America is making the world nervous
At a Berlin conference of diplomats, academics, journalists, and activists last March, a British colleague asked me how the same country that elected Barack Obama twice could be so close to replacing him with a man who is his diametrical opposite. In other words, setting aside the relative merits of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, how can America be so changeable and unpredictable?
Europeans, plagued by many worries these days, have genuine anxieties about their American ally — in part because the North Atlantic Alliance and the security it guarantees depend on Washington’s reliability and predictability. America’s other allies and partners around the world share their misgivings. Indeed, America’s adversaries and nonaligned countries must likewise take into account high uncertainty about the future direction of U.S. foreign policy.
Like businesses contemplating where and how much to invest, governments prefer certainty when making foreign policy. Does democracy make this more difficult? As recently as the 1950s, informed thinkers on foreign policy believed that democracies were quixotic, lurching from peace to war, isolation to crusading, free trade to protectionism, precisely because their electorates had so much say. America was the chief case study.
It turns out that although its actions certainly have not pleased everyone, the United States for decades had the virtue of predictability. A large body of political science literature argues that democracies are more reliable international partners because of their domestic constraints and transparency. John Ikenberry, professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton, argues that American reliability is especially important to global order because of the country’s outsized power.
America’s relatively restrained behavior, its openness and its self-enmeshment in a web of international institutions have rendered its hegemony acceptable to many other countries. Washington’s consistency over time has allowed other countries to invest heavily in their relations with the United States and with one another, helping build unprecedented global prosperity and stability.
Credit: John M. Owen US Today
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