A Way in the World

How should we use the world's only superpower? Two huge tasks for foreign policy are identifying the threats the country faces and choosing a strategy to address them. I am afraid we may be off track on both.

It is easy these days to say that terrorism, or Islamic extremism, presents the main threat to the United States. This seems obvious only if we rank threats by the chance that they will kill a large number of Americans tomorrow. Islamic terrorism probably counts first by that grim metric. But try a more complicated measure. Which threats (1) have the greatest chance of disrupting world order over the next twenty-five years and (2) present the biggest spread of good and bad outcomes? By asking this question, we get a clearer sense of where it might be most important to try to nudge -- or seize -- the rudder of history.

By the second measure, the answer is a lot less clear. Islamic terrorists are gangs, not governments. There's a limit to the resources they can throw at us, even if the weapons they might get their hands on are very frightening. And while it's true that their ideology has a lot in common with fascism -- at least in being anachronistic, violent, and deeply illiberal -- they don't control governments that they can use to mobilize populations, which is what turns fascist ideas into fascist societies. We should do a huge amount to stop them from killing people, especially Americans; but should we let them structure our foreign policy?

For other candidates, try India and China. Together they have almost 2.5 billion people, plenty of nuclear weapons, restive populations, and potentially unstable political systems. If they keep growing economically, they will shift the center of economic power eastward, as China has already begun to do. Political and military power will follow.

These countries aren't "threats" in the sense that their leaders want to kill Americans. But the direction they take in the next decades will be pivots of world history. Power in India wavers between some very nasty Hindu nationalists, who are as much fascists as the Islamic extremists, and some rather feckless liberal democrats. Popular sentiment in many ways is up for grabs between them. China, too, is home to a fierce and often militaristic nationalism, which could seize the moment of a political or economic crisis. China will be at risk of both types of crisis for at least a decade. Both countries also present a huge upside: three billion people living peacefully and freely a few decades from now.

Strategy follows threat. During the Cold War, we competed with Soviet influence in Europe by promoting prosperity and democracy. The Marshall Plan is the most famous instance, but right up to the collapse of communism in Central Europe, we were on the side of democratic movements like Poland's Solidarity and dissidents like Vaclav Havel, the dissident playwright who later became the first president of democratic Czecheslovakia. We also built up international institutions, notably the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and predecessor to the World Trade Organization, to extend liberal, capitalist influence. These strategies contributed to the ideological defeat of communism and the rise of democracy as the world's only meaningful standard of political legitimacy. They also produced a more interdependent world, stitched together by economic relations that everyone is reluctant to shatter. Both these developments have, almost incidentally, helped to keep India democratic and bring China nearer accountable government and rule of law than it would otherwise be. If this were our focus, we'd press relentlessly on shaping the world into which these powers will mature, using our moment of unchallenged power to promote democratic, liberal, and orderly standards for both domestic governments and international relations.

I fear that the overwhelming emphasis on Islamic terror and extremism draws us in another direction, toward the kind of strategy that formed the underbelly of the Cold War: alliances of convenience with brutal dictators and rebel movements, knife-fighting realpolitik across the chessboard of the world's poorest regions. Maybe that is wrong, and the Iraq adventure will, after all its disasters, prove the springboard of Islamic democracy. Even in that best of all possible outcomes, however, a foreign policy founded on a war against terrorism distracts us from developments that are more likely to shape the future of freedom and well-being, at a time when we are uniquely -- and transiently -- positioned to influence them. We are spending lives and treasure at a fast clip, and we may be doing so unwisely.