The National Interest
Fall 2001

The Present Opportunity

by Adam Garfinkle

 

. . . The second characteristic of the present era is American primacy, a condition that elides significantly with the environment of deep peace which, as Coral Bell has argued, is likely to persist for at least several decades. The United States is often referred to as a status quo power, and that is true in the sense that it is not revisionist when it comes to global political or security affairs. Certainly, an environment of deep peace appeals to the United States. But while U.S. primacy will tend to reinforce stability at the structural level defined by the interactions of the major powers, it will tend to generate instability at most every level below that. This is because the uneven spread of advanced knowledge-based economic systems bear revolutionary implications for much of the planet. New forms of market-based economics are liable to be even more disruptive of traditional relationships than older incarnations. A certain level of convulsion is to be expected, too, from the introduction of the ideas of self-determination and genuine pluralist politics to societies that have not known them. That the United States is the primary power, and that, in the face of enormous resistance, it supports by word, example and deed the spread of such systems and ideas, suggests general implications that are anything but status quo. . . .