The Great Transformation and the Failure of Illiberal Hegemony - Liberal Leviathan: The Origins, Crisis, and Transformation of the American World Order - page 165

fight foreign wars, increase domestic spending, and go into debt without fearing the pain that
other states would experience. Because of its dominance, the United States did not have to
raise interest rates to defend its currency, taking pressure off chronic trade imbalances. Dur-
ing the 1960s, French President Charles de Gaulle understood this hidden aspect of Amer-
ican hegemony and complained bitterly. 27 In the post-Cold War era, it was Asian coun-
tries—China and Japan—and OPEC countries that were the primary holders of American
debt rather than Europe, although the advantages for Washington remained. These advant-
ages again came into play during the George W. Bush administration, when the United States
was able to launch a costly war in Iraq while running budget deficits and cutting taxes—a
foreign policy made possible by the United States' ability to sell its debt to foreign countries
such as China and Japan.
In addition to its economic dominance, the United States was also the only global military
power—that is, the only country capable of projecting military power to all corners of the
world. At the end of the 1990s, the United States was responsible for 36 percent of total world
military spending. After the September 11 terrorist attacks, Washington boosted its defense
expenditures and increased its share to more than 40 percent of the world total—or roughly
equal to the expenditures of the next fourteen countries. By 2005, the United States was re-
sponsible for half of global military spending. At the same time, it retained most of its Cold
War-era alliance partnerships and far-flung bases in Europe and Asia. As table 6-1 indicates,
the United States began the postwar era with twenty-one alliance partners and this number
grew over the decades, increasing rather than contracting after the Cold War. The expansion
of NATO membership into Eastern Europe and the former Soviet sphere drove this growth.
The result is a global alliance system that has steadily expanded worldwide, increasingly in
contrast to the limited alliances of the nondemocratic great powers.
These American power advantages were ones it brought forward from the Cold War era.
What was new in the 1990s was that the United States had no serious great-power chal-
lengers. But even if there were no great powers able to balance against it, the purpose of
balancing was also unclear. Russia and China's nuclear deterrence capabilities meant that
these countries did not fear superpower aggression in any traditional sense. Likewise, the oth-
er great powers—Germany, France, Britain, and Japan—were also democracies with well-
established cooperative security ties to the United States. These democratic great powers
formed a security community—that is, a zone of peace in which the use of force was unthink-
able. Rival ideologies and great-power challengers were nowhere to be found. 28
So the twentieth century ended with world politics exhibiting a deeply anomalous char-
acter—the United States had emerged as a unipolar power situated at the center of a stable
and expanding liberal international order. The other traditional great powers had neither the
ability nor the desire to directly challenge—let alone overturn—this unipolar order. This or-
der was built on the realities implicit in the international distribution of material capabilities.