The Indispensable Nation

The distinct American version of free market democracy, with wealthy families at its indispensable center, is crucial not just for Americans, but for the world at large. And not just in ways that might immediately come to mind. Yes, American economic vigor, and the resulting gigantic market we represent to other economies around the world, is certainly the main engine of global economic growth and therefore the main hope for people everywhere for material improvement in their lives. Yes, American democracy is the most widely admired form of political organization in the world and therefore represents the main hope for freedom among people everywhere. And, yes, American military might is the main guarantor of peace globally and the main fear of despots everywhere; as well as—let's face it—the main source of fear even among our allies.

But my argument goes beyond these issues, important as they are. When former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright insisted that the United States was the world's one “indispensable nation,” European statesmen engaged in paroxysms of sputtering outrage. But Albright was transparently correct. Let's examine why.

In the famous “Kantian paradox,” Emmanuel Kant pointed out that the only solution to constant warfare among the aggressive and all-too-adjacent European powers was the creation of a world government. But because such a government would have to be all-powerful to enforce a “state of universal peace,” the world government would represent a threat to human freedom far greater than even the Hobbesian world of brutal competition and international disorder that it was intended to replace.²⁶ Yet, today, most European leaders seem to feel that Europe has resolved this paradox, that the European Union and its associated institutions (the United Nations, the World Court, the Court of International Justice, etc.) have created, in Kagan's words, “a post-historical paradise of peace.”²⁷ This “paradise” is contrasted starkly with the supposed mindset of the United States, which, it is argued, remains mired in a Hobbesian world where might makes right.

But like all paradises that are supposed to exist in a world of imperfect human beings, the European “paradise of peace” is a chimera, a frail orchid of a paradise that could not, and cannot, exist outside the protective American military hothouse. Europe is, indeed, at peace, and has been for more than half a century—a happy miracle, certainly, if not a paradise. But, as Kagan points out, peace in Europe was launched not by posthistorical moral progress on the part of enlightened Europeans, but by the applied and brutal and sometimes morally ambivalent²⁸ use of historical military power by America in twice crushing an aggressive Germany. And European peace was further enabled by America's willingness to fund the rebuilding of Europe and to fund its military defense, especially against the USSR, leaving Europeans in the privileged, but hopelessly unrealistic, position of having little to worry about but getting along with each other.

If, at any moment during the Cold War, the United States had withdrawn its military protection from Europe, the Red Army would have overrun the Continent in a few weeks, converting our enlightened European friends into inmates in a vast Stalinist gulag. Even today, if every other free market democracy on earth disappeared, the continuing existence of the United States would ensure that the candle of freedom would continue to burn, and to burn fiercely. But if the United States disappeared, leaving all the other democracies intact, civilization could mount a deathwatch for human freedom.

European nations find themselves, in short, in the paradoxical position of having to be militarily weak in order to cooperate with each other. It's a paradox because, being weak, they are easy prey to aggressive nations who have very different (and, to European minds and our own, very much worse) visions of how societies should operate. In order to avoid being destroyed by such unpalatable societies, Europe must seek the protection of a country it identifies not with its own posthistorical ethical vision, but with the very Hobbesian vision that led to all of Europe's problems, that is, the United States.²⁹

But what both Europeans and Americans seem to miss in this picture is that Europe and America, and free countries and countries struggling toward freedom everywhere, already exist in a world that bears at least a distant resemblance to Kagan's (and Kant's) “paradise of peace.” In this ersatz version of paradise, one party—America—preserves the peace. The other party—mainly, but not exclusively, Europe—drives the search for mechanisms that might ultimately eliminate the need for a militarily enforced peace.

This circumstance doesn't seem like a paradise to either party, because neither party can fully participate in the activities of the other. As the guarantor and enforcer of the peace that allows our friends to work toward happy coexistence, the United States cannot fully participate because the reduction in sovereignty these experiments require would eviscerate our role as the global “hyperpuissance.”³⁰ And as I have noted at great length in Chapter 1, our European friends cannot much participate in their own defense without first becoming as competitive and vigorous as the United States—in other words, without risking another European arms race. This odd circumstance requires each party to trust the other to do the right thing, a trust that is extraordinarily difficult to manage.

Fortunately for Europe, America is largely a benign hyperpuissance, a democracy with long-term interests closely aligned to those of Europe. And fortunately for America, European traditions and views on crucial issues of culture and human dignity are largely aligned with our own. Europe will never be content with America's vast military power and will always feel that we are abusing it. And America will never concede that our European friends are doing essential work that we cannot do ourselves. But, like it our not, Europe needs the United States and the United States needs Europe. One can imagine far worse outcomes than to have the most successful, the most civilized, and the most advanced societies guiding the fate of the world.