Module FOUR

Redefining the National Interest

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The Paradox of American Power: Why the World’s
Only Superpower Can’t Go It Alone
Joseph S. Nye

Print publication date: 2003
Print ISBN-13: 9780195161106
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: November 2003
DOI: 10.1093/0195161106.001.0001

Redefining the National Interest
Joseph S. Nye (Contributor Webpage)

DOI:10.1093/0195161106.003.0005

Abstract and Keywords
The issues raised in the foregoing chapters demonstrate the importance,
insufficiently appreciated by the current administration of President George. W.
Bush, of defining the U.S. national interest in a manner, which addresses the
wider concerns of world order and stability, and which aims to defend the
humanitarian values on which such order and stability depend. It is necessary
for U.S. foreign policy to recalibrate its sense of priorities, and to recognize that
there is a U.S. interest in preserving the “public good” of a stable international
social and economic order.

Keywords:   foreign policy, national interest, U.S.A

How should the United States define its interests in this global information age?
How shall we decide how much and when to join with others? What should we
do with our unprecedented power? Isolationists who think we can avoid
vulnerability to terrorism by drawing inward fail to understand the realities of a
global information age. At the same time, the new unilateralists who urge us to
unashamedly deploy it on behalf of self‐defined global ends are offering a recipe
for undermining our soft power and encouraging others to create the coalitions
that will eventually limit our hard power. We must do better than that.

When Condoleezza Rice, now the national security advisor, wrote during the
2000 campaign that we should “proceed from the firm ground of the national
interest and not from the interest of an illusory international community,” what
disturbed our European allies was “the assumption that a conflict between the
pursuit of national interest and commitment to the interests of a far‐from‐

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illusory international community necessarily exists.”1 The ties that bind the
international community may be weak, but they matter. Failure to pay proper
respect to the opinion of others and to incorporate a broad conception of justice
into our national interest will eventually come to hurt us. As our allies frequently
remind us, even well‐intentioned (p.138) American champions of benign
hegemony do not have all the answers. While our friends welcomed the
multilateralism of the Bush administration’s approach after September 2001,
they remained concerned about a return to unilateralism.

Democratic leaders who fail to reflect their nation’s interest are unlikely to be
reelected, and it is in our interest to preserve our preeminent position. But
global interests can be incorporated into a broad and farsighted concept of the
national interest. After all, terrorism is a threat to all societies; international
trade benefits us as well as others; global warming will raise sea levels along all
our coasts as well as those of other countries; infectious diseases can arrive
anywhere by ship or plane; and financial instability can hurt the whole world
economy. In addition to such concrete interests, many Americans want global
values incorporated into our national interest. There are strong indications that
Americans’ values operate in a highly global context—that our sphere of concern
extends well beyond national boundaries. Seventy‐three percent agreed with the
poll statement “I regard myself as a citizen of the world as well as a citizen of
the United States,” and 44 percent agreed strongly.2 We need a broad definition
of our national interest that takes account of the interests of others, and it is the
role of our leaders to bring this into popular discussions. An enlightened
national interest need not be myopic—as September 2001 reminded us.

Traditionalists distinguish between a foreign policy based on values and a
foreign policy based on interests. They describe as vital those interests that
would directly affect our safety and thus merit the use of force—for example, to
prevent attacks on the United States, to prevent the emergence of hostile
hegemons in Asia or Europe, to prevent hostile powers on our borders or in
control of the seas, and to ensure the survival of U.S. allies.3 Promoting human
rights, encouraging democracy, or developing specific economic sectors is
relegated to a lower priority.

I find this approach too narrow, as I believe that humanitarian interests are also
important to our lives and our foreign policy. Certainly national strategic
interests are vital and deserve priority, because if we fail to protect them, our
very survival would be at stake. For example, today countering and suppressing
catastrophic terrorism will deserve (p.139) the priority that was devoted to
containing Soviet power during the Cold War.4 Survival is the necessary
condition of foreign policy, but it is not all there is to foreign policy. Moreover,
the connection between some events (for example, Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, or a
North Korean missile test) and a threat to our national survival may involve a
long chain of causes. People can disagree about how probable any link in the

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chain is and thus about the degree of the threat to our survival. Consequently,
reasonable people can disagree about how much “insurance” they want our
foreign policy to provide against remote threats to a vital interest before we
pursue other values such as human rights.

In my view, in a democracy, the national interest is simply what citizens, after
proper deliberation, say it is. It is broader than vital strategic interests, though
they are a crucial part. It can include values such as human rights and
democracy, particularly if the American public feels that those values are so
important to our identity or sense of who we are that people are willing to pay a
price to promote them. Values are simply an intangible national interest. If the
American people think that our long‐term shared interests include certain values
and their promotion abroad, then they become part of the national interest.
Leaders and experts may point out the costs of indulging certain values, but if an
informed public disagrees, experts cannot deny the legitimacy of their opinion.

Determining the national interest involves more than just poll results. It is
opinion after public discussion and deliberation. That is why it is so important
that our leaders do a better job of discussing a broad formulation of our national
interest. Democratic debate is often messy and does not always come up with
the “right” answers. Nonetheless, it is difficult to see a better way to decide on
the national interest in a democracy. A better‐informed political debate is the
only way for our people to determine how broadly or narrowly to define our
interests.

The Limits of American Power
Even when we agree that values matter, the hard job is figuring out how to bring
them to bear in particular instances. Many Americans (p.140) find Russia’s war
in Chechnya disturbing, but there are limits to what we can do because Russia
remains a nuclear power and we seek its help on terrorism. As our parents
reminded us, “Don’t let your eyes get bigger than your stomach, and don’t bite
off more than you can chew.” Given our size, the United States has more margin
of choice than most countries do. But as we have seen in the earlier chapters,
power is changing, and it is not always clear how much we can chew. The danger
posed by the outright champions of hegemony is that their foreign policy is all
accelerator and no brakes. Their focus on unipolarity and hegemony exaggerates
the degree to which the United States is able to get the outcomes it wants in a
changing world.

I argued in chapter 1 that power in a global information age is distributed like a
three‐dimensional chess game. The top military board is unipolar, with the
United States far outstripping all other states, but the middle economic board is
multipolar, with the United States, Europe, and Japan accounting for two‐thirds
of world product, and the bottom board of transnational relations that cross
borders outside the control of governments has a widely dispersed structure of

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power. While it is important not to ignore the continuing importance of military
force for some purposes, particularly in relation to the preindustrial and
industrial parts of the world, the hegemonists’ focus on military power can blind
us to the limits of our power. As we have seen, American power is not equally
great in the economic and transnational dimensions. Not only are there new
actors to consider in these domains, but many of the transnational issues—
whether financial flows, the spread of AIDS, or terrorism—cannot be resolved
without the cooperation of others. Where collective action is a necessary part of
obtaining the outcomes we want, our power is by definition limited and the
United States is bound to share.

We must also remember the growing role of soft power in this global information
age. It matters that half a million foreign students want to study in the United
States each year, that Europeans and Asians want to watch American films and
TV, that American liberties are attractive in many parts of the world, and that
others respect us and want to follow our lead when we are not too arrogant. Our
values are significant sources of soft power. Both hard and soft power (p.141)
are important, but in a global information age, as we saw in chapter 2, soft
power is becoming even more so than in the past. Massive flows of cheap
information have expanded the number of transnational channels of contacts
across national borders. As we also noted earlier, global markets and
nongovernmental groups—including terrorists—play a larger role, and many
possess soft power resources. States are more easily penetrated and less like the
classic military model of sovereign billiard balls bouncing off each other.

The United States, with its open democratic society, will benefit from the rapidly
developing global information age if we develop a better understanding of the
nature and limits of our power. Our institutions will continue to be attractive to
many and the openness of our society will continue to enhance our credibility.
Thus as a country, we will be well placed to benefit from soft power. But since
much of this soft power is the unintended by‐product of social forces, the
government will often find it difficult to manipulate.

The good news is that the social trends of the global information age are helping
to shape a world that will be more congenial to American values in the long run.
But the soft power that comes from being a shining “city upon a hill” (as the
Puritan leader John Winthrop first put it) does not provide the coercive
capability that hard power does. Soft power is crucial, but alone it is not
sufficient. Both hard and soft power will be necessary for successful foreign
policy in a global information age. Our leaders must make sure that they
exercise our hard power in a manner that does not undercut our soft power.

Grand Strategy and Global Public Goods
How should Americans set our priorities in a global information age? What
grand strategy would allow us to steer between the “imperial overstretch” that

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would arise out of the role of global policeman while avoiding the mistake of
thinking the country can be isolated in this global information age? The place to
start is by understanding the relationship of American power to global public
goods. On one hand, for reasons given above, American power is less effective
than (p.142) it might first appear. We cannot do everything. On the other hand,
the United States is likely to remain the most powerful country well into this
century, and this gives us an interest in maintaining a degree of international
order. More concretely, there is a simple reason why Americans have a national
interest beyond our borders. Events out there can hurt us, and we want to
influence distant governments and organizations on a variety of issues such as
proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, terrorism, drugs, trade, resources,
and ecological damage. After the Cold War, we ignored Afghanistan, but we
discovered that even a poor, remote country can harbor forces that can harm us.

To a large extent, international order is a public good—something everyone can
consume without diminishing its availability to others.5 A small country can
benefit from peace in its region, freedom of the seas, suppression of terrorism,
open trade, control of infectious diseases, or stability in financial markets at the
same time that the United States does without diminishing the benefits to the
United States or others. Of course, pure public goods are rare. And sometimes
things that look good in our eyes may look bad in the eyes of others. Too narrow
an appeal to public goods can become a self‐serving ideology for the powerful.
But these caveats are a reminder to consult with others, not a reason to discard
an important strategic principle that helps us set priorities and reconcile our
national interests with a broader global perspective.

If the largest beneficiary of a public good (like the United States) does not take
the lead in providing disproportionate resources toward its provision, the
smaller beneficiaries are unlikely to be able to produce it because of the
difficulties of organizing collective action when large numbers are involved.6

While this responsibility of the largest often lets others become “free riders,” the
alternative is that the collective bus does not move at all. (And our compensation
is that the largest tends to have more control of the steering wheel.)

This puts a different twist on former secretary of state Madeleine Albright’s
frequent phrase that the United States is “the indispensable nation.” We do not
get a free ride. To play a leading role in producing public goods, the United
States will need to invest in both hard power resources and the soft power
resources of setting a good example. The (p.143) latter will require more self‐
restraint on the part of Congress as well as putting our own house in order in
economics, environment, criminal justice, and so forth. The rest of the world
likes to see the United States lead by example, but when “America is seen, as
with emission standards, to put narrow domestic interests before global needs,
respect can easily turn to disappointment and contempt.”7

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Increasing hard power will require an investment of resources in the nonmilitary
aspects of foreign affairs, including better intelligence, that Americans have
recently been unwilling to make. While Congress has been willing to spend 16
percent of the national budget on defense, the percentage devoted to
international affairs has shrunk from 4 percent in the 1960s to just 1 percent
today.8 Our military strength is important, but it is not sixteen times more
important than our diplomacy. Over a thousand people work on the staff of the
smallest regional military command headquarters, far more than the total
assigned to the Americas at the Departments of State, Commerce, Treasury, and
Agriculture.9 The military rightly plays a role in our diplomacy, but we are
investing in our hard power in overly militarized terms.

As Secretary of State Colin Powell has pleaded to Congress, we need to put more
resources into the State Department, including its information services and the
Agency for International Development (AID), if we are going to get our messages
across. A bipartisan report on the situation of the State Department recently
warned that “if the ‘downward spiral’ is not reversed, the prospect of relying on
military force to protect U.S. national interests will increase because Washington
will be less capable of avoiding, managing or resolving crises through the use of
statecraft.”10 Moreover, the abolition of the United States Information Agency
(which promoted American government views abroad) as a separate entity and
its absorption into the State Department reduced the effectiveness of one of our
government’s important instruments of soft power.11 It is difficult to be a super‐
power on the cheap—or through military means alone.

In addition to better means, we need a strategy for their use. Our grand strategy
must first ensure our survival, but then it must focus on providing global public
goods. We gain doubly from such a strategy: from the public goods themselves,
and from the way they legitimize (p.144) our power in the eyes of others. That
means we should give top priority to those aspects of the international system
that, if not attended to properly, would have profound effects on the basic
international order and therefore on the lives of large numbers of Americans as
well as others. The United States can learn from the lesson of Great Britain in
the nineteenth century, when it was also a preponderant power. Three public
goods that Britain attended to were (l) maintaining the balance of power among
the major states in Europe, (2) promoting an open international economic
system, and (3) maintaining open international commons such as the freedom of
the seas and the suppression of piracy.

All three translate relatively well to the current American situation. Maintaining
regional balances of power and dampening local incentives to use force to
change borders provides a public good for many (but not all) countries. The
United States helps to “shape the environment” (in the words of the Pentagon’s
quadrennial defense review) in various regions, and that is why even in normal
times we keep roughly a hundred thousand troops forward‐based in Europe, the

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same number in Asia, and some twenty thousand near the Persian Gulf. The
American role as a stabilizer and reassurance against aggression by aspiring
hegemons in key regions is a blue chip issue. We should not abandon these
regions, as some have recently suggested, though our presence in the Gulf could
be handled more subtly.

Promoting an open international economic system is good for American
economic growth and is good for other countries as well. As we saw in chapter 3,
openness of global markets is a necessary (though not sufficient) condition for
alleviating poverty in poor countries even as it benefits the United States. In
addition, in the long term, economic growth is also more likely to foster stable,
democratic middle‐class societies in other countries, though the time scale may
be quite lengthy. To keep the system open, the United States must resist
protectionism at home and support international economic institutions such as
the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund, and the
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development that provide a
framework of rules for the world economy.

(p.145) The United States, like nineteenth‐century Britain, has an interest in
keeping international commons, such the oceans, open to all. Here our record is
mixed. It is good on traditional freedom of the seas. For example, in 1995, when
Chinese claims to the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea sparked concern in
Southeast Asia, the United States avoided the conflicting claims of various states
to the islets and rocks, but issued a statement reaffirming that the sea should
remain open to all countries. China then agreed to deal with the issue under the
of the Seas Treaty. Today, however, the international commons include new
issues such as global climate change, preservation of endangered species, and
the uses of outer space, as well as the virtual commons of cyberspace. But on
some issues, such as the global climate, the United States has taken less of a
lead than is necessary. The establishment of rules that preserve access for all
remains as much a public good today as in the nineteenth century, even though
some of the issues are more complex and difficult than freedom of the seas.

These three classic public goods enjoy a reasonable consensus in American
public opinion, and some can be provided in part through unilateral actions. But
there are also three new dimensions of global public goods in today’s world.
First, the United States should help develop and maintain international regimes
of laws and institutions that organize international action in various domains—
not just trade and environment, but weapons proliferation, peacekeeping, human
rights, terrorism, and other concerns. Terrorism is to the twenty‐first century
what piracy was to an earlier era. Some governments gave pirates and
privateers safe harbor to earn revenues or to harass their enemies. As Britain
became the dominant naval power in the nineteenth century, it suppressed
piracy, and most countries benefited from that situation. Today, some states
harbor terrorists in order to attack their enemies or because they are too weak

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to control powerful groups. If our current campaign against terrorism is seen as
unilateral or biased, it is likely to fail, but if we continue to maintain broad
coalitions to suppress terrorism, we have a good prospect of success. While our
antiterrorism campaign will not be seen as a global public good by the groups
that attack us, our objective should be to isolate them and diminish the minority
of states that give them harbor.

(p.146) We should also make international development a higher priority, for it
is an important global public good as well. Much of the poor majority of the
world is in turmoil, mired in vicious circles of disease, poverty, and political
instability. Large‐scale financial and scientific help from rich countries is
important not only for humanitarian reasons but also, as Harvard economist
Jeffrey Sachs has argued, “because even remote countries become outposts of
disorder for the rest of the world.”12 Here our record is less impressive. Our
foreign aid has shrunk to 0.1 percent of our GNP, roughly one‐third of European
levels, and our protectionist trade measures often hurt poor countries most.
Foreign assistance is generally unpopular with the American public, in part (as
polls show) because they think we spend fifteen to twenty times more on it than
we do. If our political leaders appealed more directly to our humanitarian
instinct as well as our interest in stability, our record might improve. As
President Bush said in July 2001, “This is a great moral challenge.”13 To be sure,
aid is not sufficient for development, and opening our markets, strengthening
accountable institutions, and discouraging corruption are even more
important.14 Development will take a long time, and we need to explore better
ways to make sure that our help actually reaches the poor, but both prudence
and a concern for our soft power suggest that we should make development a
higher priority.

As a preponderant power, the United States can provide an important public
good by acting as a mediator. By using our good offices to mediate conflicts in
places such as Northern Ireland, the Middle East, or the Aegean Sea, the United
States can help in shaping international order in ways that are beneficial to us
as well as to other nations. It is sometimes tempting to let intractable conflicts
fester, and there are some situations where other countries can more effectively
play the mediator’s role. Even when we do not want to take the lead, our
participation can be essential—witness our work with Europe to try to prevent
civil war in Macedonia. But often the United States is the only country that can
bring together mortal enemies as in the Middle East peace process. And when
we are successful, we enhance our reputation and increase our soft power at the
same time that we reduce a source of instability. (p.147)

Table 5.1 A Strategy Based on Global Public Goods

1. Maintain the balance of power in important regions

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2. Promote an open international economy

3. Preserve international commons

4. Maintain international rules and institutions

5. Assist economic development

6. Act as convenor of coalitions and mediator of disputes.

Human Rights and Democracy
A grand strategy for protecting our traditional vital interests and promoting
global public goods addresses two‐thirds of our national interest. Human rights
and democracy are the third element, but they are not easily integrated with the
others. Other countries and cultures often interpret these values differently and
resent our intervention in their sovereign affairs as self‐righteous unilateralism.
As Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohamed complained of the Clinton
administration: “No one conferred this right on this crusading President.” Or in
the words of a Republican critic (now a high official in the Pentagon): “America
is genuinely puzzled by the idea that American assertiveness in the name of
universal principles could sometimes be seen by others as a form of American
unilateralism.” Yet this charge is levied by many countries, including some of our
friends. “Wilsonian Presidents drive them crazy—and …