Making America Safe for the World: Multilateralism and the Rehabilitation of US Authority

Abstract

Over the past century, the United States has built and sustained relationships of varying hierarchy over states in Latin America, Western Europe, and Northeast Asia. In recent decades, it also has attempted to expand its authority over other states into Eastern Europe, which has been met with a measure of success, and the Middle East, which has been far more problematic. The authority wielded by the United States over its subordinates, despite occasional abuses, provides security both internally and externally and permits unprecedented prosperity. Americans, in turn, gain from writing the rules of that order. The key foreign policy task today is not to diminish US authority, but to preserve its benefits into the future. To rule legitimately, however, requires tying the suzerain's hands. To secure the international order that has been so beneficial in the past century and to succeed in extending that order to countries that do not yet enjoy its fruits requires a new, more restraining, multilateral solution that binds the hands of the United States far more tightly than in the past. KEYWORDS: authority, hierarchy multilateralism, new world order, US foreign policy. THE UNITED STATES IS NOT AN EMPIRE. OVER THE PAST CENTURY, HOWEVER, it has built and sustained informal empires over states on the Caribbean littoral, spheres of exclusive political and economic influence over countries in South America, and after 1945 protectorates over allies in Western Europe and Northeast Asia in which it controls key segments of their foreign policies. In pursuit of a new world order, the United States has in recent decades attempted to expand its authority over other states into Eastern Europe, which has been met with a measure of success, and the Middle East, which has been far more problematic largely because its attempted rule there is not seen as legitimate. (1) Diplomats acknowledge the authority of the United States through deeds, but engage in a conspiracy of silence. Newly empowered leaders in the developing world champion the principles of sovereignty and national self-determination to secure their rule. (2) To speak publicly of the authority of the United States would gravely weaken their hold on power. Even in established democracies, leaders are loath to challenge the myth of unbridled popular sovereignty or to admit to themselves and their citizens that they are, in part, under the authority of the United States. US leaders have understood that to claim authority over others would force their counterparts in subordinate states to deny this fact and thus undermine the legitimacy of US rule. As a result, US authority has been cloaked in the euphemisms. Analysts talk of hegemony, soft power, and recently the declining legitimacy of US power. (3) Diplomats describe the United States as the leader of the free world that maintains special relationships with strategic partners. Only critics of the United States give voice to its authority in describing it as a neoimperialist or neocolonial power, concepts that are rejected by the mainstream precisely because they threaten to reveal the authority that dares not speak its name. (4) The authority wielded by the United States over its subordinates, despite occasional abuses, has been enormously beneficial. Much like individuals in Thomas Hobbes' state of nature who give up personal autonomy for the benefits of a civil society, subordinate states give up a measure of sovereignty for a political order created and enforced by the United States. (5) This order provides security both internally and externally and permits unprecedented prosperity. The United States, in turn, gains from writing the rules of that order and, especially, from turning possible rivals into reliable subordinates that largely comply with its rules. (6) The so-called Western international order has actually rested on US authority and its accompanying social contracts. It has also produced very real benefits. …