Bearing the Burden in a Trump-Led Future: Is the U.S. Overpaying for the World's Stability?
It gets a lot of bang, but is it worth the buck?
The post-war liberal international order (LIO) has primarily been a US creation. Despite tactical differences between global political elites, a post-war commitment to maintaining the LIO has remained resolute: what is often called “globalism”. Still, that order is becoming increasingly more complex as America becomes more averse to bearing the costs of upholding that system.
If we take NATO alone, why should the US continue to bear its costs? This question becomes especially pertinent given the likely victory of Donald Trump in 2024. He feels very strongly about the issue. When discussing the historic failure of many NATO members to meet their 2% GDP commitment to defence spending, he bluntly stated that those who don't meet the target are “delinquent” and that the US would not protect members. He went on to state that he would encourage Russia to “do whatever the hell they want. You gotta pay. You gotta pay your bills.”
This cost/benefit analysis by America’s foreign policy establishment and the need to “sell” America’s hegemonic leadership to the American people is one of the primary drivers of the deepening tensions in Western politics.
In this first part of this substack on America’s role in the LIO, I explore why a hegemonic power like the US would have invested so deeply into the world order in the first place. There are three main explanations.
The first is that the US is a benign hegemon happy to lead and absorb the costs associated with global leadership, including the defence of Europe under NATO's aegis.
The second explanation is that the US is a coercive hegemon that seeks to recover its costs from other states. Like a mafia boss, it gets to extract rents from subordinated and fearful states in an overt way.
The third explanation is that the US is, in fact, a structurally advantaged hegemon that recovers more benefits from the LIO than its costs to underwrite, primarily through its positional advantages. America’s leadership means it gets to game the system in ways that continue to deliver a bang for its buck.
If Trump wins in 2024, the image that wins out in his mind will help shape the future of the international system and the options open to the UK regarding its own foreign and security policies. Let’s explore the debates and what the future of American global leadership might look like.
Globalising the US national interest
At the end of the Second World War, the US possessed almost half of the world’s manufacturing capacity, most of its food supplies, nearly all of its capital reserves and a military power unparalleled in human history. The US national interest became globalised in this role as it used its hegemonic leadership to fashion a new world order. Where closed economic blocs helped exacerbate the rise of nationalist extremism after the Second World War, American foreign policy elites sought to use American post-war hegemony to create an international order based on economic interdependence, a conditional and institutionally bound multilateralism and strategic alliance networks under US leadership.
These networks existed to contain Soviet expansionism militarily and alleviate geopolitical rivalry from other world power centres, such as Japan or Western Europe. The promotion of the LIO was thus the institutional instantiation of the kind of world order that would allow the US to both thrive whilst remaining first among equals: a Pax Americana.
This order, whilst allowing the US to flourish, also carried substantial costs as other states emerged as economic challengers to the US. Germany and Japan were previously locked into an existential struggle for world mastery during the Second World War, and they emerged as economic challengers to the US a little over three decades after the cessation of hostilities, a remarkably benign form of hegemony.
We can make the same post-Cold War argument for China, whose US-built World Trade Organisation membership in 2001 allowed it to rapidly industrialise and build one of the world’s largest economies, arguably one of the most transformative events in recent world history.
A question arises from this historical narrative: why would the US choose this form of hegemonic leadership and the often steep blood and treasure costs of maintaining this system that, economically at least, allowed other centres of power to emerge?
Here, we can turn to hegemonic stability theory (HST) within international relations. HST helps us understand why America did the above.
HST argues that the international system is more likely to be stable when a single state is the dominant power within that system. This ‘singularity’ helps eliminate collective action problems, the generation of often costly global public goods necessary for world commerce, and the underwriting of the political and strategic contexts of global economic interdependence, issues that have long bedevilled international politics. Aside from the alleged efficacy of world hegemonic leadership, what does hegemonic stability theory tell us about why a preponderant power would seek this often costly global leadership role?
The first explanation is closely associated with Kindleberger and argues that a hegemon provides leadership as a benevolent service to the international community. In this sense, the hegemon seeks to promote its interests and the collective interests of the states it leads: a form of noblesse oblige. The hegemon is benign as its net resource transfers to the rest of the international community through the costs of the public goods it supplies, including security public goods in the form of alliance networks such as NATO, which is highly costly. This implies that the United States is not predominantly seeking its immediate advantage or one-sided long-term strength vis-à-vis other economic centres. Instead, it promotes change in the collective interests of world prosperity: a multilateral and benign hegemony.
Proponents of this explanation of US global leadership view the various deviations from multilateralism as being both secondary and generated by domestic protectionist and mercantilist lobbies using their domestic political power to undercut a multilateral mainstream to some extent on some issues at various times.
A second image is that of the coercive hegemon. Unlike Kindleberger’s benign hegemon, Gilpin argues that the hegemon provides public goods but is far less tolerant of states attempting to free-ride. Accordingly, the international order the hegemon helps sustain is not done out of benevolence but self-interest, with the hegemon happy to coerce free riders into paying to help fund its hegemony. There is thus no Kindleberger-style transfer of resources from the hegemon to the international community as a whole, and its public goods provision is resource-neutral for the hegemon as long as other states are either willing to pay for them or can be coerced into paying.
All other things being equal, this should be good for hegemonic longevity. However, using coercion to cover the costs of supplying public goods may create problems for the hegemon in another area: its legitimacy. This more zero-sum and coercive explanation accords firmly with Trump’s worldview and seeming relaxed attitude to legitimacy. Trump is happy to absorb the opprobrium of other states if it means they start to pay their way in a zero-sum game.
The third explanation is that of the structurally advantaged hegemon. This image argues that leadership allows the hegemon to shape world order in ways that confer its advantages, enabling it to recover the costs of supplying public goods and accrue other positional advantages. The hegemon acquires the benefits of cooperation without coercion whilst reinforcing its position by extracting resources from the rest of the international community and reinvesting them in ways that help prolong its hegemony. Moreover, the hegemon can do this as other states either accept the hegemon’s overall international order as legitimate or as long as the opportunity costs of major systemic revision outweigh the costs of staying in.
The hegemon is, therefore, in the position of enjoying resource inflows from the rest of the international community. In this sense, the US is thus both a ‘system maker and privilege taker’ and accrues advantages through structuring world order in ways that benefit its interests whilst delivering enough benefits to other states to disincentivise them, seeking to revise the US-led order.
The rise of China, Russia’s war in Ukraine and the growing unrest in the Middle East all signal the deepening of a revisionist authoritarian axis in world politics that has led to a crisis of legitimacy for US elites and a deepening schism between liberal internationalists and realists.
In the 1950s, Paul Nitze captured a dilemma that continues to capture a great deal about America’s global leadership role: ‘The most difficult problem facing the formulators of United States foreign policy is that of relating and bringing into some measure of convergence policies appropriate to the coalition of free nations, the alliance system, and the United States as an individual nation’. In short, American foreign policymakers must align the national interest with a broader system-sustaining interest while justifying this often costly role to the American people. This dual crisis of weakening Western strategic agency and the social contract between the state and citizenry across the West will continue to shock the politics of the West as we go forward.
In the next substack, I will assess the three explanations of why the US does what it does and what the future of world politics might look like.
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