Walter Russell Mead: The End of Trilateralism
[Walter Russell Mead is Henry A. Kissinger senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World. He blogs at The-American-Interest.com.]
Geopoliticians like GUTs–Grand Unified Theories–that reduce the complexity of world events to a simple underlying concept. For the last ten years the world’s favorite GUT has been “the decline of America.” For the ten years before that it was “America’s unilateral moment.”
GUTs are always oversimplified; sometimes they are useful. Right now, the reigning GUT is unusually off target. The turbulence in world politics and world markets is real and it definitely heralds the start of a new stage in world history, but to call this the decline of the United States is to miss the real drama of our times.
What we are seeing today isn’t the collapse of American power; it is something subtly but vitally different. In the 1970s, at a time when the collapse of the Bretton Woods economic system and America’s humiliating withdrawal from Vietnam made the thesis of American decline even more convincing than it is today, the United States developed a new strategy for coping with the changes afoot. That strategy was ‘trilateralism’. The world, people reasoned, was no longer unipolar. America’s era of supremacy had passed. What was needed now was a new kind of coalition: the United States would develop closer ties with the two other main pillars of the world’s economic and political orders: western Europe and Japan. By coordinating policies a bit better, and by treating its most important Cold War allies a bit more equally, the United States could continue to lead the international system even as it adjusted to the post-Bretton Woods, post-Vietnam world.
Trilateral Dynamics
This worked pretty well, and the world embarked on the Trilateral Era. Between them, the EU, the United States and Japan accounted for about 80 percent of the world economy in 1980. Bound together already by the Cold War alliance system, these countries were home to the world’s most dynamic manufacturers, the world’s largest consumer markets, and the world’s most powerful financial institutions. If the trilateral powers agreed on something, they could generally make it stick.
For the United States, the results were better still. The trilateral powers had interests that were broadly aligned with ours; it was not difficult to work out common approaches to many of the economic issues of the day. And while many observers thought that the United States would have to yield more and more power to its trilateral partners as the US continued to decline relative to the others, things didn’t work out that way. Trilateralism didn’t lead to further US decline; it halted and even reversed the process. As the leader of a resurgent Cold War alliance, the United States saw the Soviet Union and its empire fall apart during the Reagan administration. Meanwhile, the United States proved better able to handle the post-Bretton Woods economic environment — more turbulence, more innovation — and watched Japan’s once-surging economy fall into a generation long period of stagnation. Trilateralism turned out to be a transitional stage between two eras of American supremacy, rather than the beginning of American decline.
The ‘unipolar’ moment of the 1990s was produced by three distinct conditions. First, the collapse of the Soviet Union removed America’s only true great power rival from the scene. Second, the emerging powers (China, India, Brazil, Turkey) were not yet strong enough to present a counterweight even potentially to the trilateral system. Third, US predominance within the trilateral coalition continued to grow as Europe was preoccupied by tasks of expansion and governance and Japan continued to stagnate. Indeed, the rise of China, gradually forcing Japan back into a closer dependence on the United States, actually reinforced the American predominance.
Whose Decline?
In the last decade, the phenomenon widely seen as America’s decline is better understood as a crisis of trilateralism. Despite the wars in the Middle East, the United States remained the world’s greatest military power and its economy continued to do better than the economies of its trilateral partners. Nevertheless, despite America’s continued power, the trilateral bloc as a group was in relative decline. Europe continued struggling with, and failing to solve, its internal problems of governance and cohesion. Japan remained gripped by stagnation and its political system was less and less able to cope with its internal, much less its external challenges. The decline of Europe and Japan meant that the trilateral strategy was slowly becoming unworkable. Meanwhile, the rise of China, India, Brazil and Turkey changed both the economic and political dynamics of the world. As the collapse of the Copenhagen climate talks graphically revealed, general agreement among the trilateral countries is no longer enough to set policy for the world...
Read entire article at American Interest (blog)
Geopoliticians like GUTs–Grand Unified Theories–that reduce the complexity of world events to a simple underlying concept. For the last ten years the world’s favorite GUT has been “the decline of America.” For the ten years before that it was “America’s unilateral moment.”
GUTs are always oversimplified; sometimes they are useful. Right now, the reigning GUT is unusually off target. The turbulence in world politics and world markets is real and it definitely heralds the start of a new stage in world history, but to call this the decline of the United States is to miss the real drama of our times.
What we are seeing today isn’t the collapse of American power; it is something subtly but vitally different. In the 1970s, at a time when the collapse of the Bretton Woods economic system and America’s humiliating withdrawal from Vietnam made the thesis of American decline even more convincing than it is today, the United States developed a new strategy for coping with the changes afoot. That strategy was ‘trilateralism’. The world, people reasoned, was no longer unipolar. America’s era of supremacy had passed. What was needed now was a new kind of coalition: the United States would develop closer ties with the two other main pillars of the world’s economic and political orders: western Europe and Japan. By coordinating policies a bit better, and by treating its most important Cold War allies a bit more equally, the United States could continue to lead the international system even as it adjusted to the post-Bretton Woods, post-Vietnam world.
Trilateral Dynamics
This worked pretty well, and the world embarked on the Trilateral Era. Between them, the EU, the United States and Japan accounted for about 80 percent of the world economy in 1980. Bound together already by the Cold War alliance system, these countries were home to the world’s most dynamic manufacturers, the world’s largest consumer markets, and the world’s most powerful financial institutions. If the trilateral powers agreed on something, they could generally make it stick.
For the United States, the results were better still. The trilateral powers had interests that were broadly aligned with ours; it was not difficult to work out common approaches to many of the economic issues of the day. And while many observers thought that the United States would have to yield more and more power to its trilateral partners as the US continued to decline relative to the others, things didn’t work out that way. Trilateralism didn’t lead to further US decline; it halted and even reversed the process. As the leader of a resurgent Cold War alliance, the United States saw the Soviet Union and its empire fall apart during the Reagan administration. Meanwhile, the United States proved better able to handle the post-Bretton Woods economic environment — more turbulence, more innovation — and watched Japan’s once-surging economy fall into a generation long period of stagnation. Trilateralism turned out to be a transitional stage between two eras of American supremacy, rather than the beginning of American decline.
The ‘unipolar’ moment of the 1990s was produced by three distinct conditions. First, the collapse of the Soviet Union removed America’s only true great power rival from the scene. Second, the emerging powers (China, India, Brazil, Turkey) were not yet strong enough to present a counterweight even potentially to the trilateral system. Third, US predominance within the trilateral coalition continued to grow as Europe was preoccupied by tasks of expansion and governance and Japan continued to stagnate. Indeed, the rise of China, gradually forcing Japan back into a closer dependence on the United States, actually reinforced the American predominance.
Whose Decline?
In the last decade, the phenomenon widely seen as America’s decline is better understood as a crisis of trilateralism. Despite the wars in the Middle East, the United States remained the world’s greatest military power and its economy continued to do better than the economies of its trilateral partners. Nevertheless, despite America’s continued power, the trilateral bloc as a group was in relative decline. Europe continued struggling with, and failing to solve, its internal problems of governance and cohesion. Japan remained gripped by stagnation and its political system was less and less able to cope with its internal, much less its external challenges. The decline of Europe and Japan meant that the trilateral strategy was slowly becoming unworkable. Meanwhile, the rise of China, India, Brazil and Turkey changed both the economic and political dynamics of the world. As the collapse of the Copenhagen climate talks graphically revealed, general agreement among the trilateral countries is no longer enough to set policy for the world...