[UPDATE] This essay is one of three on the recommended reading list of the "Grand Strategic Choices Working Group" of the Princeton Project on National Security (Woodrow Wilson School). The group is one of seven organized for the academic year 2004-05. John Ikenberry is co-chair of this working group along with Francis Fukuyama. The other two recommended essays are Fukuyama's article from the Summer 2004 issue of National Interest, "The Neoconservative Moment," (sub reqd) and "Democratic Realism: An American Foreign Policy for a Unipolar World" by Charles Krauthammer (Speech to American Enterprise Institute, February 12, 2004) .

John Ikenberry's piece from Britain's Prospect magazine, written prior to the election, sets out the case for liberal hegemony. It is a vision in sharp distinction to the conservative hegemony that the Bush Administration has been pursuing, especially since 9/11, and which Ikenberry explains will lead to tears. The shape of his overall argument, reflected in the excerpts selected below, is of more interest than his descriptions of the familiar set of actions and attitudes of the Bush Admin that he uses to illustrate and reinforce his analysis.

Let's start with his conclusion, also the title of the piece. The Leviathan is needed to save us from the threat of Hobbesian anarchy as the key structures of the international system have been dismantled.

A traditional realist strategy of reconstructing a Westphalian balance of power order that reaffirms state sovereignty is quite unrealistic, particularly given unipolarity and the character of the new security threats. There is no going back.

What the world needs is an order where the US continues to underwrite global security but does so within a framework of rules and bargains that render the resulting system legitimate and sustainable. We need to move beyond balance of power and empire towards an international order that combines American unipolar power with widely agreed upon rules and institutions. The world needs a liberal leviathan.

His conclusion is not surprising -- it reflects the basic premises of those who set the grand strategy for the US, and therefore defined the key structures of the liberal international system in the West, during and after WWII. With the interim Cold War brought to an end, there is a return to the logic of the system that was installed by the Western allies and elaborated through building regional and international institutions and arrangements.

As such, his analysis is part of the overall "empire" debates that have sprung up, especially post 9-11. Falling in the camp of "in a unipolar system the world needs a hegemon" he takes the argument further beyond debates that view the world through the US perspective -- type of empire, whether empire is the right term, whether managing an empire is consistent with other key features of the American character or system -- and instead discusses the US role within the context of a new and challenging international system.

Though Ikenberry emphasizes the key changes , especially post 9-11, to the assumptions of the post-WWII system -- most notably the "unipolar" or hegemonic position of the US and the challenge to basic principles of national sovereignty on which the state-centric systems are based -- his is still in the last analysis a view of the international system through the prism of state-to-state diplomacy. That is certainly a key part of reassembling a workable international regime. But somehow it must take into account more explicitly the place, for good and ill, of a host of non-state actions, whether local, national or cross-national.

Despite the incompleteness of his analysis, it takes us a long way toward understanding both the radical nature of the Bush Admin's state-to-state policies and the unsustainability of those policies, both domestically and internationally.

The collapse of the Westphalian system has been swift but not a result of a shock. "[The US ]simply grew more powerful while other states sputtered or failed." He continues:

For 500 years, international order has been based on two elements which together make up the Westphalian system. At the international level, order has been maintained by the diffusion and equilibrium of power. States with roughly equal capabilities - the so-called great powers - balanced each other, alone or in concert. Domestically, countries have been sovereign, deploying what Max Weber called a "monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory." But in a dual transformation, the Westphalian order has been flipped on its head. We now have one country - the US - with a quasi-monopoly on the use of force internationally. We also have growing legitimate international authority over what goes on within countries. Westphalian sovereignty is increasingly contingent. After the second world war, it was the universal declaration of human rights that set forth international standards for the treatment of individuals secured not just by their own government but also by the international community. Decades of human rights treaties and conventions followed. And now the rise of terrorism and the spread of weapons of mass destruction have created new reasons for the international community to intervene inside states. Post-9/11 thinking within the Bush administration about "contingent sovereignty" and pre-emption has provided rationales for further intrusions.

The Bush administration's response has been true to key features of traditional conservative approaches to American foreign policy -- emphasizing the means and purposes of US engagement to, first and foremost, protect fairly narrowly defined "national interest" and offering as to justification or legitimation of US choices, as distinct from the self-serving choices of other nations, the exceptional nature of America itself.

The Bush administration has eagerly embraced this new unipolar logic. In its vision, outlined in the September 2002 national security strategy report, the US will increasingly stand aloof from the rest of the world and use its unipolar power to arbitrate right and wrong and enforce the peace. In a Hobbesian world of anarchy, the US will act as an order-creating leviathan. Where in previous eras the problem of order could only be solved by the balancing of power, it will now be solved by US dominance.
[...]
For many Americans, there is an additional attraction of this unipolar grand strategy - it gives full sway to American exceptionalism. This self-perception, as old as the nation's founding, sees America as a unique experiment; a polity more noble and enlightened than any other on earth. If in the past American exceptionalism was possible only through isolation or withdrawal from the outside world, now exceptionalism is made possible by global dominance.

Ikenberry offers a fantastical analogy that aptly captures the absurdity of expecting that such an arrangement is likely to be sustainable.

The flipping of the logic of the Westphalian state system together with the imperial hegemonic vision of the Bush administration constitute a revolution in world politics. Think of the international system as a town. For most of its history, the town had multiple police authorities and districts scattered across its neighbourhoods. But suddenly all this changes and the town now has only one policeman - and all the locks are off the doors. Moreover, the policeman indicates that he will be most concerned to protect his own house but he also announces the right to use police power when, how and where he wants in order to go after threats to the peace that lurk elsewhere - threats that may not be manifest yet and which only he will decide whether they are worthy of action. There are no elections, review boards or other mechanisms of accountability. So the question confronting the townspeople is: will the policeman be a responsible servant of the public interest, or will he abuse his power, intimidate townspeople, and trespass at will? Will this be Dixon of Dock Green or the LAPD? The policeman may be honest and upstanding, but then again he might be capricious and abusive. It is perfectly reasonable for the townspeople to be worried, and to be watching every little move the policeman makes.

As Ikenberry points out, the townspeople are going to be concerned even with the most accommodating and enlightened of fellows in the job. So the US will face a major challenge, regardless of the specific policies of the administration in office. But that's certainly not to say that those policies don't matter.

Ikenberry provides just about the finest explanation I've found of the logic of the US conservative tradition in US foreign relations, why it presented less of a danger to the US and the world in other periods, and the consequences of this tradition being the dominant tendency at this moment in the history of the international system.

Finally, conservative discourse suggests that the source of legitimacy in US foreign policy is domestic, rooted in popular sovereignty and the constitution. The rectitude of US action is ensured by the legitimacy of the nation's democratic process and not by the opinions of other governments. States around the world may approve or disapprove of what the US does, but they do not speak for some vague international standard of legitimacy; on the contrary, their views reflect their own national interests and (unlike the exceptional US) nothing more lofty or virtuous. A concern for the "decent opinion of mankind" is dismissed as naive, even anti-patriotic. These conservative themes all lead in the same direction - towards a traditional realpolitik foreign policy. The US does not have any special obligation to uphold the international order, provide public goods or abide by global norms. It is out for itself like all other states. The US is a great power in a world of competing great powers. Power rules.  [ed note: Anatol Lieven in his new analysis of American nationalism characterizes this attitudes as not " my country right or wrong," but "my country right," full stop. Any discussion of the possibility that US policy might be flawed is therefore taken as an attack on its legitimacy and seen as out-and-out unpatriotic or an attack on the US itself.]

Conservative ideas about international order have always coexisted with liberal ones in the American experience, but they have not guided Washington policy at the most critical order-building junctions of the last century. But today they do - and this is a problem. In a well established bipolar international order, like the one that shaped the world during the cold war era, conservative foreign policy impulses were less threatening to allies. Power constraints put a check on such ideas. But today - with the collapse of cold war bipolarity, the rise of US predominance, the strange election of George W Bush, and the dramatic shift in security threats - these conservative ideas are both more firmly at the centre of US foreign policy and more consequential in shaping the new international order. And so the world has reacted.

Ikenberry has the following warnings for the "liberal hawks" as well as the neoconservative impulses:

But the longer-term problem with the dominance of conservative discourse is that it contradicts the Bush administration's vision of the US as the new global leviathan. In the unipolar vision, an American leviathan provides security to the world. In return, the rest of the world accepts US dominance. Liberals who never liked the balance of power system understand the attraction of this vision, particularly when coupled with a commitment to promoting democracy and human rights. This is a vision that is not that far away from Wilsonian liberalism. But when coupled with conservative ideas about the use of US power it becomes unipolarity with no strings attached. It is a unipolar bargain in which there is no bargaining.

A unipolar order without a set of rules and bargains with other countries leads to a system of coercive unipolar American empire - and as such it is unsustainable at home and unacceptable abroad.  As the Iraq episode shows, under these circumstances other countries will tend to "undersupply" co-operation. They will do so either because they decide to free-ride on the American provision of security, or because they reject the US use of force that is untied to mutually agreed-upon rules and institutions - or both. So the US will find itself - as it does now - acting more or less alone and incurring the opposition and resistance of other states. This is the point when the conservative unipolar vision becomes unsustainable inside the US. Americans will not want to pay the price for protecting the world while other countries free-ride and resist. This appears to be true in the case of Iraq: a majority of Americans now believe that the Iraq war was not worth it, after sustaining barely more than 1,000 military deaths. The US is 5 per cent of the world's population but generates nearly 50 per cent of total world military spending. Is this sustainable in a world where other countries are in open revolt against an American imperium?

Ikenberry rightly emphasizes the huge cost to the US in the self-inflicted catestrophic decline in the value of American soft assets, principally those relating to the ability of others to trust or have confidence in American policies or leaderhship. As the Westphalian system vanished, the question of trust was going to be a major issue in redefining the "new world order" in any event. But the behavior of the Bush Admin has brought those questions issues front and center for the rest of the world, and unfortunately both the America and the world, the preliminary answers are quite unfavorable for a future order. Yet Ikenberry remains optimistic, in part because of the American foreign policy tradition of liberal internationalism, which has come to the fore and dominated the conservative approach at other critical times in the past century.

The other consideration is whether the US can credibly commit itself to these binding institutional bargains. After all, the Bush administration was able to make quick and unexpected shifts in basic US policy after 11th September. So the worry is - to go back to the example of the self-appointed sheriff -how can the townspeople be certain that the sheriff's promise to operate within the law will be honoured? In a world of anarchy, there is no guarantee that commitments will not be broken. But an America that "breaks out" of its commitments is still not going to use force to punish or conquer other democracies. Nuclear weapons also all but eliminate the likelihood of conquest among the great powers. The construction of a liberal unipolar order - a liberal leviathan - may require a leap of imagination and leadership, but it does not require defying history or theory.