The real lesson from Sept. 11: America must rejoin the world

Joseph S. Nye, Dean, Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, Project Syndicate

The terrorist attacks on New York and Washington of Sept. 11, 2001, profoundly changed the U.S., spawning a new focus on foreign policy. The Bush administration's new national security strategy, issued in September 2002, identifies the combination of terrorism, rogue states, and weapons of mass destruction as the primary threat confronting America.

Most people agree with the new focus of American foreign policy, but debate the means by which it is carried out. Is the threat so great that America must act alone, or should the U.S. act only with the support of international institutions, even if that holds the country back? Events in Iraq illustrate this debate, but it has deeper roots.

In his 2000 election campaign, George W. Bush said about America, "If we are an arrogant nation, they'll view us that way, but if we're a humble nation, they'll respect us." He was right, but unfortunately many of America's friends saw the first eight months of his administration as arrogantly concerned with narrow American interests, focused on military power, and dismissive of treaties, norms, and multilateralism.

The administration's peremptory announcement that the Kyoto Protocol on global climate change was "dead" contributed to a reaction from other countries that cost the U.S. its seat on the UN Human Rights Commission.

September 11 supposedly changed all that. Congress finally paid America's United Nations dues, and the president turned his efforts to building a coalition against terrorism. But the rapid success of the war in Afghanistan led some in the administration and some commentators to conclude that unilateralism works.

The columnist Charles Krauthammer, for example, urges a "new unilateralism" where America refuses to play the role of "docile international citizen" and unashamedly pursues its own ends.

The new unilateralists make a mistake in focusing too heavily on military power alone. True, America's military power -- backed up by a budget equivalent to the next eight countries combined -- is essential to global stability, and an essential part of the response to terrorism.

But the metaphor of war should not blind us to the fact that suppressing terrorism will take years of patient, unspectacular civilian cooperation with other countries in areas such as intelligence sharing, police work, tracing financial flows, and cooperation among customs officials.

Military success in Afghanistan addressed the easiest part of the problem. Al-Qaeda retains cells in some 50 countries. Rather than proving the unilateralists' point, the partial nature of the success in Afghanistan illustrates the continuing need for cooperation. Similarly, it was much easier to win the war in Iraq than to win the peace.

The problem for Americans in the 21st century is that more issues and forces than ever before are outside the control of even the most powerful state. What the Sept. 11 attacks demonstrated is that the information revolution and globalization, have changed world politics in a way that means Americans cannot achieve all their international goals acting alone.

The U.S. lacks both the international and domestic prerequisites to resolve conflicts internal to other societies, and to monitor and control transnational transactions that threaten Americans at home. On many of today's key issues, such as international financial stability, drug smuggling, the spread of diseases, or global climate change, military power is ineffective. Indeed, its use can be counterproductive. America must instead mobilize international coalitions to address these shared threats and challenges.

The willingness of others to cooperate depends in part on their own self-interest, but also on the attractiveness of American positions. That power to attract is "soft power." It means that others want what you want, and there is less need to use carrots and sticks to make others do what you want.

Hard power grows out of a country's military and economic might. Soft power arises from the attractiveness of a country's culture, ideals, and policies. Hard power will always remain vital, but soft power will become increasingly important in dealing with transnational issues whose resolution requires multilateral cooperation.

To be sure, no large country can afford to be purely multilateralist, and sometimes the U.S. must take the lead, as it did in Afghanistan. But in Iraq, President Bush should have followed his father's example and built a broad international coalition.

Now, as his administration returns to the UN to seek a new resolution that will enable other countries to contribute troops and resources for peacekeeping and reconstruction in Iraq, he is paying the price for the way he went to war.

Granted, multilateralism can be used by smaller states to restrict American freedom of action, but this does not mean that it is not generally in American interests. By embedding U.S. policies in multilateral frameworks, America can make its disproportionate power more legitimate and acceptable.

Even well intentioned Americans are not immune to Lord Acton's famous warning that power tends to corrupt. Learning to listen to others and to define U.S. interests broadly to include global interests will be crucial to American soft power and whether others see the American preponderance as benign or not.

The paradox of American power is that the largest power since Rome cannot achieve many of its objectives unilaterally in a global information age. America needs to pay more attention to soft power and to multilateral cooperation. That is the real lesson of Sept. 11.

The writer is author of The Paradox of American Power: Why the World's Only Superpower Can't Go It Alone.