Combat had been a horrific experience, leaving many casualties with major physical or emotional wounds that took years to heal.
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Like all major global events, World War II was complex and nuanced, and it requires careful interpretation. Access to the complete content on Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History requires a subscription or purchase. Public users are able to search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter without a subscription. If you are a student or academic complete our librarian recommendation form to recommend the Oxford Research Encyclopedias to your librarians for an institutional free trial. Please subscribe or login to access full text content. If you have purchased a print title that contains an access token, please see the token for information about how to register your code.
For questions on access or troubleshooting, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History. Publications Pages Publications Pages. Others see an American empire that is coercive, exploitative, and destructive. Chalmers Johnson argues that America's far-flung Cold War military alliance system has been consolidated over the last decade into a new form of global imperial rule.
Others see American empire as a impulse rooted in a US unipolar power and military dominance that is ultimately incoherent and doomed to failure. America's imperial reach will exceed its grasp and destabilize the global system Barber, ; Mann, Thus we must ask several basic questions about American unipolarity. What is the character of the American unipolar order as a political formation? How does the rise of unipolarity alter America's grand strategic behaviors? What are the costs, incentives, and impulses for pursuing liberal and imperial strategies of governance? In the long run what will be the dominant tendencies of the leading state within a unipolar system?
Will it construct — or reconstruct — multilateral rule-based order or pursue a bilateral, divide-and-rule imperial strategy? In this essay, I make four arguments. First, the American postwar order — which has occupied the center of world politics for half a century — is a historically novel political formation. This is not empire; it is an American-led open-democratic political order. Second, transformations in the global system are making it more difficult to maintain some of the liberal features of this order — and so the stability and integrity of this old American order are increasingly at risk.
The two most important sources of breakdown are the rise of American unipolarity and the transformation of global security threats. America's power has been on the rise since the end of the Cold War, while state norms of sovereignty have eroded. This makes US power worrisome to the rest of the world, and it erodes the balance of power logic of the previous geopolitical eras.
Likewise, new security threats — not uniformly shared by old alliance partners — erode the indivisibility of security that underlay the American system.
America in Transition | Allied Media Projects
Strategic cooperation between old partners is harder, and it is easier for the United States to go its own way and for European and East Asian countries to depend less on the United States or simply to free-ride on American security provision. As a result the postwar alliance system — so crucial to the stability of American political and economic relations with Europe and East Asia — has been rendered more fragile and tenuous. Third, these shifting global circumstances mean that both liberal and neo-imperial logics of order are put in play.
Both logics are deeply rooted in American political culture and both have been manifest in American diplomacy over the last century. The liberal logic has been manifest most fully in the Atlantic community, and its institutional expressions include NATO and multilateral economic regimes. As we shall see, both liberal and neo-imperial logics continue to offer a mixture of benefits and costs for the American governance of unipolarity.
Finally, despite Washington's imperial temptation, the United States is not doomed to abandon rule-based order. This is true if only because the alternatives are ultimately unsustainable. Likewise, there are an array of incentives and impulses that will persuade the United States to try to organize unipolarity around multilateral rules and institutions. The United States may want to renegotiate rules and institutions in some global areas, but it ultimately will want to wield its power legitimately in a world of rules and institutions.
The rising power of China, India, and other non-Western states presents a challenge to the old American-led order that will require new, expanded, and shared international governance arrangements. In this essay, I look first at the features of the American postwar order. After this, I discuss the rise of unipolarity and other shifts in the global system that are altering the foundations of support for this liberal hegemonic system.
Finally, I look at the forces that continue to give the United States reasons to support and operate within a rule-based international system. In contrast with imperial political formations, the American system took shape in the decades after World War II as an open, negotiated, and institutionalized order among the major democracies. The United States is situated at the center of this complex liberal order — but it is an order built around the American provision of security and economic public goods, mutually agreeable rules and institutions, and interactive political processes that give states a voice in the running of the system.
Strategic bargains, binding security ties, open markets, and diffuse reciprocity also infuse the order and give it liberal characteristics. This distinctive liberal political architecture is built on top of a Western security community that removes war and threats of force from American relations with the other democracies. For a discussion of the Cold War origins of the American system, see Gilpin Capturing this unusually liberal and enlightened American postwar ordering logic, the Singaporean scholar—diplomat Kishore Mahbubani notes: No other great power has tried to create a level playing field to enable other countries to succeed.
This order was built in the decades after World War II through the pursuit of two grand strategies. One grand strategy is realist in orientation. Forged during the Cold War, it is organized around containment, deterrence, and the maintenance of the global balance of power.
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This strategy has been celebrated in America's history of the last half-century. Facing a threatening and expansive Soviet Union after , the United States stepped forward to fill the vacuum left by a waning British empire and a collapsing European order to provide a counterweight to Soviet power. The touchstone of this strategy was containment, which sought to deny the Soviet Union the ability to expand its sphere of influence outside its region.
Order was maintained during these decades by the management of the bipolar balance between the American and Soviet camps. Stability was achieved through nuclear deterrence Gaddis, ; Leffler, For the first time in the modern era, nuclear weapons and the doctrine of mutual assured destruction made war between the great powers utterly irrational.
Containment and global power balancing ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union in Nuclear deterrence is no longer the defining logic of the existing order, but it remains a recessed feature that continues to impart stability in relations among China, Russia, and the West.
America's balance of power grand strategy yielded a bounty of institutions and partnerships in the decades after This global system of American-led security partnerships has survived the end of the Cold War, providing a bulwark for stability through the commitments and reassurances they manifest. The United States maintains a forward presence in Europe and East Asia, and its alliance partners gain security protection as well as a measure of regularity in their relationship with the world's leading military power.
But Cold War balancing has yielded more than a utilitarian alliance structure. The American-led alliance system has inspired a wider array of economic and political agreements that have helped generate unprecedented levels of integration and cooperation among the countries of Western Europe, North America, and Northeast Asia.
The other grand strategy, forged during World War II as the United States planned the reconstruction of the world economy, is liberal in orientation. America's agenda for reopening the world economy and integrating the major regions of the world was not simply an inspiration of businessmen and economists. There have always been geopolitical goals as well.
Whereas America's realist grand strategy was aimed at countering Soviet power, its liberal grand strategy was aimed at avoiding a return to the s: Open trade, democracy, and multilateral institutional relations went together. Undergirding this strategy is the view that a rule-based international order — especially one where the United States uses its political weight to derive congenial rules — is an order that most fully protects American interests, conserves its power, and extends its influence into the future.
During the s, the United States continued to pursue this liberal grand strategy.
America in Transition
Both the first Bush and Clinton administrations attempted to articulate a vision of world order that was not dependent on an external threat or an explicit policy of balance of power. Bush the elder talked about the importance of the Euro-Atlantic community and articulated ideas about a more fully integrated Asia Pacific region.
In both the Atlantic and Pacific regions the Bush strategy was to offer a positive vision of alliance and partnership that was built around common values, tradition, mutual self-interest, and the preservation of stability. The Clinton administration attempted to describe the post-Cold War order in terms of the expansion of democracy and open markets. What emerged was a liberal vision of order. Democracy provided the foundation for global and regional community. Trade and capital flows were seen as forces for political reform and integration. These two grand strategies are rooted in divergent, and in some ways antagonistic, intellectual traditions, but over the last fifty years they have worked remarkably well together.
The realist grand strategy created a political rationale for establishing major security commitments around the world. The liberal strategy created a positive agenda for American leadership. The United States could exercise its power and achieve its national interests but do so in a way that helped deepen the fabric of international community.
American power did not destabilize world order; it helped create it. The creation of rule-based agreements and political-security partnerships were both good for the United States and for a huge part of the rest of the world. The result by the end of the s was a global political formation of unprecedented size and success — a transoceanic coalition of democratic states tied together through markets, institutions, and security partnerships. Importantly, this American system is tied together in a cooperative security order.
This was a very important departure from past security arrangements within the Atlantic area. The idea was that Europe and the United States would be part of a single security system. Such a system would ensure that the democratic great powers would not go back to the dangerous game of strategic rivalry and balance of power politics.
In helped, of course, to have an emerging Cold War with the Soviet Union to generate this cooperative security arrangement. But the goal of cooperative security was implicit in the other elements of Western order. Without the Cold War, it is not clear that a formal alliance would have emerged as it did. Probably it would not have taken on such an intense and formal character. But a security relationship between Europe and the United States that lessened the incentives for these states to engage in balance of power politics was needed and probably would have been engineered.
A cooperative security order, embodied in a formal alliance institution, ensured that the power of the United States would be rendered more predictable Risse-Kappen, Power would be caged in institutions, thereby making American power more reliable and connected to Europe and to East Asia. This American system is built on two historic bargains that the United States has made with the rest of the world. One is the realist bargain and grows out of its Cold War grand strategy. The United States provides its European and Asian partners with security protection and access to American markets, technology, and supplies within an open world economy.
In return, these countries agree to be reliable partners who provide diplomatic, economic, and logistical support for the United States as its leads the wider Western postwar order. The other is a liberal bargain that addresses the uncertainties of American power.
East Asian and European states agree to accept American leadership and operate within an agreed-upon political-economic system. In return, the United States opens itself up and binds itself to its partners. The United States makes its power safe for the world and in return the world agrees to live within the American system.
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These bargains date from the s but continue to undergird the post-Cold War order. The result has been the most stable and prosperous international order in world history. Three features of this order make American power more stable, engaged, and restrained. First, America's political institutions — open, transparent, and organized around the rule of law — have made it a relatively predictable and cooperative hegemon.
The pluralistic and regularized way in which American foreign and security policy is made reduces surprises and allows other states to build long-term, mutually beneficial relations. The United States was deeply ambivalent about making permanent security commitments to other countries or allowing its political and economic policies to be dictated by intergovernmental bodies.
Networks and political relationships were built that — paradoxically — made American power more far-reaching and durable but also more predictable and malleable. The classic formulation of this logic is Hirschman On the logic of security binding, see Schroeder For more recent formulations, see Deudney and Ikenberry Despite the postwar legacy of liberal hegemony and Western security community, unpolarity — particularly when combined with the new strategic thinking triggered by September 11 — does make more plausible the logic of American empire. In shaping world order, power and liberalism are a much more potent mixture than simply the exercise of crude material power alone.
But the question remains whether the resulting American-led order is an empire. Realist scholars depict international relations as the interaction of sovereign states who maneuver in a world of anarchy. In the classic Westphalian image, states maintain a monopoly on the use of force domestically, while order at the international level is maintained through a diffusion and equilibrium of power among states.
For an important reinterpretation of the Westphalian settlement, see Krasner Krasner argues that the norms of Westphalian sovereignty actually emerged long after and departures from it lace the entire history of the state system. Today, however, there is a partial inversion of this Westphalian logic.
Now the United States has a quasi-monopoly on the use of force at the international level and states are increasingly less sovereign. The domestic institutions and behaviors of states are increasingly open to global — that is, American — scrutiny. The rise of American unipolar predominance and the simultaneous unbundling of state sovereignty are a new world historical development.
In historical terms, this is a radically new distribution and manifestation of state power, and so it is not surprising that the world is rethinking and worrying about the new rules and institutions of global order. Echoing this view, the Italian scholar Vittorio Emanuele Parsi argues that the international system has undergone a transformation in the last decade — only to be intensified since September 11 — as profound as any since the Peace of Westphalia.
Parsi identifies two epochal shifts. For five hundred years, the security of states was maintained by ensuring the absence of an overarching power in the international system. With the rise American unipolarity, stability and peace are guaranteed by the wielding of power by a single superstate. The disparities of power are so great that counterbalancing by the other great powers is impossible. The other grand transformation is the shift in security threats, which makes the Westphalian flip even more provocative and potentially destabilizing. This is the rise of non-state terrorism.
Private transnational groups and religious fanatics can now, or will soon be able to, gain access to violence capability that previously only some powerful states could possess. As many analysts have observed, this alters how the United States and other major states think about their security. The most profound implication is that it makes security among countries within the American system more divisible.
That is, whereas during the Cold War all the states in the system experienced a more or less common threat — which reinforced security cooperation and made security indivisible — the new fragmentation and privatization of security threats means these countries experience threats in very different ways. Incentives for security cooperation are eroded. This transformation has the added effect of making American power and its use of force more controversial and contested. Together these two shifts give the United States the capacity and necessity — but only a few would say the authority — to police international order and unilaterally project force into the affairs of vulnerable yet threatening sovereign states.
These new twin logics, of course, were grandly embraced by the Bush administration in its National Security Strategy. In this vision, the United States will increasingly stand aloof from the rest of the world and use its unipolar power — most importantly, its military power — to arbitrate right and wrong and enforce the peace. In a Hobbesian world of anarchy, the United States must step forward as the order-creating Leviathan. The United States will refuse to play by the same rules as other states; this is the price that the world must pay for the unipolar provision of security.
The Bush administration also warns other great powers not to challenge America's military preeminence. Indeed, in the Bush view, no one should want to try: The rise of post-Cold War unipolarity does alter America's position with other states. Increased power advantages give the United States more freedom of action.
It is easier for Washington to say no to other countries or to go it alone. Growing power — military, economic, and technological — also gives the United States more opportunities to control outcomes around the world. But unipolarity also creates problems of governance. Without bipolar or multipolar competition, it is not clear what disciplines or renders predictable US power. Other countries worry more than in the past about domination, exploitation, and abandonment.
They may not be able to organize a counterbalancing alliance but they can resist and undermine US policies.
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Moreover, when countries confronting the United States are democracies, their leaders may have electoral incentives not to bend to American pressure. The first feature of the shift from bipolarity to unipolarity is that it entails greater power advantages for the lead state. The United States has new latitude for withholding cooperation. The cost of nonagreement is lower for the United States than for other states, so this confers bargaining advantages on the United States.
There are also new opportunities for other states to free-ride on the American provision of global public goods, particularly security protection and the underwriting of economic openness. Unipolarity, in this sense, is a welcome development for weaker states — to the extent that the United States provides those public goods. But it also opens up a new set of distributive conflicts between the United States and other states. It is here that temptations emerge for the leading state to move from multilateral agreements to specific bilateral deals that allow it to renegotiate the sharing of costs.
More generally, the growing disparities of power between the United States and other major states generate incentives for the unipolar state to renegotiate the old security and economic bargains. This, of course, is the dynamic that emerges after a hegemonic transition, when a new leading state emerges in the international system and wields its newly acquired power to reshape the rules and institutions of international order.
Finally, to the extent that the unipolar state anticipates that its power advantages will wane in the near future, it has incentives to embed in the international order rules and institutions that will lock in some of its advantages in the out-years when it is in a relatively weaker position. This is the dynamic I discuss in Ikenberry The other feature of unipolarity is the disappearance of a competitor pole. One immediate implication of this is that the absence of alternative options gives the unipolar state bargaining advantages.
If other states could threaten to form an alternative and opposing coalition, this would create incentives for the United States to compromise and accommodate its interests to those of weaker states. But another implication of the disappearance of a rival pole is that one benefit of aligning with the United States also disappears — or is radically reduced — namely, the benefit of security protection.
Other countries do not need the United States as much as they did.