Survival: Global Politics and Strategy, vol. 52, no. 1, February–March 2010, pp. 187–190
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Follies of Power: America’s Unipolar Fantasy
David P. Calleo. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. £25.00/$30.00. 176 pp.
David Calleo has spent most of his professional life attacking America’s claim to global hegemony. He has always said it was bad for the world, and bad for America. In the Cold War period his attack on American pretensions was made on behalf of Europe. America’s vision of a Pax Americana left no room for Europe to breathe. Now it leaves no room for anyone else to breathe.
In his latest book, Calleo provides a brilliant, sustained argument against America’s ‘unipolar fantasy’ – crudely, the belief that the United States can and should run the world. America, he suggests, was born with a ‘unipolar gene’ which has made it either isolationist or imperial. The excluded middle way, which Calleo has always favoured, is pluralism. The unipolar temptation was checked during the Cold War, but when bipolarity ended with the implosion of the Soviet Union, America instinctively opted for unipolarity rather than multipolarity. This was a mistake, according to Calleo, not only because the United States lacks the capacity to be a global hegemon, but because any such condition would be morally repugnant.
America’s unipolar fantasy, Calleo argues, derives from four fundamental assumptions, about the country’s irresistible ‘soft power’; its incomparable ‘hard power’; its invulnerability to ‘overstretch’; and its legitimacy. The first three are about capacity, while the last involves morality. Calleo dismisses all four. ‘Soft power’ does not stop anti-Americanism: ‘Terrorists eat at McDonald’s, wear blue jeans, and download popular music’. The so-called successes of ‘soft power’ in transforming Germany and Japan into democracies after the war depended on the presence of American armies of occupation, and this will also be true of the much less promising venture in Iraq. So the question is whether America’s ‘hard power’ is up to the job of policing the world. Calleo thinks not. Although American hard power remains incomparable, it has to work harder. During the Cold War, American forces were required to police half the world; now they have to police the whole world. As a result, American spending on security is greater today than during the Cold War. The deployment of hard power also makes the world less secure: it encourages nuclear proliferation and turns rogue states into failed states that will require permanent garrisons. In short, Calleo reverses Tony Blair’s rationale for nation-building that ‘the spread of our values makes us more secure’. In fact, attempting to force our values on others makes us less secure by stirring up resistance all over the world.
Calleo then turns to the well-worn theme of ‘overstretch’. In doing so, he offers a fascinating, but neglected, geopolitical perspective on the current economic crisis. The United States has long suffered from imperial overstretch in the sense that it has run an almost continuous current-account deficit since the 1970s. Calleo correctly points out that the continued ability of the United States to finance its external deficit is a ‘critical support…
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Robert Skidelsky is Emeritus Professor of Political Economy at Warwick University. His latest book, Keynes: The Return of the Master, was published by PublicAffairs in September 2009.
Related articles
A Change We Can Believe In? by David Calleo (August–September 2009)
Restoring America’s Image: What the Next President Can Do by Mitchell B. Reiss (October–November 2008)
America’s Global Role After Bush by Bruce W. Jentleson (Autumn 2007)
Charting a New Course by Kishore Mahbubani (Autumn 2007)
American Power and Allied Restraint: Lessons of Iraq by Dana H. Allin (Spring 2007)
Anatomy of a Habit: America’s Unnecessary Wars by John L. Harper (Summer 2005)
