Dilemmas and Pathways of Liberal International Order - Liberal Leviathan: The Origins, Crisis, and Transformation of the American World Order - page 222

The last decade has shown that American power can be more or less welcome within the
global system. States can solicit American leadership and defer to its authority as the most
powerful state in the system, or they can resist it and seek alternative partners and systems of
order. The United States has an incentive to stay—to the extent that it can—within the center
of the international order. It would prefer to operate in a system in which other states are will-
ing partners. And it would like to build or reinforce the rules and institutions of order in such
a way as to ensure that the order persists even as American power declines. All these consid-
erations relate to the preservation and management of American power assets—and they all
lead the United States to favor an open, rule-based order.
As noted in 3, this perspective begins by looking at the choices that dominant states face
when they are in a position to shape the fundamental character of the international order. A
state that wins a war or through some other turn of events finds itself in a dominant global
position faces a choice: it can use its power to bargain and coerce other states in struggles
over the distribution of gains or, knowing that its power position will someday decline and
that there are costs to enforcing its way within the order, it can move toward a more rule-
based, institutionalized order in exchange for the acquiescence and compliant participation
of weaker states. In seeking a more rule-based order, the leading state is agreeing to engage
in strategic restraint. It is acknowledging that there will be limits on the way in which it can
exercise its power. Such an order, in effect, has constitutional characteristics. Limits are set
on what a state within the order can do with its power advantages. Just as in constitutional
polities, the implications of winning is reduced. Weaker states realize that the implications of
their inferior position are limited and perhaps temporary—to operate within the order despite
their disadvantages is not to risk everything nor will it give the dominant state a permanent
advantage. Both the powerful and the weak states agree to operate within the same order des-
pite radical asymmetries in the distribution of power. 57
A multilateral system of rules and institutions becomes the outcome of bargaining between
leading and weaker states over the character of international order. In agreeing to relations
organized around multilateral rules and institutions, the dominant state reduces its enforce-
ment costs and succeeds in establishing an order where weaker states will participate will-
ingly rather than resist or balance against the leading power. 58 It accepts some restrictions
on how it can use its power. The rules and institutions that are create serve as an investment
in the longer-run preservation of its power advantages. Weaker states agree to the order's
rules and institutions, and in return they are assured that the worst excesses of the leading
state—manifest as arbitrary and indiscriminate abuses of state power—will be avoided, and
they gain institutional opportunities to work with and help influence the leading state. 59
As noted in chapter 6 , the Bush administration attempted to extract the United States from
parts of this postwar system of restraints and commitments—and costs were incurred. As a
result, it paid a price in lost authority and diminished cooperation. The architects of Amer-