America Abroad: The United States’ Global Role in the 21st Century

289 Pages·2016·2.38 MB·English

by  Stephen Brooks

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America Abroad
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America Abroad
The United States’ Global Role
in the 21st Century
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STEPHEN G. BROOKS
WILLIAM C. WOHLFORTH
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© Oxford University Press 2016
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ISBN 978– 0– 19– 046425– 7
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Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America
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To Avery Brooks, Charlie Wohlforth, and Owen Wohlforth.
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Contents
Preface  ix
Acknowledgments  xi
1. Introduction  1
2. Assessing America’s Global Position  14
3. Assessing Change in a One- Superpower World  48
4. America’s Grand Strategic Choice  73
5. The Security Logic of Deep Engagement  88
6. Assessing the Security Benefits of Deep Engagement  103
7. Assessing the Economic Cost of Deep Engagement  122
8. Assessing the Security Costs of Deep Engagement  134
9. The Economic and Institutional Logic of Deep Engagement  155
10. Assessing the Economic Benefits of Deep Engagement  171
11. Conclusion  190
Notes  201
Index  259
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Preface
When we finished our last book on America’s role in the world in 2007,
we hardly thought we would write another on the same general subject. In
World Out of Balance we probed the main scholarly traditions in interna-
tional relations for insights about how the world works when one state dra-
matically outweighs all others on the scales of power. But almost as soon as
it hit the shelves, its underlying premise, that the United States would long
occupy a singular position at the top of the international system— until then
almost universally taken for granted— came under strong challenge. In his
2002 Financial Times article, historian Paul Kennedy— by far the world’s
most widely read expert on the rise and fall of great powers— stated flatly,
“Nothing has ever existed like this disparity of power; nothing.” By 2010 he
was reasserting for readers of the New Republic his more familiar theme, that
the United States, overburdened and confronting fast rising rivals, was “nat-
urally losing its abnormal status in the international system and returning to
being one of the most prominent players in the small club of great powers.”
Had the world really shifted so fast as to warrant this new focus on a
coming “post- American” world? To answer that question, we would need to
do something we had not done in our previous book: carefully measure how
the distribution of power was changing and do so in a way that was sensitive
to the changing nature of power in the 21st century. The distribution of ca-
pabilities among states is a moving target— it never stands still— and the first
part of this book represents a years- long effort on our part to comprehend the
changes afoot and project their likely trajectory. Our answer is revealed in
chapters 2 and 3, which show that, although the world is changing, America’s
role within it is not shifting nearly as much or as quickly as is commonly
believed.
It was not just perceptions of power that shifted quickly. The scholarly
conventional wisdom about what the United States should do with its power
also underwent a sea change. What had been a handful of scholars calling