I don’t think it is safe to assume that “a reasonably benign post-American balance of power is latent in the structure of international life and will emerge if we will just get out of the way.” But I also don’t think that the status quo is reasonably benign. This is even more true if you think about that status quo that existed the day that President Obama was inaugurated.
It’s true that America shouldn’t hand its influence over to “the Central Powers: Russia, China and Iran.” But we shouldn’t think in such binary terms. The president has wisely refused to conduct U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East as though we are allied with the Sunnis in their regional conflict with the Shiites. We may get along better with Sunni-dominated countries like Turkey, Jordan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia than we do with Shiite-dominated countries like Iran and Iraq, but we don’t have any national interest in their sectarian differences.
In weighing “the risks as Obama tries to reposition the United States into an “offshore balancer” rather than a power that fights expeditionary wars,” we shouldn’t forget that we have allies in the Far East (e.g., Japan and South Korea), the British Commonwealth, and in Europe who have enormous economies and mostly shared values. We are not alone, and we do not have to shoulder the burden of maintaining an international order alone. We don’t have to balance against any nefarious and malign influence from Russia and China alone.
And we are not confronting Iran alone. China and Russia are key members of the negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program. We don’t have to operate like we are still in a Cold War setting.
We need to spread some of the responsibility for the maintenance of international order to other nations that have internalized what we set out to do with the United Nations in the first place. At this point, many nations are more respectful of human rights, international law, and the need for collective security than we are. They may be commercial competitors, but they are mainly commercial partners, and they ought to be ready to step up their investments in security so that we can take a step back.
In this way, we won’t create a void to be filled by the Russians and Chinese, but we will broaden the coalition that takes responsibility for a stable order that promotes commerce, human rights, and conflict resolution. We don’t have to see this as a zero-sum game, and we don’t have to see every commercial advance for Russia and China as a net loss for us. We don’t want our leadership to be replaced by theirs, but we also don’t have to see them as strictly adversaries. It’s important that they also are committed to a stable international order.
