American global power hot topic in presidential election campaign

Joseph Nye Dean, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard, Project Syndicate

America's presidential election campaign is heating up, and with it the debate about American power. A year ago, after the blitz victory in the four-week Iraq War, many people thought the issue was settled. But the subsequent difficulties in Iraq -- and in America's foreign relations more generally -- have placed that topic at the heart of the election campaign.

It is hard to recall, but a little over a decade ago, conventional wisdom -- both inside and outside the U.S. -- held that America was in decline. In 1992, the winner of the New Hampshire primary election argued that "the Cold War is over -- and Japan won." When I published Bound to Lead in 1990, I predicted the continuing rise of American power. But today I regard it as equally important to challenge the new conventional wisdom that America is invincible, and that the "new unilateralism" should guide U.S. foreign policy.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, some analysts described the resulting world as unipolar and saw few constraints on American power. This is misleading. Power in a global information age is distributed among countries in a pattern that resembles a complex three-dimensional chess game.

On the top chessboard, military power is largely unipolar. The U.S. is the only country with large state of the art air, naval, and ground forces capable of global deployment -- thus, the quick victory in Iraq last year. But on the middle chessboard, economic power is multi-polar, with the U.S., Europe, Japan, and China representing two-thirds of world production. On this economic board, other countries often balance American power.

The bottom chessboard is the realm of transnational relations that cross borders beyond government control. At the benign end of the spectrum, this realm includes actors as diverse as bankers electronically transferring huge sums; at the other end are terrorists transferring weapons or hackers disrupting Internet operations.

On this bottom board, power is widely dispersed, and it makes no sense to speak of unipolarity, multipolarity, or hegemony. Those who recommend a unilateral American foreign policy based on such traditional descriptions of American power are relying on a woefully inadequate analysis.

Many of the real challenges to American power are coming not on the upper military board, on which the unilateralists concentrate, but on the lower transnational board. Ironically, the temptation to go it alone may ultimately weaken the U.S. in this domain.

Why is this true? Today's information revolution and the type of globalization that accompanies it are transforming and shrinking the world. At the beginning of the 21st century, these two forces increased American power, particularly the ability to influence others through attractive, or what I call "soft" power. But with time, technological gains will spread to other countries and peoples, diminishing America's relative pre-eminence.

For example, today America's 5 percent of the global population represents more than half of all Internet users. But in a decade or two, Chinese may become the language of the largest number of Internet users. It will not dethrone English as a lingua franca, but at some point, the Asian market will loom larger than the American market.

Even more important, the information revolution is creating virtual communities and networks that cut across national borders, and transnational corporations and non-governmental actors -- terrorists included -- will play larger roles. Many organizations will have soft power of their own as they attract citizens into coalitions that cut across national boundaries.

The terrorist attacks on New York, Washington, and now Madrid are terrible symptoms of the deep changes already occurring. Technology has been diffusing power away from governments, and empowering individuals and groups to play roles in world politics -- including wreaking massive destruction -- that were once reserved to governments. Privatization has been the leitmotif in economic policy in recent years, but in politics the privatization of war is terrorism.

Moreover, as globalization shrinks distance, events in faraway places -- like Afghanistan -- have a greater impact on everyone's lives. The world has moved from the Cold War to the Global Information Age, but the dominant foreign policy paradigms have not kept pace.

Today's growing global networks of interdependence are putting new items on national and international agendas; Americans simply cannot solve many of these by themselves. International financial stability is vital to prosperity, but the U.S. needs the cooperation of others to ensure it.

In a world where borders are becoming more porous than ever to everything from drugs to infectious diseases to terrorism, Americans will be forced to work with other countries beyond their borders.

Because of its leading edge in the information revolution, and its vast investment in traditional power resources, the U.S. will remain the world's single most powerful country well into this new century. While potential coalitions to check American power may be created, it is unlikely that they will become firm alliances unless the U.S. handles its hard coercive power in an overbearing unilateral manner that undermines its "soft" or attractive power.

The writer is author of the forthcoming book, Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics.