Unipolar versus Unilateral

Long before their bitter falling out over the war in Iraq, the United States and France were at odds over unilateralism. In a November 1999 speech in Paris, French President Jacques Chirac fired one of the first salvos in this conflict. He condemned the U.S. Senate’s decision not to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, setting forth a vision of a multipolar world the chief organizing principle of which was the containment of American power. For Chirac and other French officials, American unilateralism was a product of the post-Cold War imbalance of power and the emergence of the United States as the world’s lone “hyperpower.” Multilateralism was to be both the ultimate objective of a French-led effort to restore a balance and the means by which to achieve it.

Policymakers and academics on both sides of the Atlantic have since debated whether a more multipolar world is feasible or desirable. The debate has done little, however, to establish consensus on what both sides have taken to calling “effective multilateralism.” Government ministers speak in garbled terms of the need to build a “multipolar and partnership-oriented world order” and to “strengthen all multipolar structures,” using the terms multipolar and multilateral almost interchangeably — and without defining either one. In effect, the debate over unipolarity has been marked by the same rhetorical excess and lack of intellectual rigor that characterize the broader discussion of multilateralism.

Three particular problems stand out in this debate. The first is conceptual and concerns the absence of any logically necessary or historically demonstrable association between unipolarity and unilateralism or between multipolarity and multilateralism. The second relates to the internal American debate and the absence of a dominant “unipolar unilateralist” outlook on the part of those making U.S. foreign policy. The third concerns the course of post-Cold War diplomacy and the difficulty of reconciling the actual record of events since the fall of communism with the thesis that a shift in the balance of power led to increased unilateralism on the part of the United States.

Conceptual confusion

To identify unipolarity with unilateralism and multipolarity with multilateralism is to confuse categories and levels of analysis. Polarity is a system-level concept that relates to the distribution of power, real or perceived, in the international system. Unilateralism and multilateralism are choices about policies that states adopt within a given international system. In principle, there is no reason why the leading power in a unipolar order cannot pursue a multilateralist foreign policy or, conversely, why the great powers in a multipolar system necessarily must be multilateralists.

If anything, history shows that the strongest powers often are the most multilaterally inclined. International relations theorists have been fascinated by the concept of hegemonic stability in which it is the strongest power that underpins the multilateral system in a way that serves both its own interests and provides order as an international public good. Nineteenth-century Britain and late-twentieth-century America were classic hegemons in this regard. Conversely, the persistent unilateralism of French policy for much of the post-1945 period — the franc devaluations of 1957 and 1958, the refusal to sign the Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963, the European Community “empty chair” crisis of 1965, the withdrawal from the integrated nato command in 1966, the refusal to participate in the us-uk-ussr Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty of 1969, and the decision not to join the International Energy Agency at the time of the 1973 oil crisis — can only be explained in terms of France’s relative weakness and the determination of Paris to preserve its freedom of action by keeping a certain distance from the postwar multilateral order.

Moreover, to identify multipolarity with multilateralism and unipolarity with unilateralism is to overlook the complexity of the U.S. foreign policy debate, reducing it to a one-dimensional conflict between unilateralists and multilateralists. If polarity and multi-/unilateralism are different analytic categories, then foreign policy visions should be analyzed with reference to both these categories: in regard to differing perceptions of the distribution of power in the international system, on one hand, and different preferences for unilateral or multilateral approaches to policy, on the other.

Table 1 attempts a rough classification of a number of participants in the U.S. policy debate and how they view the relationship between power and policy.

Charles Krauthammer and Robert Kagan are what might be called unipolar unilateralists. They see the distribution of power in the international system as essentially unipolar. They also embrace unilateral policies as the means by which the United States must protect its interests and act for the greater good of humanity. Krauthammer identified the “unipolar moment” in his seminal article of 1990 and later came to see unipolarity as an enduring feature of the international order. He rejects the multilateral “straitjacket” that in his view threatened to neutralize American power during the Clinton administration and has commended the Bush administration for “adopting policies that recognized the new unipolarity and the unilateralism necessary to maintain it.”¹

Kagan also sees the United States as possessing unique strengths that make the world unipolar and that account for what he sees as an increasing U.S. tilt toward unilateralism. He argues that the strong are always attracted to unilateral options while the weak seek refuge in multilateral diplomacy — and that the defining characteristic of the current international order is European weakness. Moreover, he sees little chance that Europe, having let its military capabilities atrophy in the post-Hobbesian paradise that it has built behind U.S. protection, will develop the capabilities needed to function as a credible pole in a multipolar world.

In acute form, unipolar unilateralism informs the much talked-about imperial strain in U.S. thinking about foreign policy — what one analyst has called “global social engineering” to rid the world of dictators and to promote the spread, by force if necessary, of democracy and free markets.

John Ikenberry and Joseph Nye are similar to Krauthammer and Kagan in that they perceive the international system as essentially unipolar.² However, they differ over the effect of unilateral policies, which in their view undermine rather than underpin American interests. Ikenberry focuses on the way in which dominant powers — England after 1815, the Western powers in 1919, and the United States after 1945 — built institutions that constrained their own power but that also reduced the incentives and opportunities for potential rivals to challenge their dominant positions. Ikenberry essentially updates hegemonic stability theory to post-Cold War conditions, arguing that through restraint and the judicious use of international institutions, the United States can perpetuate its special status in the international system, forestalling the formation of hostile coalitions or the rise of a new hegemon.

Nye acknowledges some elements of multipolarity in the international system — he argues that international relations has become a three-level game involving military, economic, and so-called soft power, with the United States enjoying unipolar dominance only on the first level — but he is concerned that a shift to across-the-board multipolarity would be destabilizing. American foreign policy, according to Nye, can and should work to preserve U.S. military dominance through the judicious use of soft power. Like Ikenberry, Nye believes that the dominant power has the option, if it is smart, of shaping the international order in ways that can forestall the rise of competing powers in the system.

Traditional realists such as John Mearsheimer reject both the neoconservative and liberal views of the unipolar world order.³ They argue that the international system is inherently multipolar. Any unipolar imbalance can only be momentary, as competing power centers inevitably rise and seek to counterbalance the dominant power. But Mearsheimer also argues that U.S. policy must be unilateralist for the simple reason that all great powers pursue essentially unilateralist policies. As a realist, he regards international norms and institutions largely as window dressing, the importance of which has been vastly overstated by liberal institutionalists. Under no circumstances can the promotion by the dominant power of such norms and institutions — no matter how imaginative or judicious — persuade rulers in Beijing, Moscow, New Delhi, or Paris to abandon their efforts to counterbalance.

Patrick Buchanan (drawing upon the work of Christopher Layne and other realists) and Jeremy Rabkin are also multipolar unilateralists, albeit for different reasons.⁴ Like Mearsheimer, they are not dismissive of the power of other countries and blocs. Buchanan not only expects but positively embraces multipolarity: Only a truly multipolar world will eliminate the geopolitical vacuums that drew twentieth-century America into extensive involvement in the affairs of Europe and Asia, with (in his view) harmful effects on the U.S. constitutional order. At the same time, however, Buchanan affirms that U.S. policy must remain true to its nineteenth-century unilateralist roots, precisely to avoid the international entanglements (and resulting domestic spillovers) that multilateralism requires.

Rabkin also sees strong elements of multipolarity — or at least bipolarity — in the international system, with the European Union as the chief rival to the United States. Focusing on economics and law rather than military power, he sees Brussels and the United States engaged in a struggle over global governance, with the eu very much threatening to gain the upper hand. Rabkin takes a very negative view of the eu’s self-proclaimed status as the champion of a new system of global governance, which he sees as a threat to democratic legitimacy, economic efficiency, and American sovereignty. Resistance to the European governance agenda — which from the European perspective comes across as U.S. unilateralism — is the only sensible American response. Rabkin thus differs strongly from Kagan, who does not see a serious bid for power in European multilateralism but merely the tactics of the weak.

Those who see the world as multipolar and embrace genuinely multilateral policies include Michael Lind, who has called for an effort to revive a concert of the great powers, as well as David Calleo and Charles Kupchan, both of whom also embrace a form of multipolar multilateralism, albeit one that is highly Eurocentric.⁵ Lind argues that the United States should concentrate on working with the other major powers in the United Nations Security Council and the g8, an approach that in his view will spare the United States the need to choose between a reflexive multilateralism that subordinates U.S. interests to the rule of small and weak countries and an arrogant unilateralism that places Washington at odds with the rest of the world. Calleo and Kupchan see the eu as evolving into a great-power counterpart to the United States, one that is neither weak nor necessarily a threat to U.S. interests. Calleo sees a stronger eu as the natural partner of a chastened and more modest United States in building “a cooperative multilateral system, based on rules with an effective balance of power to sustain those rules,” while Kupchan heralds the “return of a world of multiple power centers” in which Europe is America’s only near-term major competitor.

Each of these streams of foreign policy thinking has its strengths and insights, but each also has problems and contradictions. Collectively, they point toward the dilemmas that the United States has faced as it has tried to chart a post-Cold War foreign policy. The unipolar unilateralists are generally not given to self-doubt, but even they display a certain unease at policies that so obviously irritate so many people around the world. Krauthammer has called for what he admits would be an oxymoronic “humble unilateralism.” Kagan, even as he insists that the Europeans are too weak to constrain the United States, counsels that Washington should show more generosity of spirit by playing along with multilateralism when the costs of doing so are low.

Ikenberry argues that multilateralism can dissuade would-be rivals from mounting challenges to No. 1 but fails to explain how the self-restraint of the leading power can prevent the ambitious number twos and threes — particularly those that see themselves in ascendance — from turning multilateral institutions against the leading power to challenge its hegemony (in the way, for example, that imperial Germany exploited free trade to undercut British preeminence). As a former policymaker, Nye is sensitive to the need for the United States to act unilaterally to protect its interests when inertia or opposition elsewhere in the world precludes multilateral action or when multilateral initiatives do not meet certain tests for U.S. involvement. But he does not explain how a general preference for multilateralism will prevent what Washington might regard as exceptional acts of unilateralism from accumulating into the unilateralist-rogue-state image that the United States has earned in recent years.

The cautions of the realists — the multipolar unilateralists — about overextension and excessive engagement are well taken. As policy guidance, however, they have their limitations. While it may be useful for policymakers to remind themselves that in the long run all empires fall and all power is counterbalanced, even the most realpolitik-oriented administration cannot avoid making decisions on a daily basis about the many agreements and institutional arrangements in which the United States is enmeshed.

As regards the multipolar multilateralists, their readiness to think about a world of multiple power centers acting according to some agreed definition of multilateralism is to be welcomed, given the eventual likely emergence of India and China as great powers, Russia’s path toward recovery, and Europe’s continued drive for a greater role in world affairs. But they confront the same structural dilemmas that arise for Ikenberry and Nye: How can the leading power be sure that cooperation within a concert will not be exploited by potential rivals to establish a new hegemony? Or, conversely, what guarantees do the rising powers have that the erstwhile hegemon will not use the concert to lock them into positions of permanent inferiority? Absent a solution to these dilemmas, it is difficult to see how what Kupchan calls the “devolution” of responsibility from the United States to Europe (or any other power center) can become the chief guiding principle of U.S. foreign policy.

Diplomacy after the Cold War

The link between American unilateralism and the emergence of unipolarity since the end of the Cold War distorts the actual record of international relations in this period. Future historians are unlikely to have much patience with the simplistic view that the United States suddenly took a unilateralist turn in 1991 — or even in 2001 — as a consequence of its newfound relative strength. The first Bush and Clinton administrations teemed with multilateral activism — in economics, arms control, nonproliferation, and selected world-order issues. The descent into what the rest of the world came to see as unilateralism, which began during Clinton’s second term and accelerated dramatically after George W. Bush’s inauguration, was a much more complex process involving both the rejection of a particular brand of American multilateralism and the rise of competing multilateral initiatives.

As any hegemonic stability theorist would have predicted, the United States entered the post-Cold War era in a decidedly multilateralist frame of mind. The first President Bush declared the establishment of a “new world order,” led the U.N.-mandated coalition that expelled Saddam Hussein from Kuwait, completed the Uruguay Round negotiations that established the World Trade Organization, completed the start treaty with the collapsing Soviet regime, and launched the negotiations that led to the treaty banning chemical weapons and the establishment of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. The Clinton administration continued in much the same vein. It secured the ratification of the Uruguay Round agreements, took the lead in negotiating a comprehensive nuclear test ban treaty, backed the establishment of and provided much of the funding for the International Criminal Tribunal on the Former Yugoslavia, and, after some initial hesitation, began a campaign to enlarge and reform nato.

As the hegemonic stability theorists also would have predicted, the Bush i and early Clinton policies reflected a tendency to enlist multilateralism in the service of unipolarity. Whether or not they were consciously framed as such, many of these U.S. initiatives had a certain one-sided character that, while they were difficult to oppose outright, made other powers distinctly nervous. The European Union, for example, was initially skeptical of the U.S. push for a mandatory dispute resolution mechanism in the wto, which meant the end of the standard eu practice of using the consensus rule to block any finding that Brussels had violated international trade law. France and Britain were hardly enthusiastic about the criminal trials for the former Yugoslavia, which smacked of American Wilsonianism at its worst and potentially touched upon the pro-Serb leanings in both countries. France and China could not accept a comprehensive test ban treaty until they had completed a final round of tests, while India was incensed by the Clinton administration’s early proposals for a ctbt that would have allowed some low-level testing by the nuclear powers in a way that sanctioned and perpetuated the existing inequality between nuclear haves and have-nots. European governments were also quite wary of Clinton’s push to enlarge and reform nato, which they saw as an attempt to reinforce U.S. influence on the continent and to upstage the eu, whose widening and deepening they saw as the main act in Europe’s post-Cold War transformation.

Not surprisingly, beginning gradually in the early 1990s and gathering strength during Clinton’s second term, an increasing number of international actors began to resist American hegemonic multilateralism, less by outright rejection of U.S. initiatives than by assertive counteractions, the eventual effect of which was to deprive Washington of the multilateralist high ground and place it on the unilateralist defensive.

The United States won quick victories over the eu in the wto on beef hormones and bananas, areas in which the eu had long defied international rules. But this encouraged an enraged European Commission to begin scouring the U.S. trade, tax, and antitrust code in search of non-wto-compliant provisions and to file a flurry of lawsuits that Brussels knew it could win. Today, transatlantic trade relations are very much shaped by the unpredicted (but in retrospect entirely predictable) way in which the eu learned to counterpunch against U.S. legal activism in the wto, as Congress struggles to amend tax and antitrust laws that may have little real effect on trade but that from a strictly legal point of view are not wto-compliant.

In the arms control sphere, the non-nuclear powers came to accept the idea of a comprehensive test ban treaty but demanded a steep price in return: The United States and the other nuclear powers had to accept the “true zero yield.” President Clinton ultimately made this concession, winning international support for the agreement but doing so in a way that ultimately doomed the treaty in the Senate. As in the case of the wto, the story of the ctbt is one of effective and in some ways unexpected counterpunching by other countries against a multilateral initiative by the United States that other powers saw as one-sided. In the end, Washington was left with an agreement that banned all U.S. testing and was enormously difficult to verify, but that did little to arrest the nuclear ambitions of Pakistan and India — not to mention Iran, Iraq, Libya, and North Korea.

A key moment in the shift from the “assertive multilateralism” of the early Clinton administration to a new defensiveness about unilateralism was the Ottawa process that led to the signing of the December 1997 treaty banning land mines. This process was driven by a coalition of ngos and “like-minded” states that turned aside the U.S. request for a partial and temporary exception for the Korean Peninsula. Having lost the initiative on this issue, the United States was faced with a simple choice: to accept an immediate and total ban, codified in a treaty that allowed for no exceptions or reservations, or not to sign the treaty and risk being tagged with the unilateralist label.

In the negotiations to establish the International Criminal Court (icc), concluded in Rome some six months later, countries that had never shown much interest in a permanent court became active in the effort to establish such a body, largely in pursuit of unrelated agendas, including undermining the power of the U.N. Security Council. They were joined by a coalition of like-minded countries and ngos that, as with land mines, were determined to push through a treaty that did not reserve a special role for the U.N. Security Council and that at least implicitly was directed at constraining U.S. power. Once again, Washington was forced either to accept an agreement that it feared could be used against it or to reject the treaty and endure the unilateralist opprobrium that doing so would bring.

With regard to global warming, the United States had always been somewhat on the defensive, but the first Bush administration was able to sign the 1992 Framework Convention on Climate Change, with its purely voluntary commitments to stabilizing greenhouse gas emissions. By the mid-1990s, key European countries and the environmental ngos were demanding that Washington accept the mandatory cuts ultimately imposed by Kyoto and that the U.S. economy experience real pain as it turned away from its energy-wasting ways, which many European ministers saw as much in moral as environmental terms. By the Hague conference of 2000, environmental multilateralism had been turned against the United States by an assertive coalition of weaker powers that, at a minimum, did not want to see Washington come off with any special treatment and that, more ambitiously, hoped to take some of the gloss off the much-heralded U.S. economic boom by highlighting what they saw as its dark environmental underside.

The most triumphalist phase of U.S. policy in the 1990s thus rather awkwardly coincided with the strengthening of external and especially European determination to use multilateral agreements to check U.S. power. In the end, the second Clinton administration was caught between recalcitrant partners who, notwithstanding the administration’s essentially Eurocentric and multilateralist instincts, were unwilling to cut it much slack on key world-order issues and U.S. domestic forces (chiefly though by no means exclusively in the Republican-controlled Senate) who had never signed onto the new world order and perhaps were not surprised to see multilateralism turned against U.S. interests in so many areas.

These developments set the stage for the intensified transatlantic clashes over unipolarity and unilateralism that followed the inauguration of the second President Bush. To some extent, the much-decried unilateralism of the new administration was a matter of style, as Washington explicitly and in some cases harshly walked away from arrangements that the Clinton administration had never really embraced but could not bring itself to repudiate. Clinton signed Kyoto but took no steps to ratify or implement it; Bush declared the treaty dead. Clinton voted against the icc agreement, signed it at the last possible moment for procedural reasons, but recommended that the Senate not ratify; Bush went out of his way to “unsign” the agreement. With regard to the use of force, the new administration clearly was more inclined to act without U.N. or European sanction — hence, the eventual conflict with France and Germany over Iraq. But even this was more a matter of degree than an absolute change, and in any case it was difficult to separate from the extraordinary security challenges that would have confronted any U.S. administration after September 11.

Where to go from here

The evidence does not support the view that American unilateralism is the result of a unipolar imbalance of power and that a return to multipolarity is a necessary or sufficient condition for creating a stronger multilateral order.

Viewed in the light of a vast international relations literature, this argument does not explain why the United States was the consummate multilateralist at the height of its power in the 1940s but then turned unilateralist after the unexpected collapse of the Soviet Union more than restored its earlier dominance. Conversely, it does not explain how France, once a weak and prickly unilateralist, suddenly became the world’s most fervent multilateralist when confronted 50 years later with the emergence of the new American “hyperpower.”

Similarly, the argument does not fit the facts as they relate to post-Cold War diplomacy. The history of this period is yet to be written, but even a cursory review of the wrangling over global warming, the icc, the use of force, and other issues suggests that the usual generalizations about the relationship between polarity and the choice of unilateral or multilateral policies are at best partially correct. Multilateralism is not a politically neutral instrument that, as the hegemonic stability theorists imply, can be used by a right-minded dominant power to cement its advantages. Nor is it, as the unipolar unilateralists argue, a tool of the weak that the leading power can safely ignore. Rather, multilateralism is itself up for grabs in the international system, with both the leading and aspirant powers seeking to define it and use it in ways that serve their interests.

Finally, the argument that unipolarity is the cause of unilateralism vastly simplifies the intellectual debate in the United States and ignores the different strands of thinking that have gone into shaping post-Cold War policy. As has been seen, some influential Americans see unipolarity as an argument for rather than against robust multilateralism. Others doubt the reality, at least for long, of a truly unipolar order but divide sharply on whether this means that the United States should follow unilateral or multilateral policies to advance its interests in what they see as a multipolar world.

Since January 2001, the tendency in Europe has been to see U.S. policy as driven by the unipolar unilateralism associated with prominent neoconservative thinkers. But even under the Bush administration, U.S. policy has reflected a blend of intellectual currents as policymakers have sought to adjust to particular situations and come to grips with American power and its limitations. Clearly, a readiness to act unilaterally and to do so on the basis of an awareness of power is a factor, albeit one that tends to be exaggerated in Europe. But there is also a certain unipolar multilateralist momentum behind the foreign policy of this as of any administration as the sheer weight of the United States shapes multilateral forums and international norms in ways that reflect and help to perpetuate U.S. power, precisely in the way that the hegemonic stability theorists would predict. Perhaps most interestingly, there are adumbrations of a multipolar multilateralism in U.S. policy — an acceptance of the emergence of new power centers and a willingness to work with these powers cooperatively in international forums. This tendency can be seen, for example, in the recognition of China, India, and Russia as potential great powers in the 2002 National Security Strategy and more recently in Secretary of State Powell’s focus on “embracing major powers.”⁶ It is a stance that has historic roots in the Republican Party — in the Eisenhower administration, for example — and arguably was reflected in candidate Bush’s call for a “humble” foreign policy.

Multilateralism in the service of multipolarity is precisely the high diplomatic ground that the eu has staked out for itself as it goes around the world forming “strategic partnerships” with key countries said to share its commitment to global governance and stronger multilateral institutions in a multipolar world. It remains to be seen, however, whether such a world will emerge and, if so, what it would look like; whether multipolarity in fact would strengthen multilateralism rather than lead to an intensified economic and political rivalry of all against all; and, not least, whether Europe would have more influence and security in such a world.

Many in Europe seem to assume that because the United States is the chief protagonist of the unipolar world, any attenuation of unipolarity will redound to Europe’s benefit. This view seems to be based on the assumption that such a world will be exactly like the one that exists at present, except that Europe will have vastly more power relative to the United States. In reality, Europe could emerge as one of the weaker “poles” in such a system, the Austria-Hungary of a new globalized balance of power, its privileged ties with the United States weakened but without the endogenous sources of power — economic and demographic dynamism, favorable geography, and effective centralized leadership — that are likely to be needed to exercise real power in the rough and tumble of a true multipolar order.

Alternatively, diffusion of power to Asian giants such as China and India along with a partial revival of Russian power outside Europe’s sphere of control could lay the basis for a new transatlantic solidarity as both sides accentuate commonalities of interest, values, and history in a more diverse world. Europe would continue to build its own identity and pursue its interests, but becoming a “counterweight” to the United States would not be the driving rationale behind eu or member-state foreign policies. Both sides would concentrate on finding ways to use multilateralism to solve global and regional problems without artificially seeking to employ it either to consolidate or to reverse power relationships that in the long run will be determined by the internal cohesion and dynamism of each side. Such an outcome is arguably in the interests of both parties in that it neither permanently condemns Europe to a second-tier status in a way that many European elites find difficult to stomach nor exposes the United States to the constant harassment of a Europe seeking to consolidate its unity and enhance its international status by playing the “unilateralism” card.

This outcome can be realized, however, only if both sides of the Atlantic are careful not to make policy on the basis of erroneous assumptions about unipolarity, unilateralism, and the relationship between them.