World Policy Journal
Volume XVIII, No 2, Summer 2001

 

Bush's Choice: Athens or Sparta
By Martin Walker

 

The decade since the fall of the Soviet Union continues to be defined by a phrase, by a reality, and by a metaphor. The phrase, "the post-Cold War world," harks back to a familiar past, its vagueness redeemed by its suggestion that the current state of affairs is interim and temporary, that another organizing structure will eventually emerge. The reality is the overwhelming global fact of American power after the implosion of its adversary of the previous half-century. Since the Soviet Union had been a superpower, another and more awesome term had to be coined to define the unprecedented combination of military, economic, technological, political, and cultural predominance that America achieved in the 1990s. France's foreign minister, Hubert Vedrine, obliged; the reality of the past decade has been "hyperpuissance," America as hyperpower. The metaphor that best expressed this, even before Vedrine coined his neologism, was that of the United States as the modern equivalent of ancient Rome.

But this transitional period is now drawing to a close, and the contours of the real aftermath of the Cold War may already be discerned. Despite its military predominance, America will have great difficulty in maintaining the political will and the financial means, and cannot guarantee the technological monopolies, that might indefinitely sustain its lonely eminence. Regional challengers are already flexing their muscles. To manage what appears likely to become a turbulent political environment, America must look beyond the simplistic metaphor of itself as the modern Rome. It may find that its choices for a sustainable grand strategy are best illustrated and defined by two other models from classical times. The United States in the twenty-first century must decide whether it wants to play the role of Athens or of Sparta.

Athens would be more congenial, and would probably come more naturally to a free trading and self-indulgent democracy with a robust belief in the merits and survivability of its own culture and a strong naval tradition. But there is much in the American political and military culture that leans to the fortress mentality and uncompromising attitudes of a modern Sparta. America as Athens would be extrovert and open, encouraging the growth of democracies and trading partners. America as Sparta would be introspective and defensive, tending to protectionism, and determined to maintain military superiority at all costs. America as Athens would seek to work with allies and partners in collaborative ventures with a common purpose, from global warming treaties to international legal structures. America as Sparta would be unilateralist, suspicious of the erosions of national sovereignty that might flow from cooperation with other states, and would prefer clients and satellites to allies that might some day challenge Sparta's primacy.

The metaphor of Athens and Sparta presents the two extremes of policy, and no U.S. administration is likely in current circumstances to adopt so fully the attitudes of one that it abandons altogether the other. The most Spartan-minded administration may embrace free trade, from a farsighted view of the national economic interest. The most Athenian administration may be expected to foster the Spartan spirits in the Pentagon, just in case they should be needed. Indeed, the Athens of the Peloponnesian wars was known for its high-handed ways toward allies, and Sparta's eventual victory hinged on its pragmatic readiness to cooperate with anyone, from besieged Syracuse to the traitor Alcibiades, who would help it against Athens.

The concepts of an Athenian or Spartan America have been familiar in the exercise of U.S. foreign policy. During the Cold War, the tune was constantly played as point-counterpoint between the two themes: good cop and bad cop; dente and aggressiveness; arms control talks and rearmament; State Department and Pentagon. The contrast and interplay between these two approaches not only reflected the ebb and flow of domestic politics but was also a reasonably rational response to a strategic competitor who played by broadly similar rules. It has been the collapse of that adversary that has plunged America, and the world it dominates, into such an aberrant period of singular hyperpower, and into the beguiling metaphor of America as Rome. Indeed, now that it has lasted for over a decade, and through three presidencies, from Bush to Clinton and back to the Bush dynasty again, the aberrant has come to seem normal and even comforting.

The city of the caesars was the last great hyperpower in our cultural memory that appeared to have achieved what Stalin, Hitler, Napoleon, Louis XIV, Genghis Khan, and Charlemagne all failed to do. Rome, like contemporary America, established authority by power but then spread and maintained it through a kind of consent, rooted in widening prosperity, a tolerable system of law and order, and the seductive infiltration of its language and culture. The parallels are uncannily precise. English is clearly the modern Latin. The Roman roads of old are rebuilt in the global information highways. The dollar is as ubiquitous as the old denarius. The obsessions of the ancient Romans with plumbing and central heating have famously been inherited by their modern successors. And it is tempting to discern in today's couch potato the true heir to those Romans lulled into contentment by bread and circuses. A cultural wheel seemed to turn full circle with the success of the film Gladiator at this year's Oscar ceremonies.

And the month of March 2001, in which the Oscars were awarded, provided its own equivalent of Queen Victoria's Jubilee, a symbolic display of American power and the way the rest of world has little choice except to acknowledge it. A parade of global deference to the new occupant of the White House that was extraordinary even by the standards of the imperial presidency unfolded. It opened with the first visit of British prime minister Tony Blair to meet the new American president and closed with the arrival of Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak. Mubarak arrived hard on the heels of German chancellor Gerhard Schrüder and Brazil's president Fernando Enrique Cardoso. In between Blair and Mubarak, trooping into Washington like so many submonarchs come to pay their duty or their respects to the imperial throne, came President Kim Dae Jung of South Korea, Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori of Japan, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel, Vice Premier Qian Qichen of China, and Kofi Annan, the secretary general of the United Nations. Some dignitaries, like Sergei Ivanov from the Kremlin, NATO secretary general Lord Robertson, Javier Solana from the European Union, and Serbia's new prime minister, Zoran Djindjic never quite scaled the protocol height to be granted an audience with the American president.

In the case of Ivanov, head of Russia's security council and the closest aide to President Vladimir Putin, the snub was deliberate. Ivanov had come seeking an early summit for his master and was coolly rebuffed. In sharp contrast to President Bill Clinton's eagerness for an early summit with Boris Yeltsin in 1993, President Bush would not be disposed to see his Russian counterpart until the G-8 summit in Italy in July, and even then in the company of others. The days of White House eagerness for a one-on-one with the opposite number in the Kremlin were clearly over. This was perhaps the most telling clue to the difference between the early 1990s and the early 2000s. Then, in what was widely but mistakenly thought to be the post-Cold War era, Russia still loomed disproportionately large in the Washington imagination. It no longer does. In the post-Cold War world as we have now come to understand it, a Chinese vice premier (although this understates the real status of Qian Qichen as steward of Beijing's foreign policy and international strategy) appears to come considerably higher than a Russian president in the White House pecking order.

This ability to grant or withhold status by the shuffling of a diplomatic schedule or the timing by which an audience is granted or withheld is a remarkable feature of America's current standing in the world. It was a matter of serious political moment for Tony Blair and the British media that he was seen to be the first European leader to be vouchsafed an audience. When Downing Street proudly released the news that the meeting would be at Camp David, the presidential country retreat, and would include an overnight stay, the joy among Blair's aides and diplomats was unconfined. The French sniff that such Anglo-Saxon servilities are not for them. But even before Bush was inaugurated, French president Jacques Chirac took advantage of France's temporary tenure in the EU presidency to pay a farewell visit to Clinton, and then applied intense social pressure to lure President-elect Bush to the French ambassador's home in Washington for a hastily arranged cup of coffee. The meeting lasted barely 15 minutes, but for Paris it had two great merits: the French saw Bush first, and they also managed to organize the coffee session without informing Romano Prodi, president of the European Commission and former Italian premier, who was supposedly accompanying Chirac to Washington. Prodi was gratifyingly furious.

Of such petty triumphs is modern diplomacy made in this age of American hyperpower, when all roads lead to the modern Rome on the Potomac. Lesser powers measure their standing by their access to its rulers, and now understand sufficiently the pluralist complexities of American power that most visiting foreign leaders make time to pay their respects to Congress as well as the White House. So perhaps it is this very nomenclature, of Capitol Hill and Senate, piled atop the realities of military and economic predominance, that has made the metaphor of Washington as the modern Rome so inescapable.

The End of American Predominance?

Yet there has always been something fundamentally unsatisfactory about the metaphor, however beguiling. American presidents are not the victors of civil wars nor acclaimed to the purple by the Praetorian Guard. They are elected, although we had better pass hastily over the parallel between the fund-raising obligations of modern campaign finance and the oblations of gold that secured the loyalty of the Roman legions. Rome's empire was the real thing, held down by force and occupation, at least until the benefits of law and order, and trade and cultural assimilation reconciled the colonized peoples to their new status. It was a single geographic bloc, with garrisoned frontiers and constant wars and skirmishes against the barbarians on the northern front and the all-too-civilized Persians to the east. Rome's allies were satellites and client states, required to reward their protectors with tribute that symbolized their dependence. Above all, Rome fell. And while few expect America's current episode of predominance to last for more than another generation, it seems unlikely to succumb to "the forces of barbarism and religion" that Gibbon famously asserted as the causes of Rome's fall. Moreover, America has established (recent unfortunate incidents in Florida and the Supreme Court notwithstanding) a reasonable and accepted system of organizing the succession and the institutionalized rejuvenation of power.

However, the essential contours of an era never become quite so plain as at its peak. The diamond jubilee of the Queen-Empress Victoria in 1897, with its parade of tributary kings and chieftains and Maharajahs marked the high point of the British Empire. The pomp and grandeur masked the imminence of decline, as the gigantic military bluff on which the empire had been built was about to be exposed by the Boer War, challenged by the Kaiser's new German navy and frustrated in its home islands by Irish nationalism. And its economy had been outmatched by the United States.

The era of American hyperpower now seems to be at-or perhaps, if the stock markets are right, a little beyond-its peak. There are ominous signs of resentment and surliness among allies, and of defiance and challenges from other powers that do not find the status quo congenial. The perception of American power has been diminished by its frustrations in the Middle East, from the stubborn resistance of Saddam Hussein's regime to the collapse of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process in which the White House had invested so much effort and prestige. Military expeditions to Haiti and Somalia and Kosovo have not worked out as planned. The global economic system that American hyperpower largely built and financed and managed appears resistant to Washington's prescriptions for more free markets and free trade. American embassies and warships are blown up by elusive enemies. The modern proconsuls and the legions in their far-flung garrisons do not sleep easily.

Above all, the transitory post-Cold War era seems to be drawing to its close largely because the conditions of peace and prosperity and furious technological change that the American predominance fostered have spurred the growth and ambitions, or the resentments, of other states. The United States is currently the only significant power that has no reason to seek fundamental changes in the global order, and many sound reasons of self-interest to resist them. All the others are locked into various patterns of demanding or requiring change.

The decade of American dominance has been wretched, for different reasons, for the two declining powers of Russia and Japan. Russia, under brisk and assertive new management, is determined by various means to make itself once more a significant power, whose interests should be respected in global affairs, and particularly in its own neighborhoods. Moscow has taken advantage of its remaining technological assets, in nuclear power and in the manufacture of advanced arms, to forge close relations with Iran, India, and China. A Sino-Russian friendship treaty is under negotiation and scheduled to be signed this summer during the formal visit of President Jiang Zemin to Moscow. A new mutual security pact with all the former southern Soviet Republics except Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, which includes a joint rapid reaction force and joint military headquarters in the Kyrgyz Republic and free Russian arms shipments to the signatories has already been agreed. Russia also appears determined to maintain its logistical dominance, through existing pipelines, over the energy wealth of the Caspian Basin.

Japan's decade of economic stagnation was also marked by a deepening of its military alliance with the United States, best symbolized by its status as the only other Pacific power with which the United States has shared its Aegis antimissile system. Japan's strategic alliance with the United States remains politically controversial and problematic in practice, as Japan adjusts to the rising strength of China and the uncertainties of U.S. policy toward the Korean Peninsula. During the opening phase of the crisis over the collision of an American P-3 surveillance aircraft and a Chinese fighter in April, a sudden Japanese protest over the arrival of a nuclear-powered U.S. warship signaled Tokyo's discomfort with anything that smacked of U.S. adventurism. Perhaps most important, as its economy faltered Japan sought to find alternatives to the dominance of the dollar and the U.S.-dominated global financial system. The first effort, during the 1997-98 Asian financial crisis, proposed a yen-based and purely Asian alternative to the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The Clinton administration swiftly blocked this. The project has now been revived, without the original dominant role for the yen, and is now part of the wider Asian financial talks inspired by China's proposal last October for a free trade zone to include China, the Association of the South-East Asian Nations, and perhaps others.

Europe has taken the first steps on a course that seems likely to test the durability of the Atlantic Alliance, at least in its traditional form of Europe's strategic subordination to the United States. The 15nation European Union, now equipped with a common currency that challenges the traditional primacy of the dollar, has charted its own common foreign and security policy, and buttressed it with a proposal for a specifically European rapid reaction force whose autonomy from NATO has yet to be settled. Above all, the planned course of EU enlargement, with 13 nations now engaged in the accession process and Turkey formally accepted as a candidate for membership, means that Europe by definition can no longer be counted as a supporter of the status quo in the global equation. Europe may or may not accede to French proposals that it should carve out its own role as an independent strategic actor. Europe's support of American policy in the Middle East during the 1990s was contingent on the evenhanded approach enshrined in the Oslo peace process, which looks less and less viable. The Middle East has traditionally provoked strains in the Atlantic Alliance. Only Portugal provided landing rights during the American airlift to Israel during the 1973 Yom Kippur War, and only Britain provided its bases for the U.S. bombardment of Libya in 1986. Moreover, the EU's determination to forge amicable links with Russia has already provoked tension over the next phase of NATO enlargement, which seems likely to come to a head over the Baltic states at the NATO summit in Prague next year.

Asian Challengers

Russia, Japan, and Europe, whatever their degrees of discomfort or resentment at American predominance, seem unlikely to take their restlessness with the current status quo to the point of open challenge. This is not the case in Asia, where two rising powers have already done so. The gross domestic product (GDP) of China more than doubled in the first decade after the end of the Cold War. China is evidently determined to extend its influence in East Asia in and beyond its coastal waters, to include Taiwan and the Spratley Islands. The incident over the U.S. P-3 surveillance aircraft established China's determination to assert its authority over the 200-mile "exclusive exploitation zone" beyond its shores. The pattern of China's rearmament-purchasing submarines, Su-27 and Su-30 strike aircraft, and anti-ship missiles from Russia, and installing formidable missile batteries opposite Taiwan-is evidently designed to inhibit the ability of U.S. naval power to support Taiwan. China's decision to invest $20 billion in a 5,000-mile pipeline to the oil and gas fields of Central Asia makes little economic sense. From Beijing's point of view, the alternative sea route to bring oil from the Persian Gulf is so vulnerable to U.S. or Indian naval power that the overland pipeline is a straegic necessity, whatever the cost. But this in turn establishes vital strategic interests for China in Central Asia, a region where its own Uighur Muslim minority presents a security problem. China's longstanding relationship with Pakistan, which includes Beijing's provision of ballistic missile technology, widens China's strategic interests to include South as well as Central Asia. Seen from Beijing, China's determination to assert its sovereignty over Taiwan may look consistent with a nonaggressive, introspective strategy that seeks only prosperity and contentment within the traditional boundaries of the Middle Kingdom. Seen from the perspective of Vietnam, or from India, or Tibet, or the Muslim 'Stans of Central Asia, China appears outward-looking and aggressive, if not expansionist.

India, whose GDP grew less dramatically but perhaps in a more stable and sustainable manner than that of China in the post-Cold War decade, made a profound transition from a developing country to a high-tech powerhouse. It also became a nuclear power, equipped with ballistic missiles, and coolly rejected American attempts to persuade it to sign the Non-Proliferation Treaty. India has also embarked on an ambitious conventional rearmament program, developing its own supersonic jet fighter, and buying warships, tanks, and laser-guided artillery from Russia. India, which is negotiating to buy a used aircraft carrier and to lease a nuclear submarine from Russia, is intent on dominating South Asia and the Indian Ocean, whose sea routes carry Persian Gulf oil to China, South Korea, and Japan. India's recent naval exercises in the South China Sea and its prime minister's visit to Vietnam, along with its testing of the Agni-2 missile (whose range was engineered to reach Shanghai), suggest that two fast-growing regional superpowers in Asia are jostling for position.

Athenian vs. Spartan Approaches

While America, like Britain in the 1890s or Rome in the fourth century A.D., is a sated power largely content with the geopolitical status quo, other states seek to change it. In Athenian mode, which can see change as a win-win proposition, America need not find change threatening. A Europe that acted as regional policeman for the troubled Balkans, spread a calming prosperity to the Maghreb and North Africa, and mobilized the investments and market access that might guide Ukraine and Russia into the habits of honest trading and growth-driven democracy would be a useful partner, fostering desirable developments. In Spartan mode, however, in which global shifts are seen as zerosum games, such a European maturity would be seen as a setback for American predominance. And even in Athenian mode, America might see an enlarged Europe, once Turkey was included to bring Europe's borders to Iraq, Iran, and Syria, with a double proximity to both Persian Gulf and Caspian oil, as the kind of challenger that inspires Spartan instincts.

The balance between Athenian and Spartan approaches will be sorely tested in Asia. An Athenian approach would recognize the essential democratic character of India, support and invest in its economic liberalization, and encourage it to become a regional linchpin-and chief naval power-of a security system that set clear limits on Chinese ambitions. A Spartan approach would insist on maintaining predominance in the Indian Ocean, and jealously guard the Anglo-American naval base at Diego Garcia that commands the Persian Gulf approaches. An Athenian America could embrace the reformist approach of Iran's president, Mohammad Khatami, with whom the United States shares some important interests, from constraining Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq to suppressing the narcotics trade and opposing the Taliban of Afghanistan. An Athenian America would recognize the economic burden of exploiting Caspian oil via pipelines through the unsettled Caucasus or the Kurdish regions of Turkey, and adopt far cheaper alternatives that connect to the existing pipeline system through Iran. A Spartan America would remember little but the humiliation of the seizure of the Tehran embassy, and fix its concern on Iran's record of supporting terrorism and on its ambitions to acquire weapons of mass destruction.

Whatever model America chooses to adopt for its foreign policy in the twenty-first century, Athenian or Spartan-or even the vain attempt to perpetuate a Roman predominance-China seems destined to present the most testing challenge. A Spartan America would work to ensure that China did not become a serious danger, encircling it with alliances, and restraining trade and investment to inhibit its growth, gambling that the resultant socio-economic pressure would preoccupy the Beijing leadership if it did not overthrow it. The risk is that the alliances would not hold, that other outlets for China's trade and other sources of investment would compensate, and that Chinese popular sentiment would rally behind Beijing and against the United States. There is a further risk that a srategy so coldly rooted in realpolitik would face difficulty with American public opinion, and possibly in Congress.

An Athenian America would follow the broad strategy adopted by the Clinton administration, although it would probably stop short of rhetorical flourishes about "strategic partnership." This strategy was based on broad engagement with China, strongly supporting its engagement in the global trading system, while trying to guide it toward internal openness and external quiescence. At the same time, the Clinton strategy established some rules, which included the deployment of aircraft carriers in 1996 to counter Beijing's pressure on Taiwan and moderate pressure on China to improve its human rights record. The eventual rise of China to superpower status was deemed inevitable, and thus it was thought that the United States should use its period of advantage to lock China into a series of economic and security relationships and codes of internal and international behavior that would render the fullness of China's power far less problematic. The difficulty with this strategy is that it failed to take into account the readiness of the Beijing leadership to deflect internal dissent by playing the nationalist card, over Taiwan, over the bombing of the Belgrade embassy during the Kosovo war, and most recently over the spy plane incident. It also assumes that the current Beijing leadership can stay in control, or pass power almost seamlessly to a government enjoying popular legitimacy, despite the intense social strains associated with breakneck economic growth.

It already seems clear that there is no "Roman" solution to the challenge of managing China's growth. The United States, even in the current high noon of its hyperpower, cannot alone determine China's future, nor even the way that other powers will react to it. Despite American concerns, Moscow has built and intends to seal by treaty an amicable relationship with Beijing. The Europeans, with the exception of the French, have chosen to avoid any role with Taiwan (France sells it arms), and have most recently sought to engage North Korea when the Bush administration shunned it. Japan dithers. India builds its missiles and counts on deterrence. Only Taiwan follows the American lead, investing and trading energetically with China while pursuing its own internal course of democratization and counting on the United States for the weapons and support that buttress its security.

The Roman Delusion

China illustrates the emptiness of applying Rome, the metaphor, to the policies of Rome, the hyperpower. Yet the Roman metaphor, which has now entered the language and the thinking of senior aides in the White House and the State Department, is historically flawed. It can foster some dangerously misleading habits of mind; witness the creeping tendency to unilateralism in the way America engages with the rest of the world. Some of the rhetoric of the Clinton years about the United States as "the indispensable nation," endowed in Madeleine Albright's arresting phrase with the capacity "to see further," illustrates the process. The Republican-controlled Congress refused to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, vowed also to reject American adhesion to an International Criminal Court, and unilaterally demanded a reduction in its dues to the United Nations, holding back payments until the United States got its way. It also passed legislation on trade and sanctions that seemed to have forgotten Thomas Jefferson's "decent respect for the opinions of mankind." European and Canadian corporate executives were appalled to learn that their visits to the United States would be curtailed because their companies had done business with Cuba, an example of the extraterritorial enforcement of U.S. law that Americans would resent if used against them.

The new Republican administration has gone further down this unilateralist path. It has sharply reduced previous regional commitments, closing the White House offices for both the Middle East and the Northern Ireland peace processes. The National Security Council's Office of Non-Proliferation has been renamed the Office of CounterProliferation and Homeland Defense. The administration has unilaterally withdrawn from the Kyoto Protocol process on the control of greenhouse gases. Its Treasury Department, after a distinguished period of stewardship and intervention to manage instabilities in the global economy, is now staffed with senior officials who openly deride such intervention and question the continuing need for institutions like the World Bank and the IMF. It has put on hold some $800 million for programs to secure and reduce the nuclear arsenals of the former Soviet bloc, pending a review. It has withdrawn the Clinton administration's broad support for South Korea's "sunshine" policy of engagement and opening with North Korea. It has infuriated Moscow by ostentatiously opening negotiations, at senior level, with the "foreign minister" of the Chechen rebels. Having deliberately downgraded and chilled relations with Russia, the Bush administration has simultaneously cooled relations with China, acting on the provocative campaign rhetoric that denounced the Clinton term "strategic partner," replacing it with "strategic competitor."

While it is too early to tell whether the Bush administration will pursue the Roman delusion, or start making serious analyses of the Athenian-Spartan mix it will eventually adopt, there is one tactical factor to remember. The distinct tilt toward Spartan unilateralism that emerged in the new administration's opening weeks may represent less arrogance than calculation. The administrations of Ronald Reagan and the senior Bush found it useful to start tough and become more moderate later. And the opening salvo of unilateralism from George W. Bush, in the resolve to press ahead with a costly and technologically unproven system of national missile defense may yet follow this pattern.

The worst fate that could befall a Roman-style hyperpower, that its very dominance encourages others to form coalitions against it, began as President Bush took office to look like a distinct possibility-witness the unholy conspiracy that voted the United States off the U.N. Commission on Human Rights. The rhetoric of the Sino-Russian meetings that prepared the ground for their friendship treaty was, like the rhetoric of French diplomacy, openly critical of "hegemonic tendencies." But initial fears that missile defense could provoke the emergence of an extraordinary opposing coalition that rallied Russia, China, and the European allies proved unfounded. First Britain and then Germany accepted that the project was going to proceed and it made more sense to work with the Americans to limit the damage to the international security system than to force a crisis in transatlantic relations by opposing it. Russia, too, has now conceded a part of the principle at stake, that there is a new threat of ballistic missile attack from "rogue" states that justifies the development of antimissile defenses.

American unilateralism, in this case, appeared to have worked; Rome had spoken. Such, at least, was the perception in Washington. In London and Berlin, the view was more cynical. The Americans were going to spend tens of billions of dollars on unproven technologies that would take years to develop and would deploy only on some future politician's watch. So long as the issue could be deferred without dismantling the structure of arms control and strategic stability that had developed since the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, there was little point in provoking a serious row with a new American president over what might be presented as his right and duty to protect the American mainland from attack. Moreover, the decision by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to drop the N-word from national missile defense (at the suggestion of Sen. Joseph Lieberman, who offered global missile defense or alliance missile defense as alternatives), helped peel the egregiously unilateralist label from the project. A system that would be shared with the allies, and deployed to protect them, was a very different prospect from the erection of some shield of invulnerability around Fortress America. This early foreign policy success of the Bush administration was achieved because it dropped the imperious threat to impose it. In short, what succeeded was the sensible decision to adopt an Athenian solution to what had looked like a Spartan threat.