However, unlike the European situation, a democratic bridgehead on the eastern mainland will not emerge soon. That makes it all the more important that America’s efforts to nurture a deepening strategic relationship with China be based on the unambiguous acknowledgment that a democratic and economically successful Japan is America’s premier Pacific and key global partner. Although Japan cannot become a dominant Asian regional power, given the strong regional aversion it evokes, it can become a leading international one.
Tokyo can carve out a globally influential role by cooperating closely with the United States regarding what might be called the new agenda of global concerns, while avoiding any futile and potentially counterproductive effort to become a regional power itself. The task of American statesmanship should hence be to steer Japan in that direction. An American-Japanese free trade agreement, creating a common economic space, would fortify the connection and promote the goal, and hence its utility should be jointly examined.
It is through a close political relationship with Japan that America will more safely be able to accommodate China’s regional aspirations, while opposing its more arbitrary manifestations. Only on that basis can an intricate three-way accommodation—one that involves America’s global power, China’s regional preeminence, and Japan’s international leadership—be contrived. However, that broad geostrategic accommodation could be undermined by an unwise expansion of American-Japanese military cooperation.
Japan’s central role should not be that of America’s unsinkable aircraft carrier in the Far East, nor should it be America’s principal Asian military partner or a potential Asian regional power. Misguided efforts to promote any of the foregoing would serve to cut America off from the Asian mainland, to vitiate the prospects for reaching a strategic consensus with China, and thus to frustrate America’s capacity to consolidate stable geopolitical pluralism throughout Eurasia.
A TRANS-EURASIAN SECURITY SYSTEM
The stability of Eurasia’s geopolitical pluralism, precluding the appearance of a single dominant power, would be enhanced by the eventual emergence, perhaps sometime early in the next century, of a Trans-Eurasian Security System (TESS). Such a transcontinental security agreement should embrace an expanded NATO—connected by a cooperative charter with Russia—and China as well as Japan (which would still be connected to the United States by the bilateral security treaty).
But to get there, NATO must first expand, while engaging Russia in a larger regional framework of security cooperation. In addition, the Americans and Japanese must closely consult and collaborate in setting in motion a triangular political-security dialogue in the Far East that engages China. Three-way American-Japanese-Chinese security talks could eventually involve more Asian participants and later lead to a dialogue between them and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. In turn, such a dialogue could pave the way for a series of conferences by all European and Asian states, thereby beginning the process of institutionalizing a transcontinental security system.
In time, a more formal structure could begin to take shape, prompting the emergence of a Trans-Eurasian Security System that for the first time would span the entire continent. The shaping of that system—defining its substance and then institutionalizing it—could become the major architectural initiative of the next decade, once the policies outlined earlier have created the necessary preconditions.
Such a broad transcontinental security framework could also contain a standing security committee, composed of the major Eurasian entities, in order to enhance TESS’s ability to promote effective cooperation on issues critical to global stability. America, Europe, China, Japan, a confederated Russia, and India, as well as perhaps some other countries, might serve together as the core of such a more structured transcontinental system. The eventual emergence of TESS could gradually relieve America of some of its burdens, even while perpetuating its decisive role as Eurasia’s stabilizer and arbitrator.
BEYOND THE LAST GLOBAL SUPERPOWER
In the long run, global politics are bound to become increasingly uncongenial to the concentration of hegemonic power in the hands of a single state. Hence, America is not only the first, as well as the only, truly global superpower, but it is also likely to be the very last.
That is so not only because nation-states are gradually becoming increasingly permeable but also because knowledge as power is becoming more diffuse, more shared, and less constrained by national boundaries. Economic power is also likely to become more dispersed. In the years to come, no single power is likely to reach the level of 30 percent or so of the world’s GDP that America sustained throughout much of this century, not to speak of the 50 percent at which it crested in 1945. Some estimates suggest that by the end of this decade, America will still account for about 20 percent of global GDP, declining perhaps to about 10–15 percent by 2020 as other powers—Europe, China, Japan—increase their relative share to more or less the American level. But global economic preponderance by a single entity, of the sort that America attained in the course of this century, is unlikely, and that has obviously far-reaching military and political implications.
Moreover, the very multinational and exceptional character of American society has made it easier for America to universalize its hegemony without letting it appear to be a strictly national one. For example, an effort by China to seek global primacy would inevitably be viewed by others as an attempt to impose a national hegemony. To put it very simply, anyone can become an American, but only a Chinese can be Chinese—and that places an additional and significant barrier in the way of any essentially national global hegemony.
Accordingly, once American leadership begins to fade, America’s current global predominance is unlikely to be replicated by any single state. Thus, the key question for the future is “What will America bequeath to the world as the enduring legacy of its primacy?”
The answer depends in part on how long that primacy lasts and on how energetically America shapes a framework of key power partnerships that over time can be more formally institutionalized. In fact, the window of historical opportunity for America’s constructive exploitation of its global power could prove to be relatively brief, for both domestic and external reasons. A genuinely populist democracy has never before attained international supremacy. The pursuit of power and especially the economic costs and human sacrifice that the exercise of such power often requires are not generally congenial to democratic instincts. Democratization is inimical to imperial mobilization.
Indeed, the critical uncertainty regarding the future may well be whether America might become the first superpower unable or unwilling to wield its power. Might it become an impotent global power? Public opinion polls suggest that only a small minority (13 percent) of Americans favor the proposition that “as the sole remaining superpower, the U.S. should continue to be the preeminent world leader in solving international problems.” An overwhelming majority (74 percent) prefer that America “do its fair share in efforts to solve international problems together with other countries.”[3]
Moreover, as America becomes an increasingly multicultural society, it may find it more difficult to fashion a consensus on foreign policy issues, except in the circumstances of a truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat. Such a consensus generally existed throughout World War II and even during the Cold War. It was rooted, however, not only in deeply shared democratic values, which the public sensed were being threatened, but also in a cultural and ethnic affinity for the predominantly European victims of hostile totalitarianisms.
In the absence of a comparable external challenge, American society may find it much more difficult to reach agreement regarding foreign policies that cannot be directly related to central beliefs and widely shared cultural-ethnic sympathies and that still require an enduring and sometimes costly imperial engagement. If anything, two extremely varying views on the implications of America’s historic victory in the Cold War are likely to be politically more appealing: on the one hand, the view that the end of the Cold War justifies a significant reduction in America’s global engagement, irrespective of the consequences for America’s global standing; and on the other, the perception that the time has come for genuine international multilateralism, to which America should even yield some of its sovereignty. Both extremes command the loyalty of committed constituencies.
More generally, cultural change in America may also be uncongenial to the sustained exercise abroad of genuinely imperial power. That exercise requires a high degree of doctrinal motivation, intellectual commitment, and patriotic gratification. Yet the dominant culture of the country has become increasingly fixated on mass entertainment that has been heavily dominated by personally hedonistic and socially escapist themes. The cumulative effect has made it increasingly difficult to mobilize the needed political consensus on behalf of sustained, and also occasionally costly, American leadership abroad. Mass communications have been playing a particularly important role in that regard, generating a strong revulsion against any selective use of force that