For half a decade, the easy answer has been–“Because America is the world’s sole remaining superpower.” But that obscures more than it illuminates. It doesn’t reveal why gnarled Arabs and Jews seek the blessing of a young American president, or why Bosnia’s warriors listen only to an American diplomat. “America is back,” The Washington Post reported the French foreign minister as saying last week. Nice phrase; but what does it mean?
In many respects, after all, America is not back. Its politicians get easy applause by decrying spendthrift diplomats. In much of the world, it’s easier to find a Japanese or Scandinavian aid program than an American one. And–notoriously–Americans won’t cross what is now called “the Mogadishu Line.” They won’t take a military action that risks more than 18 young lives.
Yet still, somehow, nothing happens unless America makes it happen–while those things that America wants (such as a promise by China not to sell nuclear technology to Iran) it usually gets.
In part, this is because Bill Clinton’s foreign-policy team is not quite the group of bungling amateurs it looked in the awful days of 1993. Then, Warren Christopher, the secretary of state, seemed to be a modest man with much to be modest about. Now he looks like a delegator of genius–happy to let Dennis Ross run the detail of the Middle East peace talks, or Richard Holbrooke take on the thankless task of banging Bosnian heads together. Add useful assistance on Northern Ireland, the restoration of near democracy in Haiti and staunch support of economic reform in Mexico, and Clinton’s foreign team can polish a few medals on its collective breast.
Better staff work, however, is only a part of the story. America makes things happen for two reasons. It is the only single country with a truly global military reach; and, though often befuddled, it has a moral sense. One other country–Russia–has enough nuclear arms that can threaten destruction if it doesn’t get its way. But only the U.S. has the much more useful hard-ware–the satellites that can peek into Sad-dam Hussein’s palaces, the giant aircraft carriers that can whisk thousands of troops and airplanes to the far side of the world. Even in the post-Mogadishu age, America’s unparalleled military, might means it can offer anyone else a choice of the strongest shield or the sharpest sword. Little wonder the United States is a country with which everyone wants to be friends.
America’s global ability to offer threat or protection will remain unique for years. Japan can’t rival it; nor China, at least for a generation. Last week Britain said it would join France and Germany in a common system of defense procurement. But it may be two decades before the Europeans have a single army, equipped to the same standards as those now enjoyed by the Americans–by which time the next wave of pony tailed Californian software writers will have leapfrogged yet farther ahead.
Only America, moreover, professes to run its foreign policy on moral lines. Sometimes this is disastrous: Americans were so keen to keep their hands away from grubby compromise that they stayed disengaged from the search for a solution in Bosnia for far too long. (“We don’t do maps,” said one senior administration official, prissily, last year. “You [Europeans] do maps.”) Yet precisely because America does adopt a moral tone at the start of issues, its vote in favor of any particular end game carries weight. If America could stomach the dictator Raoul Cedras walking away from Haiti with freedom and cash, it was hard for anyone else to say he shouldn’t. If the United States says that the present division of Bosnia is acceptable, the Muslim forces know they will lose vital support if they keep fighting.
Giants can’t expect to be loved. American military power will always be resented by those who don’t have it, and American sermonizing (from a country that has a few bloodstains on its hands) will always enrage the Old World’s dispassionate diplomats, for whom a show of feeling is bad form. Yet the combination of American might and moralizing serves a purpose. American hegemony may not be perfect, but it is at least preferable to any other way in which the world might be ordered–as people outside the United States know very well. So: why do they turn to America? Because they’re grateful.
