A Concert-Balance Strategy for a Multipolar World

Abstract

The United States is a superpower in search of a strategy. Following the end of the Cold War, no new grand strategy has won the bipartisan support that underpinned America's strategy of containment from President Truman to President Reagan. Enthusiastic promoters of globalization occasionally argue that international trade will be a panacea for conflict, at least among developed nations. (1) The neoconservative vision of unilateral US global hegemony always lacked adequate military forces and funding to realize its ambitious goals. (2) Now, in the aftermath of the Iraq War, the hegemony strategy also lacks public support. (3) Most critics of the hegemony strategy, however, have failed to propose a credible alternative capable of guiding US national security. (4) The philosophical void at the highest levels of American statecraft should be of particular concern for America's armed forces. If, as Clausewitz wrote, war is policy by other means, then the purposes and structure of the US military cannot be debated or planned except in the context of a larger vision of America's goals in the world. The claim that following 11 September 2001 the United States is engaged in a Long or a Global War on Terrorism provides little guidance, because minimizing the threat from al Qaeda and other jihadists is primarily a matter for intelligence agencies, police, and first responders, with the military playing a critical but supporting role. A new grand strategy for the United States should be compatible with the nation's fundamental values and capable of achieving American goals in the world order that will emerge in the decades ahead. Neither the strategy of US hegemony nor two proposed alternatives, neoisolationism and offshore balancing, meet these tests. The United States needs to prepare itself for a multipolar world in which it is not a solitary hegemon but rather one of several great powers, even if it is the most powerful for decades to come. And the United States has to prepare itself to cooperate in the interest of security with other major powers either as a member of a great-power concert or as a participant in an alliance against one or more powerful aggressors. Because similar military capabilities would be required in either a concert of power or a balance of power strategy, this approach can be defined as a concert-balance strategy for a multipolar world. US Strategy: Make the World Safe for Democracy Following World War II, the influence of continental European conceptions of power politics, advocated by emigre realists such as Nicholas Spykman, Hans Morgenthau, and Henry Kissinger, led to the neglect of the unique American tradition of grand strategy which views the purpose of American foreign policy as shaping an environment favorable to the preservation of the United States as a civilian, liberal, commercial, and democratic republic. Making the world safe for democracy, in the words of Woodrow Wilson, was not a utopian delusion, as European-style realists often claim, but a practical effort to preserve the kind of geopolitical environment in which the fragile institutions of a democratic republic with a free-enterprise economy would survive. (5) Although the term garrison state was coined by American sociologist Harold Lasswell in 1941, the fear that the United States would be forced by foreign threats to become a militarized regime has haunted American statesmen since the founding of the republic. A hostile hegemon that dominated Europe, Asia, or both might force Americans to remodel their republic into a America, in which citizens reluctantly obtained security at the expense of civil liberties, economic freedom, and legislative and judicial oversight. A Fortress America could also be the result of America's repeated participation in costly and violent balance of power conflicts such as the two World Wars and the Cold War. To avoid the necessity of defensive militarization resulting from frequent participation in balance of power wars, the United States pursued a policy of non-entanglement in the nineteenth century, creating its own sphere of influence in North America while staying out of European conflicts. …