Strength Through Restraint

America can scale back its global ambitions and still emerge stronger. In fact, it’s the only way.

The United States is still by far the most powerful country on earth but seems increasingly incapable of doing much with its power. The hopes of the Bush Administration for unilateral global domination backed by military power and “democratic” ideology collapsed in ruins. The Obama Administration has achieved limited reconciliation with Russia and prevented a deterioration of relations with other countries, but has proved incapable of resolving critical international challenges, including the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the dispute between India and Pakistan, the nuclear ambitions of Iran and North Korea, and the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, China continues to grow stronger, and other leading states seem less and less willing to follow America’s lead on key issues. At the same time, Americans are very far from ready to surrender their global primacy. A central question for the future of the United States and humanity is whether, and how, the United States can accommodate rising new powers without conflict and, if possible, cooperate with them to resolve regional and local problems.

Charles Kupchan’s latest book therefore comes at a most opportune moment. How Enemies Become Friends is a highly important contribution to the debate in the United States on how to manage U.S. foreign and security policy in a world of considerably reduced U.S. power. Above all, Kupchan provides the historical and theoretical underpinning for ideas of strategic accommodation: the need for America to take large-scale and visible steps to acknowledge the power and the interests of other states, and, when necessary, to scale back its own regional ambitions and roles.

The current widespread perception of U.S. decline is to some extent an illusion built upon an illusion: That is to say, for a brief decade between approximately 1992 and 2003, American fantasies—Republican-led, but more bipartisan than many progressives would care to admit—of unipolar dominance and unlimited possibilities were so overblown that everything since must appear a “decline,” even if it is in fact only a return to the historical norm.

The apparent stalemate in Afghanistan is in many respects only a lower-intensity, slow-motion replay of the U.S. defeat by guerrillas in Vietnam, the French in Vietnam and Algeria, and so on. As for the fact that the Russians and their local allies have been able to block the idea of NATO expansion to Georgia and Ukraine, this too is a return to the historical norm, and something for which previous generations of U.S. statesmen would actually have been grateful—since an Eisenhower, Dean Acheson, or even Theodore Roosevelt would have regarded the idea of the United States making security guarantees to these countries as nothing short of barking madness.

For that matter, even in the Middle East, where a bipartisan consensus now exists that the United States must maintain both a heavy military presence and an absolute commitment to Israeli security, it is worth remembering that previous generations of the U.S. establishment would have disagreed radically. Until the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990, only a very small number of U.S. forces was stationed in the region. Despite that meager presence, America for decades managed to contain threats and secure at least adequate supplies of oil (quite apart from the question of whether it would not be better for the world’s climate and the U.S. economy for America to wean itself off it). As for the present level of U.S. commitment to Israel, Eisenhower could not have imagined this, and, if he could have imagined it, would have regarded it as monstrous. This was demonstrated, among other actions, by Eisenhower’s successful opposition to the British, French, and Israeli attack on Egypt in 1957, and his insistence on full Israeli withdrawal from the Sinai.

Nonetheless, so widely and deeply was the unipolar illusion shared that ratcheting expectations down from these heights will be a tricky business—as the most cursory examination of recent Republican foreign-policy rhetoric makes clear, whether it concerns continued pressure on Russia, threats of an attack on Iran, or advocacy of the containment of China. Indeed, managing this kind of scaling back has been extremely difficult for almost every country that has had to undertake it, and many, such as France in its handling of decolonization after 1945, have suffered disasters in the process.

Kupchan, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a professor at Georgetown University, served as director for European affairs on the National Security Council during the Clinton years. The idea of strategic adjustment is one that has interested him for a long time. In 1994, he published The Vulnerability of Empire, looking at how countries at the height of their power engaged in self-defeating behavior that helped doom them to decline. Kupchan therefore never shared the illusions that under George W. Bush did so much damage to America’s position in the world.

The greatest strength of Kupchan’s book is its extraordinarily wide-ranging account of different processes of strategic accommodation, restraint, and reconciliation through history—including a number of examples that are very rarely examined in international relations studies (the case of the Iroquois, for one). The drawback of this range is that it risks a degree of incoherence, and indeed, it would be a mistake to look in this work for detailed plans for how the United States should conduct its present foreign policy. Rather, Kupchan on the one hand offers a strong basis on which to argue against the classical realists that a stable, peaceful order is achievable, and that international anarchy is not the inevitable norm; and, on the other hand, to argue with liberals that this peaceful order does not depend (at least in the short-to-medium term) on the spread of democracy.

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