The Great Transformation and the Failure of Illiberal Hegemony - Liberal Leviathan: The Origins, Crisis, and Transformation of the American World Order - page 194

cannot be secure. President Woodrow Wilson wanted to make the world safe for democracy. Bush extends and re-
verses this, arguing that only in a world of democracies can the United States be safe.” See “Remaking of a Unipolar
World,” 13.
75 Condoleezza Rice, “Transformational Diplomacy,” speech at Georgetown University, 18 January 2006.
76 President George W. Bush, “You Are Either with Us or against Us,” CNN.com, 6 November 2001.
77 Quoted in Shapiro, Containment , 27.
78 Ian Shapiro argues, “[t]he Bush Doctrine in effect declares null and void the international law on neutrality that
stretches back to the nineteenth century and was codified in the Hague Convention of 1907—to which the United
States is a signature.” Shapiro, Containment , 27.
79 For a survey of these ideas and their rise within the American foreign policy establishment, see Peter J. Spiro,
“The New Sovereigntists: American Exceptionalism and Its False Prophets,” Foreign Affairs 76, no. 6 (November/
December 2000), 9-15. For a spirited defense of the doctrine of sovereignty and of American unilateralism, see
Jeremy A. Rabkin, Law without Nations? Why Constitutional Government Requires Sovereign States (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2005).
80 See Jonathan Monten, “Primacy and Grand Strategic Beliefs in U.S. Unilateralism,” Global Governance 13,
no. 1 (January-March 2007), 119-38.
81 Charles Krauthammer, “The New Unilateralism,” Washington Post , 8 June 2001, A29.
82 John Bolton, “Should We Take Global Governance Seriously?” Chicago Journal of International Law 1, no. 2
(2000), 205-22.
83 This view is expressed, for example, by the neoconservative pundit Max Boot, who argued that the growth of
American power in the 1990s inevitably reduced its incentives to operate in a multilateral order. “Any nation with
so much power always will be tempted to go it alone. Power breeds unilateralism. It is as simple as that.” Max Boot,
“Doctrine of the 'Big Enchilada,'” Washington Post , 14 October 2002, A29.
84 Condoleeza Rice, “Rethinking the National Interest: American Realism for a New World,” Foreign Affairs
(July/August 2008), 2-26.
85 President George W. Bush, State of the Union address, 20 January 2004.
86 John Bolton, “'Legitimacy' in International Affairs: The American Perspective in Theory and Operation,” re-
marks before the Federalist Society, Washington, DC, 13 November 2003.
87 Walter Russell Mead describes this foreign policy orientation as Jacksonian. See Mead's Special Providence:
American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World (New York: Knopf, 2001). This Jacksonian or
conservative-nationalist orientation should be distinguished from a classical realist orientation, which can actually
be quite internationalist, as manifest in the Nixon-Kissinger policy of détente, for example.
88 As many observers note, even before the end of its term, the Bush administration began to retreat from its
strong version of this unipolar grand strategy.
89 The leading figures in the Bush administration, as James Mann notes, shared an “extraordinary optimistic as-
sessment of American capabilities. . . . They had been arguing for thirty years that America was not in decline and
that it had vastly more power in reserve for international affairs than others believed.” Mann, Rise of the Vulcans ,
362-63.
90 On the Bush administration's misreading of power realities, see Joseph Nye, The Paradox of American Power:
Why the World's Only Superpower Can't Go It Alone (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); and Michael Mann,
Incoherent Empire (London: Verso, 2003).
91 See Nye, Paradox of American Power .
92 The key policy tool for states confronting a unipolar and unilateral America is to withhold cooperation in day-
to-day relations with the United States. The United States may be a unipolar military power, but economic and polit-
ical power are more evenly distributed across the globe. The major states many not have much leverage in directly
restraining American military policy, but they can make the United States pay a price in other areas.