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OPINION | Zhu Xinxian: American Global Leadership in Question


03 May 2016 | By Zhu Xinxian | SISU

  • The World America Made

    “Many millions around the world have benefited from an international order that has raised standards of living, opened political systems and preserved the general peace.”

  • American Global Leadership

    “But no nation and no people have benefited more than Americans. And no nation has a greater role to play in preserving this system for future generations.”

E

arly last week, the article “The U.S. Cannot Afford to End Its Global Leadership Role”, was published in The Washington Post. Ivo Daalder, the former U.S. ambassador to NATO, and Robert Kagan, the author of The New York Times bestseller The World America Made, have declaredly argued that “Many millions around the world have benefited from an international order that has raised standards of living, opened political systems and preserved the general peace. But no nation and no people have benefited more than Americans. And no nation has a greater role to play in preserving this system for future generations”.  The problem is what the so-called “American leadership” means to the world.

America obviously assumes the world leadership ever since the Second World War. If the world order which was created and has been sustained by the U.S. after World War II collapses, the U.S. will definitely suffer a huge loss. Historically, the foreign policy of the U.S. has always centered on American interests, and that’s why the guiding principle of American foreign policy was transformed from independence to leadership in 1950. Since then, global leadership has implied American interests.

American leadership is virtually not that costly. The fact is that leadership has enabled Washington to require its allies to share the burden. Most of American allies do believe that without American leadership the world will fall into global chaos in which they will suffer more. Actually, all the countries which have been involved in the global capital market and international affairs have been sharing the costs of American leadership. No matter how benign the notion of ‘leadership’ has been interpreted by America, its proponents have unveiled its essence: a global hegemony rather than a leader. The leadership of America, by nature, is coercive, relying on the military power and more importantly the U.S. dollar hegemony.

Since the Clinton administration, the U.S. has openly introduced more than 30 times of military interventions, concerning many countries and regions, including Iraq, Somalia, Yugoslavia, Bosnia, Haiti, Congo, Liberia, Albania, Sudan, Afghanistan, Yemen, Macedonia, Philippines, Colombia, Pakistan, Syria, and Libya etc. If we have a look at the world map, it might be safe to conclude that almost all the countries mentioned above have occupied the strategically significant areas, from the Gulf to Balkan peninsula, from North Africa to the crucial points in oceans. These areas have covered the thoroughfares between 6 continents. From this huge network, the U.S. has gained a considerable number of natural resources, the access to expansive markets, and the power of discourse to spread its American values.

American leadership, to a large extent, sits on the privilege of American currency. In 1971, President Nixon took the U.S. dollar off the gold standard that was born at the Breton Woods Conference at the end of World War II. Since then, the U.S. dollar has been the hegemonic currency. The deep-going pace of globalization has made world’s economies increasingly interlinked, but the world trade has, to some extents, become an unfair game in which the U.S. prints its greenbacks and the rest of the world produces critical commodities that only the greenbacks can buy. Since foreign debts are dominated by the U.S. dollar, world’s other economies have to try their utmost to attract dollars to its own economy. They have to depend on the accumulation of dollar reserves to sustain the exchange value of their own domestic currencies and to prevent possible attacks on their currencies. As a result, the higher the pressure to devalue a particular currency is, the more dollar reserves of the particular economy are needed. In another word, the danger of being attacked by a strong currency, for instance, the U.S. dollar, has forced world’s other economies to hold more dollar reserves. In turn, it makes the U.S. dollar stronger.

 That’s why the U.S. has always preferred to make world’s other economies feel that their domestic currencies are threatened. To make sure that the sword of Damocles is always hanging above them, the global leader has been inclined to make troubles in the strategically essential areas or signal the possibility of adjusting its own interest rates to cause panics. While the U.S. has made huge profits from the dollar hegemony, the rest of the world has suffered heavy burdens as victims of the unfair rule. Brazil, Argentina and Azerbaijan are the miserable examples.

The problem is whether American leadership will, as the article argues, unstoppably proceed?

To demonstrate their argument, the advocates of American leadership, including Daalder and Kagan, have repeatedly emphasized the ability of the U.S. to sustain its global leadership role. According to them, America still enjoys strategic advantages. At home, its economy is gradually recovering from the financial crisis while the emerging powers are running into troubles of their own. As for its global influence, U.S. dollar remains the world’s reserve currency, U.S. institutions of higher education remain the world’s best and attract students from all over the world, and Washington still preserves its ability to marshal multinational coalitions.

Indeed, America is still a super power, but the uni-polar world order has been confronted with unprecedented challenges. A multi-polar world is emerging and America is losing its global leadership. This trend cannot be reversed no matter how quick America’s economic recovery can be, how distinguished America’s education is, or how much impact America retains on global affairs. It is the collapse of American value that deprives America of its leadership. Standing in the ruins of Arab Spring, people have begun to doubt whether democracy is the best form of government. Walking in the sluggish shopping center of Athens, laissez-faire liberalism has been called into question. The refugee camps, scattered over the Europe, have directly challenged the content of freedom. Politically, materially and morally, America has lost its potent forces.

Time changes at its own will which is out of the will of anyone. The sustainability of American leadership has been questioned and maybe only time can give us the answer.

The author is an Assistant Professor of the Center for British Studies, Shanghai International Studies University (SISU). She is a Ph.D. candidate in Philosophy at Fudan University. 

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Tel : +86 (21) 3537 2378

Email : news@shisu.edu.cn

Address :550 Dalian Road (W), Shanghai 200083, China

Further Reading