The world cannot remain unipolar

There is a vast power disparity between France, Germany and Russia, on the one hand, and the US, an the other. But you don8217;t need an exact equilibrium of forces between adversaries to balance each other. All that the weak needs is the power to hurt the strong. France and Germany and Russia have that power. Talks have begun at Brussels between France, Germany, Belgium and Luxembourg on a European defence system. France with its penchant for an European counterpoise to America would like to see this defence system outside NATO; others don8217;t say so openly but hope so privately.

What is really significant about these talks is Germany8217;s participation in it. The German-US relationship has been particularly close. But the US action in Iraq has stirred the Europeans to think about their defence. This is also true of the people of Spain, Italy and Britain, who massively demonstrated against US action in Iraq. Therefore, the principal countries of the EU together with Russia could emerge as a counterweight to US power.

The history of the modern state system of the past five centuries shows that primacy by any one power provokes others to challenge it. The Hapsburgs, Napoleonic France, Victorian England, Bismarckian Germany were all dominant powers for a short time and they all saw their dominance contested. American primacy is not divinely ordained. Unipolarity is an aberration. Multipolarity is the recurring historical pattern. Whether you can preserve or lose your primacy also depends on how you use it. At the end of the second world war, the US had power no country possessed in history: 50 per cent of the world8217;s GDP, nuclear monopoly, unmatched military power and the towering status of President F.D. Roosevelt. It used this power to build a liberal international order. Institutions to serve this order were created8212;the Bretton Woods system, the GATT, the Marshall Plan and NATO. Maintenance of the Atlantic alliance was seen as vital to US interests.

All US presidents, from Truman to Clinton, were basically committed to he Rooseveltian liberal interdependent order. George Bush Jr has fundamentally departed from it. Crass realpolitik combined with messianism go into the making of the Bush administration8217;s foreign policy. A brotherhood of neo-cons who run America today believe that with its enormous military power it can reshape the world in the American image. But Iraq may turn out to be the nemesis of American power. For the first time since its emergence as a preeminent power, the US has taken on a truly imperial role. This project is far greater in scope then the one in Vietnam. That experiment ended in total failure and it took 54,000 lives. Nothing suggests that it will succeed in Iraq. US success in implanting democracy on the ruins of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan cannot be replicated elsewhere. Few believe that the US wants to build democracy in Iraq. It would readily settle for a pro-American dictatorship in Iraq, as it has done elsewhere.

We will gain nothing by endorsing American primacy. The greater dispersal of power is in our interest. About two years ago we signed a statement with the visiting French foreign minister, Hubert Vederine, calling for the building of a multipolar world. Have we abandoned that idea?