THE GREAT EXPERIMENT
THE STORY OF ANCIENT EMPIRES, MODERN STATES, AND THE QUEST FOR A GLOBAL NATION
STROBE TALBOTT
SIMON & SCHUSTER 2008
PART II
PART ONE: THE IMPERIAL MILLENIA
Chapter 1: Caravans at Rest
Chapter 2: A Light Unto the Nations
Chapter 3: The Ecumenical State
Chapter 4: The Poet and ‘The Prince’
Chapter 5: Perpetual War and ‘Perpetual Peace’
Chapter 6: Blood and Leather
PART TWO: THE AMERICAN CENTURIES
Chapter 7: Monsters to Destroy
Chapter 8: Empty Chairs
Chapter 9: The Master Builder
Chapter 10: A Trusteeship of the Powerful
Chapter 11: An End and a Beginning
PART THREE: THE UNIPOLAR DECADES
Chapter 12: The New World Order
Chapter 13: Seizing the Day
Chapter 14: Hard Power
Chapter 15: A Theory of the Case
Chapter 16: Going it Alone
Chapter 17: A Consequential Aberration
CONCLUSION: THE CRUCIAL YEARS
I am doing it because it is right – I am doing it because it is necessary to be done if we are to survive ourselves.
Harry Truman, on his motivation for the Marshall Plan
As I was finishing this book in the spring and summer of 2007, several foreign officials with whom I had worked closely in the nineties asked me a rhetorical question along these lines: If the son of the Bush we so confidently followed into Iraq in 1991 could bring about such a disaster there 12 years later, how can we ever know what to expect from you Americans in the future? These were not inveterate U.S.-bashers (and only one of them was French), yet they were less confident than I was that America’s unilateral moment was over. Bush’s successor will have to deal with that scepticism at a time when the United States will need all the help it can get in and around Iraq. That help will have to come from governments whose relations with Washington are strained, from countries where America’s reputation is scraping bottom, from an enfeebled United Nations, from a European Union that is struggling to restore its sense of identity, purpose, and momentum, and from a NATO that has been wounded in Afghanistan.
The next administration should therefore waste no time in demonstrating that respect for international law is once again part of the bedrock of U.S. foreign policy. A good start would be to declare full adherence to the Geneva Conventions on treatment of civilians and prisoners of war, a similar statement with regard to the UN Convention against Torture, an affirmation of the right of habeas corpus for U.S.-held detainees, and a revalidation of President Clinton’s signature on the treaty creating the International Criminal Court.
Measures like these would constitute initial repair work that is necessary if the United States is successfully to reclaim its leadership of the long, slow process of strengthening a rule-based international order.
That challenge extends far beyond Turtle Bay – and beyond the UN system as a whole. The UN has the permanent advantage of combining universal membership, global scope, and a comprehensive agenda.
If the UN had not existed since 1945, we would not be able to invent it now, especially with the United States the object of such widespread mistrust and resentment. That makes the organisation indispensable as a convenor of the governments of the world and as a legitimizer of decisions and actions taken in their name.
But the UN also has the permanent disadvantage of being spread too thin – of being too cumbersome and, ironically, too representative; the sheer numbers and diversity of its membership are often a drag on its effectiveness.
- To offset that defect, the UN needs to be incorporated into an increasingly variegated network of structures and arrangements – some functional in focus, others geographic; some intergovernmental, others based on systematic collaboration with the private sector, civil society, and NGOs.
- One of the UN’s prime deficiencies is the ‘policing’ function that Franklin Roosevelt had in mind some 65 years ago. Someday the UN may have at its disposal on-call forces to deter, contain, and, if necessary, defeat and replace aggressive or dangerous regimes; intervene in and end civil wars; stop and punish genocide and ethnic cleansing; and provide security for peacemaking, peacekeeping, and nation building.
- To hasten that day, which is a long way off, the United States can use its uniquely wide-ranging influence, enhanced by recovery of its legitimacy in the eyes of the world, to encourage regional organizations to develop their own capacities as well as habits of cooperation with one another and with the UN itself.
- What happens in global politics will hinge largely on trends in the global economy. Managing that dimension of the international system will meet basic standards of equity and efficiency only if advanced industrial nations open their markets, share their technology, and invest in the eradication of poverty.
- Ensuring a peaceful 21st century will depend in large measure on narrowing the divide between those who feel like winners and those who feel like losers in the process of globalization, and on shifting the ratio in favor of those who feel like winners. Otherwise globalization itself will become a loser for us all.
Progress in meeting these goals will take decades of sustained, coordinated effort and a high degree of ingenuity and persistence in overcoming setbacks and working around obstacles.
It is humankind’s self-inflicted misfortune not to have anything like that much time to come to grips with two clear and present dangers. One is a new wave of nuclear-weapons proliferation; the other is a tipping point in the process of climate change. These mega-threats can be held at bay in the crucial years immediately ahead only through multilateralism on a scale far beyond anything the world has achieved to date. That challenge puts a unique onus on the United States as the most heavily armed nuclear-weapons state and as the leading producer of greenhouse gases. How long the United States will remain the leading power on earth will depend to a significant degree on how quickly and successfully it provides leadership on these two issues.
To make up for lost time in stanching proliferation, the administration inaugurated on January 20, 2009, should immediately undertake a series of initiatives, starting with one directed to Moscow. Russia’s nuclear-weapons stockpile is second only to America’s. Drastic reduction is important in its own right, as an example to other countries. It is also an obligation under international and U.S. law (the goal of eventually abolishing nuclear arsenals is written into the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which the Senate ratified nearly forty years ago.)
- Until now, real disarmament has been treated as an object of lip service. That is beginning to change.
- The United States should also resume negotiations with Russia on defensive systems, with an eye toward reinstating the premise of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.
Hard as preventing a spiral of nuclear proliferation may be, it is easy compared to stabilizing climate change. Aside from the technological difficulties, there are daunting financial and political costs associated with the measures necessary for reducing the emission of greenhouse gases.
The danger that we will disastrously overheat the earth – or, depending on the vicissitudes of climate change, drown, starve, or, in some parts of the world, choke or freeze ourselves to death – is a new nightmare.
- Dick Cheney warned in the context of terrorism that if there is even a 1% chance of something very bad happening, we should act as though it were a certainty.
- Since the odds are approaching 100% that if humankind continues to pump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, it will alter the planet in ways that no one can predict, Cheney’s rule should make him, on the subject of climate change, Al Gore’s soulmate.
- The so-called ‘dirty dozen’ that account for 80% of the problem will have to accept mandatory cuts. The Kyoto Protocol will expire in 2012. That means the next U.S. president will have less that 4 years to play a decisive role in the design of an effective successor regime.
It is asking a lot of the world to grapple simultaneously with nuclear proliferation and climate change, but it is not asking too much, given the stakes. Public recognition of the way in which these and other dangers are connected might help galvanize support for the necessary remedies, sacrifices, and tradeoffs.
- Projections indicate that the more onerous effects of climate change will be in poorer parts of the world, where soaring temperatures, encroaching sands, and rising sea levels are likely to cause or hasten the failure of fragile states.
- In failing, they will teach us the linkage between their misery and our insecurity: failed states are often outlawed states, sources of regional instability, incubators of terrorism, and thriving markets for lethal technology.
Dwight Eisenhower chose to put his idea before the world from the podium of the General Assembly, and in the decades that followed, the UN system provided his successors with a mechanism for pursuing global arms control and nonproliferation. In a similar way, the UN can, in the years to come, serve as a forum for the diplomacy – in the first instance among the big powers, but involving the smaller ones as well – to strike the crosscutting deals that will be necessary to slow down climate change and stop nuclear proliferation.
If the stories told in this book is any guide, it is an open question whether humankind is capable of responding adequately – and that means quickly and boldly – to proliferation and climate change. By and large, breakthroughs in the great experiment of nations learning to work together have come in the wake of explosions in the laboratory: it took the bloody stalemate of the battle of Kadesh for Pharaoh Ramses II to parley with the Hittite king Hattušili; it took the Thirty Years War to bring about the Treaty of Westphalia; it took the Napoleonic wars to inspire the Concert of Europe; it took World War I to achieve what turned out to be the false start of the League of Nations; only after World War II did the world’s leaders try again, more successfully, with the United Nations.
- The most pertinent and encouraging exception to this woeful pattern was the maintenance of the nuclear peace during the cold war: it did not take World War III to spur international regulation of national arsenals; the looming menace was enough.
If we take the steps necessary to fend off specific, imminent, and existential threats, we will be giving ourselves time and useful experience for lifting global governance to a higher level. By solving two problems that are truly urgent, we can increase the chances that – eventually – perhaps by the time Lola has grandchildren of her own – the world will be able to ameliorate or even solve other problems that are merely very important. Whether future generations make the most of such a world, and whether they think of it as a global nation or just a well-governed international community, is up to them. Whether they have the choice is up to us.
Acknowledgements
Illustration Credits
Notes