Can This Be the Second American Century?

By Paul Kendall

For the first time in many years, a presidential election may turn on issues of foreign policy. While the rhetoric of the pre-2008 debates is focused upon Iraq, Iran, and terrorism, the underlying issue is America´s role in the world of today, and the central challenge is how to lead a frightened American public in a time of tectonic geopolitical change.

In 1941 the owner of Time-Life magazine, Henry Luce, wrote in an article entitled The American Century, ¨We Americans are unhappy.... We are nervous - or gloomy - or apathetic.... As we look toward the future...we are filled with foreboding. The future doesn´t seem to hold anything for us except conflict, disruption, war.¨

Faced with the uncertainty of his time, Luce asserted America´s greatness: America had the world´s strongest economy, was the leader in science and technology, was known as being the world´s Good Samaritan, and above all was passionate about its ideals. He was not blind to the challenges of his time, but he had faith that with proper leadership the American people would respond to them and triumph over them.

Luce was right. With vision, shrewdness, tenacity, sacrifice, and luck, we won World War II, created the international institutions that bind the world together today, got to the moon, defeated the Soviet Union, and ushered in an era of global economic wealth previously unknown in world history. The twentieth century was truly The American Century.

Now at the outset of a new century we are experiencing a similar time of national confusion. Today we face a different world situation than 66 years ago, but the unspoken assumption of the presidential candidates is that this too will be an American century. The candidates are just not sure what kind of an American century it should be or how to achieve it.

Henry Luce concluded his article with the observation that America makes the geopolitical environment in which she lives. This is arguably still true today. We were then, and still remain, so dominant in the world´s economy, in international institutions, in global security-maintenance, and in cultural pace-setting that we essentially ¨own¨ the political and economic situation in which we find ourselves.

But there is no guarantee that this position of dominance will last. Economically, the United States no longer has either the world´s only powerful economy or the obviously most attractive economic model. Militarily, both China and Russia now have the will, reason, and resources to challenge our strategies. Geographically, the security threat has moved from the known and friendly soil of Europe to the more culturally unfamiliar and sceptical terrains of the Middle East and Asia. Politically, much of the rest of the world is more concerned about containing the rogue elephant that the United States is today than about containing the rogue elephant that China or Iran may become tomorrow. And then, of course, there is our track record on global warming.

In sum, we are losing the competitive edge we enjoyed at the end of the Cold War and can no longer compel, by either force or attractiveness, the cooperation of those nations whose willing assistance we require in order to achieve our ambitions. But the way forward is not to seek recapturing the past.

America does not need to be the world´s hegemon, policeman, banker, or savior. Those burdens are too heavy for any single nation to bear in today´s world. What the world needs is a respected leader, and that leader could still be the United States.

To be that leader, however, our elected representatives will have to broaden their policy focus beyond the issues of Iraq, Iran, terrorism, and Hugo Chavez and their security thinking beyond military power. Instead, they will have to respond to the realities of our age with more candor, comprehension, courage, and imagination than they have to-date displayed.

Retaining global leadership will require painful fiscal discipline at home and demonstrating the practical utility of our liberal democratic ideals, both at home and abroad. It will require changing our nation´s deeply ingrained consumer buying, travel, and living patterns. It will require commitments to international alliances, institutions, and laws that challenge our notions of national sovereignty and limit our military options. And, it will require displaying greater maturity in response to the acts of non-state terrorists.

If any presidential candidate can convince the American people that the benefits of such leadership are worth its costs and that he or she has the strength and shrewdness to realize such a vision, then this century could be an even greater American century than was the last. On the other hand, if no such leader emerges, the consequences of continued decline are impossible to predict, but none of the probable scenarios is rosy. Like the American public of 1941, we have both reason to be anxious and reason to be hopeful.