Alone or With Others: The Temptations of Post-Cold War Power

Once again Americans are in a period of increasing contention over foreign policy. There is surely nothing unusual in this. Throughout this century, controversy over the nation's foreign policy has been the rule rather than the exception. Not only has it been provoked by crises and apparent failures, it has seldom been stilled even by success. The sudden and unexpected victory in the conflict with the Soviet Union was soon succeeded by rising criticism of post-Cold War foreign policy. With the end of the Cold War, the argument of critics ran, the world had changed profoundly -- but U.S. foreign policy had failed to change with it. Americans remain tied to a past that has become largely irrelevant, prisoners of ideas and policies developed in the long encounter with the Soviet Union.

Yet the present debate has not centered around an immediate and visible crisis. To be sure, there have been divisions over specific issues of foreign policy, but they largely illustrate the broader controversy. The view common to the participants -- that the nation's foreign policy is badly in need of correction -- is not a response to any specific development that can be considered a major policy failure. Nor is it a response to any imminent significant setback to interest and position. The perceived danger lies in the future, either when (as one side contends) a world that already deeply resents American hegemonism has gained the strength to oppose arrogant U.S. assertiveness, or (as the other side argues) when a world lacking real leadership finds that it no longer enjoys the order that only the exercise of American power can bring.

The central issue in the present debate is a recurring one: whether America should act alone or with others. In employing American power, should efforts bend as far as possible toward acting collectively, even to the extent of making cooperative action a prerequisite for acting at all? Or should the United States take as its guiding principle -- however desirable the approval and cooperation of others may be -- that in a world as much in need of direction as ever, America has no real alternative other than to act alone when necessary to maintain the international order?