OVERPOWERED:SURVEY FROM US

Overpowered?
Questioning the Wisdom of American Restraint
Michael Mandelbaum
May/June 2010


For the authors of three new books about power and U.S. foreign policy, the essence of "the power problem" is that the United States has too much of it. But the era in which U.S. foreign policy could be driven in counterproductive directions by an excess of power is in the process of ending.

MICHAEL MANDELBAUM is Christian A. Herter Professor of American Foreign Policy at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and the author of the forthcoming book The Frugal Superpower: America's Global Leadership in a Cash-Strapped Era. For an annotated guide to this topic, see "What to Read on American Primacy" at www.foreignaffairs.com/readinglists/american-primacy.

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Cover image
Author Jack F. Matlock Jr.
Publisher Yale University Press
Year 2010
Pages 368 pp.
ISBN 9780300137613
Price $30.00

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Author Giulio M. Gallarotti
Publisher Lynne Rienner
Year 2010
Pages 2007 pp.
ISBN 1588266699
Price $22.00

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Author Christopher A. Preble
Publisher Cornell University Press
Year 2009
Pages 232 pp.
ISBN 0801447658
Price $25.00

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"Money can't buy happiness," the old saying goes, and anyone who doubts that this is sometimes true should conduct a Google search for "lottery winners horror stories." He or she will find accounts of people for whom a great financial windfall led to misery, bankruptcy, and even suicide. In international relations, power is the equivalent of money -- highly desired, actively sought, and eagerly used. The theme of three new books about power and U.S. foreign policy is that as with money, so with power: a great deal of it does not necessarily bring success.

It can even have the opposite effect. Powerful countries can and do carry out foreign policies that fail, making them less prosperous, less respected, and, ultimately, less powerful. In each of the books, the prime example of the dangers of power, the equivalent of the lottery winners destroyed by riches, is the United States during the George W. Bush administration. For all three authors, the essence of what Christopher Preble calls "the power problem" is that the United States has too much of it.

Each author advocates a foreign policy different from the one Bush conducted. Each calls for more modest aims and wider international cooperation. And although each severely criticizes the Bush administration, all find evidence of the drawbacks of power in the policies of other administrations and in the histories of other countries as well. The three books have another important feature in common: each is backward-looking. Although they do not seem to recognize it, the era in which U.S. foreign policy could be driven in counterproductive directions by an excess of power is in the process of ending.

DEBATING DOMINANCE

Jack Matlock is one of the most accomplished U.S. diplomats of the last half century. His specialty in the Foreign Service was the Soviet Union, where he served four tours of duty -- the last of them, from 1987 to 1991, as U.S. ambassador. Prior to his final posting in Moscow, he advised President Ronald Reagan on Soviet affairs.

Matlock's assessment of the Bush administration is harshly negative. He says, for example, that the 9/11 attacks "could have been prevented if the Bush administration had shown minimal competence in using the information the CIA had provided." Matlock, a trusted aide to Reagan, contends that in temperament and outlook, if not always in policy preferences, Barack Obama more closely resembles the president with whom he worked than did President George W. Bush -- a judgment likely to occasion both surprise and dismay among the partisans of all three chief executives.

The most important feature of Superpower Illusions is Matlock's explanation of the wayward course of U.S. foreign policy after the Cold War. It has stemmed, he believes, from a mistaken understanding of how and why the great conflict with the Soviet Union ended. Americans have wrongly seen this end as a kind of military victory. In fact, it was "a negotiated outcome that benefitted both sides." The four-decade-long policy of containment certainly helped create the conditions in which the conflict could end as it did, but military power alone could never have produced that ending. Matlock denounces "the idea . . . that it was U.S. force and threats, rather than negotiation, that ended the Cold War, and also that Reagan's rhetoric 'conquered' communism, and that the collapse of the Soviet Union was the equivalent of a military victory." Such claims, he goes on, "are all distortions, all incorrect, all misleading, and all dangerous to the safety and future prosperity of the American people."

The triumphalist interpretation has had pernicious consequences. It has reinforced Russian leader Vladimir Putin's narrative of his country's recent history, which asserts that the end of the Soviet Union was an unmitigated disaster, foisted on the Russians by the West in order to weaken the Russian nation. That narrative supports Putin's autocratic domestic policies and Russia's reflexive hostility to the United States.

The incorrect reading of the Cold War's end has also contributed, by fostering an exaggerated sense of American power, to harmful foreign policies on the part of the United States. Matlock is particularly eloquent and convincing on one of them: the decision to expand NATO to former communist countries and former republics of the Soviet Union while excluding Russia. NATO expansion was not necessary to assure the security of the newly independent countries of eastern Europe, he says, and it has had devastating consequences for U.S. interests. In his view, it "increased America's exposure to risk by adding countries to its security guarantee, . . . weakened NATO (because the more members it had the more its unity was challenged by competing national interests), and . . . alarmed Russia and made it less willing to cooperate fully with the United States."

NATO expansion proved all the more offensive to Russia because Western leaders had given assurances to their Soviet counterparts that the alliance would not move eastward. Matlock was present when U.S. Secretary of State James Baker conveyed such an assurance to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in February 1990. In light of his account, the argument made by the apologists for NATO expansion -- that the United States was entitled to carry it out because Soviet leaders never received a written promise that it would not take place -- can be seen as the travesty of basic American principles that it is. Neither the founders of the United States nor those who led it through the trials of the next two centuries ever intended their country to behave like a dishonest businessman whose word cannot be trusted unless it is formally embedded in an ironclad legal contract.

(Source: the Council on Foreign Relations, Inc.)