The New York Times
May 26, 2002
Take pity on our foreign policy wonks. Gone are the blessedly simple, bipolar days when containment of Soviet power governed and defined American diplomacy and military action. Now the analysts strain to describe the world's chaos. National laws and frontiers are failing to contain not only terrorists but also global corporations, financial speculators, industrial polluters, illegal migrants, drug smugglers, disease bearers. The very idea of sovereign geographic control has lost much of its meaning.
As Joseph S. Nye Jr. demonstrates in ''The Paradox of American Power,'' there is an almost ludicrous competition for jargon to describe the world's present imbalance of power (''unipolar,'' ''uni-multipolar,'' ''hybrid uni-multipolar'') and for words that might encapsulate a wise foreign policy. He generally scorns ''unilateralists'' (also known as ''triumphalists'' or ''sovereigntists''), who deem America so dominant that it should just look out for itself -- the folks who were most influential at the Pentagon in the early months of the Bush administration. Nye, a Democratic wonk and the dean of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, champions the cause of ''a la carte multilateralists,'' who mostly (but not always) favor cooperative ventures that balance the interests of collaborating nations -- the types who reside mainly at the State Department.
Yet for all his experience in government and his worldly common sense, Nye proves in his analyses how mired we all are in the mud of nationalism, unable to devise a genuine transnational policy that would let us begin to function as citizens of the world. He recognizes the need for ''a representative form of global governance,'' for ''multilateral laws and institutions that constrain others and provide a framework for cooperation'' and maybe even for ''a loose constitutional framework'' with parts of Europe. But his imagination shrinks from his own logic. He does not much speculate on how we might get from here to there.
Maybe pre-Sept. 11 America still needed Nye's main message: the ''paradox'' that although the United States will long remain militarily and economically supreme, it will become increasingly dependent on other peoples to defeat terrorism, protect the environment, control weapons of mass destruction, regulate trade and deal with a host of other borderless problems. Though the ''hard power'' of our military and economic might will not soon be challenged, he rightly argues that we also need ''soft power,'' the influence and respect that we gain from our democratic values but risk losing by ''unilateralism, arrogance and parochialism.''
Surely by the morning of Sept. 12, however, when we were begging Muslim societies to help hunt Osama bin Laden, no go-it-aloner would deny Nye's point. He duly amended his manuscript and even says that the attacks on New York and Washington sounded his alarm ''far more effectively than any pen could.'' But he responds only weakly to his own challenge that ''we still need to determine how to use the current decades of our pre-eminence to advance long-term national and global interests.''
How indeed. Nye flirts here and there with genuinely radical propositions, then drowns them in dense prose lest readers mistake him for some kind of idealist. For example, he quotes with obvious approval Daniel Bell's observation that the nation-state has ''become too small for the big problems of life and too big for the small problems.'' Simply put, the nation-state is becoming an obstacle to effective problem-solving. Technology in general, the speed of communication and the information revolution are eroding the control that individual governments once had over their people and corporations. But if most governments are fast losing control over their frontiers and economies, it is hard to know how much faith to invest in the idea of national sovereignty, which Nye nonetheless asks us to respect and protect. He is palpably reluctant to explore the implications of his own best, unconventional ideas.
Near the start of his book, Nye writes, ''The impact of American preponderance is softened when it is embodied in a web of multilateral institutions that allow others to participate in decisions and that act as a sort of world constitution to limit the capriciousness of American power.'' Enmesh America in a ''transnational web''? That limits ''American capriciousness''? And acts as ''a sort of world constitution''?
Yes. But now see Nye run: two chapters on he insists that he wants no truck with ''world government,'' only ''networks'' coexisting with ''a world formally divided into sovereign states.'' That retreat soon requires him to list the practices of transnational and offshore supercorporations, which had seemed to be among his problems, as part of his solutions. Then again he concedes that the networks he envisions would not fairly represent public interests. Oh, well, he decides, ''our democratic theory has not caught up with global practice.'' End of vision.
The worthy but vague prescriptions that close this book resemble the position papers that a diplomatic Polonius might offer the secretaries of state or defense, whom Nye has occasionally served: preserve regional balances; promote free trade; keep open the oceans, the air and cyberspace; cooperate with nations to curb weapons proliferation and to promote peacekeeping and human rights; send aid to developing societies; mediate others' disputes.
Sadly avoided are the many tough, specific, truly paradoxical tensions that Nye's values produce. How, for instance, can the United States and a few other self-appointed nations wield the Bomb without appearing ''unilateral'' and ''arrogant'' to those they exclude from the club? Or by what logic do we haul a Milosevic before a world court whose authority we then refuse to extend to Americans?
Simply accepted by Nye is the proposition that the highest goal of American foreign policy should be the preservation of our power within a congenial environment of sovereign nations. If to his own logic Nye were true, he would bid us to lead the world in abandoning some of our eroding sovereignty and subscribing to genuinely independent and representative global institutions. That, for a mighty superpower, would be a paradox worthy of notice.
Max Frankel, a former executive editor of The Times, served earlier as diplomatic correspondent in Washington and then as bureau chief.