A little more than two years ago I wrote a blog post entitled "The End of Power?" After riffing on the subject for a spell, I closed with:

So... we live in a world in which more actors have vetoes over systemic change but no actor has the ability to truly compel change. This leads to lots of talk about "G-zero worlds" and so forth. 

Just to be provocative, however, I wonder if what's truly changed is the extinction of compellence power as we know it. The primary, ne plus ultra tools of compellence require a willingness to kill, jail, or starve a lot of people. Recent flare-ups like Iran in 2009 and Egypt right now suggest that such actions are possible at the domestic level but pretty damn costly; even authoritarian countries flinch at using brute force on a domestic population. Cross-border efforts are even more expensive in terms of both material and reputational costs. 

This isn't the end of power, but it might be the end of one particular dimension of power. I'm not entirely convinced that this supposition is true and am willing/eager to hear counterarguments. That said, I still hereby claim The End of Power as my title, so everyone else just back off, OK?

Well, so much for my claim. Former FP head honcho Moisés Naim has a new book out called... The End of Power: From Boardrooms to Battlefields and Churches to States, Why Being In Charge Isn't What It Used to Be. His argument: 

Power is shifting -- from large, stable armies to loose bands of insurgents, from corporate leviathans to nimble start-ups, and from presidential palaces to public squares. But power is also changing, becoming harder to use and easier to lose. As a result, argues award-winning columnist and former Foreign Policy editor Moisés Naím, all leaders have less power than their predecessors, and the potential for upheaval is unprecedented. In The End of Power, Naím illuminates the struggle between once-dominant megaplayers and the new micropowers challenging them in every field of human endeavor. The antiestablishment drive of micropowers can topple tyrants, dislodge monopolies, and open remarkable new opportunities, but it can also lead to chaos and paralysis. Drawing on provocative, original research and a lifetime of experience in global affairs, Naím explains how the end of power is reconfiguring our world.

The originality of the argument -- along with the subtitle -- saves Moisés from some serious legal retribution!! Well, that and he asked me to moderate a panel on the topic with him and Fareed Zakaria at the Council on Foreign Relations. Here's the video.  Enjoy! 

As someone who had a little fun at President Obama's expense with a slight rewriting of his first inaugural address over the weekend, I will not be so indecorous as to skewer his second inaugural address in as rough a manner.  A few thoughts on the speech and pomp and circumstance and commentary, however:

1)  The build-up to the speech demonstrates the blind spots that occasionally hobble our political class.  All long weekend I've heard that good second inaugurals are rare or inconsequential (save Lincoln's, of course).  This demonstrates a remarkably short-term memory.  I'm not George W. Bush's biggest fan, but his second inaugural address was both significant in policy implications and lyrical in its use of rhetoric.  If political commentators can't parse the difference between a good speech and good policy, what chance do they have of providing any enlightenment about what's to come in politics?

2)  As for Obama's rhetoric, on the whole, I'd say this was both a more confident and relaxed speech than his first inaugural -- and a measure of the ways in which the country has changed in the past four years.  His use of "we the people" was an effective trope and highlighted some trends that sometimes get lost in DC obsessions about the right-wing backlash to Obama.  The simple fact is that over the past four years Americans have become significantly more tolerant of each other, particlarly with respect to gays and lesbians.  Obama was smart to place this in a broader inexorable march towards less discrimination and greater civil and political rights in the United States.  At the same time, Obama also did not shy away from his progressive economic message.  We'll see how well that goes moving fowards.

3)  As for the foreign policy section of the speech... meh. Here's the biggest paragraph: 

We will defend our people and uphold our values through strength of arms and rule of law. We will show the courage to try and resolve our differences with other nations peacefully – not because we are naïve about the dangers we face, but because engagement can more durably lift suspicion and fear. America will remain the anchor of strong alliances in every corner of the globe; and we will renew those institutions that extend our capacity to manage crisis abroad, for no one has a greater stake in a peaceful world than its most powerful nation. We will support democracy from Asia to Africa; from the Americas to the Middle East, because our interests and our conscience compel us to act on behalf of those who long for freedom. And we must be a source of hope to the poor, the sick, the marginalized, the victims of prejudice – not out of mere charity, but because peace in our time requires the constant advance of those principles that our common creed describes: tolerance and opportunity; human dignity and justice.

This is pretty boilerplate, in my book.  Nothing new, nothing particularly soaring.  It almost read as if it was a placeholder for better text.  In that, this speech was a marked contrast to Bush's second inaugural, which was principally about foreign affairs.

4)  That said, the most significant foreign policy implications in this speech weren't in that paragraph, but earlier: 

Some may still deny the overwhelming judgment of science, but none can avoid the devastating impact of raging fires, and crippling drought, and more powerful storms. The path towards sustainable energy sources will be long and sometimes difficult. But America cannot resist this transition; we must lead it. We cannot cede to other nations the technology that will power new jobs and new industries – we must claim its promise. That’s how we will maintain our economic vitality and our national treasure – our forests and waterways; our croplands and snowcapped peaks. That is how we will preserve our planet, commanded to our care by God. That’s what will lend meaning to the creed our fathers once declared.

I don't know if this will translate into concrete policy achievements, but it's interesting that Obama put it front and center in this speech.  It's also interesting that, like Bush, he used religious imagery and religious authority to make the case for addressing climate change as an urgent national imperative. 

5)  Finally -- and I know this is gonna be controversial -- but I'm gonna say it anyway:  Kelly Clarkson outsang Beyonce today.  I would not have expected that going in.  I suspect Beyonce might have had some technical difficulties.  While they are both excellent singers, on nine out of ten days I'd expect Beyonce to outclass Clarkson.  But not today.  Not today.  "The Star-Spangled Banner" is a tougher song than "My Country Tis of Thee," but still. 

That said, my favorite pop rendition of a patriotic song is embedded below:

What did you think? 

A year ago your humble blogger penned a post suggesting that the United States was really, really, really super-bad at being an empire.  Those who claim that the United States conducts all aspects of its foreign policy purely for profit need to cope with the fact that America really stinks at making a buck from its military actions.  A year later, with respect to Afghanistan and Iraq, that assessment really hasn't changed:  the United States investment in both of those countries remains a massive net loss.  Even Libya doesn't seem to have panned out all that well as a money-making opportunity for Americans. 

As a social scientist, however, I need to seek out potentially contradictory data points, and Matthew Brumwasser has a story in the New York Times about how one U.S. military action does seem to be yielding economic gains.... for the individual policymakers responsible for it: 

So many former American officials have returned to Kosovo for business — in coal and telecommunications, or for lobbying and other lucrative government contracts — that it is hard to keep them from colliding.

They also include Wesley K. Clark, a retired Army general and the former supreme allied commander of NATO forces in Europe who ran the bombing campaign against the Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic; and Mark Tavlarides, who was legislative director at the Clinton White House’s National Security Council.

The State Department has no policy that forbids former diplomats from lobbying on behalf of nations where they served or returning to them for profit, beyond the one applying to federal employees as a whole, which prohibits senior officials from contacting agencies where they once worked for one year and bans all federal employees for life from advising on the same matters.

Kosovo is not the only nation where former officials have returned to conduct business — Iraq is another example — but it presents an extreme case, and perhaps a special ethical quandary, given the outsize American influence here. Pristina, the capital, may be the only city in the world where Bob Dole Street intersects Bill Clinton Boulevard.

Foreign policy experts say the practice of former officials’ returning for business is more common than acknowledged publicly. Privately, former officials concede the possibility of conflicts of interest and even the potential to influence American foreign policy as diplomats who traditionally made careers in public service now rotate more frequently to lucrative jobs in the private sector.

If you read the whole story, however, you'll see that the correlation between ex-policymakers profiting and U.S. corporation profiting is not a perfect one.  For example, the Slovenian firm IPKO hired Ms. Albright to be a "special advisor," no doubt to advance their burgeoning interests in Kosovo. 

Still, this is a data point that suggests at least some Americans can make a profit off of successful military actions.  Of course, contrary to the somewhat sinister tone of the story, I'm not sure that Americans are really screwing over the Kosovars in their hunt for government contracts and assets.  Indeed, paradoxically, the very surfeit of ex-policymakers in Pristina means there's real competition among them for prime investments in Kosovo  -- which means better terms for the Kosovars. 

So yeah, I still think Americans are awful at empire-building.

What do you think? 

My recent post on the overstatement of American decline has probably been my most popular single non-zombie item since moving the blog to Foreign Policy.  It has also attracted some useful observations on Michael Beckley's International Security essay in particular -- see Phil Arena and Erik Voeten for some trenchant criticisms. 

My FP co-blogger Steve Walt has also weighed in, however, arguing that obsessing about the Sino-American comparison misses some larger points about the decline of American influence: 

The United States remains very powerful -- especially when compared with some putative opponents like Iran -- but its capacity to lead security and economic orders in every corner of the world has been diminished by failures in Iraq (and eventually, Afghanistan), by the burden of debt accumulated over the past decade, by the economic melt-down in 2007-2008, and by the emergence of somewhat stronger and independent actors in Brazil, Turkey, India, and elsewhere. One might also point to eroding national infrastructure and an educational system that impresses hardly anyone. Moreover, five decades of misguided policies have badly tarnished America's image in many parts of the world, and especially in the Middle East and Central Asia. The erosion of authoritarian rule in the Arab world will force new governments to pay more attention to popular sentiment -- which is generally hostile to the broad thrust of U.S. policy in the region -- and the United States will be less able to rely on close relations with tame monarchs or military dictators henceforth. If it the United States remains far and away the world's strongest state, its ability to get its way in world affairs is declining.

All this may seem like a hair-splitting, but there's an important issue at stake. Posing the question in the usual way ("Is the U.S. Still #1?", "Who's bigger?", "Is China Catching Up?" etc.,) focuses attention primarily on bilateral comparisons and distracts us from thinking about the broader environment in which both the United States and China will have to operate. The danger, of course, is that repeated assurances that America is still on top will encourage foreign policy mandarins to believe that they can continue to make the same blunders they have in the recent past, and discourage them from making the strategic choices that will preserve U.S. primacy, enhance U.S. influence, and incidentally, produce a healthier society here at home.

I disagree with Steve on multiple points here, so let's be thorough and go through them one at at time. 

First, I'd argue that developing accurate assessments about the power balance between China and the United States is actually super-important.  Miserceptions about a rising China or a declining United States can lead to a) toxic political rhetoric in Washington, which leads to b) rhetorical blowback, which leads to c) stupid foreign policy miscalculations.  As I wrote about a year ago: 

Exaggerating Chinese power has consequences. Inside the Beltway, attitudes about American hegemony have shifted from complacency to panic. Fearful politicians representing scared voters have an incentive to scapegoat or lash out against a rising power -- to the detriment of all. Hysteria about Chinese power also provokes confusion and anger in China as Beijing is being asked to accept a burden it is not yet prepared to shoulder. China, after all, ranks 89th in the 2010 U.N. Human Development Index just behind Turkmenistan and the Dominican Republic (the United States is fourth). Treating Beijing as more powerful than it is feeds Chinese bravado and insecurity at the same time. That is almost as dangerous a political cocktail as fear and panic.

The discussion of China in the GOP presidential campaign, as well as Obama's mercantilist State of the Union address, strongly suggest that political assessments and political rhetoric about Chinese power need a strong jolt of sobriety.  Walt is concerned that an overestimation of American power will lead to stupid foreign policy decisions, but I'd wager that an overestimation of Chinese power would lead to equally stupid foreign policy decisions. 

As for Walt's assertions about the decline of American influence... well, I must take issue with several of them.  First, the notion that the United States was able to exercise power more easily during the Cold War seems a bit off.  As Robert Kagan points out in The New Republic:

And of course it is true that the United States is not able to get what it wants much of the time. But then it never could. Much of today’s impressions about declining American influence are based on a nostalgic fallacy: that there was once a time when the United States could shape the whole world to suit its desires, and could get other nations to do what it wanted them to do, and, as the political scientist Stephen M. Walt put it, “manage the politics, economics and security arrangements for nearly the entire globe.”

If we are to gauge America’s relative position today, it is important to recognize that this image of the past is an illusion. There never was such a time. We tend to think back on the early years of the Cold War as a moment of complete American global dominance. They were nothing of the sort. The United States did accomplish extraordinary things in that era: the Marshall Plan, the NATO alliance, the United Nations, and the Bretton Woods economic system all shaped the world we know today. Yet for every great achievement in the early Cold War, there was at least one equally monumental setback.

During the Truman years, there was the triumph of the Communist Revolution in China in 1949, which American officials regarded as a disaster for American interests in the region and which did indeed prove costly; if nothing else, it was a major factor in spurring North Korea to attack the South in 1950. But as Dean Acheson concluded, “the ominous result of the civil war in China” had proved “beyond the control of the ... United States,” the product of “forces which this country tried to influence but could not.” A year later came the unanticipated and unprepared-for North Korean attack on South Korea, and America’s intervention, which, after more than 35,000 American dead and almost 100,000 wounded, left the situation almost exactly as it had been before the war. In 1949, there came perhaps the worst news of all: the Soviet acquisition of the atomic bomb and the end of the nuclear monopoly on which American military strategy and defense budgeting had been predicated.

Kagan's essay is getting some attention in high places, so I'll be very curious to hear Walt's take on it. 

It Walt overestimates America's influence during the Cold War, he also underestimates American influence now.  The funny thing about the "stronger and independent actors in Brazil, Turkey, India, and elsewhere" is that they're siding with the United States on multiple important issues.  Coordination between Turkey and the United States on the Arab Spring has increased over time, and their policy positions on Iran are converging more than diverging.  Brazil has turned a cold shoulder to Iran and has been warier about China's currency manipulation and rising influence in Latin America.  India seems perfectly comfortable to be a partner in America's Pacific Rim pivot, as are Australia, Japan and South Korea. 

This is perfectly consistent with Walt's own balance-of-threat theory, by the way.  The actors that seem to be generating the most anxiety among the rising developing countries are the ones that seem to be exhibiting the most aggressive regional intentions -- namely, China and Iran.  Indeed, even countries with strong historical resentments against the United States are now trying to find creative ways to bind themselves to Washington.  Will these countries always march in lockstep with the United States?  Of course not -- but as Walt would surely acknowledge, America's NATO allies were not always on the same page with the United States on myriad Cold War issues. 

It seems that Walt's primary concern is that without better domestic policies, the United States might fritter away its great power advantages.  I'm sympathetic to that argument -- I'd also take the bold position that I'd like to see improvements in American education and infrastructure as well.  One of the points I was making in my original post, however was that even absent grand initiatives from Washington, the United States economy was finding ways to heal itself.  Indeed, compared to either Europe or China, one could argue that the United States has adjusted to the post-2008 environment the best.  This is not so much praise for Washington as an indictment of rigidities in Brussels and Beijing.  Still, power and influence are relative measures, and I see little evidence to support Walt's pessimism. 

Am I missing anything? 

The past decade's worth of American foreign policy debacles has led to some lazy thinking on American empire.  Either the United States is using force to advance rapacious economic interests, or Washington is neglecting economic diplomacy because U.S. foreign policy has become too militarized.  Right, now, neither argument holds up terribly well. 

For example, the Financial Times' Lina Saigol looks at postwar foreign direct investment in Iraq and notes the prominent absence of U.S. and British firms:

After almost nine years, $1tn spent and 4,487 American and 179 British lives lost, theUS is withdrawing from Iraq, leaving the country’s vast economic spoils to nations that neither supported nor participated in the US-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein.

Turkey, Iran, China, South Korea and Arab states have already invested billions in Iraq, far outpacing their US and UK counterparts in every non-oil sector from transport and telecoms to housing and construction.

This is really a variation of a theme.  Take a look at Afghanistan, and the same pattern plays itself out -- significant U.S. military investment, remarkably little follow-on U.S. economic investment, significant investments by others.  In short, arguments that the United States uses its military power to advance its economic interests don't hold up well at all -- unless one wants to posit that U.S. elites are really an executive committee of the Chinese Communist Party's economic bourgeoisie. 

The overmephasis on military force has been a long-running criticism of American foreign policy.  That said, it leads to some lazy analytical habits.  Consider this NYT Sunday Review essay by Stephen Glain on the U.S. "pivot" to the Pacific Rim: 

With the economy in disarray, President Obama chose a costly instrument in deciding to expand the American military commitment in Asia by deploying a Marine contingent to Australia; the move will only help insulate the Pentagon from meaningful spending cuts and preserve the leading role the military has played in foreign policy since the 9/11 attacks....

Indeed, America’s top diplomat has become the chief civilian advocate for military answers to diplomatic challenges. Speaking in Honolulu last month, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton called for “a more broadly distributed military presence” in Asia. While in Manila, she appeared on an American warship and reaffirmed the nearly 60-year-old security pact between the United States and the Philippines. She also has endorsed the creation of an American-led regional trade pact that pointedly excludes China for the present, a remarkably petty snub compared to the way her legendary predecessor George C. Marshall offered (without success, in the face of Stalin’s suspicions) to include the Soviet Union in the postwar reconstruction plan that now bears Marshall’s name. And this month she visited Myanmar, where the Obama administration has assiduously worked to neutralize a corrupt and repressive government in favor of democratic reform; in the grander strategic game, this, too, could be read in Beijing as a tactic to weave the country — which has been Beijing’s ally — into an American noose around China. 

OK, this argument is confusing on a number of fronts.  First, how is ratifying an FTA with South Korea and negotiating a framework agreement on the Trans-Pacific Partnership an example of an excessive role for the military? 

Second, President Obama was quite explicit in saying he would welcome Chinese participation in TPP.  However -- like Marshall before him -- Obama is saying this because he's pretty sure China will be unwilling to pay the regulatory coin necessary to join. 

During the 1990's, one could argue that U.S. foreign policy in the Pacific Rim was too heavily dominated by the Treasury Department.  During the 2000's, one could argue that it was too heavily dominated by the Defense Department.  Right now, U.S. policy in the region looks like a decent balance of security and economic diplomacy.  I suspect that this balance has been so rare for so long that analysts simply aren't used to recognizing it. 

In the wake of Hurricane Irene, the St. Petersburg Times records an interesting interpretation of recent events from GOP presidential candidate Michele Bachmann. This is a direct quote of Bachmann:

I don't know how much God has to do to get the attention of the politicians. We've had an earthquake; we've had a hurricane. He said, 'Are you going to start listening to me here?' Listen to the American people because the American people are roaring right now. They know government is on a morbid obesity diet and we've got to rein in the spending.

An interesting hypothesis!! So, there are three possibilities here. The first is that Bachmann was joking -- in which case, wow, that's a really tasteless joke given the loss of life and probably warrants a pretty big apology.

The second is that Bachmann is simply nuts wrong. Doug Mataconis points out,

I’m not sure how this computes given the fact that the storm largely spared Washington, D.C. and New York, while hammering a red states like North Carolina and a heavily Republican area like Virginia’s Tidewater region.

Well, socialist-supporting Vermont got hit pretty hard too, but still, this is a fair point, and "Bachmann being wrong" seems like another safe bet.

The third possibility is the one I want to explore, however -- what if Bachmann is right? What if God really is using wrath to coerce humanity into implementing a particular set of policy preferences?

A God-fearing person would naturally decide to obey. However, this kind of coercive demand strikes me as a pretty massive intrusion into human sovereignty. The point of a democracy is for majorities of citizens and their elected representatives to decide matters of policy. Recent history suggests that neither sovereign governments nor their populations take kindly to coercive threats from other men. If we acquiesce to Divine demands now, don't we just let God win?

Bachmann's response suggests an obvious bandwagoning approach to the awesome power of deities: When God says jump, you should say, how high? And, indeed, if the Almighty really is omnipotent, this strategy has much to recommend it. Bandwagoning is generally recommended when the targeted actor is comparatively weak, has few natural allies, and believes that the targeting actor can be appeased with concessions. This seems to fit the Old Testament, monotheistic God to a tee.

On the other hand, however, might a balancing approach yield better long-term results? After all, God has a disturbing track record of making demands like this. We know from Genesis the Old Testament that the Almighty has a tendency to, well, you know, smite humans on a semi-regular basis. There's the flood, Sodom and Gomorrah, an awful lot of Egyptians, etc. This doesn't even include the number of times God demanded death (the sacrifice of Isaac, Ninevah) only to relent at the last minute. Sure, God has some good reasons in some of these instances, but from a threat assessment perspective, it's veeeeery disturbing.

Maybe the bandwagoning criteria don't apply. If one operates along the monotheistic assumption*, humans should ask if there is a possible ally out there to help resist God's will [Don't go there --ed.], an entity who is God's enduring rival [You're really going there, aren't you?! --ed.] , one who might have the necessary power to make God think twice about all that smiting?

It's time to wonder … would a temporary alliance with Satan really be that bad? [Yes it world!! --ed.] Winston Churchill once said, "If Hitler invaded hell I would make at least a favorable reference to the devil in the House of Commons." Now I'm not sure I would even go that far … the whole selling souls thing sounds like a pretty big demand too. That said, a sober, realpolitik perspective would demand that making a deal with the devil has to be a policy option that stays on the table.

[How about a nice buck-passing strategy instead?--ed. Hey, I'd love to just force other creatures like, say, apes to go toe-to-toe with God, but I just don't see it happening.]

Readers are warmly encouraged to puzzle this out for themselves -- or, instead, to buy the very entertaining Biblical Games by Steven Brams.

*The monotheism assumption is important when thinking about how to cope with a venegeful god. If the universe turns out to be polytheistic, then the question becomes whether us mortals can sow dissension among the gods before someone releases a Kraken.

While I was obsessing about Egypt last week, I see that John Quiggin, William Winecoff and others have been having a rollicking debate about the status of American hegemony, the fungibility of military power, and Boeing/Airbus subsidies.  OK, that last one is less interesting, but I strongly encourage readers to go through the comment thread to that blog post. 

Essentially, Quiggin contends that:

[T]he decline of the US from its 1945 position of global pre-eminence has already happened. The US is now a fairly typical advanced/developed country, distinguished primarily by its large population. 

Ergo, other large market jurisdictions, like the European Union, are equal to the U.S. in terms of relative power. 

This cheesed off Winecoff and others into pointing out the myriad ways in which the U.S. power profile is a) still outsized; and b) largely shaped the current global order we live in; and c) allowed entities like the EU to focus on welfare maximization rather than security.   

Dan Nexon, in a comment to Quiggin's last rejoinder, gets at one nub of the debate:

John’s pointing out, quite rightly, that military power isn’t necessarily fungible. He’s doing so in the context of economic and regulatory power, which is the most “multipolar” dimension of global power right now. His IR critics are pointing out that the US still has outsized influence across a number of domains, and that some of those domains involve international (economic) institutions. They’re both onto something.

I pretty much agree with Dan here.  In the military sphere, the U.S. remains a hegemonic power.  In the economic and regulatory realms, well, I wrote a whole book arguing that until recently we lived in a bipolar world, so I'll side with Quiggin on that score. 

There's something missing from this debate that is worth raising, however -- a proper definition of power.  For example, in his first post, Quiggin noted that "[advanced industrialized countries] might be said to have declined in relative terms. But this doesn’t seem to me to constitute 'decline' in any important sense."  This is heresy to an international relations scholar, in that power is viewed as a zero-sum commodity. 

Beyond that, however, it is useful to think about the power to deter change from the status quo vs, the power to compel change in the status quo.  In a deterrence scenario, countries use their capabilities to ward off pressure from other actors, or from structural pressures.   In a compellence scenario, a powerful government threatens to use statecraft to extract concessions from other actors, or use power to alter the rules of the global game. 

Deterring pressure by others is different than applying such pressure to others.  With military or economic statecraft, it is generally easier to defend than attack.  Many IR scholars argue that the ability to deter is a necessary condition of the power to compel.  Only after an actor has the ability to resist pressure from others will they contemplate whether they can be the actor to generate pressure.  Countries possessing sufficient reservoirs of power should therefore have both greater autonomy of action and be better placed to apply pressure on other actors. 

What the past few years have demonstrated is the relative decline of U.S. compellence power and the rise of other countries deterrence power.  Certainly the recent uses of U.S. military force haven't yielded the expected results.  In the economic realm, countries like India and Brazil can veto WTO negotiation rounds in a way that simply wasn't possible 15 years ago.  Similarly, China can resist U.S. jawboning on its exchange rate policy far more than in the past. 

On the other hand, neither U.S. deterrent power nor other countries' compellence power has changed all that much, even in the economic realm.  The rest of the G-20 can scream as loud as they want, but  quantitative easing is going to continue.  China has tried to find ways to use its newly found financial muscle to force changes in the international system, to little avail.  To be sure, Russia, China and others can compel countries on their immediate periphery, but even a glance at the 2008 Russian-Georgian war suggests that even modest efforts like these are expensive and messy. 

So... we live in a world in which more actors have vetoes over systemic change but no actor has the ability to truly compel change.  This leads to lots of talk about "G-zero worlds" and so forth. 

Just to be provocative, however, I wonder if what's truly changed is the extinction of compellence power as we know it.  The primary, ne plus ultra  tools of compellence require a willingness to kill, jail or starve a lot of people.  Recent flare-ups like Iran in 2009 and Egypt right now suggests that such actions are possible at the domestic level, but pretty damn costly; even authoritarian countries flinch at using brute force on a domestic population.  Cross-border efforts are even more expensive in terms of both material and reputational costs. 

This isn't the end of power, but it might be the end of one particular dimension of power.  I'm not entirely convinced that this supposition is true, and am willing/eager to hear counterarguments.  That said, I still hereby claim The End of Power as my title, so everyone else just back off, OK? 

More seriously, am I missing anything? 

My post yesterday on following Vizzini's advice U.S. retrenchment from Central Asia generated a bit of pushback. I should point out that my concern here is that the U.S. husbands its power resources with a bit more acumen. Sure, Central Asia has some strategic significance, but the thing is, every region in the globe has some strategic significance. If I'm rank-ordering U.S. strategic priorities, it would go as follows: 1) East Asia; 2) Latin America; 3) Europe; 4) Middle East; 5) South Asia; 6) Central Asia; 7) Africa (there's also a big gap between 4 and 5 on this list). Scarce resources devoted to Central Asia have to be siphoned from somewhere, and I don't want too much of a diversion from other strategic priorities.

That said, I want to clarify that I'm not saying that the U.S. is in terminal decline and therefore should engage in a systematic strategic retreat. David Bell makes an excellent point in The New Republic today -- there has been a perpetual declinism industry in the United States since the launch of Sputnik.

Twenty-two years ago, in a refreshingly clear-sighted article for Foreign Affairs, Harvard's Samuel P. Huntington noted that the theme of "America's decline" had in fact been a constant in American culture and politics since at least the late 1950s. It had come, he wrote, in several distinct waves: in reaction to the Soviet Union's launch of Sputnik; to the Vietnam War; to the oil shock of 1973; to Soviet aggression in the late 1970s; and to the general unease that accompanied the end of the Cold War. Since Huntington wrote, we can add at least two more waves: in reaction to 9/11, and to the current "Great Recession."....

What the long history of American "declinism" -- as opposed to America's actual possible decline -- suggests is that these anxieties have an existence of their own that is quite distinct from the actual geopolitical position of our country; that they arise as much from something deeply rooted in the collective psyche of our chattering classes as from sober political and economic analyses.

For whatever reason, it is clear that for more than half a century, many of America's leading commentators have had a powerful impulse consistently to see the United States as a weak, "bred out" basket case that will fall to stronger rivals as inevitably as Rome fell to the barbarians, or France to Henry V at Agincourt.

On the foreign policy front, selective U.S. retrenchment doesn't imply terminal decline so much as a temporary realignment to ensure that American power and interest are matched up going forward.

Question to readers: does retrenchment presage resurgence?

My latest column at The National Interest online is now available.  It takes a closer look at the mismatch between domestic and foreign expectations of American hegemony.  I also throw in some international relations theory:

While the Obama administration and the American people might be content with the notion of America as just another country, this sentiment raises some uncomfortable questions. There is the factual one: is America really just one of many nations? Despite everything that has befallen the United States during this decade, the fact remains that by standard metrics—GDP, military might, cultural attraction—the United States is far and away the most powerful country in the world. This fact is so glaring that even academics are starting to acknowledge it. Stephen Brooks and William Wohlforth wrote an entire book on the durability of American unipolarity. World Politics published a special issue this year on the nature of the unipolar era.

Go check it out! 

My latest column at The National Interest online is now up.  It looks at yesterday's media frenzy about China amount to much.  I'm relatively sanguine: 

One could be excused for thinking, in this kind of news environment, that Beijing is literally taking over the world. Some perspective is useful, however. There is no question that China is trying to turn this crisis into a series of opportunities. There is a question, however, whether these opportunities will actually be realized....

Let’s be clear—China is clearly on the rise, and they will be punching their weight more frequently in venues like the G-20, the U.N. Security Council and Asian regional forums. Greater activity does not always equal greater influence, however. So if you read that China is taking over the world, take a deep breath and relax.

In effect, the US central bank is taking care of the dollar liquidity needs of these four emerging economies, leaving the IMF to take care of the rest. International officials believe that the European Central Bank may also take some responsibility for providing further support for vulnerable economies in Europe, including potential members of the eurozone, along with the IMF. The Fed is providing its support to Mexico, Brazil, South Korea and Singapore via currency swaps on essentially the same terms as those offered to the 10 industrialised economies with which it already has reciprocal currency arrangements, including the eurozone, UK and Japan. These are much more generous than the terms on which the US government and multilateral institutions lent money to developing countries during emerging market crises, for instance in the 1990s. In today’s operations the Fed simply lends dollars to the local central bank, and the local central bank lends the dollars on to local banks. The Fed takes the counterparty credit risk of the central bank on the other side of the swap, with collateral in the form of an equivalent amount in local currency. There are no policy conditions.... It worried that the IMF might not have enough resources to support all the emerging economies that might need dollars. The Fund’s total lending capacity is about $250bn. The Fed swaps supplement this with an extra $120bn for Brazil, Mexico, South Korea and Singapore alone. The Fed hopes the Fund’s resources will be enough to deal with the remaining needs of the emerging economies.

[I]t has been fashionable to argue that the crisis would increase China’s financial influence — as China sits on a ton of foreign exchange and potentially offered an alternative source of foreign currency liquidity. Indeed, China seems keen on doing a deal with Russia that would help Russian state-owned energy firms raise foreign exchange to help cover their maturing external debts — and the in the process, help reduce the drain on the government of Russia’s foreign exchange reserves. But so far the crisis hasn’t had that effect — in part because the US and Europe have moved quickly (by the standards of governments) to help a broad range of countries meet their foreign currency needs. That was driven first and foremost by the needs of the emerging economies — and the ripple effect their deepening trouble would have on the US and Europe. But I wonder if the possibility that institutions like the IMF could be bypassed if they didn’t respond more quickly and creatively than in the past didn’t help to spur the recent set of policy changes. Those in the IMF’s Executive Board who normally would object to unconditional lending didn’t block the new short-term lending facility — perhaps at least in part because of recognition that the IMF potentially isn’t the only game in town (or in the world). China’s rise, in effect, contributed to the a change in the political climate that helped to lift some of the political constraints that in the past limited the IMF’s scope. I certainly didn’t anticipate this. Three months ago I was among those thinking that the rise of the emerging world’s reserves would reduce the IMF’s future relevance.

1. These countries are focusing on domestic problems first.  So is the G-7, of course, but the nature of the Russian and Chinese polities make those governments extra concerned about any signs of unrest. 
2. For all their aspirations to great power status, both countries lack the policy expertise necessary to take on greater leadership roles.  This leads to profound risk aversion, which leads to inaction.  On the flip side, the U.S. is accustomed to talking to the countries in crisis, which both provides it with more information and allows Washington to act more quickly.