HOW

From terrorism to global warming, the evils of globalization are moredangerous than ever before. What went wrong? The world became dependenton a single superpower. Only by correcting this imbalance can the world -become a safer phi f By SteveniVeSer, Pfaazrieen E^arma,Matthew Kroenig, and Ely Ratner

he world today is more dangerousand less orderly than it was supposedto be. Ten or 15 years ago, the naive

im expectations were that the "end ofhistory" was near. The reality has been the opposite.The world has more international terrorism andmore nuclear proliferation today than it did in 1990.International institutions are weaker. The threatsof pandemic disease and climate change are stronger.Cleavages of religious and cultural ideology aremore intense. The global financial system is moreunbalanced and precarious.

It wasn't supposed to be like this. The end of theCold War was supposed to make global politics andeconomics easier to manage, not harder. What went

Steven Weber is professor of political science and directorofthe Institute of Inierndtional Studies at tbe University ofCalifornia, Berkeley. Naaznitcn Barma. MiJtthew Kroenig,and Ely Ratner are Ph.D. candidates at U.C, Berkeley,and research fallows at its New Era foreign Policy Center.

wrong.' I ne nau news OT tne z i sr cenrury lb mat giou-alization has a significant dark side. The containerships that carry manufactured Chinese goods to andfrom the United States also carry drugs. The air-planes that fly passengers nonstop from New Yorkto Singapore also transport infectious diseases. Andthe Internet has proved just as adept at spreadingdeadly, extremist ideologies as it has e-commerce.

The conventional belief is that the single greatestchallenge of geopolitics today is managing this darkside of globalization, chipping away at the illegitimateco-travelers that exploit openness, mobility, and free-dom, without putting too much sand in the gears. Thecurrent U.S. strategy is to push for more trade, moreconnectivity, more markets, and more openness.America does so for a good reason—it benefits fromglobalization more than any other countr>' in theworld. The United States acknowledges globaliza-tion's dark side but attributes it merely to exploita-tive behavior by criminals, religious extremists, andother anachronistic elements that can be eliminated.The dark side of globalization, America says, widj

How Globalization Went Bad

very little subtlety, can be mitigated by the expansionof American power, sometimes unilaterally and some-times through multilateral institutions, dependingon how the United States likes it. In other words,America is aiming for a "flat," globalized worldcoordinated by a single superpower.

That's nice work if you can get it. But the UnitedStates almost certainly cannot. Not only becauseother countries won't let it, but, more profoundly,because that line of thinking is faulty. The predom-inance of American power has many benefits, but themanagement of globalization is not one of them. Themobility of ideas, capital, technology, and people is

The world is paying a heavy price for the instabilitycreated by globalization and unipolarity, and theUnited States is bearing most of the burden.

hardly new. But the rapid advance of globalization'sevils is. Most of that advance has taken place since1990. Why? Because what changed profoundly inthe 1990s was the polarity of the international sys-tem. For the first time in modern history, globaliza-tion was superimposed onto a world with a singlesuperpower. What we have discovered in the past 15years is that it is a dangerous mixture. The negativeeffects of globalization since 1990 are not the resultof globalization itself. They are the dark side ofAmerican predominance.

take the former. It's the familiar law of diminishingreturns. Because powerful states have large spheres ofinfluence and their security and economic intereststouch every region of the world, they are threatenedby the risk of things going wrong—anywhere. That isparticularly true for the United States, which leveragesits ability to go anywhere and do anything throughmassive debt. No one knows exactly when the law ofdiminishing returns will kick in. But, historically, itstarts to happen long before a single great powerdominates the entire globe, which is why large empiresfrom Byzantium to Rome have always reached a pointof unsustainability.

That may already be happeningto the United States today, on issuesranging from oil dependency andnuclear proliferation to pandemicsand global warming. What Axiom 1tells you is that more U.S. power isnot the answer; it's actually part ofthe problem. A multipolar worldwould almost certainly manage theglobe's pressing problems more effec-

tively. The larger the number of great powers in theglobal system, the greater the chance that at least oneof them would exercise some control over a givencombination of space, other actors, and problems.Such reasoning doesn't rest on hopeful notions that thegreat powers will work together. They might do so. Buteven if they don't, the result is distributed governance,where some great power is interested in most every partof the world through productive competition.

THE DANGERS OF UNIPOLARITYA straightforward piece of logic from market eco-nomics helps explain why unipolarity and global-ization don't mix. Monopolies, regardless of whoholds them, are almost always bad for both themarket and the monopolist. We propose three sim-ple axioms of "globalization under unipolarity"that reveal these dangers.

Axiom h Above a certain threshold of power, the rateat which new global problems are generated willexceed the rate at which old problems are fixed.

Power does two things in international politics: Itenhances the capability of a state to do things, but italso increases the number of things that a state mustworry about. At a certain point, the latter starts to over-

Axiom 2: In an increasingly networked world,places that fall between the networks are very dan-gerous places—and there will be more ungovemedzones when there is only one network to join.

The second axiom acknowledges that highly con-nected networks can be efficient, robust, and resilientto shocks. But in a highly connected world, the piecesthat fall between the networks are increasingly shutoff from the benefits of connectivity. These problemsfester in the form of failed states, mutate like pathogenicbacteria, and, in some cases, reconnect in subterraneannetworks such as al Qaeda. The truly dangerous placesare the points where the subterranean networks touchthe mainstream of global politics and economics. Whatmade Afghanistan so dangerous under the Talibanwas not that it was a failed state. It wasn't. It was a par-tially failed and partially connected state that workedthe interstices of globalization through the drug trade,counterfeiting, and terrorism.

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Can any single superpower mon-itor all the seams and back alleys ofglobalization? Hardly. In fact, a lonehegemon is unlikely to look closelyat these problems, because morepressing issues are happening else-where, in places where trade andtechnology are growing. By contrast,a world of several great powers is amore interest-rich environment inwhich nations must look in less obvi-ous places to find new sources ofadvantage. In such a system, it'sharder for troublemakers to springup, because the cracks and seamsof globalization are held togetherby stronger ties.

Axiom 3: Without a real chanceto find useful allies to counter asuperpower, opponents will try toneutralize power, by going under-ground, going nuclear, or going''bad."

Axiom 3 is a story about thepreferred strategies of the weak. It'sa basic insight of international rela-tions that states try to balancepower. They protect themselves byjoining groups that can hold a hege-monic threat at bay. But what ifthere is no viable group to join? In today's unipolarworld, every nation from Venezuela to North Koreais looking for a way to constrain American power.But in the unipolar world, it's harder for states to jointogether to do that. So they turn to other means.They play a different game. Hamas, Iran, Somalia,North Korea, and Venezuela are not going to becomeallies anytime soon. Each is better off finding otherways to make life more difficult for Washington.Going nuclear is one way. Counterfeiting U.S. cur-rency is another. Raising uncertainty about oil sup-plies is perhaps the most obvious method of all.

Here's the important downside of unipolar glob-alization. In a world with multiple great powers,many of these threats would be less troublesome.The relatively weak states would have a choiceamong potential partners with which to ally,enhancing their influence. Without that more attrac-tive choice, facilitating the dark side of globalizationbecomes the most effective means of constrainingAmerican power.

SHARING GLOBALIZATION'S BURDENThe world is paying a heavy price for the instabilitycreated by the combination of globalization andunipolarity, and the United States is bearing most ofthe burden. Consider the case of nuclear proliferation.There's effectively a market out there for proliferation,with its own supply (states willing to share nucleartechnology) and demand (states that badly want anuclear weapon). The overlap of unipolarity withglobalization ratchets up both the supply and demand,to the detriment of U.S. national security.

It has become fashionable, in the wake of the Iraqwar, to comment on the limits of conventional militaryforce. But much of this analysis is overblown. TheUnited States may not be able to stabilize and rebuildIraq. But that doesn't matter much from the perspec-tive of a government that thinks the Pentagon has it inits sights. In Tehran, Pyongyang, and many other cap-itals, including Beijing, the bottom line is simple: TbeU.S. military could, with conventional force, end thoseregimes tomorrow if it chose to do so. No country in

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How Globalization Went Bad

the world can dream of challenging U.S. convention-al military power. But they can certainly hope to deterAmerica from using it. And the best deterrent yetinvented is the threat of nuclear retaliation. Before1989, states that felt threatened by the United Statescould turn to the Soviet Union'snuclear umbrella for protection. Now,they turn to people like A.Q. Khan.Having your own nuclear weaponused to be a luxury. Today, it is fastbecoming a necessity.

North Korea is the clearest exam-ple. Few countries had it worse dur-ing the Cold War. North Korea wassurrounded by feuding, nuclear-armed communist neighbors, it was officially at warwith its southern neighbor, and it stared continuous-ly at tens of thousands of U.S. troops on its border. But,for 40 years, North Korea didn't seek nuclear weapons.It didn't need to, because it had the Soviet nuclearumbrella. Within five years of the Soviet collapse,however, Pyongyang was pushing ahead full steam onplutonium reprocessing facilities. North Korea'sfounder, Kim II Sung, barely flinched when former U.S.President Bill Clinton's administration readied warplans to strike his nuclear installations preemptively.

military strength means a lot less to anuclear North Korea. Saddam Hussein'sgreat strategic blunder was that he took

too long to get to the same place.How would things be different in a

multipolar world? For starters, great pow-ers could split the job of policing prolifer-ation, and even collaborate on some par-

ticularly hard cases. It's often forgotten nowthat, during the Cold War, the only state

'with a tougher nonproiiferation policy thanthe United States was the Soviet Union. Not

a single country that had a formal alliance'*• with Moscow ever became a nuclear;. '* power. The Eastern bloc was full of•• ^ countries with advanced technological.* ;̂*:!-capabilities in every area except one—

V 'nuclear weapons. Moscow simply: •;. wouldn't permit it. But today we see theuneven and inadequate level of effort that

non-superpowers devote to stopping prolif-. .. .;• eration. The Europeans dangle carrots at':'; Iran, but they are unwilling to consider serioussticks. The Chinese refuse to admit that there is aproblem. And the Russians are aiding Iran's nuclearambitions. When push comes to shove, nonproiifera-tion today is almost entirely America's burden.

The same is true for global public health. Global-

If there were rival great powers with different culturaland ideological leanings, globalization's darkest

problem of all—terrorism—would look different.

izadon is tuming the world into an enormous petri dishfor the incubation of infectious disease. Humans can-not outsmart disease, because it just evolves too quick-ly. Bacteria can reproduce a new generation in less than30 minutes, while it takes us decades to come up witha new generation of antibiotics. Solutions are onlypossible when and where we get the upper hand. Poorcountries where humans live in close proximity tofarm animals are the best place to breed extremely dan-gerous zoonotic disease. These are often the samecountries, perhaps not entirely coincidentally, that feel

That brinkmanship paid off. Today North Korea is threatened by American power. Establishing an earlylikely a nuclear power, and Kim's son rules the warning system for these diseases—exactly what wecountry with an iron fist. America's conventional lacked in the case of SARS a few years ago and exact-

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ly what we lack for avian flu today—^will require a sig-nificant level of intervention into the very places thatdon't want it. That will be true as long as intemationalintervention means American interference.

The most likely sources of the next ebola or HIV-like pandemic are the countries that simply won't letU.S. or other Western agencies in, including the WorldHealth Organization. Yet the threat is too arcane andnot immediate enough for the West to force the issue.What's needed is another great power to take over apiece of the work, a power that has more immediateinterests in the countries where diseases incubate andone that is seen as less of a threat. As long as theUnited States remains the world's lone superpower,we Ye not likely to get any Kelp. Even after HIV, SARS,and several years of mounting hysteria about avian flu,the world is still not ready for a viral pandemic inSoutheast Asia or sub-Saharan Africa. America can'tchange that alone.

If there were rival great powers with different cul-tural and ideological leanings, globalization's darkestproblem of all—terrorism—would also likely lookquite different. The pundits are partly right: Today'sinternational terrorism owes something to globaliza-tion. Al Qaeda uses the Internet to transmit messages,it uses credit cards and modern hanking to movemoney, and it uses cell phones and laptops to plotattacks. But it's not globalization that turned Osamabin Laden from a small-time Saudi dissident into thesymbolic head of a radicalglobal movement. What cre-ated Osama bin Eaden wasthe predominance of Amer-ican power.

A terrorist organi-zation needs a story toattract resources andrecruits. Oftentimes,mere frustration overpolitical, economic, orreligious conditions is notenough. Al Qaeda under-stands that, and, for thatreason, it weaves a narra-tive of global jihad against a"modernization," "Westerniza-tion," and a "Jut^co-Christian"threat. There is really just onecountry that both spearheadsand represents that threat: theUnited States. And so the mostefficient way for a terrorist to

gain a reputation is to attack the United States. Thelogic is the same for all monopolies. A few years ago,every computer hacker in the world wanted to bringdown Microsoft, just as every aspiring terrorist wantsto create a spectacle of destruction akin to the Sep-tember 11 attacks inside the United States.

Al Qaeda cells have gone after alternate targetssuch as Britain, Egypt, and Spain. But these are notthe acts that increase recruitment and fundraising,or mobilize the energy of otherwise disparate groupsaround the world. Nothing enhances the profile ofa terrorist like killing an American, something AbuMusab al-Zarqawi understood well in Iraq. Even ifal Qaeda's deepest aspirations lie with the demise ofthe Saudi regime, the predominance of U.S. powerand its role supporting the house of Saud makesAmerica the only enemy really worth fighting. Amultipolar world would surely confuse this kind ofclear framing that pits Islamism against the West.What would be al Qaeda's message if the Chinesewere equally involved in propping up authoritarianregimes in the Islamic, oil-rich Gulf states? Doesthe al Qaeda story work if half its enemy is neitherWestern nor Christian?

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How Globalization Went Bad

RESTORING THE BALANCEThe consensus today in the U.S. foreign-policycommunity is that more American power is alwaysbetter. Across the board. For both the United Statesand the rest of the globe. The National SecurityStrategy documents of 2002 and 2006 enshrinethis consensus in phrases such as "a balance ofpower that favors freedom." The strategy explic-itly defines the "balance" as a continued imbalance,as the United States continues "dissuading poten-tial competitors ... from challenging the UnitedStates, its allies, and its partners."

In no way is U.S. power inherently a badthing. Nor is it true that no good comes fromunipolarity. But there are significant downsides tothe imbalance of power. That view is hardly rev-olutionary. It has a long pedigree in U.S. foreign-policy thought. It was the perspective, forinstance, that George Kennan brought to the tablein the late 1940s when he talked about tbe desir-ability of a European superpower to restrain theUnited States. Although the issues today are dif-ferent than they were in Kennan's time, it's still thecase that too much power may, as Kennanbelieved, lead to overreach. It may lead to arro-gance. It may lead to insensitivity to the concerns

of others. Though Kennan may have been pre-scient to voice these concerns, he couldn't have pre-dicted the degree to which American unipolaritywould lead to such an unstable overlap with mod-ern-day globalization.

America has experienced this dangerous burdenfor 15 years, but it still refuses to see it for what itreally is. Antiglobalization sentiment is comingtoday from both the right and the left. But by blam-ing globalization for what ails the worid, the U.S.foreign-policy community is missing a very big partof what is undermining one of the most hopefultrends in modern history—the reconnection of soci-eties, economies, and minds that political bordershave kept apart for far too long.

America cannot indefinitely stave off the rise ofanother superpower. But, in today's networked andinterdependent world, such an event is not entirelya cause for mourning. A shift in the global balanceof power would, in fact, help the United States man-age some of the most costly and dangerous conse-quences of globalization. As the international play-ing field levels, the scope of these problems and thethreat they pose to America will only decrease.When that happens, the United States will find glob-alization is a far easier burden to bear. [39

Want to Know More?

For more discussion of the virtues and dangers of unipolarity in a globalized world, read JohnJ. Mearsheimer's The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2003),America Unrivaled: The Future of the Balance of Power (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,2002), edited by G. John Ikenberry, and Niall Ferguson's "A World Without Power" (FOREIGNPOLICY, July/August 2004).

Stephen M. Walt looks at how other nations are challenging U.S. dominance in TamingAmerican Power: The Global Response to U.S. Primacy (New York: W.W. Norton &c Co., 2005).In "David's Friend Goliath" (FOREIGN POLICY, January/February 2006), Michael Mandelbaumargues that the world secretly wants American hegemony. Insight into America's strategic view ofthe post-Cold War world can be found in Robert Kagan's Of Paradise and Power: America andEurope in the New World Order (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003).

The classic text on balance of power thinking remains an essay by German historian Leopoldvon Ranke in 1833, "The Great Powers," available in Leopold Ranke: The Formative Years(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950). A.J.P. Taylor's The Struggle for Mastery inEurope, 1848-1918, offers an authoritative account of how balance of power pohtics shapedthe 20th century.

»For links to relevant Web sites, access to the FP Archive, and a comprehensive index of relatedFOREIGN POLICY articles, go to www.ForeignPoIicy.com.

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