I suspect that Mandelbaum and Walt are right about transformational undertakings like Iraq and Afghanistan, which have increasingly come to feel like acts of folly, or hubris. (In Shteyngart's novel, the United States has embarked on a catastrophic invasion of Venezuela.) But does the same reasoning apply to the civilian effort -- the state-building effort -- in Pakistan, as Mandelbaum argues? What about, say, the upcoming effort in Southern Sudan: Should the people of that region vote for independence in the referendum next January? Should a superpower living within its straitened means confine itself to encouraging market reform? After all, classic deterrence, which keeps American soldiers quartered all over the globe, is vastly more expensive than state-building. The real question is whether a post-hegemonic United States should continue to try to do the difficult things that do not enjoy a great deal of support from an increasingly agitated and impatient public, but are nevertheless extremely important.
Well, what else is leadership for? President Barack Obama devoted almost half of his speech to the U.N. General Assembly this week to the promotion of democracy and human rights abroad -- the very definition of the "philanthropic" policy that his predecessor so ruinously pursued and upon which the American people seem to have turned their back. China, of course, suffers from no such imperial distractions. But Obama's appeal, unlike George W. Bush's, focused on institutions the United States would support, rather than on American unilateral will and capacity. His administration, he said, would seek to foster civil society organizations around the world; would fund UNDEF, the United Nations' democracy program; and would promote transparency in closed societies. Obama specifically asked the emerging-power democracies to make a comparable pledge. It was a policy that acknowledged the limits -- though not the economic limits -- of American power.
The way I would put the post-hegemonic dilemma is that the United States must leverage the international system to produce outcomes that promote its national security: whether in regard to regulating the global economy, stopping nuclear proliferation, propping up weak states, or promoting democracy and good governance abroad; but that system has become less tractable as America's relative position has slipped. Washington cannot, for example, solve the problem of Iran on its own -- and only through the most lavish effort can it keep other key states in line. Newcomers to the international order like Brazil and Turkey, and above all China, feel they have more to gain than to lose by advancing their own interests when they conflict with Washington's. Yet what choice does the United States have, save navigating this turbulent system and seeking to shape it so that it better serves American ends?
Even more important, would much of the world really welcome a chastened United States which sticks to its knitting, pursues self-interest narrowly defined, and stows away the language of universal values? For a little while, perhaps it would. After all, Washington has committed a multitude of sins in the name of those values. But the celebration would die away soon enough: If the sole superpower won't take up the hard jobs, no one else will either.
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