|
|
|
CIAO DATE: 09/03
Foreign Policy
From Victory to Success: An FP-Carnegie Special Report
Looking for Legitimacy in All the Wrong Places
Robert Kagan*
Concerns over transatlantic relations, American attitudes toward the United Nations Security Council, and the future of multilateralism stem from a single, overarching issue of the post–Cold War era: the issue of international legitimacy. When the United States wields its power, especially its military power, will world opinion and, more importantly its fellow liberal democracies, especially in Europe, regard its actions as broadly legitimate? Or will the United States appear, as it did to many during the crisis in Iraq, as a kind of rogue superpower?
“Legitimacy” is an intangible factor in foreign policy, but like so many intangibles it can have great practical significance. Neither this nor any future American administration wants to be regarded as behaving illegitimately when it goes to war; hence President George W. Bush sought U.N. support before the conflict. A perceived pattern of illegitimate behavior can limit the cooperation other countries are willing to offer and put sand in the gears of even a sole superpower. Nor are Americans likely to be comfortable consistently acting in ways that much of the world, and especially other like-minded peoples, deem illegitimate.
Keep
Your Eyes On
|
What
To Expect |
The problem is a new one for Americans and very much the product of post–Cold War changes in the international system. After World War II, the fundamental legitimacy of American foreign policy was not seriously questioned by the majority of peoples in Europe, nor by those of America’s Asian allies. The American responsibility for defending “the West” against the Soviet Union and international communism lent some justification, even to questionable policies. It was this widely acknowledged role in leading the common defense that bestowed legitimacy on American policy throughout the Cold War, not American obeisance to the dictates of international law or to the manifestly dysfunctional U.N. Security Council.
How to replace that old and irretrievable source of legitimacy is the challenge faced by this and future American administrations. Unprecedented American global dominance following the collapse of the Soviet Union has created suspicion and resentment even among America’s allies.
The blame for this state of affairs does not lie primarily with this or any previous administration in Washington. It was in the late 1990s that a French foreign minister coined the term “hyperpower”; nervousness about unchecked American power antedates George W. Bush and the Iraq war. Although poor diplomacy and careless rhetoric can exacerbate tensions, the core of the problem lies in the unique structural realities of the present international system. The overwhelming power of the United States and the lack of any plausible peer competitor are naturally unnerving, certainly to those who do not benefit from American dominance, and perhaps even to some of America’s allies, who do.
Global opposition to the Iraq war had much to do with these kinds of fears, which the United States should address. Americans will not always be able to say to the world, “Trust us, we know what we’re doing.”
Simple answers to the problem of international legitimacy will be elusive, however. The disparity of power at the root of the problem is an intractable reality, as many critics of the United States implicitly recognize. Many Europeans, for instance, often express their desire for a world order characterized not by American hegemony, however benevolent, but by checks and balances. Legitimacy would presumably come from a new “concert” of world powers, no one of which could act without the consent of the others.
Yet even under the questionable assumption that a 19th-century balance of power would be a more desirable system than one characterized by American hegemony, a return to multipolarity is not in the cards. A multipolar world cannot be decreed; it must be created. Europe lacks the will to establish itself as a second “pole” capable of balancing American power. Nor would most Europeans want to see multipolarity and global balance created by the rise of a superpower China or the return of a superpower Russia.
Europe’s inability or unwillingness to create actual global multipolarity explains much of the European desire to establish the U.N. Security Council as the sole authority for determining the legitimacy of military action, and especially American action. By investing equal power in the five permanent members, which include France and Britain, the Security Council today produces an institutional multipolarity, at least in theory, to compensate for the lack of genuine multipolarity in the international system.
Yet few Americans, and by no means all Europeans, would agree that the Security Council by itself is the answer to the problem of legitimacy. Europeans are increasingly accustomed to ceding authority to supranational bodies, but even self-proclaimed multilateralists in the United States don’t argue that the United States must always be bound by the decisions or nondecisions of the U.N. Security Council. In 1999, the major European countries themselves, including the French, agreed that a Security Council imprimatur was not necessary to legitimate military action in Kosovo. The fact is, in the decades since the founding of the U.N. Security Council, that entity has never succeeded in establishing itself as the final authority bestowing legitimacy on military action, and it is no closer to doing so today.
In addressing the problem of legitimacy, a simple institutional legalism will not avail. If the United States seeks legitimation for its actions, and it should, it will have to earn that legitimacy the old-fashioned way. It must promote and appear to promote not only its own national interest narrowly conceived, but also the common interests of the liberal democratic world. Even if the Cold War alliances cannot be re-created, this quality of American leadership during the Cold War can and should be emulated today.
Success solves many problems, as the global reaction to the fall of the Saddam Hussein regime has shown. American success in the military campaign and the failure of worst-case scenarios to materialize have not only blunted European opposition but have even led to a rethinking of that opposition. Such developments should put to rest some of the more hysterical claims on both sides of the Atlantic that the American invasion of Iraq has irreparably damaged the international order and severed transatlantic ties.
The ultimate legitimacy of the war, however, and of American behavior more broadly, will depend on the course Iraq takes. If the United States is seen to have fostered liberal democracy in Iraq; to have eliminated a security threat to the region and beyond; and to have undertaken the war not only for its own interests but also in the interests of others, then the question of legitimacy will be settled largely in America’s favor. If, however, Iraq is unstable and undemocratic, and the stability of the region as a whole has not improved, then the legitimacy of American actions and of American foreign policy in general will be eroded.
The problem of legitimacy, like most international problems, can never be definitively solved. Perhaps the best test of American foreign policy in the coming years will therefore be whether, through an active and generous diplomacy and through successful actions in the common interest, the United States can win the argument that it has acted in the common good more often than it loses it.
Notes
Note *: Robert Kagan is the author of Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order (New York: Knopf, 2003) and a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment. Back