Nav i g at i n g t h e P e r m a n e n t Q uag m i re
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the Chinas and Russias into the international system. And if the Bush team genuinely wanted to see a global division of labor that worked, it couldn’t expect the Europeans and others to blindly sign on to peacekeeping and nation building without being consulted on overall strategy beforehand. Both our traditional allies, including France, and our putative future rivals, such as China, fear the prospect of falling so far behind the überpower that they appear as mere “ants” to us from on high, as one Washington commentator put it. This is precisely the moment for America to be magnanimous: The payoff in goodwill could be priceless. Which way these sentiments will ultimately go hangs very much in the balance. “This is a historically defining moment,” one European diplomat told me. “The decisive question is how America will manage its dominance.”⁶⁴ Anti-American elements within countries such as China are even now studying the ways of “asymmetric warfare” to determine how best to take America on, even as Beijing itself is resisting a military buildup to challenge American hegemony. To avoid coming out on the wrong side of historyand engendering anti-American alliance building we Americans must find the proper balance between reassuring the world of our nation’s essential benign nature and yet not encouraging the idea that we’ve gone “soft” or will withdraw, and warning the world that we will permit no other power to challenge us and yet not being overbearing about it. This is a task of consummate diplomacy that will require, Washington analyst Andrew Krepinevich says, “the virtuosity of a Bismarck to pull it off.”⁶⁵ Much of the rest of this book will be about how to find this middle path. Yes, American hegemony is a fact. It is even a historically lucky fact: The world, in truth, has never enjoyed such a benign “imperium.” And yes, American hegemony is necessary, as a kind of exoskeleton of hard power that keeps the international system together. But to embrace power alone as a worldview is far too simplistic. The world the hegemonists and realists describe as a mushy fantasy worldthe world of the international community, of norms, of valuesis now real. While it doesn’t follow that the world they thought they were living in the world defined by hard power is fantasy, this view does need to be drastically modified, as we will see in later chapters.