Understanding International Relations, Third Edition

World order in the twenty-first century
The last ‘American century’ both began and ended in the 1940s – will the
present ‘century’ last much longer? One of the few things that can be said
with some certainly about IR theory is that a gambler who used it to predict
the future would soon go broke. Still, there are one or two propositions
which, although non-specific – in fact, because they are non-specific – are
reasonably defensible.
In the first place, personalities are important, but, in the longer run, they
are not that important. It does matter who is elected President of the US, or
France – and the charismatic power of leaders such as Osama Bin Laden is,
by definition, highly personal – but the interests of nations persist over time,
and the forces that produce one terrorist leader will produce another, albeit
maybe not one as effective as Bin Laden. A tendency of the modern popular
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Understanding International Relations

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media – which, nowadays, in the UK means all media except the Financial
Times and, perhaps, the BBC World Service – is to personalize every issue.
Just as, in our celebrity culture, we are presented with the illusion that we
know David Beckham or Kate Moss, so we imagine we know what makes
George W. Bush or Tony Blair tick. We don’t, as witness the number of people
who have been surprised on meeting Bush by his command of the issues, or
the incredulity that greeted Bob Woodward’s books on Afghanistan and
Iraq, which painted Bush as an effective war leader. We think we know him
as the bumbling, ineffective, stupid character portrayed by Rory Bremner or
in Private Eye, and because we have formed this picture we think that his
replacement by someone else – whom we also think we know, but actually
don’t – would make an enormous difference. It would not have; it might
have made some difference on the margin, but only on the margin. The con-
tinuities in US (and British and French) policies are more striking than the
changes over time.
Second, we can say that the history of the international system over the
last four centuries suggests that states are very reluctant to tolerate great
concentrations of power – but that there is no guarantee that this reluctance
can be translated into an effective anti-hegemonic politics. A balance of
power can only emerge if the material conditions for balance are present. At
the moment they are not, and all the while the US defines its interests in
such a way that it does not directly challenge its main potential competitors
there is little chance that the latter will move from bandwagoning to balancing.
In other words, in this situation intentions are crucial and not simply capa-
bilities; to put the matter crudely, the costs involved in challenging the US
are potentially so high that states will not be willing to take this step unless
the US by its behaviour makes it necessary for them so to do. In yet other
words, as long as the US does not pursue the chimera of absolute security,
there is no reason to think that US dominance is likely to be challenged in
the near future – in that respect, this American century could last quite
a long time.
Third, however much the US may wish to act unilaterally on occasion,
there will always be good reasons for it to seek to use the multilateral insti-
tutions that exist, and which it was largely responsible for creating. In
this respect, figures such as Joseph Nye, John Ikenberry and Zbigniew
Brzezinski are essentially correct (Nye 2002; Ikenberry 2001; Brzezinski
2004). The importance of brute power is a sad fact about the world which
should never be denied or ignored, but legitimized power – authority – is
always more effective. International institutions have the ability to legiti-
mate US actions and this means that the US needs these institutions; good
quality diplomacy by the US and by its allies will bring results. James Rubin
has argued persuasively that over Iraq US diplomacy was ineffective – that
a more intelligent approach might well have preserved consensus – and it