Pensées on U.S. Power

L’Empire du milieu: Les Etats-Unis et le monde depuis la fin de la guerre froide
(The Middle Kingdom: The United States and the World Since the End of the Cold War)
By Pierre Mélandri and Justin Vaïsse 550 pages, Paris: Editions Odile Jacob, 2001 (in French)

American readers convinced of the incorrigible anti-Americanism of the French elite are due for a surprise: The best book written so far on the subject of U.S. foreign policy during the Clinton years, and on the problems the United States faces as the world’s only superpower, is by two French historians.

Pierre Mélandri has written several books on American diplomacy in the 20th century; all are well informed, well told, and scrupulously balanced. Justin Vaïsse (son of another historian, Maurice Vaïsse, a leading specialist of French strategic policies and of Charles de Gaulle) is a brilliant and inquisitive young man, whose first long (unpublished) essay written toward his doctorate was a study of Foreign Policy magazine from its creation until the mid-1990s.

What makes their book so remarkable? Readers who like narratives but often choke on the dry dust of diplomatic history will find a graceful, subtle, and comprehensive investigation of the many fronts of Clinton’s foreign policy: the pronouncements, the maneuvers, the divagations, the tribulations, and the changes in its course. There is a clever awareness of the Clinton administration’s many currents — its successes (particularly the determined fight for globalization and markets open to U.S. goods and services) and its difficulties with rogue states, reluctant allies, potential rivals, a risk-averse military, and, after 1994, a hostile Congress. This narrative leads to a critical evaluation. The years between 1993 and 1995 were largely lost because the realities Clinton had to face did not fit the stance he had taken on many issues during his campaign (a recurrent problem for U.S. administrations). Even after the return to U.S. forcefulness in the spring of 1995, there was only "part-time leadership" by a president who was never a foreign-affairs expert and was better at reacting to events and at tactical maneuvering than at devising a broad strategy. All this will sound familiar to Americans except for the virtuosity with which the story is told.

More thought provoking are the main themes, which transcend the Clinton era and, in the introduction as well as in the 142-page final chapter, provide the most perceptive and well-argued critical analysis of the United States’ present position in world affairs available today. On the one hand, the United States is the only superpower: The title of the book describes it as a new incarnation of the old Chinese Empire — the Middle Kingdom that had "built the world in such a way that the world gravitated around it." Among America’s assets are not only formidably advanced military technology and a trade policy "conceived in political and strategic terms" but an unrivaled cultural influence and the capacity to export "concepts and categories that arise out of the American national experience in order to describe and analyze the world."

On the other hand, the United States, notwithstanding the views of French Foreign Minister Hubert Védrine, is not a "hyperpower" for two main reasons. One is the increasing complexity of the world, which the United States is in no position to dominate alone (even with the help of private actors that play, in fact, diplomatic roles). The other is the multiplicity of internal limitations that tie down the American Gulliver. The United States is, Mélandri and Vaïsse tell us, neither a unitary nor a rational actor. Its decision-making process is too fragmented; its Congress has a vast arsenal of power that often intimidates or defeats the executive (as in the fast-track fiasco); and its pressure groups have formidable assets because of the way House members are elected, the candidates’ need for money, and the professionalization of lobbying. Moreover, there is a constant tension, since the end of the Cold War, between external activism and a country "inclined to see in foreign policy at worst a kind of necessary evil, at best the mere auxiliary of the domestic expansion that is deemed to be the priority." The capacity of U.S. transnational corporations to redistribute production on a world scale "contributes to deepen the gap between the evaluation of American economic power and the influence that the nation-state can derive from it." They seek profit rather than pursue foreign-policy goals. The U.S. public does not want its soldiers to suffer casualties when vital security objectives are not at stake. And while it remains more internationalist than isolationist, the importance of foreign-policy concerns has faded, except when globalization threatens jobs.

The result of all these limitations and of the rise of the Republican Party has been, according to the authors, that the United States wants to control and guide the evolution of world order but "doesn’t appear to be able to or want to pay the price." Another result is a split among four schools of thought: isolationism, Wilsonian liberal internationalism, Kissingerian realism, and a "hegemonist or ‘neo-conservative’" current that is unilateralist. It is composed of "sovereignists" eager to defend U.S. sovereignty against international law, organizations, and treaties and of "hegemonists" eager for "America to assert its might and to project without inhibitions its values on the world." Indeed, the concluding chapter detects an evolution toward less strategic restraint, more hostility to institutionalized cooperation, more unilateralism, and "degraded multilateralism." This evolution, according to the authors, results from the frequently inevitable clash between legal prescriptions and the need to maintain international order (as when the United States bypassed the U.N. Security Council over Kosovo), as well as from the right’s hostility to external forms of the liberalism it dislikes at home. It is precisely because the internal causes of multilateralism’s degradation are so strong that the authors simultaneously warn Americans against this trend and worry about its getting worse.

The Middle Kingdom contains other fascinating themes, including an analysis of the international system as a unique hybrid of empires, Wilsonian rule of law, and balance of power. Mélandri and Vaïsse also draw a distinction between two schools of thought about how the United States (whose preponderance the authors believe stable) should act: the school of "benevolent hegemony," which provides the world with regional stability, and the school of strategic restraint and multilateral organizations.

An epilogue examines some of the criticisms of the United States made by the French and distinguishes three kinds of attacks. A first category is aimed at the "American model," so different from the French (insofar as the role of the state, law and lawyers, and relations between religion and state are concerned). This model is resented by the French as threatening their political and cultural identity, built around the French language, a strong state, distrust of private interests, and mixed feelings about the free market and capitalism. A second category of criticisms, often ignorant of domestic constraints, is aimed at U.S. behavior. A third protests against an American power that is deemed excessive and a decision-making system deemed capricious.

The last sentence of the book asks whether American “recipes” are adapted to all contemporary societies or whether their inadaptation won’t lead to new world tensions. It is an invitation to modesty in which the reader will find a traditional French theme but also a thoughtful call for greater restraint and cooperation — a call that deserves, like the rest of the book, to be translated into English.