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.S.hege-mony.The smartest of our foreign interlocutors know that for our faults,we are essentially benign as a national power.We may occasionally go outinto the world in force, brandishing all our high-tech weaponry and Toward a New Consensus 255flaunting our exceptionalism, but we will always go home again (thoughwe may leave a military base or two behind, as in Central Asia mostrecently, to secure the peace).Indeed, to make the case for the continueddominance of the überpower requires only that we look at the great pow-ers that came beforeÞöand at those that would likely follow if the UnitedStates were somehow to disappear from the global scene.From ancientAthens and Sparta to Rome, the British empire, the German Third Reich,and Japan s Co-Prosperity Sphere in Asia, every dominant power in his-tory has sought to build an imperium on a tide of blood and conquest.More important, whereas few previous empires ever willingly gave up acolony or a conquest, America has made this a habit, indeed a national mis-sion.There is no precedent for what America did after World War II, hand-ing Germany and Japan back their countries, replenished.There is noprecedent for what America did in the Gulf War, restoring Kuwait s rulersto their rule and then going home.Or during the 1990s in Bosnia orKosovo, where the national interest, as traditionally defined, was next to nil,and yet an American president staked his and NATO s credibility in orderto save Muslims (not that al-Qaeda appreciated this).Britain and Francegave up their coloniesÞöbut only under American and local pressure.The key point is this: Our exceptional behavior has nothing to do withAmerican munificence or goodness, just as the ravages brought on byprevious empires had little to do with rulers who were intrinsically moreevil than we.It is simply that this behavior defines who we are.Americanexceptionalism can be made to work for the world.Every previous empirehas been organized around national, ethnic, or tribal chauvinism (theword barbarian, after all, originally referred to the strange language ofnon-Greek speakers); this has inevitably led to brutal behavior towardthose peoples who are not members of the same tribe or ethnic ornational group and who are often seen as lesser beings, even subhuman.This is a constant in imperial behavior throughout history.America, itsWASP origins aside, began as a nation of people escaping imperialism.This has meant, in practice, that we Americans cannot help it but wishfreedom on others (granted, for much of our history this once meantfreedom only for Caucasians, hence America s brutal treatment of NativeAmericans and blacks.But that attitude is no longer acceptable).America 256 At War with Ourselveswill almost certainly be engaged abroad more robustly for a long time tocome, occasionally with guns blazing.But we will remain a nonimperialhegemon, a stabilizing power.We now have to persuade allies and ene-mies alike of this.To quote Kissinger again, An international order whichis not considered just will be challenged sooner or later. ¹xLiberals tend to believe that the global system is likely to survive evenwithout American power behind it; the norms of the international systemshould be made powerful enough so that if, say, Japan or China or Russiawere to become the hegemon, the global system would endure.I tend todoubt this could happen; even if these countries are becoming part of theinternational community, it is for the most part a forced entry.Ethnicityand nationalism will continue to define the self-identity of most othernations (a possible exception to this rule of great powers is the EU, whosetransnational embrace of new international structures could potentiallymake it an able caretaker, if it can ever achieve a common voice andpower structure).On the other hand, we certainly should be preparing for the possibil-ity of American decline.True, America s dominance in the world today issuch that we have a lot of geopolitical capital to play with, a lot of roomfor error.While there will assuredly be terrorist breakouts, and moreAmericans will die in them, we will remain unthreatened by full-scale warfor decades.But if we treasure our heirs, we should recognize that thisstatus quo is a fool s paradise.At some point that will probably take placelater in the twenty-first century, no matter how much we pour intodefense, our unparalleled powerÞö the power represented by stealthbombers and a world-dominating economyÞöwill likely decline relative toother countries.This is so, ironically, because of the very global system weare creating, one that is, again, marked by open markets and the free flowof information.As I have argued, I believe we must build this systemÞöasopposed to an old-fashioned empireÞöbecause openness and democracydefine who we are and because we Americans feel more secure and athome within such a system.But we must expect that this system willsomeday lead to more of a global equilibrium in knowledge and powerÞöa spreading of the wealth.For America, this will be the ultimate challengeposed by ideological blowback.The question now is whether we allow Toward a New Consensus 257this global system to become our undoing, because we are scarcely payingattention to its maintenance while it may be creating future great-powerrivals such as China, or whether this system will be sustained, strength-ened, and applied by wise American leadership to co-opt such great-power rivals into it, perhaps permanently.The Merger of Realism and IdealismI close this book in the hope that the arguments I delivered effectively ful-fill the promise I made earlier on: to close the gap, conceptually and prac-tically, between Wilsonian idealism and conservative realism, the twopoles that have defined American foreign policy for much of the last cen-tury.The Wilsonian world we live in, troubled as it is, is an outgrowth ofAmerica s inexorable if somewhat unwitting construction of a worldorder during the twentieth century
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