The End of Power Read online

  The rise of the “coalition of the willing” as a new kind of multinational military enterprise testifies to the diminished force of alliances. The most notorious manifestation of this decline was the ad hoc group of countries who agreed to participate in or otherwise support the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. But it aptly describes the Afghanistan operation as well as security, peacekeeping, and humanitarian efforts from earthquake relief to patrolling the sea lanes off Somalia—where countries have pooled military forces despite no formal alliance having been triggered, and with no overarching authority forcing them to take part. Because the “willing” sign up on an ad hoc basis, their support is contingent on political developments in their respective countries, their continued willingness to pay the financial costs, and the side deals they can negotiate in exchange for taking part—in the case of several nations participating in the Iraq operation, for example, streamlined visa procedures for their citizens to enter the United States.

  As for the actual new alliances that have sprung up in the world under Pax Americana, some are simply forums for military cooperation among members of a regional organization, similar to the EU. The African Union, for instance, has its own peacekeeping force to intervene in regional conflicts. A South American Defense Council is building military ties in Latin America. But these fall short of traditional alliances that are built on tight cooperation, sharing plans and technology, and the promise of mutual defense. One might have expected the rise of new alliances around a large rival power, such as China or Russia, in an effort to recreate a rival in place of the Warsaw Pact. Instead, the most active efforts—albeit largely unsuccessful—were those by Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez to form a military alliance with Cuba, Bolivia, and other sympathetic nations as a regional counter-power to the United States. The more representative “alliances” today are in fact between states and nonstate actors that they support—for instance, Iran’s support of Hezbollah and Hamas, and Venezuela’s reported role as intermediary between the Colombian FARC and organizations like the Basque militant group ETA.23

  One military arena in which some of the traditional hierarchies remain intact is arms sales—at least of the traditional kind. The same dominant suppliers—the United States, Russia, China, France, Germany, Italy—still account for the overwhelming majority of arms deals, in a top tier that has held intact for decades. But official sales backed by government financing are only one part of the actual global arms business. As the UN secretary-general’s April 2011 report puts it, “In recent decades, the arms trade has seen a shift from mostly direct contact between Government officials or agents to the ubiquitous use of private intermediaries, who operate in a particularly globalized environment, often from multiple locations.”24 This part of the arms trade, unregulated and often stateless, is out of control, and points to the diminished grasp of national defense ministries in the environment of armed conflict—yet another symptom of the decay of power.

  The Decline of Economic Diplomacy

  Alongside military alliances, great powers have traditionally used economic inducements as a way to get other countries to support their interests. The most direct method is bilateral aid—that is, directly from one government to another—in the form of loans, grants, or preferential trade or resource deals. Economic diplomacy can be punitive as well, in the form of trade barriers against a targeted country, boycotts, embargoes, or sanctions against their economic institutions.

  Here again the methods persist, but their effectiveness as a means of power projection has diminished. For starters, thanks to the integration of the world economy, the dependence of any one country on supplies, customers, or financing from any one other country has loosened enormously. Falling trade barriers and more open capital markets were long-held goals of the United States and other rich nations in international trade talks. Their victory—along with the widespread promotion of the “Washington consensus” as a condition for lending by the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and other institutions—has had the paradoxical effect of weakening the hold that the United States or former colonial powers like Britain and France once had over countries in their sphere of influence.

  The imposition of sanctions against Iran in an effort to bring its nuclear program into compliance with international regimes is the exception that proves the rule. The United Nations, the United States, the European Union, and several other countries have imposed a widening array of restrictions on commerce with Iran, including an embargo on Iranian oil, curtailment of transactions with its central bank, and restrictions on travel and tourism. But the United States has had to grant exemptions to several of its allies who depend on Iranian oil and has faced the difficult dilemma of whether to impose penalties on friendly countries such as South Korea and India, and on rivals with significant retaliatory capacity such as China, for their unwillingness to curtail purchases.

  The targeted use of state power through the allocation of aid to favored countries has become enormously diffuse as well. At the end of World War II, only five or six national aid agencies existed. Today there are more than sixty. In the 1950s, an overwhelming 88 percent of aid disbursed came from three countries: the United States (58 percent), France (22 percent), and Britain (8 percent). The bilateral aid field saw its first major expansion in the 1960s when Japan, Canada, and several European countries set up overseas aid agencies. The Netherlands and the Scandinavian countries soon became major players, contributing a greater share relative to their national income than did the United States, Britain, or France. In the 1970s, the oil windfall allowed Arab countries to set up development assistance funds that they used to support projects in Muslim countries and throughout Africa. The landscape expanded again in the 1990s, with Eastern European countries becoming donors; large emerging nations like India and Brazil have also become major aid issuers in their own right.25 By 2009, the United States, France, and the UK accounted for only 40 percent of total official development assistance.26

  And that is just the bilateral part of the picture, which accounts for 70 percent of aid flows. There are at least 263 multilateral aid agencies,27 from the World Health Organization to regional groupings like the Nordic Development Fund or specialty agencies like the World Fish Center or the International Council for Control of Iodine Deficiency Disorders. On top of all this is the vast expansion of private aid through nongovernmental organizations that follow their own agenda. In 2007, total official development assistance (bilateral and multilateral) was about $101 billion, and private aid was about $60 billion.28 The global private aid industry is estimated to employ more staff than the government and multilateral organizations with which it competes more and more effectively.

  The proliferation of sources means that the typical recipient country is dealing with a great many partners, rather than a few that monopolize the scene and can exercise disproportionate influence on its government. In the 1960s, there were on average twelve donors channeling foreign government funds into each recipient country; in 2001–2005, the number had almost tripled to thirty-three.29 The dispersion of economic power is even more pronounced when it comes to foreign investment. The days when the United Fruit Company acted as a transmission belt for US interests in the “banana republics” are well over. Multinational companies are no longer national champions for their home country, extending its interests and sometimes serving as more or less complicit agents in its foreign policy. Between the expansion of global markets, outsourcing and manufacturing facilities, the wave of mergers and acquisitions, and investment by individual tycoons, multinationals are as unmoored from the foreign policy of “home” countries as they have ever been. What specific national interest, for instance, would you attribute to the world’s largest steel company, Arcelor Mittal, given that it is based in Europe, its shares are listed in the stock exchanges of six countries, and yet it is owned primarily by an Indian billionaire?

  In fact, if any countries have seen their interests expand through foreign invest
ment in recent years, it is emerging economies whose companies have become active international investors, especially in agriculture, natural resources, construction, and telecommunications. Brazil’s Petrobras or China’s CNOOC in oil, Malaysia’s Sime Darby in rubber, Mexico’s CEMEX in cement and Bimbo in food, South Africa’s MTN or India’s Bharti Airtel in mobile phone service are just a few of the many companies involved in the so-called South-South foreign direct investment (FDI) supported by increasingly strong investment promotion agencies, export-import banks, or political risk insurance. An estimated twenty-thousand multinational companies have their headquarters in emerging markets. Investments originating in developing countries are still a minority of global foreign investment, but they have skyrocketed from only $12 billion in 1991 to $384 billion in 2011. Of this, a growing proportion has gone to investments in other developing countries. In 2011, emerging-market investors accounted for more than 40 percent of global merger and acquisition activity. The ensuing distribution of executives, personnel, and brand-name visibility gives the lie to the antiquated idea of foreign investment as a political tool of rich nations.30

  Economic diplomacy still has the best chances of translating to political clout in places where the needs are greatest and competition from other partners and the private sector is lowest. In recent years that has meant Africa, where China and the West are facing off in the closest thing we now have to an old-fashioned scramble for influence, against a background of promising oil reserves and political instability. Chinese influence in Africa has grown in the last decade, as the country has built roads, hospitals, and other infrastructure, lavishly outbidding Western firms for oil concessions and turning projects around rapidly—with few or none of the onerous policy or management conditions imposed by Western funding agencies. One of China’s most recent high-profile gifts was a $200 million headquarters for the African Union in Addis Ababa. This generosity combined with professions of support for the sovereignty of recipient countries and a blind eye to rebellions and political unrest have earned China credit among African political elites and created strong competition for French and US companies and agencies. But as fast as Chinese influence in Africa grows, it too is vulnerable to decay as other countries—notably India, South Africa, and the Arab countries—expand their investments on the continent.

  SOFT POWER FOR ALL

  If the military and economic clout of the great powers has become diluted, their soft power dominance has been equally affected, though this is difficult to measure. The Pew Global Attitudes project, which has polled in an increasing number of countries since 2002, confirms that the global image of the United States declined in most parts of the world during the George W. Bush administration, particularly after the invasion of Iraq, and appeared to have improved—sometimes returning or exceeding 2002 levels, sometimes not—after Barack Obama’s election. In Germany, for instance, 60 percent of those polled in 2002 had a favorable view of the United States, compared to only 30 percent in 2007, and 64 percent in 2009. In Turkey, favorable views of the United States dropped from 30 percent in 2002 to 9 percent in 2007, and rose back to 14 percent in 2009. Measured this way, America’s soft power is far from uniform: in 2009 American favor-ability was 78 percent in Nigeria, 69 percent in Britain, 47 percent in China, 38 percent in Argentina, and 25 percent in Jordan. Moreover, by 2012, the “Obama dividend” was declining in many countries.

  The same question posed of China offers similarly ambiguous results, with the biggest improvements in China’s image reported in Nigeria (from 59 percent favorable in 2006 to 85 percent in 2009) compared with a drop in Turkey (from 40 percent in 2005 to 16 percent in 2009) and tepid results, in the 40–50 percent range, in many of the countries polled. Tellingly, in 2011, Pew reported that a majority or plurality of respondents in fifteen out of twenty-two nations said that China either will replace, or has replaced, the United States as the world’s leading superpower. Opinions of the EU have been mixed—its overall image declined in thirteen of twenty countries from 2010 to 2011—while views of Russia tend to be negative and opinions of Iran even more so, with a few salient exceptions (for instance, in 2009, 57 percent of Lebanese had a favorable opinion of Russia, and 74 percent of Pakistanis thought highly of Iran).31

  All this suggests that soft power is, at the very least, a volatile concept, highly vulnerable to short-term twists in world affairs, in an environment where news travels more rapidly than ever. That has not stopped numerous countries from embracing the concept and looking into ways to increase their soft power. The scholar Joshua Kurlantzick traces China’s shift to a soft power strategy to 1997, when the country couched its refusal to devaluate its currency as “standing up for Asia.” Since then, China has become the major provider of aid to many Southeast Asian countries, expanded aid and projects in Africa, accelerated distribution of its national television programs, and opened Confucius Institutes for language teaching and cultural programs around the world. In February 2012, China Central Television launched an effort to produce programming for the United States, opening a studio in Washington, DC, with more than sixty international staff.32 China is also becoming a destination for global artists and architects; and a sense of its growing importance is prompting parents around the world to consider enrolling their children in Mandarin classes. For China, soft power is an explicit strategy.33

  In India, by contrast, soft power is less a policy priority and more a concern among analysts who hope that the country has already amassed a soft power advantage by virtue of being a democracy and having attracted generations of Western tourists, seekers, and now investors. “India has an extraordinary ability to tell stories that are more persuasive and attractive than those of its rivals,” argues Shashi Tharoor, the author and former UN high official turned Indian government minister and politician.34 The head of India’s overseas culture programs cited the popularity of yoga as a component of soft power.35 Vague as all this can sound, one area in which India’s soft power is generally accepted is Bollywood, the world’s largest film exporting industry; it has won fans across Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe for decades and is now breaking into the Western commercial mainstream.

  If media penetration and popularity are among the more reliable indicators of soft power, as evidenced by both Hollywood and Bollywood, they also reveal a landscape where telenovelas from Mexico and Colombia, low-budget films from Nigeria, and reality shows from South Africa are broadening the range of influences. In Russia and Eastern Europe, just as the end of the Cold War threw huge arsenals of surplus weapons onto the world market, the end of state television monopolies created a vast vacuum for cheap telenovelas from Latin America to fill, giving birth to addictions—and also markets. In Southeast Asia, a whole generation of fans knows South Korea not for its confrontation with the North nor for its time under dictatorship in the 1970s, but for its video games, pop music stars, and the Winter Sonata TV series. The Korean government capitalizes on this by sponsoring concerts and offering language and cooking classes at its cultural centers in the region. Once an opportunity to extend soft power comes into view, capitalizing on it is easy—and often very cheap.36 The latest Korean cultural beachhead is the United States, where the rapper Psy created a sensation with his “Gangnam Style” dances and songs. (Gangnam is a posh neighborhood in Seoul.) “K Pop,” another Korean superstar, also won over legions of fans: the New York Times reported that R&B singer Jay Park’s songs and albums have hit No. 1 on the R&B/Soul charts on iTunes in the United States, Canada, and Denmark since 2010. Together with the global spread of consumer names such as Samsung, Hyundai, Kia, and LG, these cultural inroads are helping to strengthen South Korea’s global brand: in the Anholt GfK Roper Nation Brands Index, which surveys twenty thousand people in twenty countries to put together a ranking of the top fifty country brands, South Korea has risen from thirty-third in 2008 to twenty-seventh in 2011.37

  THE NEW RULES OF GEOPOLITICS

  One of the best e
xamples of smaller countries that have used coalitions of the willing, economic diplomacy (i.e., a lot of money), and soft power to advance their interests must surely be Qatar. It led the way in toppling Libya’s Moammar Qaddafi by supplying rebels with money, training, and more than twenty thousand tons of weapons, and called early for the arming of rebels in Syria.38 It has attempted mediation in Yemen, Ethiopia, Indonesia, and Palestine and—importantly—in Lebanon. Through an $85 billion investment fund, Qatar has bought into businesses from Volkswagen to the Paris St. Germain Football Club. And it is not only behind what is perhaps the most influential new news organization, the network Al Jazeera, but has been building up its reputation as a cultural center with top-rated museums of Islamic and Middle Eastern art as well as high-profile purchases of pieces by the likes of Warhol, Rothko, Cezanne, Koons, and Lichtenstein.39

  But you don’t have to be sitting on top of a small fortune in hydrocarbon resources to play with the big boys. A small group of countries that are not necessarily neighbors or bound by a common history can achieve results more quickly by simply choosing to work together than by going through cumbersome international organizations. And a more geographically ambitious foreign policy, one focused only on immediate neighbors, is within reach of a larger number of countries now; countries that lag in grasping this opportunity stand to lose their competitive edge.