My friend, colleague, co-author, and visiting scholar at IIS Jonathan Sallet has been pondering the world 'unilateral'... after a little back and forth talking with me, he's written what I think is a characteristically insightful piece that makes a simple and powerful point.
With the possible exception of “appeasement”, there are few more loaded terms in the lexicon of American foreign policy than the term “unilateral”. It means strong to some, short-sighted to others. It conveys determination and purpose to many, and a failure to understand the complexities of the world to many more.
With the possible exception of “appeasement”, there are few more loaded terms in the lexicon of American foreign policy than the term “unilateral”. It means strong to some, short-sighted to others. It conveys determination and purpose to many, and a failure to understand the complexities of the world to many more.
But the debate over whether unilateralism is a good or bad notion for US foreign policy misses the point. Unilateralism is fictitious because it makes no sense as a description of the strategic environment in which we live. In other words, unilateralism is not just right or wrong, smart or stupid as a principle of statecraft. It is factually false.
Unilateralism suggests that the United States can drive the course of events in world politics, without considering the desires of other international actors, simply by deciding what US actions will be. Phrased that way, the default position of U.S. policy makers should be clear: “What we have to do is make up our minds and demonstrate the will to execute.” It’s an attractive notion for an action-oriented culture that thrives on getting things done. And of course it stands in sharp contrast to ‘multilateralism’, which sounds less resolute, less effective, and thus less favorable to the United States.
Unilateralism suggests that the United States can drive the course of events in world politics, without considering the desires of other international actors, simply by deciding what US actions will be. Phrased that way, the default position of U.S. policy makers should be clear: “What we have to do is make up our minds and demonstrate the will to execute.” It’s an attractive notion for an action-oriented culture that thrives on getting things done. And of course it stands in sharp contrast to ‘multilateralism’, which sounds less resolute, less effective, and thus less favorable to the United States.
Except that the United States has never successfully pursued significant foreign-policy objectives through a purely unilateral approach. Think about the Cold War. The central insight of Nobel Laureate Thomas Schelling was that the contest between the United States and the Soviet Union was fundamentally a game of intertwined psychologies between two players. Schelling explained how their joint behaviors of signalling, negotiating, blustering, and temporizing over the potential creation and use of nuclear weapons, managed over the course of a few decades to avoid a nuclear war.
With the demise of this big second player – and the seeming “end’ to history – the world looked to some like a one-player game, at least for a while. It was tempting to believe that the only obstacle to our success was whether we had the will and the wallet. But this is wrong on at least two dimensions.
It is wrong because Schelling’s core arguments about game theory remain in play. We may be powerful enough, sometimes, to pick the game that others then need to play, but we can not by ourselves determine the outcome. For example, we pick a game called ‘conquest’, and seek to convince others, through the use of force, that their only choice is to acquiesce to our will. But there are always other players. And they have choices too. It is wrong also because the games of world politics don’t end abruptly, but go one and on through multiple rounds. In the language of theory, we are playing iterated games. And that matters, because you never can ‘win’ in a way that ends the game.
With the demise of this big second player – and the seeming “end’ to history – the world looked to some like a one-player game, at least for a while. It was tempting to believe that the only obstacle to our success was whether we had the will and the wallet. But this is wrong on at least two dimensions.
It is wrong because Schelling’s core arguments about game theory remain in play. We may be powerful enough, sometimes, to pick the game that others then need to play, but we can not by ourselves determine the outcome. For example, we pick a game called ‘conquest’, and seek to convince others, through the use of force, that their only choice is to acquiesce to our will. But there are always other players. And they have choices too. It is wrong also because the games of world politics don’t end abruptly, but go one and on through multiple rounds. In the language of theory, we are playing iterated games. And that matters, because you never can ‘win’ in a way that ends the game.
Don’t think so? We defeat Germany in WWI and then ignore the impact of the treaty of Versailles on domestic political institutions. We suffer the rise of Nazism. We defeat Germany in WWII, but leave half of Europe under the rule of a soon-to-be hostile Soviet empire. We “defeat” the Taliban, but leave behind some loose pieces, and the Taliban survives to attack another day. (Imagine if in 1949, we were still fighting a rogue band of Nazi guerillas with Hitler in command, even if from a hidden cave), We defeat Saddam and then, four years later, are telling Iraqi politicians they haven’t done their bit.
These stories share a simple characteristic: No matter how much power America has, we are never the only player and war is never the full extent of the game.
Once we understand that the world is composed of multiple players involved in games that can last a long time, the distinction between uni- and multi-lateralism as a theory of statecraft begins to dissolve.
In other words, the implied ‘theory’ of unilateralism — or perhaps it should be called, the ‘influence theory of unilateralism’, is that the US is capable of structuring the incentives of others such that their least bad option is always to do what we want. The power to actually set up the world that way is a reasonable definition of hegemony. At least this ‘theory’ includes a notion of bargaining, because it recognizes that other players will try to find better options that are not what the US wants – at least until they adopt our value structure.
The problem is that the notion of “bargaining” got lost, in the arrogance of seeming success, at the end of the Cold War. What was left was nothing more than a fundamental over-estimation of the power of a single nation. And just as insidious, a fundamental under-estimation of the dual creative and destructive potential of other human beings. As Schelling and his colleague Alexander George explained so well, these independently-minded individuals, groups and nations, in pursuit of their own goals, have every incentive to “design around” U.S. strategies, so that that they don’t have to confront them head on. And human beings are remarkably innovative when it comes to acting in their perceived self-interest.
Military strategists understand intuitively that they never have the field of battle to themselves, even when they possess overwhelming force. Political strategists forget this fact all the time. They act as if they are the perfect technologists, creating the uber-software product that is not capable of being hacked, surpassed or avoided. They believe they can create an architecture that leaves the world with no choice except acceptance. Then, again and again, they are surprised when they discover that the greatest army in human history makes you pretty strong, but that any ‘software code” for world politics is just infinitely subject to hacking.
The best way to prosecute the interests of the United States is to be a chess player, not a chest thumper. To understand how to meld other peoples’ interests with our own (not in place of our own), in order to muster the strongest arsenal of tactics over the longest time in the widest space. When Richard Nixon went to China, he was not trying to do Mao a favor. Rather, he had a clear-eyed view of how to advance U.S. interests by transforming a two-player game into a three-player game where the two communist powers would have to compete against each other for US favors. It did, after all, work pretty well.
The complexities of the world are enormous – various competing aspirations at a national and regional level across the world, very different views of the organization of government (and the appeal of Western democracy), and the respective roles of non-governmental versus governmental bodies in addressing social and political challenges. We will not be successful so long as we view others’ aspirations as having inherently lower strategic impact than our own. Let’s drop unilateralism from our foreign-policy vocabulary. We will then speak more clearly, listen more readily – and learn much more profoundly. And get more of what we want in the world.
These stories share a simple characteristic: No matter how much power America has, we are never the only player and war is never the full extent of the game.
Once we understand that the world is composed of multiple players involved in games that can last a long time, the distinction between uni- and multi-lateralism as a theory of statecraft begins to dissolve.
In other words, the implied ‘theory’ of unilateralism — or perhaps it should be called, the ‘influence theory of unilateralism’, is that the US is capable of structuring the incentives of others such that their least bad option is always to do what we want. The power to actually set up the world that way is a reasonable definition of hegemony. At least this ‘theory’ includes a notion of bargaining, because it recognizes that other players will try to find better options that are not what the US wants – at least until they adopt our value structure.
The problem is that the notion of “bargaining” got lost, in the arrogance of seeming success, at the end of the Cold War. What was left was nothing more than a fundamental over-estimation of the power of a single nation. And just as insidious, a fundamental under-estimation of the dual creative and destructive potential of other human beings. As Schelling and his colleague Alexander George explained so well, these independently-minded individuals, groups and nations, in pursuit of their own goals, have every incentive to “design around” U.S. strategies, so that that they don’t have to confront them head on. And human beings are remarkably innovative when it comes to acting in their perceived self-interest.
Military strategists understand intuitively that they never have the field of battle to themselves, even when they possess overwhelming force. Political strategists forget this fact all the time. They act as if they are the perfect technologists, creating the uber-software product that is not capable of being hacked, surpassed or avoided. They believe they can create an architecture that leaves the world with no choice except acceptance. Then, again and again, they are surprised when they discover that the greatest army in human history makes you pretty strong, but that any ‘software code” for world politics is just infinitely subject to hacking.
The best way to prosecute the interests of the United States is to be a chess player, not a chest thumper. To understand how to meld other peoples’ interests with our own (not in place of our own), in order to muster the strongest arsenal of tactics over the longest time in the widest space. When Richard Nixon went to China, he was not trying to do Mao a favor. Rather, he had a clear-eyed view of how to advance U.S. interests by transforming a two-player game into a three-player game where the two communist powers would have to compete against each other for US favors. It did, after all, work pretty well.
The complexities of the world are enormous – various competing aspirations at a national and regional level across the world, very different views of the organization of government (and the appeal of Western democracy), and the respective roles of non-governmental versus governmental bodies in addressing social and political challenges. We will not be successful so long as we view others’ aspirations as having inherently lower strategic impact than our own. Let’s drop unilateralism from our foreign-policy vocabulary. We will then speak more clearly, listen more readily – and learn much more profoundly. And get more of what we want in the world.
