The age for generosity

American dominance is not simply military. The US economy is as large as the next three — Japan, Germany and Britain — put together. With 5 per cent of the world’s population, this one country accounts for 43 per cent of the world’s economic production, 40 per cent of its high-technology production and 50 per cent of its research and development. If you look at the indicators of future growth, all are favourable for America. It is more dynamic economically, more youthful demographically and more flexible culturally than any other part of the world. It is conceivable that America’s lead, especially over an aging and sclerotic Europe, will actually increase over the next two decades.

Given this situation, perhaps what is most surprising is that the world has not ganged up on America already. Since the beginnings of the state system in the 16th century, international politics has seen one clear pattern — the formation of balances of power against the strong. Countries with immense military and economic might arouse fear and suspicion, and soon others coalesce against them. It happened to the Hapsburg Empire in the 17th century, France in the late 18th and early 19th century, Germany twice in the early 20th century, and the Soviet Union in the latter half of the 20th century. At this point, most Americans will surely protest: ‘‘But we’re different!’’ Americans — this writer included — think of themselves as a nation that has never sought to occupy others, and that through the years has been a progressive and liberating force. But historians tell us that all dominant powers thought they were special. Their very success confirmed for them that they were blessed. But as they became ever more powerful, the world saw them differently. The English satirist John Dryden described this phenomenon in a poem set during the Biblical King David’s reign. ‘‘When the chosen people grew too strong,’’ he wrote, ‘‘the rightful cause at length became the wrong.’’

Has American power made its rightful cause turn into wrong? Will America simply have to learn to live in splendid isolation from the resentments of the world? This is certainly how some Americans see things. And it’s true that some of the opposition to the United States is thinly veiled envy. ‘‘Scratch an anti-American in Europe, and very often all he wants is a guest professorship at Harvard or to have an article published in The New York Times,’’ says Denis MacShane, Britain’s minister for Europe.

But there lies a deep historical fallacy in the view that ‘‘they hate us because we are strong’’. After all, US supremacy is hardly a recent phenomenon. America has been the leading world power for almost a century now. By 1900 the United States was the richest country in the world. By 1919 it had decisively intervened to help win the largest war in history. By 1945 it had led the Allies to victory in World War II. For 10 years thereafter America accounted for 50 per cent of world GDP, a much larger share than it holds today.

Yet for five decades after World War II, there was no general rush to gang up against the United States. Instead countries joined with Washington to confront the Soviet Union, a much poorer country (at best comprising 12 per cent of world GDP, or a quarter the size of the American economy). What explains this? How — until now — did America buck the biggest trend in international history?

To answer this question, go back to 1945. When America had the world at its feet, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry Truman chose not to create an American imperium, but to build a world of alliances and multilateral institutions. They formed the United Nations, the Bretton Woods system of economic cooperation and dozens of other international organisations. America helped get the rest of the world back on its feet by pumping out vast amounts of aid and private investment. The centrepiece of this effort, the Marshall Plan, amounted to $120 billion in today’s dollars.

Not least of these efforts was the special attention given to diplomacy. Consider what it must have meant for Franklin Roosevelt — at the pinnacle of power — to go halfway across the world to Tehran and Yalta to meet with Churchill and Stalin in 1943 and 1945. Roosevelt was a sick man, paralysed from the waist down, hauling 10 pounds of steel braces on his legs. Travelling for 40 hours by sea and air took the life out of him. He did not have to go. He had plenty of deputies — Marshall, Eisenhower — who could have done the job. And he certainly could have summoned the others closer to him. But FDR understood that American power had to be coupled with a generosity of spirit. He insisted that British commanders like Montgomery be given their fair share of glory in the war. He brought China into the United Nations Security Council, even though it was a poor peasant society, because he believed that it was important to have the largest Asian country properly represented within a world body.

The standard set by Roosevelt and his generation endured. When George Marshall devised the Marshall Plan, he insisted that America should not dictate how its money be spent, but rather that the initiatives and control should lie with Europeans. For decades thereafter, the United States has provided aid, technical know-how and assistance across the world. It has built dams, funded magazines and sent scholars and students abroad so that people got to know America and Americans. It has paid great deference to its allies who were in no sense equals. It has conducted joint military exercises, even when they added little to US readiness. For half a century, American Presidents and Secretaries of State have circled the globe and hosted their counterparts in a never-ending cycle of diplomacy.

Of course, all these exertions served our interests, too. They produced a pro-American world that was rich and secure. They laid the foundations for a booming global economy in which America thrives. But it was an enlightened self-interest that took into account the interests of others. Above all, it reassured countries — through word and deed, style and substance — that America’s mammoth power need not be feared.

To be continued.
Tomorrow: Where Bush went wrong.
Courtesy: Newsweek Inc

READ: THE ARROGANT EMPIRE: PART I
How Bush has isolated America