Dominant role in politics is not easy in a longer time. This writing deals about why United States is not destined to decline it´s world leadership. The article has relevant value in the study of International Relationship because many authors like Robert Kagan in his book “The World America Made” and “Power and Willpower in the American Future: Why the United States Is Not Destined to Decline” by Robert J. Lieber, establish that the U.S has played a dominant role in the world politics in the last 60 years.
Recently USA has experienced two problems to maintain this leadership: China’s rising power and American economic, political and military malaise. The future of the U.S as a world political leader has two tendencies: optimistic and pessimist. Kagan an Lieber are two optimists, they analyze the U.S in the past, present and future in the role of leader of the global order and they do not give importance to multilateral institutions. They sustain that during this leadership the global economy has grown and democracies has quadrupled. United States promoted peace, prosperity and political liberalization and this is important in maintaining the world order.
It is a fact that the lack of common government means that the order depends on threats and promises. Kagan opposes to other authors but he does not offer data or systematic evidence. Other authors sustain that the world politics is uncertain and characterized by natural absence of harmony.
Theorist and practitioners make efforts to avoid disorder in the world, so they create institutions like the United Nations, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization and European Union to achieve cooperation between states.
Kagan states that other nations accept dominance of the U.S because they approve the American values and believe that this countries may eventually need American power. I have personally experienced how the U.S forces countries (like Mexico and other Latin America States) to act in a certain way, with the threat of removing the support that it provides them.
Kagan does not give relevance to the efforts of the UN, the World Bank and European Union, he fails to mention that the UN Security Council has always being operated with vetoes possibly by any of the five permanent members (China, France, Russia, United Kingdom and of course United States) showing that there can not be authority above these States and there is a extensive literature about how some States use the UN and other institutions to pursue their own interests. Kagan does not make a serious analysis of how much military power United States needs to maintain its leadership. Lieber agrees with Kagan arguing that it is important to maintain the leadership, otherwise the result would be a disorderly and dangerous world. Lieber arguments are similar to Kagan because he dismisses multilateralism as ineffective, paying less attention to it´s successes.
The main failure of these book is to distinguish what is known and what is unknown. There are things relevant to the future of the U.S global role. First, in the absence of leadership, world politics suffer from collective actions problems, it generates uncertainty, insecurity and lack of cooperation. Second, leadership is more effective by creating institutions to share responsibilities and they probably do not resolve all disagreement, but this make cooperation easier. Third, leadership is costly and the responsibilities must be shared. Fourth, in democracies like the U.S people are not interested in politics, they care more in welfare and tax cuts but pay less attention to military spends and foreign affairs, so the investing in international leadership is tending to decline. Fifth, the autocracies are less stable than democracies. Lacking the law of transitions, the former is subject to repeated internal political crisis. Finally, we know that only the U.S has the material and political capacity to exercise leadership. They had the ability to solve economic and political problems, although they have domestic partisan troubles to deal with.
What we do not know is important too and I consider relevant for the future leadership. Will the major powers of international system, mainly China, maintain their social and political coherence to avoid civil war? Will the instabilities of the global economy be corrected? Will ideologically regimen like Iran be prudent or may use nuclear weapons and potentially threaten states react prudently? Will the tendency of democracy be maintained?
The most important issue dealing here: can United States maintain the power and willpower to sustain the political leadership?
This lecture helped me to understand the International Relations, because I consider that the U.S has an important role in the world leadership (in the last 60 years), but the pessimist and optimist about the maintenance of this leadership tend to blend the knowledge and speculation and make their conclusions based more in mood and temperament than in evidences, so the future role of the U.S is unknown and it is better not to make predictions.
I consider that institutions like the United Nations, the World Bank and European Union sometimes can not resolve all problems but they have helped to increase cooperation between countries.
It is important to the world to have a leadership, but there must be institutions to prevent abuse of the political and economical powerful countries against the less developed ones.