The Great Transformation and the Failure of Illiberal Hegemony - Liberal Leviathan: The Origins, Crisis, and Transformation of the American World Order - page 189

above its rules and institutions. The United States would use its unrivaled power to enforce
order and seek out security threats. Other states would be obliged to follow. This new secur-
ity system would also be the capstone of the wider world order. The character of America's
relations with states in other domains—economic, social, political—would hinge on whether
these states were “with us or against us.” The result would be a unified global system, but
one that was effectively ruled from the center and from the top.
The Bush vision combines post-Westphalian unipolar thinking and conservative national
policy ideas where American power is used directly to attack the new threats. But this
strategy is built on a contradiction that leads to free riding or resistance by other states—or
both. Its greatest attraction is that it provides an easy unilateral solution to security threats.
But it is ultimately an unwelcome and unsustainable vision of order. To the outside world,
this vision of order looks like modern-day empire. It is a vision of order that cannot gather
the consent of other peoples and governments. It does not have the making of a legitimate
system of global rule. But even if the Bush administration's unipolar security order had been
seen as legitimate by other states, it still is not clear the United States could afford to lead
such a system into the future. The hidden costs of the Bush-era transformational agenda are
potentially unlimited. Yet, the logic of rule proposed by Bush certainly is not legitimate. It
was not a system of rule that received the consent of other peoples and governments, even
among allies and friends. So the costs of perpetuating American dominance would be even
higher—costs that are well beyond anything that even a preeminent America can afford.
The multiplicity of shifts in the international system would play havoc with any American
grand strategy. A traditional realist strategy of reconstructing a Westphalian balance-of-
power order that reaffirms state sovereignty is not an easy proposition, particularly given the
continuing unipolar distribution of power and the new security threats. In some sense, there
is no going back. A global-governance grand strategy of turning questions about the use of
force over to the United Nations or other global groupings is consistent with the search for
legitimacy and the transformed character of sovereignty—indeed, liberals have championed
this rethinking of sovereign norms—but this strategy has great difficulty in dealing with uni-
polar American power. The United States has the capacity to dominate but not the legitimacy
to rule. In other words, it has power but not authority. It would appear we need to move bey-
ond balance of power and empire toward a new international order that combines American
unipolar power with widely agreed-upon rules and institutions.
1 Jack F. Matlock, Jr., Reagan and Gorbachev: How the Cold War Ended (New York: Random House, 2004),
316 2 Robert Hutchings, American Diplomacy and the End of the Cold War: An Insider's Account of U.S. Policy in
Europe, 1989-1992 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 343.