these organizations and relationships are in tatters. Where not formally disbanded, the Trump administration has so poisoned relations that many member states no longer feel the assurances of mutual aid, the lifeblood of these agreements. As Tom Tugendhat has recently written of the British, but which applies with equal and more force to the Americans, the fracturing of our alliances “has revealed our dependencies, not our partnerships, the risks we’ve hidden, not the resilience we’ve built, and, perhaps most gravely of all, our casual confidence of a return to normal when the disrupted alliances and energy flows will do anything but.”
 
Military Prowess. Since World War II the Americans have maintained a massive navy, a globally competent air force, an unmatched nuclear arsenal, a limited but formidable army, and a vast global basing and alliance system. American military power is unrivaled, easily eclipsing any other competitor or, indeed, alliance of competitors. But as vast as it was (and is), American military power is also unusable in very many geopolitical challenges. It can be brittle, easily broken and not easily restored, and enormously costly to use even when it is effective. It is not, as this administration seems to think, a tool for all seasons. US military power is in fact unusable in most instances, and often not very usable even in seemingly advantageous circumstances. Military power is very often the least effective vector of American global preeminence.
 
The latter half of the twentieth century, with military setbacks, outright defeats, and unstable victories in places from Korea to Vietnam to Iraq, should have taught us the lesson that the sword is very often most effective when sheathed. The two great military calamities of the past thirty years, the War in Iraq and the current War in Iran, should be proof enough of this reality. We will be reaping the consequences of these disasters for decades.
 
It is never military power alone that advances a nation’s interests. American history proves this reality time and again, that overweening military advantage does not necessarily produce laudable outcomes in the nation’s interests.
 
My book examines in some detail how and why the institutions of American global multilateralism were built and how they operated in one representative context. To be sure, American-led multilateralism has not always produced favorable results for the US nor for international partners. There is plenty to criticize in the long and often tragic history of US foreign relations since World War II. But to blindly dismantle the edifices of global multilateralism is to surrender, without debate and without complaint, American leadership in the world. That is a future fraught with privation, suffering, and terror.
 
—David J. Snyder