World Policy Journal
Volume XV, No 4, Winter 1998/99

CODA: The Balance of Power

By James Chace

 

Having nothing to win and much to lose, America has become an essentially conservative, and therefore peace-loving, nation; it is strong enough to discourage aggression in others but vulnerable enough not to practice aggression itself; and dreading above all things the domination of the world by a single militarist power, it identifies itself with the encouragement of liberal institutions.

With apologies to Harold Nicolson, I have paraphrased the previous paragraph from his classic study of diplomacy, The Congress of Vienna, substituting America for Britain. In an age when “globalization” is used in every other article dealing with international affairs, there is a tendency to forget or ignore certain verities of foreign policy. First of all, the nation-state has not been superseded by “globalization”: an American company, no matter how global its reach, is still an American company, dependent on American power if trouble abroad threatens its operations. The conduct of foreign policy, from a realist perspective, must still rest on an America active in working for global, and, when appropriate, regional balances of power.

There is no evidence that an interdependent world points the way to a more peaceful world or eliminates the exercise of power politics. Prosperity among nations does not breed contentment or end conflict. No nations were more “globalized” than were the nations of Europe prior to the First World War, yet the causes of that war were largely rooted in misperceptions, misunderstandings, and the false calculations of power. In The Federalist, Alexander Hamilton inveighed against those who believed that “the spirit of commerce has a tendency to soften the manners of men, and to extinguish the inflammable which have so often kindled into wars.”

To urge the United States to play a central role in seeking a balance of power among nations—either globally or regionally—is simply to recognize that the international system has never given way to an effective world government, as Woodrow Wilson hoped, nor to an enduring imperium, as Augustus Caesar might have imagined. As the key player in seeking and maintaining such balances—in East Asia, for example—America can demonstrate that even while it must play a military role in the region, it has no desire to try to impose or perpetrate its hegemony in the region. Still, it is in the nature of things that great powers resent any nation that tries to exert hegemony over others. Former cabinet secretary James Schlesinger warned in 1997 of “the historic tendency” of the great powers “to cut a leader down to size.”

But it would go against the American grain to practice balance of power politics with little or no reference to moral content. In a famous speech of the nineteenth-century British prime minister, Lord Palmerston, the realist credo found its most eloquent spokesman: “We have no eternal allies and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow.” But later in that same speech, Palmerston went on to explain that the policy of Britain was also “to be the champion of justice and right: pursuing that course with moderation and prudence, not becoming the Quixote of the world, but giving her moral sanction and support wherever she thinks justice is, and whenever she thinks that wrong has been done.”

Palmerston’s advice could well serve an American president at the turn of the twentieth century. A balance of power policy need not imply a post-Bismarckian drive for power for its own sake. It does not deny a globalized economy, but recognizes the persistence of the nation-state whose primary purpose is to provide for the well-being of its citizens. Or to put it differently, the search for a new way to construct a more humane as well as more prosperous society at home and abroad—the aspiration of Franklin Roosevelt in 1945, the “third way” of Bill Clinton and Tony Blair—does not preclude the quest for a balance of power among nations. To think otherwise would be to ignore Harold Nicolson’s conclusion as he contemplated the achievements of those statesmen who gathered at Vienna almost two centuries ago to devise a system that brought absolute peace to the European great powers for almost four decades, and relative peace for a hundred years. “It is thus a mistake,” Nicolson writes, “to regard the balance of power as some iniquitous plotting force; it was rather an achievement of such a distribution of strength as would render aggression by any single country a policy of the greatest uncertainty and danger.”