It is tempting to hope that the Project for a New American Century currently enshrined as the policy of the United States may soon meet with a concerted effort by other significant elements of the international community to temper and restrain American initiatives. Traditionally, in the modern world-system forged by Western Europe between the 16^th and 20^th Centuries, such "elements" did come forward to prevent any one state from achieving preponderant power. But given the overwhelming military and economic might of the United States at the beginning of the 21^st Century, what chance is there of such an outcome?

In a provocative recent article in Prospect Magazine ("The American Contract," July 2003), Robert Skidelsky of Warwick University sees little chance of implementing the old "balance of power" strategy any time soon. The armed force and the political will are not available, not in Europe, not in all of Eurasia, not anywhere.

Nevertheless, there may be a third option, beyond acquiescing in American hegemony or mustering a formidable military alliance of anti-American nations, which Skidelsky labels "a new multilaterialism." What if, by utilizing all the diplomatic, political, economic, and moral resources at their disposal, the rest of the world’s "great powers" can work together to bring the United States back into the "international fold"? Can they collectively persuade the United States to let its sisters share fully in maintaining peace and promoting justice throughout the globe? Skidelsky does not believe that the bid of the United States to run the world as it pleases can ever be successful. But if America’s ambitions are not checked, they will lead to the destabilization of the world order and the eventual collapse of the American empire itself through a process of "overstretch."

So it becomes the historic task of the European Union, Russia, and China to assume leading roles in the oversight of weaker nations, the stemming of conflict, and the prevention of humanitarian disasters. Skidelsky speaks of "an agreed distribution of responsibilities," and furnishes a few examples of what might be done. Europe could join the U.S. "as an effective partner in the search for peace in the middle east." China could help the U.S. disarm North Korea. Pan-European forces could replace the U.S. on the European continent and also prevent "the slide of parts of Africa into barbarism."

Some15 years ago, in my book "A Short History of the Future," I imagined (but with abundant sarcasm) an almost identical future for the first 40-odd years of the 21^st Century. Subsequent editions, the latest published in 1999, have retained this vision. I called it "the partition of the world into zones of special influence." The great powers–the United States, the European Union, Russia, and an alliance of Japan and China–agreed at a conference in Vienna to carve up the planet. In my 1999 scenario, the United States received a more or less free hand in Latin America, the Pacific islands, and the western half of the Middle East. Japan and China took charge of South and Southeast Asia (I neglected to mention North Korea). Russia was entrusted with Central Asia, Iran, and Afghanistan. The European Union had the care of Africa.

In another context, I have referred to this scheme as "the condominium of the rich." The major capitalist powers manage the world. Attempts by breakaway states or movements to challenge the world-system are crushed. Stability returns, America settles for a partnership that helps to protect its economy, and the world is at "peace," a peace that in my fictional scenario lasted until 2044. For various reasons, which need not detain us here, the international system did collapse at that point, but until then it had performed quite well, from the perspective of those in charge.

Skidelsky, however, speaks not just of "maintaining peace" but also of "promoting justice." Can he be serious? In whose interest would this condominium of great powers manage their world? In the interest of imperilled weak peoples, the autonomy and welfare and dignity of weak peripheral peoples, or in the interest of megacorporate elites and other ruling circles in their own overdeveloped countries? Since when has it been the business of big business to promote worldwide justice? Did the United States invent the imperialism and capitalism peculiar to the modern world-system? Does it signify that more than half of the world’s top multinational corporations are headquartered and owned primarily by capitalists in countries other than the United States? The "mad professors" in Washington currently, and rightly, command our horrified gaze, but let us not forget the history of the last 500 years, or what, in the light of all such previous exploits, may yet lie ahead.

As Samir Amin has often reminded us, the conquest of Amerindia, Africa, and most of Asia from the 16^th Century onward was principally the work of the nations of Western Europe. What we like to call "globalization" is more accurately labeled "Europeanization" or, at most, "Westernization." Nor should we overlook the history of Russia, which built one of the largest empires ever known over the span of five centuries and lost most of it only a few years ago. Even China has a well-defined imperial tradition, dating back at least to the doubling of its territory under the aegis of the Ch’ing emperors in the 17^th and 18^th Centuries. Japan’s predatory exploits from 1894 to 1945 are still (or should be) fresh in memory. The reanimation of all or any of these imperial traditions under the right future circumstances is far from implausible.

Further. How representative of humankind are these great powers deemed worthy of sharing the world? Three of the four boast a Christian heritage, greatly attenuated by secularization, but still powerfully influenced by Rome and Byzantium, not to mention Wittenberg and Geneva. The vast majority of their people are racially Caucasian. The fourth great power has a Confucian and Mahayana Buddhist heritage, even more greatly attenuated by secularization, but unique to Northeast Asia. All four are hell-bent on "modernization," which means higher and higher tech, mass production, and finishing off the world’s fossil fuels, forests, and whales. Are these the powers, and the cultures, that know how to manage the worlds of Islam, Hinduism, Hinayana Buddhism, Latin and Caribbean America, and animism? Are these the appropriate role models for the weak and the impoverished? Very doubtful.

I conclude that although a new global order in which America’s sister great powers play a more forceful part might be more stable, from their point of view, than a world under ceaseless attack from American bombers, helicopters, and missiles, it would not be more just and might even, if it did its work well, diminish the quality of life for billions of the Earth’s people.

Despite what I have just written about the possible fateful reanimation of imperial traditions in Europe and elsewhere, another substantial issue remains. Is it realistic to expect that the sisters even can–in cold fact–rise up, take heart, pool their energies, and collaborate effectively in the task of curbing American power? Do they have the resources and the will to loop a leash around Washington’s neck?

Some observers find solace in a recent article written for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung by two of Europe’s leading philosophers, Jacques Derrida of France and Jürgen Habermas of Germany, in which they appeal for a unified European foreign policy designed to function as a counterweight to the imperial pretensions of the United States. That Derrida and Habermas do not occupy the same philosophical space is irrelevant. Somehow they managed to agree on this one point, and they opted to speak with a single voice.

The most effective response that I have seen to their initiative is an article in The Guardian (U.K.) by the Yale historian Paul Kennedy, published on June 24 of this year. But the comments he offers could have been made by almost anyone with an awareness of contemporary European politics and public sentiment. It turns out (but is this a surprise?) that Western Europeans are no less self-centered and self-engrossed than the people of Texas or New York. World peace and world justice do not occupy a high rung on the stepladder of their priorities.

Kennedy suggests six measures that the E.U. could take to gain respect as a global leader from its own people, from the United States, and from the whole international community. It would need to invest heavily in the development of professional (not conscript) armed forces well equipped with state-of-the-art hardware, press for reform of the United Nations by enlarging the non-European permanent membership of the Security Council, abandon its fierce protection of European agricultural goods in the interests of fair and free world trade, significantly enlarge its commitment to international development assistance, raise its economic growth rates, and actively promote an increase in the fertility of its younger generations.

All this might help, but will any of it really happen? Kennedy is dubious, and I am even more dubious. Europe is still not a nation, much less a state. The E.U. has grown steadily over the years, but despite its bureaucracy and economic institutions, and its parliament, it lacks a chief executive, a foreign policy, an army, or a common law. The real Europe is a Eurasian peninsula consisting of 42 sovereign nations. Its rate of population increase per year is minus one-tenth of one percent. Including all of eastern Europe and the European part of the former Soviet Union, its population of 728 million people will shrink to 651 million by 2050, at current expected rates of reproduction and immigration. The richest of its nations, the Federal Republic of Germany, has an annual product equal to one-fifth of the annual national product of the United States, whose own current population of 290 million is expected to grow to 415 million by 2050. And all of these 415 million people will acknowledge the supreme authority of a single president and live under a single flag. In 2050, by contrast, there will be only 65 million Britons, 68 million Germans, 65 million French.

As for state-of-the-art military hardware, the professional armed forces of the United States today enjoy what appears to be an insurmountable lead over those of Europe, even if European leaders should decide tomorrow to double or triple their defense budgets, which in any case they will not and cannot do. America’s nuclear arsenal, its armada of supercarrier battle groups and attack submarines, its immense air force and supporting aerial tanker fleet, its heavy armor dwarfing anything fielded by anyone, its smart munitions and stealth technologies, its array of reconnaissance satellites, and much more leave all the other nations of the world combined in its dust. Nor should it be overlooked that the United States has also made by far the world’s largest investment in higher education, with more students, more faculty, more research facilities, and more campuses than any other continent, and perhaps more (although meaningful comparative statistics for both quantity and quality are difficult to come by) than the whole rest of the planet put together.

Of course the United States courts financial catastrophe by overextending its global reach, amassing huge debts and budget deficits, neglecting its balance of trade, rewarding its elites at the expense of its poor, and otherwise building down, in some future decade, to the mother of all economic depressions, but the story in Europe and Japan is not much more edifying. There, too, the costs of government rise, growth is sluggish, unemployment festers, debts accumulate, and surpluses to bankroll major initiatives do not exist. This author would bet his last Euro that such doldrums will persist for many years. The image of a European goliath emerging from the confabulations of fusty technocrats and multiple premiers beggared by entitlement programs they already cannot afford is an image not to be entertained seriously for some time to come.

Now all this could turn around at a conceivable later juncture. Clearly, the E.U., at least, possesses the technological and human infrastructure to compete with and perhaps overtake the United States in every department of business and political and military endeavor. By 2025 or 2050 our current alarm over unbridled American imperialism and European impotence may seem laughable. Nevertheless, our alarm today is quite rational, grounded in facts and trends obvious to every objective observer, and I think it will take much more than a clarion call from two justly celebrated intellectuals–Derrida and Habermas–to set Europe on a radically new course.

With respect to the other "great powers" invoked by Skidelsky, even more caution is advisable. The notion that Russia is still a great power at all may be questioned. Its economy, based on technologies and assumptions already long obsolete in the 1980s, totally collapsed after the débâcle of 1989-1991, and is only just now on a path to modest recovery. Except for its fossil fuels, it has little to offer the rest of the world. The value of its exports is about the same as the value of the exports of Sweden, a country with 6% of Russia’s population. Its once vaunted armed forces are in shambles. It has also experienced a demographic catastrophe, with death rates soaring, fertility rates plummeting, and projections of a further population decline of 30% over the next 50 years. It is reasonable to assume that the outlook for Russia will improve as the new century wears on, but when I contrast the 100 million Russians expected to be alive in 2050 with the 415 million Americans thriving in that same year, I do not automatically think of a competitive edge for Russia.

Then there is that increasingly unlikely quadruped, the alliance of Japan and China. For many years a great number of social scientists, including those in the camp of world-systems analysis, have expected some sort of new colossus to emerge on the far western (or is it eastern?) edge of the Pacific Rim. It made so much sense. The technological prowess of Japan and some of its smaller potential allies, from Singapore to South Korea, argued the imperative of a coalition of East Asian powers, with populous and industrious China in the center, that would restore the area to the world primacy it had enjoyed for at least a millennium before the "rise of the West." China had the intelligent human and invaluable natural resources to support such a confederacy, the others would invest strenuously, and voilá! What George Orwell dubbed "Eastasia," a new global superpower, would take its honored place on the stage of world politics.

I subscribed to this vision, too, in "A Short History of the Future." Most world-system analysts, from Immanuel Wallerstein to Andre Gunder Frank, still believe it implicitly. The nosedive of the Japanese economy in the past decade has muted some of the rhetoric, and often Japan is hardly mentioned at all, as in Skidelsky’s article. But the thought is that, even if Japan does not "make it," the Chinese economy is still in hyper-drive, and in any case China has 11 times as many people, not to mention incomparably more mineral wealth.

First of all, Japan is not going to "make it," not into the ranks of the superpowers. We all overestimated its potential in the 1980s and 1990s. Its culture is not as elastic as we once thought, its centrally-directed institutions (almost like those in the former Soviet Union) do not quickly respond to challenges, and its population is graying more rapidly than Europe’s, thanks not only to low fertility but also to a virtual absence of immigration from other countries. Japan is expected to lose 20% of its citizenry by 2050, bringing the total to just 100 million, the same as Russia in that year. Sheer size of population is not the only index to a nation’s potential, but if all other things are equal, 100 million people cannot outthink and outproduce 400 million people with comparable assets.

China is clearly a different country altogether, with almost unlimited potential. Its astonishing industrial performance since the 1970s and its success in enhancing living conditions, economic opportunity, and political stability for its gargantuan population are worthy of sustained applause, despite the cost to civil liberties. But I do not see any chance of a common political front with Japan or the other smaller East Asian capitalist powers, or any chance of catching up militarily with the United States, or any likelihood of bonding with the E.U. and Russia to offer a concerted diplomatic rebuttal to American ambitions. China will also be hard-pressed to continue feeding its people. Long self-sustaining, it has now become a net importer of agricultural products, as the direct result of unwisely headlong urban and industrial development.

Let us make no mistake. Diplomatic alliances occur because they are in the strongly perceived national interests of all the parties concerned. To counter the manifest ambitions of France, or Germany, or Japan when each was on the warpath in earlier years, improbable bedfellows did accept one another’s company. I doubt that China’s leadership in this decade loses much sleep over American designs for preponderant power. During the Korean War in 1950 it did, and it responded accordingly and effectively when it saw its own vital national interests at immediate risk. That was another era. To expect today’s China to conspire with the E.U. and Russia to restrain American initiatives, for example in the Middle East, is unrealistic. The United States is China’s largest trading partner, and I cannot imagine that Beijing labors under any illusions about the long-term value of its awkward (and obsolete) ideological fraternity with an increasingly dysfunctional and embarrassing Pyongyang.

All of this, too, can change, without advance notice. A new American Napoleon, even more rabid and reckless than George W. Bush, might prompt a serious diplomatic revolution electrifying the most complacent of present-day regimes. The United States might find itself confronted and encircled by Skidelsky’s woeful sisters, fiercely determined to set it straight at any cost.

But that is not really what Skidelsky looks forward to. He simply wants the sisters to step in and mitigate American ambitions, here and now. Let the other "great powers" prevail upon Columbia to accept full-time partners in policing and bringing justice to this troubled world. I take his point.

The problem is that the hands of these other estimable great powers are not clean. They have all been complicit in previous, and may imaginably be complicit in future, efforts to exploit the rest of the planet in the best interests of their corporate and ruling classes. Russia is now a full-fledged capitalist nation, and China, for all practical purposes, is the same. They are not primarily or secondarily or in any way committed to worldwide social justice. They seek peace, but not if it interferes with their own agendas, whether in Tibet, or Taiwan, or Palestine, or Chechnya, or the Balkans, or wherever. And if millions die in strife in sub-Saharan Africa, well, it is easy to look the other way.

So even if Paul Kennedy is too much the pessimist, and against all odds the E.U. can rise to its historic challenge, and the other sisters clamber on board, and the United States gets its well-deserved comeuppance, so what?

Perhaps Skidelsky’s new multilateral world order will succeed, in its time. It might also last a lot longer, exploit working people everywhere more remorselessly, and destroy indigenous cultures more efficiently than any Pax Americana. Be careful what you wish for. Under the jaws and claws of a rogue male lion, you might prefer a different fate, but I doubt that an assault by an entire pride would improve your chances of survival.

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W. Warren Wagar

Department of History, Binghamton University