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Foreign Affairs
The Inadequacy of American Power
By Michael Mandelbaum
Alone at the Top
It is a truth universally acknowledged that the central feature of the world at the outset of the twenty-first century is the enormous power of the United States. This country possesses the most formidable military forces and the largest and most vibrant national economy on the planet. From within its borders emanate the social and cultural trends that exercise the greatest influence on other societies. In the league standings of global power, the United States occupies first place—and by a margin so large that it recalls the preponderance of the Roman Empire of antiquity. So vast is American superiority that the distinction bestowed upon it and its great rival, the Soviet Union, during the Cold War no longer applies. The United States is no longer a mere superpower; it has ascended to the status of "hyperpower."
The fact of American supremacy tends to polarize opinion. For those who deem such supremacy desirable, the great question of twenty-first century international politics is how to perpetuate it. On the other hand, those who regard U.S. power as unwelcome seek to discover how it can be curtailed. The undoubted fact of American supremacy, however, raises a prior question: For what purpose is all this power to be used? The proper answer to that question puts American power in a different light, and that answer derives from the singular and unprecedented character of the world in which we now live.
The contemporary world is dominated by three major ideas: peace as the preferred basis for relations among countries, democracy as the optimal way to organize political life within them, and the free market as the indispensable vehicle for producing wealth. Peace, democracy, and free markets are the ideas that conquered the world. They are not, of course, universally practiced, and not all sovereign states accept each of them. But for the first time since they were introduced—at the outset of the period that began with the French and Industrial Revolutions and is known as the modern era—they have no serious, fully articulated rivals as principles for organizing the world's military relations, politics, and economics. They have become the world's orthodoxy. The traditional ideas with which they contended in the nineteenth century and the illiberal ideas, embodied by the fascist and communist powers, with which they did battle in the twentieth have all been vanquished.
From these new circumstances follow the central purpose of the United States in the twenty-first century and the principal use for American power: to defend, maintain, and expand peace, democracy, and free markets. Achieving this goal, however, involves two separate tasks, and for these American power, great though it is, is . . .
Michael Mandelbaum is Christian A. Herter Professor of American Foreign Policy at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. This essay is adapted from his new book, The Ideas That Conquered the World: Peace, Democracy and Free Markets in the Twenty-first Century (PublicAffairs, 2002).