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Thucydidesandhegemony:AthensandtheUnited States
RichardNedLebowandRobertKelly
ReviewofInternationalStudies/Volume27/Issue04/October2001,pp593609 DOI:10.1017/S0260210501005939,Publishedonline:26November2001

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Review of International Studies (2001), 27, 593609 Copyright British International Studies Association

Thucydides and hegemony: Athens and the United States

R I C H A R D N E D L E B O W A N D RO B E RT K E L LY

Abstract. Fifth century Greeks distinguished between hegemonia (legitimated leadership) and arkhe (control). Thucydides employed this distinction to track the changing nature of the Athenian Empire during the Peloponnesian War, and the ways in which a diminishing concern for balancing self-interest against justice corroded Athenian authority, made survival of the empire increasingly problematic and encouraged the disastrous expedition to Sicily. The Melian Dialogueoften cited by realists to justify a power-based approach to foreign policyis intended to symbolize this decay. Building on our analysis of Thucydides, we examine the British, Soviet and American experiences with hegemony. A striking feature of the contemporary American situation is the extent to which American leaders claim hegemonia but deny any interest in arkhe. Rightly or wrongly, much of the rest of the world has the reverse perception. This seeming contradiction has important implications for US foreign policy and world politics more generally. The success or failure of the American peoples foreign policy remains the single greatest factor shaping our own history and the future of the world. Madeleine K. Albright1

Political scientists frequently turned to Thucydides during the Cold War for analytical insights into the causes and structure of that conict. The post-Cold War era raises a different set of problems, and Thucydides is once again relevant to the formulation of appropriate responses. His analysis of Athens provides a cautionary tale for the United States and a useful conceptual framework for thinking about the nature of hegemony in the post-Cold War world. We contend that Thucydides has a complex and nuanced understanding of political authority that distinguishes between hegemonia (legitimated leadership) and arkhe (control) and emphasizes ideology as much as it does material capability. His narrative tracks the changing basis of Athenian hegemony during the Peloponnesian War, and the ways in which a diminishing concern for balancing self-interest against justice corroded Athenian authority, made survival of the empire increasingly problematic and encouraged the disastrous expedition to Sicily. The Melian Dialogue often cited by realists to justify a power-based approach to foreign policyis intended to symbolize this decay. Thucydides understands Athenian behaviour at Melos as pathological, and the crude exercise of power it represents as something to be shunned, not emulated. Building on our analysis of Thucydides, we examine the British, Soviet and American experiences with hegemony, and the possible roles of the United States in
1

Madeleine K. Albright, The Testing of American Foreign Policy, Foreign Affairs, 77:6 (1998), p. 64.

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the post-Cold War era. All three states confronted a series of choices similar to those of Athens. A striking feature of the contemporary American situation is the extent to which American leaders claim hegemonia but deny any interest in arkhe. Rightly or wrongly, much of the rest of the world has the reverse perception. This seeming contradiction has important implications for US foreign policy and world politics more generally. Our approach to Thucydides is holistic. It starts from the premise that a principal goal of his narrative is to describe the political pathology that aficted Athens, and Greece, more generally, as a result of the Peloponnesian War. Thucydides adopted a medical model for his history, and like a physician, tried to observe and describe the etiology of a diseasefrom the appearance of its rst symptoms in Epidamnus to its subsequent development and resulting crisis for the patient.2 For Thucydides, the healthy Athens was the school of Hellas under Pericles, and illness manifested itself in a series of irruptions and crises culminating in the Melian Dialogue and Sicilian expedition.3 The meaning of these events can only be understood with reference to the progression of the disease. Like a good physician, Thucydides is also concerned with the suffering of his patient. He graphically documents the barbarism associated with the war and the civil upheavals it provoked. He compels the reader to confront these horrors where contemporary, theoretical analyses of conicts do not. Thucydides puts us on the scene with leaders and assemblies struggling to make decisions and with people who become the victims of sieges and massacres. This is the work of a man deeply moved by the calamity that befell Greece and who wanted his readers to appreciate the human cost of that tragedy.4

Hegemony There are striking differences between ancient Greek and modern English conceptions of hegemony. Thuycdides distinguished between hegemonia and arkhe, both of which are most frequently translated as hegemony. For fth and fourth century Greeks, hegemonia was associated with timethe gift of honour.5 Time was bestowed informally by free consent of the Greek community as reward for achievements, and retained by consent, not by force. Sparta and Athens were so honoured because of their contributions during the Persian Wars. Athens also earned time because her intellectual and artistic accomplishments made her the school of Hellas. Arkhe connoted something akin to our notion of political control, and
2

3 4

Charles Cochrane, Thucydides and the Science of History (London: Oxford University Press, 1929), ch. 3. Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, 2.40. See especially Thucydides famous remarks at 3.8285 on the general deterioration of character throughout the Greek world during the war. This point is also made by Clifford Orwin, The Humanity of Thucydides (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 9, and Robert Connor, Thucydides (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), p. 246. Russell Meiggs, The Athenian Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972); Shalom Perlman, Hegemony and Arkhe in Greece: Fourth-Century Views, in Richard Ned Lebow and Barry Strauss (eds.), Hegemonic Rivalry: From Thucydides to the Nuclear Age (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1991), pp. 26988.

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initially applied to authority within a city-state and only later to rule or inuence over other city-states. Fifth century Greeks spoke of arkhe tes thalattesdominion over the seaand arkhe tes gesdominion on the landto refer to Athens and Sparta, the two great, Greek arhkai of the period. Hegemonia began to be associated with empire in Roman times, where it was translated as imperium. We will use the term hegemon throughout to refer to political control in the sense of arkhe. Hegemons are by denition powerful states, but successful hegemonia is based on more than material capabilities. It requires acquiescence by allies or subject states, and this in turn rests on some combination of legitimacy and self-interest. Rule based on sheer force, or the threat of force, is despotism, like the Mongol Empire, the Nazi occupation of Europe or the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe by the 1980s. When a despots power declines or its leaders or their local representatives lose their will to crush any opposition, its demise becomes imminent. A hegemon that makes loyal subjects out of conquered and foreign peoplesthe Romans are the best examplecan endure long after its strictly material power has waned.6 Hegemony requires a justication that is acceptable to a signicant proportion of those who are ruled. Some empires evoked religious myths, as did the Egyptians and Mayans, while others, notably the Chinese and British, based their rule on their material and cultural achievementsand the time, or its equivalent, that this conferred. Allies and subjects must see hegemony as conducive to their national, class or personal interests. Rome provided guarantees of internal and external security, generally supported the worship of local gods and offered citizenship and access to its markets to assuage those whom they had subdued by force. The Romans were so successful in legitimizing their rule that they could afford to rely on a relatively small military force, most of it deployed on the periphery of the empire, facing the Parthians and Germanic tribes. During the rst century of the common era, Rome ruled over a territory that stretched from Britain to Persia with an average of twenty-nine legions, each composed of approximately 6,000 men.7 The British accomplished a similar feat. At the height of their empire, at the end of the nineteenth century, they maintained colonies on six continents with an army of 250,000 men supplemented by local forces, mostly Indian.8 Legitimacy requires more than myth. To secure and maintain the voluntary compliance of allies or subjects, hegemons need to behave in a manner consistent with their claims and professed values. They must forego short-term gains that threaten the longer-term stability and survival of their alliance or empire. All hegemons periodically succumb to the temptation to exploit their privileged status for selsh ends, and their leaders are not infrequently torn between the opportunities
6

Michael Doyle, Empires (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), pp. 3745, and Barry S. Strauss, The Art of Alliance and the Peloponnesian War, in Charles D. Hamilton and Peter Krentz (eds.), Polis and Polemos: Essays on Politics, War and History in Ancient Greece in Honor of Donald Kagan (Claremont, CA: Regina Books, 1997), pp. 12740. Graham Webster, The Roman Imperial Army of the First and Second Centuries AD (London: Black, 1969); Adrian Keith Goldsworthy, The Roman Army at War, 100 BCAD 200 (London: Oxford Unversity Press, 1995); Edward N. Luttwak, The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire: From the First Century AD to the Third (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), pp. 1316. This gure is from 1899, on the eve of the Boer War. In 1880, the British managed with 186,000 men, another 65,000 troops in India and much smaller forces elsewhere. Corelli Barnett, Britain and Her Army, 15091970 (New York: W. W. Morrow, 1970), pp. 272349; Byron Farwell, Mr. Kiplings Army (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981), passim.

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of the moment and the more important, but usually less pressing, interest of maintaining legitimacy. Thucydides understood this political truth, and his narrative indicates that a principal cause of Athens decline and subsequent defeat was its failure to exercise self-restraint in relations with allies.

Athens Thuycdides history describes the decline of Athenian hegemonia into a failed arkhe. On the eve of the Peloponnesian War, Athens, led by Pericles, managed to combine many of the benets of oligarchy and democracy. As rst citizen, Pericles made the most important domestic and foreign policy decisions, but his policies had to be approved by the assembly. The creative tension between the rational vision of a farseeing leader and the more emotional and immediate concerns of the demos produced a remarkable balance in domestic and foreign policy. Athenian behaviour toward allies and adversaries alike was characterized by energy and restraint, and the pursuit of self-interest tempered by respect for the norms and conventions that facilitated successful pursuit of that interest. Pericles successors lost their citys hegemonia and failed to nd a substitute basis for their empires legitimacy. They alienated most of their allies, and relied increasingly on coercion to maintain arkhe. The Melian Dialogue, which gives full expression to the doctrine of might makes right is celebrated by Robert Gilpin and others as a timeless expression of political realism.9 For Thucydides, it represents a crude and dangerous strategy for maintaining hegemony and empire. He clearly contrasts the expanding use of force between early Periclean Athens and the later post-Periclean leadership. Once their empire was based principally on coercion, Athenians had to worry that allies would rebel if they were perceived as weak or irresolute. This fear encouraged an expansionist foreign policy as a means of demonstrating resolve and power, and with it, the kind of risk-taking that threatened serious military losses. The Sicilian expedition, the ultimate expression of this strategy, set in motion the chain of events that led to the collapse of the empire and the defeat of Athens. The Athenians made their fears self-fullling. Athens empire was based on its leadership of the Delian League. Founded in 478 after the battles of Platea and Mycale, the League was an alliance of Greek citystates and islands formed to expel Persia from Hellas and guard against a renewed invasion. Because of her time Athens was asked to assume leadership of the League after Sparta from the anti-Persian coalition. Athens restructured the alliance, now known as the Delian League, because its members periodically convened on the island of Delos and established their treasury there. By the early 460s, when the Athenian general Cimon led the League to a climactic victory over the Persians in Pamphylia, it comprised almost two hundred states in the Aegean Sea and a broad coastal strip of present-day Turkey. After the Persian threat receded, many members
9

Everything that the new realists nd intriguing in the interaction of international economics and politics can be found in the History of the Peloponnesian War, and Robert Gilpin, The Richness of the Tradition of Political Realism, in Robert Keohane (ed.), Neorealism and Its Critics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), p. 308.

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elected to pay a cash equivalent to the ships and crews they were otherwise committed to furnish the League. Athens used these funds to beautify its city and augment the size and quality of its navy. The growing gulf in military capability between Athens and other members of the League put Athens in a position to compel tribute from reluctant allies. By 431, the year the Peloponnesian War broke out, only Lesbos and Chios continued to supply ships and remained allies rather than subjects. Athenian leadership was initially based on hegemonia.10 The allies accepted Athens military leadership because of their admiration for the citys courage and quality of its leadership. Athenians had displayed notable heroism at Marathon in 490, where their army had turned back the rst Persian invasion of Greece. Ten years later, during the second Persian invasion, they evacuated their city rather than submit to foreign rule. Led by Themistocles, the Athenian navy and its allies defeated the Persian eet at Salamis and compelled Xerxes to give up his dream of conquering Hellas. The rst Athenian strategos of the Delian League was Aristides, known to the allies as the Just. If Persia represented despotism and slavery to most Greeks, the Athens of 480 stood for self-government and freedom. The years between Salamis and the Peloponnesian War witnessed the gradual transformation of the Delian League into the Athenian empire. Athens imposed its silver coinage on most of its allies, intervened in their domestic affairs to support democratic factions and used its superior military force to extract tribute from increasingly restive allies. Before 467, Athens crushed a rst revolt on the island of Naxos, and between 465 and 462, it besieged and defeated Thasos, compelling it to remain an ally and pay tribute. In 440, Athens faced and overcame a more serious threat from the larger island of Samos. In the aftermath of these uprisings, Athenians resorted to increasingly harsh measures to safeguard their empire; they levied large nes against offending allies, exiled opponents, and occasionally resettled their land with Athenian citizens or lot-holders who served as local garrisons. By 430, Pericles acknowledged that the Athenian empire had tyrannical aspects, but it still retained a high degree of popular support among subject governments and peoples.11 There were few revolts in the early stages of the Peloponnesian War; they became more frequent after Brasidas successes in Chalcidice and more so after Athens defeat in Sicily. Many allies nevertheless remained loyal throughout the war. Allied support for Athens was attributable in part to the time Athens had gained in the long struggle against Persia; this respect endured for some time after the Persian threat receded. The cultural vitality of Athens was widely respected throughout the Greek world, particularly among Ionians, and made many people proud to be allies. Simultaneously, Athens pursued her own national interest within the empire. Athenian support was often decisive for democratic factions, who remained loyal to Athens if for no other reason than to keep oligarchs from returning to power. Most allies, regardless of their form of government, greatly valued access to the large and expanding Athenian market, and island and trading statesmost of the alliancebeneted from Athenian suppression of piracy. Many
10

11

See Gregory Crane, Thucydides and the Ancient Simplicity: the Limits of Political Realism (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998), ch. 3 for a discussion. Thucydides, 2.63.

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poor men found employment as rowers in the Athenian eet, and the lower classes as a whole proted from the jobs created through expanded trade and commerce. At least through Pericles generalship, Athens made a conscious effort to encourage loyalty and publicize the manifold advantages alliance conferred. In their speech to the Spartan assembly in 432, the Athenian envoys stress allied access to impartial courts and note that their judgments often beneted allies at the expense of citizens.12 Athens had reason to be proud of its popular courts, which after the reforms of 462 handled a greater volume of cases and a wider variety of suits and prosecutions in a more sophisticated and fairer way than any other contemporary justice system. The value of access to Athenian markets is best illustrated by the Megarian Decree, which barred this small, landlocked polis from access to any market in Attica or elsewhere in the alliance. The consequences for Megara were catastrophic, and the possible use of economic sanctions so frightening to other trading states, that the Peloponnesians attempted to mobilize support for their cause by making revocation of the Decree one of the demands for continued peace with Athens.13 In the years before the Peloponnesian War, Athenians were justly proud of their empire, although by no means blind to the ways in which it had become a tyranny for many allies.14 From the perspective of the allies, the empire was a mixed blessing, and the balance sheet varied from ally to ally. There was enough support among allies, or at least factions within them, to lend substance to the Athenian claims that their empire was mutually benecial. These benets and the general feeling that Athens had earned its empire through service in the cause of Hellas helped to make inferior political status tolerable to many states and peoples. The Peloponnesian War would erode this legitimacy. Throughout the fth century, Athens was blessed with a string of exceptional leaders from Themistocles down to Pericles. After Pericles death from plague in 429, Thuycdides observes with undisguised bitterness that demagogues, unable or unwilling to lead the demos as Pericles had, were led by it, and pandered to its baser instincts in their efforts to gain and maintain power.15 They squandered the Hellenist ideology that had earned Athens its empire and legitimized it to many allies.16 Cleon and Alcibiades are the paradigmatic examples of such leaders; they receive considerable attention in his history. For Thucydides they were representative of a general decline that spawned such men as the demagogue Hyberbolus, the oligarchs Antiphon and Pisander, and the generals Nicias, Euphemus and Phrynichus, among others. The change in the nature of leadership entrained changes in military strategy and conception of hegemony, and Athens entered a new stage in its relations with its allies. In the 420s and 410s, Cleon and his successors spurned Pericles defensive strategy in favour of an offensive strategy aimed at imperial expansion. As Pericles had foreseen, this aroused consternation throughout Greece and appeared to lend

12 13

14 15 16

Ibid., 1.139.12 and 4; 1.140.3 and 1.144.2. On the importance of the Megarian Decree in the wars outbreak, see John Finleys introduction to Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War (New York: Modern Library, 1951), Introduction. Thucydides, 1.63 and 1.77. Ibid., 2.65. Crane, Thucydides and the Ancient Simplicity, p. 241.

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substance to Spartas claim that it was the liberator of Hellas.17 The offensive strategy required more resources and compelled Athens to demand more tribute from its allies, and this too provoked unrest and occasionally armed resistance. Allied restiveness, and open rebellion in a few cases, elicited a harsh response, and several cities were invested. These sieges required considerable resources, making it necessary to extract more tribute, triggering a downward spiral in Athenianallied relations that continued for the duration of the war. In 427, Mytilene, an important Thracian ally, revolted, and Athens laid siege to the city. Shortly after the revolt was crushed, Cleon, Thucydides paradigmatic example of a post-Periclean demagogue, made his rst signicant appearance. He debated with Diodotus, an otherwise unknown Athenian orator, over the appropriate punishment for the rebels.18 Cleon demanded extermination of the entire population of Mytilene to deter rebellion by other restless allies. The assembly, acting under the strain of war, was in no mood to act generously, and voted in favour of his proposal. Such an act would have been unthinkable ve years earlier under Pericles. Poliscide was at odds with the Athenian image of themselves and their empire, and cooler heads prevailed the next day. The assembly reconvened, and inspired by the words of Diodotus, rescinded its decision. Only the aristocratic leaders of the revoltseveral hundred people in totalwere executed. In 432, the Athenian envoys at Sparta had argued that the Athenian Empire was motivated by honour as well as fear and prot.19 Diodotus recognized that honour was rapidly giving way to fear and prot, and that the leadership of Cleon and other would-be demagogues had reinforced the parochial and short-term instincts of the demos. He argued the case for good treatment of the Mytileneans on the grounds of expediency, whereas Pericles presumably would have persuaded his fellow citizens to act out of concern for their empires honour and long-term health. Diodotus concluded his speech with the observation that orators must lie to the demos to serve its best interestsa stark admission of the decline of Athenian domestic politics. Equally telling was Diodotus attempt to exploit the cleavage between democrats, who generally sided with Athens, and oligarchs, who looked to Sparta.20 This ideological division became more acute during the war as civil strife pitted democrats against oligarchs. One catalyst for these violent disorders was the expectation by warring factions that they could obtain outside assistance from Athens or Sparta. Diodotus suggestion that support for democrats be made the new prop for Athenian legitimacy would never be fully exploited because a capricious and rapacious leadership, responding to the growing burdens of war, found it more convenient to emphasize purely short-term considerations. Distinctions between democrats and oligarchs became increasingly irrelevant in Athenian foreign policy. In 416, Athens occupied Melos and prepared to launch its fateful invasion of Sicily. The Melian Dialogue represents the intellectual descent of Athens into

17 18 19 20

Thucydides, 4.87. Ibid., 3.363.50. Ibid., 1.75. Daniel Garst, Thucydides and Neorealism, International Studies Quarterly, 33 (1989), pp. 327; Marc Cogan, The Human Thing: The Speeches and Principles of Thucydides History (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 5565 and 149154, support this ideological interpretation of Diodotus speech. Orwin, ibid. pp. 149, fn. 10 and 180, fn. 20, strongly rejects it.

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despotism. The Athenians argue solely from the basis of metropolitan self-interest; they refuse to allow any appeal to justice. Honour was no longer part of their calculus, only fear and prot. The Athenian spokesmen explicitly repudiate their traditional basis for hegemonyleadership of the struggle against the Persian invadersand invoke their superior powerthe strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they mustto justify their right to act as they wish.21 Fifteen years into the war, the Athenians surrendered all pretences, and radical honesty about their motives and intentions became a substitute for any form of legitimization.22 Thucydides wants readers to draw an analogy between Athens and Persia.23 The Athenians treat the Melians as the Persians attempted to treat them. The reversal of roles is made explicit by the parallel structure of the arguments in the relevant passages of Herodotus and Thucydides. The Persians in 480 and the Athenians in 416 make similar arguments about the self-interest of empires and treatment of their subject states. The Athenians of 480 and the Melians of 416 make similar arguments about freedom and liberation from tyranny. The Athenians even admit that they fear their allies and subjects more than they do their enemies.24 After a siege that was vigorously pressed, the Melians surrendered, and their men were put to death and the women and children enslaved. There is none of the soul searching and eventual clemency that characterized the Mytlinean debate. Thucydides matter-of-fact treatment of the executions communicates the uncontroversial nature of the punishment at this point in the war.25 The Athenians have become the Persians, long the symbol of rank despotism to the Greek world.26 Alcibiades is the end product of this moral decline. He rallied the Assembly to support the expedition to Sicily even though he recognized that a major diversion of resources from the principal theatre of war entailed enormous risk. The selfinterested capriciousness personied by Alcibiades was typical of Athenian politics by this point in the war. Few, if any, restraints constrained the pursuit of parochial interests, and the resulting intensication of factional conict led to an oligarchic coup and civil war in 409. Neither the democratic restoration in 407 nor Alcibiades generalship could prevent defeat and collapse of the empire in 403. Thucydides wrote no conclusion to his unnished history, but he clearly offered the fate of Athens as a homily.27 Empires based on force alone will not endure. Attempts by hegemons to impress allies and subordinate states with their military capability and resolve are fraught with risk. They antagonize these audiences, undercut whatever residual support hegemons may retain, and increase the likelihood of rebellion if and when the hegemons suffer setbacks. Raw force can impose its will at any given moment, but few hegemons have the military and economic

21 22 23 24 25

26 27

Thuycdides, 5.89. Crane, Thucydides and the Ancient Simplicity, develops this theme in ch. 10. Ibid., p. 241. Herodotus, 8.140144; Thucydides, 5.91. For an alternative view, cf. A. B. Bosworth, The Humanitarian Aspect of the Melian Dialogue, Journal of Hellenic Studies, 43 (1993), pp. 3044. Crane, Thucydides and the Ancient Simplicity, pp. 246 ff. This point is also made by Hayward R. Alker, The Dialectical Logic of Thucydides Melian Dialogue, American Political Science Review, 82 (September 1988), pp. 80620.

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capability to repress their subjects indenitely.28 Hegemons need to justify their position through some kind of ideological claim backed up by tangible rewards. Allies and subjects must believe that hegemony also benets them. Hegemonia is essential for sustainable arkhe. Allies who see themselves as the objects of exploitation will abandon their alliance when the opportunity arises. Hegemonic mistreatment also leaves memories that inhibit future attempts at empire building. In 378, when Athens tried to revive its empire in the form of the Second Athenian Confederacy, most of Greece resisted. States and peoples have long memories. Athenian exploitation of its allies created a legacy that endured for at least two generations. Thucydides expects readers to take away a more general lesson from his history: the need to try to reconcile ethics and interest. Realists conceive of the national interest in terms of power.29 Many regard international law and associated norms as distractionsor even inimical to state interestsunless they provide a rhetorical cover for policies actually intended to maximize power and inuence.30 Realists on the whole urge statesmen to resist popular pressures to act for ideological or humanitarian motives. Condoleezza Rice, the new US national security advisor, writes to be sure there is nothing wrong with doing something that benets all humanity, but that is, in a sense, a second-order effect. Foreign policy in a Republican administration will proceed from the rm ground of national interest, not from the interests of an illusory international community.31 Thucydides did not subscribe to such a narrow view of state interests. He distinguished between foreign policies that were shaped by enlightened conceptions of state interests and those driven by momentary constraints and opportunities and unduly inuenced by domestic politics. Pericles was so laudable because he made foreign policy reect his vision of what was best for Athens in the long run, and used his political stature and rhetorical skills to win popular support for these policies. The demagogues who followed him were tacticians who advocated foreign policies they expected to be popular with the demos or important factions. They were often more interested in advancing their personal interests than those of the polis. Pericles understood that the overriding interest of Athens was preservation of its empire, and this in turn required power and legitimacy. To maintain the latter, Athens had to act in accord with the principles and values that had won it

28

29

30

31

Spartas earlier hegemony in the Greece is a valuable counter-example to Athens eventual reliance on military force. Crane, Thucydides and the Ancient Simplicity, p. 188, notes how the Spartans became pre-eminent in Greece when they give up hopes for domination and seek instead hegemony. Spartan timeits restraint and respect for its partnersundergirded the Peloponnesian League. When Sparta jettisons this time for outright arkhe in the fourth century, as Athens did in the fth century, it too faces the problems of restive, rebellious allies and the increasing reliance on force. Although coercion in the form of Spartan governors and garrisons around the Aegean maintained control for several decades, Sparta too suffered eventual defeat at the hands of a disgruntled challengerThebes in 371. The classic statement is Hans J. Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1948), ch.1. Cf. Edward Hallet Carr, The Twenty Years Crisis, 19191939: An Introduction to the Study of International Relations, 2nd edn. (New York: Harper & Row, 1946), ch. 5. Promoting the National Interest, Foreign Affairs, 79:1 (January/February 2000), pp. 47, 62. On the neorealist bent of the new Bush team, cf. Jacob Heilbrunn, The Unrealistic Realism of Bushs Foreign Policy TutorsTeam W, The New Republic, 27 September 1999.

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hegemonia. Viewed in this light, the Melian Dialogue represents a pathological departure from rational self-interest.32 Thucydides believed that interest and justice are inextricably connected and mutually constitutive. Supercially they appear to be in conict; almost every debate in the history pits considerations of interest against justice. But Thucydides was interested in the underlying and often hidden nature of things. And at this level, his history shows that interests cannot be intelligently considered, formulated or pursued outside a community (homonoia) and the identities it constructs. As the Peloponnesian War progresses, the terms of discourse that functioned at the outset in intelligible ways shift and change and the language and community constituted by it deteriorate into incoherence.33 Athenians can no longer use the traditional language of justication for their foreign policy. They struggle to nd an alternative and nally resort to assertions of pure self-interest backed by military clout. Such a language is not rooted in ideas, is unstable and deprives its speakers of their culture and identities. By using it, Athenians destroy the distinctions among friend, colony, ally, neutral and enemy, and make the world their enemy through a policy of limitless expansion. Athenians have in effect abandoned the culture through which self-interest can intelligently be dened, expressed and bounded. As language deteriorates, so does behaviour. At Melos, Athenians not only talk in an objectionable way, they slaughter people. By the time of the Sicilian debate, Athenians can no longer speak and act coherently, and this failure is the underlying reasons for their empires decline. Thucydides history indicates that while there is often tension between interest and justice, they are also two sides of the same coin. They validate and give meaning to one another.34 Thucydides recognized that there were situations in which the demands of justice and power were contradictory. Athens conquest of Aegina is a case in point. Because of its strategic location and the head of the Saronic Gulf, an independent Aegina with a powerful navy would have posed an intolerable threat to Athenian commerce and imperial expansion. More generally, the pursuit of power had to be subordinated to the demands of justice. Hegemonia was an important source of power, and states maintained their power by living up to the principles and commitments from which it derived. Situations in which principles and self-interest came into conict were critical in this regard. Post-Periclean Athens consistently chose power over principle and by doing so alienated allies and third parties, lost hegemonia and weakened its power base. The implicit counterfactual in Thucydides history is that Pericles, if he had lived, would have behaved differently. He envisaged Athens as a satised power and would have waged a standofsh and defensive war designed to frustrate Sparta and discredit its war party, and some special cases aside (for example, Megara and Potideaea), would have treated allies and third parties
32

33 34

Crane, Thucydides and the Ancient Simplicity, p. 237, notes that most analyses of the dialogue avoid, or are simply unaware of, its wider cultural setting. We agree with Crane that to a fth century Greek, the Melian Dialogue was a destructive portrayal of a hegemon gone bad. For a Greek inter-polis system with no previous experience of outright arkhewhether Persian, Athenian or Spartan Athens words at Melos are a striking refutation of the time that originally earned Athens its hegemonia. Contemporary realists concerned with acultural, universal laws easily overlook situation of the Melian Dialogue in the Greek context. Hence they reliably misread its purposes. Thucydides, 3.82. James Boyd White, When Words Lose Their Meaning: Constitutions and Reconstitutions of Language, Character, and Community (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1984); Daniel Garst, pp. 6, 16.

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cautiously and respectfully. For Thucydides and Pericles, there was little contradiction between justice and the national interest. The latter depended upon the former.35

Twentieth century hegemons Thucydides central insight about hegemony is as much psychological as it is material. It requires a concept of legitimacy that makes subordinate status acceptable to member states, their elites and peoples. Successful hegemons also build and maintain loyalty by providing tangible rewards to dependent states, or at least to politically signicant classes within them. These requirements are sometimes at odds with metropolitan interests and domestic political imperatives, compelling hegemonic leaders to make or nesse difcult trade-offs. For hegemons to survive in the longer term, their leaders must be politically skilful and committed to a conception of metropolitan interests that values preservation of hegemony above short-term gains to be made by exploiting subjects or allies. Hegemony requires the prudent exercise of power. The United States, Great Britain and the Soviet Union were arkai at the end of World War II. They also possessed hegemonia to varying degrees. Like Athens, their role as liberators was widely acknowledged, although this sentiment was far from universal, especially in the case of the Soviet Union. They were admired by different constituencies for their political and economic systems, and their advocates sought to introduce these systems in their own countries. Only the United States remains an arkhe in the post-Cold War world, and its hegemonia is a matter of controversy. Britain and the Soviet Union illustrate two different routes by which arkhe can be lost. For Britain, it was a loss of hegemonia and capabilities. The British began to look for ways of reducing the cost of empire and of defending it at the beginning of the twentieth century.36 After World War II, London granted independence to India, and by the 1960s, had withdrawn from all of its possessions and commitments east of Suez. Some of Britains former colonies sought independence, but others wished to remain part of the empire (for example, Gibraltar, the Falklands), and some former colonies (such as Singapore) lobbied intensively for London to retain its military ties and defence commitments.37 The Soviet Union also experienced a decline in capabilities, but its most precipitous decline came after the breakup of its empire. The principal reason for
35 36

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Richard Mansbach, personal communication to the authors. Wm. Roger Louis, Imperialism at Bay: The United States and the Decolonization of the British Empire, 19411945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978.); Aaron L. Friedberg, The Weary Titan: Britain and the Experience of Relative Decline, 18951905 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988); Charles A. Kupchan, The Vulnerability of Empire (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994). Jeffrey Pickering, Britains Withdrawal from East of Suez: The Politics of Retrenchment (New York: St. Martins Press, 1998); Michael J. Cohen and Martin Kolinsky (eds.), Demise of the British Empire in the Middle East: Britains Response to Nationalist Movements, 194355 (London and Portland: Frank Cass, 1998). For an argument that British rule, at least in India, was always based more on coercion than hegemonia, see Guha Ranajit, History and Power in Colonial India (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).

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the collapse of the Soviet empire was the prior Soviet loss of hegemonia made more acute by a failure to provide concrete benets to its East European allies. Arkhe was maintained by the threat or application of force and exercised through local authorities whose power depended entirely upon Moscows backing. When Gorbachev announced that he would not use force to retain the Soviet sphere of inuence in Eastern Europe, communist regimes in the region collapsed in short order. All the new regimes declared independence from the Warsaw Pact and demanded withdrawal of Soviet forces on their territory. The same situation prevailed internally and led to the breakup of the Soviet Union. Of the three postwar powers, the Soviet experience most closely resembles that of Athens. During the Cold War, the United States also showed some similarities with Athens. They shared an ideology of democracy and held themselves out as models for others to emulate. Athens saved Greece from the Persians and was the foremost democratic power in the Hellenic world. The United States helped to liberate Europe from fascism, and was the leader of the Western alliance. Stylized visions of their recent pasts provided both polities with the ideological foundations for their respective hegemonies, and initially helped to legitimize them in the eyes of allied elites and public opinion.38 Like Athens, the United States made good on some of its ideological claims. Perhaps its greatest foreign policy success was the occupation of Germany, Italy and Japan and the introduction of institutions that set all three countries on the road toward successful democratization and economic development. American aid was the catalyst for European economic recovery and sparked the phenomenal growth of the economies of the Pacic rim. In all these countries the United States retains considerable good will, especially among the postwar generation. Washington also pursued policies at odds with its ideology. Successive administrations supported a score of repressive, authoritarian regimes that were seen as valuable partners in the struggle against the Soviet Union and other communist adversaries. The United States waged a costly and unsuccessful war in Southeast Asia that alienated public opinion in most of the countrys closest allies. In more recent decades, American hegemonia has been further eroded by a score of poor international policies, including Reagans bellicose foreign policy rhetoric, excessive Congressional hostility toward the United Nations and foreign aid in general, the rejection of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, the landmine ban and the Kyoto accord, as well as the new unilateralism of the Bush administration symbolized by the reckless drive for national missile defence.39

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G. John Ikenberry, Liberal Hegemony and the Future of American Postwar Order, in T. V. Paul and John A. Hall (eds.), International Order and the Future of World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 12345, argues that this legitimacy is based on economic openness, reciprocity, and multilateral management, and this is why American leadership has outlasted the end of the Cold War. Michael Elliott, et al., A Target Too Good to Resist, Newsweek (Atlantic Edition), 31 January, 200, p. 20; John OSullivan, Chirac Therapy, National Review, 6 December 1999.

Thucydides and hegemony Washingtons choices

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The United States has reached a crossroads. Like Athens after the peace treaty with Persia, it can no longer base its hegemony on the existence of a serious military threat to itself and its allies. In this circumstance, Athens chose to impose tighter control over its allies. This option is not open to the United States, nor would it be palatable to the American people. Washington has generally chosen to wield inuence by informal and indirect means, and its ability to do so depends at least as much on ideological afnity, common interest and respect for American leadership as it does on material capabilities. For this reason, hegemonia may be even more important than it was during the Cold War. After the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet empire and state dissolved, Americans basked in the euphoria of what Charles Krauthammer called the unipolar moment.40 The United States wielded unprecedented power measured in terms of military capability, and the Pentagon quickly proposed a new grand strategy to preserve unipolarity.41 Thoughtful members of the academic security community disagreed about how long their nations extraordinary position could be maintained, with some arguing that it was transitory and even dangerous.42 A minority view holds that American pre-eminence can endure. William Wohlforth, who makes the most persuasive case for this position, contends that the United States is the rst state in modern history with decisive preponderance in all the underlying components of power: economic, military, technological, and geopolitical. He sees no reason why the United States should lose its relative advantages in any of these domains. Unipolarity, he maintains, benets other major powers by minimizing security competition among them, while providing incentives to minor powers to bandwagon.43 Joseph Nye, Jr. makes a parallel argument about the survival of American primacy that emphasizes the importance of soft power the leadership resources, cultural and ideological attraction, and norms and institutions that have become increasingly important means of inuencing international behaviour. Nye suggests that the United States has an even greater lead in soft power, and that the importance of soft power is increasing relative to more traditional forms of power that rely on coercion.44

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Charles Krauthammer, The Unipolar Moment, Foreign Affairs 70 (Winter 1990/1991), pp. 2333. Patrick Tyler, The Lone Superpower Plan: Ammunition for Critics, New York Times, 10 March 1992, p. A12. Christopher Layne, The Unipolar Illusion: Why New Great Powers Will Arise, International Security, 17 (Spring 1993), pp. 551; Douglas Lemke, Continuity of History: Power Transition Theory and the End of the Cold War, Journal of Peace Research, 34 (February 1996), pp. 20336; Michael Mastanduno, Preserving the Unipolar Moment: Realist Theories and US Grand Strategy after the Cold War, International Security, 21 (Spring 1997), pp. 4498; Charles A. Kupchan, After Pax Americana: Benign Power, Regional Integration, and the Sources of Stable Multipolarity, International Security, 23 (Fall 1998), pp. 4079; Samuel P. Huntington, The Lonely Superpower, Foreign Affairs, 78 (MarchApril 1999), pp. 3549. William C. Wohlforth, The Stability of a Unipolar World, International Security, 24 (Summer 1999), p. 541, cite at p. 7. See also Ikenberry, Liberal Hegemony and the Future of American Postwar Order; and Mastanduno, Preserving the Unipolar Moment. Joseph S. Nye, Jr., Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power (New York: Basic Books, 1990), pp. 173201.

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The debates about hard versus soft power and the duration and value of unipolarity address only one component of political inuence as envisaged by Thucydides. Such capabilities, whether hard or soft, are only the raw materials of arkhe. They must be used to the benet of allies and third parties in order to reconcile them to their subordinate status, and, if possible, to convince them that the leading state has earned its status as a hegemonia. Once achieved, such a hegemonia must constantly be reinforced. There has been little recognition of this political truth in Washington, and no discussion in the scholarly literature of the concept of hegemonia, its basis, current standing or future. Judging from their public statements, American leaders appear to take their nations hegemonia for granted. President Bill Clinton and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright referred to the United States as the leader and indispensable nation.45 Secretary Albright insisted that American leadership is as essential now to the world as it was at the beginning of the Cold War.46 The only question in the minds of these ofcials is the extent to which the American people are prepared to make the nancial and other sacrices necessary to sustain such a policy. Accusing Republican critics of isolationism, former National Security Advisor, Samuel R. Berger, asked: Are we going to seize this opportunity to lead the world, or are we going to pull back? 47 Other prominent ofcials, elected and appointed, have made statements that reect a widespread view that, just as before, other nations recognize and respect the leading role of the United States.48 International relations scholars make similar claims. William Pfaff has noted how academics have underwritten Washingtons reach for hegemony: the isolated position of the United States as the sole superpower is tending to go to the national head. Congress has a acquired a habit of legislating to the world, with the executive branch expected to see that those laws are carried out, while the academy explains that global hegemony is manifest destiny. 49 According to Wohlforth, the United States is the global security manager, and indispensable nation in all matters of importance because the international system is built around American power.50 He suggests, in the spirit of Pfaff s remark above, that scholars and policymakers should do more to advertise the attractions of unipolarity.51 The very title of Joseph Nyes text, Bound to Lead, exudes the same hubris. Given the power of the United States, Nye writes, most other nations have an interest in Americans understanding their role.52 According to Joshua Muravchik, the United States did not chose hegemony; it was forced to accept the responsibility. This leadership

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46 47 48

49 50 51 52

Quoted in Alison Mitchell, Clinton Urges NATO Expansion in 1999, New York Times, 23 October 1996, p. A20. In 1998, Albright, The Testing of American Foreign Policy, maintained the notion of US indispensability but softened it by suggesting that include many nations (p. 61) play indispensable roles. Albright, The Testing of American Foreign Policy. John M. Broder, Gentler Look at the US World Role, New York Times, 31 October 1999, p. A14. See http://www.state.gov/www/global/general_foreign_policy/ for a list of speeches from the Clinton administration, most of which begin, in Thomas Pickerings words http://www.state.gov/www/policy_remarks/1999/991023_pickering.html), with the presumption that the US has a international role and the importance of our unique role in the world. Cited in the editorial The Misuses of US Power, The Boston Globe, 26 January 1997, p. E6. Wohlforth, The Stability of a Unipolar World, p. 40. Ibid., p. 41. Nye, Bound to Lead, p. xviii.

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accrues naturally from our position; aside perhaps from the French, the only people who are averse to American leadership are the Americans.53 The situation looks different from almost any vantage point outside the United States. In November 1998, President Jacques Chirac of France called on the European Union to adopt a joint foreign and defence policy independent of the United States. His foreign minister, Hubert Vedrine, insisted that We cannot accept a politically unipolar world, nor a culturally uniform world, nor the unilateralism of a single hyper-power.54 French complaints about American power are traditional, and it should come as no surprise that 68 per cent of the French public are more worried about the superpower status of the United States in the aftermath of intervention in Kosovo.55 But the French are not alone. Former German chancellor Helmut Schmidt has boasted that the Euro means that the United States can no longer call all the shots in the world. Karsten Voigt, a foreign policy spokesman for the German Social Democratic Party, proclaimed that American unilateral denitions of global behaviour will not be acceptable anymore.56 The Netherlands minister of foreign trade, Anneke van Dok van Weele further proclaimed that Washington should stop bossing its friends.57 In Canada, anti-Americanism has increased as Congress legislated to the Western Hemisphere on Cuba policy.58 Indians are pained at the manner by which President Clinton and Secretary Albright lecture the world about democracy yet trade vociferously with China and slight the worlds largest democracy.59 As a prominent British diplomat put it, One reads about the worlds desire for American leadership only in the United States. Everywhere else one reads about American arrogance and unilateralism. 60 To be sure, there are leaders, elites and countries that look to Washington for material and political support. But the era is long past when Americas Western European allies or its friends along the Pacic rim look to Washington for leadership; and it is doubtful that France or most of Latin America and the Middle East ever did so. The United States is seen by the elites of these countries as just another state, albeit a very powerful one whose interests must be taken into account and whose support can prove extremely valuable, even decisive, on a wide range of issues. American foreign policy since the end of the Cold War has a mixed record in confronting trade-offs between power and principle. No matter how belated or awed in their execution or outcome, the interventions in Somalia, Haiti, KuwaitIraq and Kosovo were motivated by commitments to uphold international principles
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Joshua Muravchik, The Imperative of American Leadership: A Challenge to Neo-Isolationism (Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute Press), 1996. The citations are from the AEI book summary available at http://www.aei.org/bs/bs6297.htm. John OSullivan, Chirac Therapy, National Review, 6 December 1999. OSullivans dismissive tone is itself characteristic of the American Rights tendency to understate foreign concerns with American hegemonia. Suzanne Daley, More and More Europeans Find Fault with US, New York Times, 9 April 2000, pp. 1 and 8. Jeffrey Gedmin, The New EuropeMenace, Weekly Standard, 29 March 1999, p. 19. Washington Should Stop Bossing Its Friends, New Straits Times, 2 July 1997, p. 37, reprinted from the International Herald Tribune. Preston Jones, Our Canadian Cousins, Weekly Standard, 19 October 1998, p. 36 and Craig Turner, Canada: America the Bully is Medias New Tune, Los Angeles Times, 2 August 1996, p. A5. Tavleen Singh, Words of Inuence, India Today, 14 February, 2000, p. 19. These examples come from friends of the United States disappointed in the triumphalism of American foreign policy in the 1990s. Fareed Zakaria, Loves Me, Loves Me Not, Newsweek, 5 October 1998, p. 55.

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and provide humanitarian assistance to those in need. These interventions involved real risks for the presidents involved as the initial proposals met varying degrees of resistance from the American military and diplomatic establishments and traditional allies and met with a mixed response from the American public. Without an American push on Kosovo, NATO would not have intervened. Both Bush administrations and the Clinton administration have also pursued short-term domestic or foreign policy interests at the expense of their professed principles. They have ignored disagreeable decisions of the World Trade Organization and employed unilateral sanctions in trade disputes in violation of the liberal creed Washington urges on the rest of the world. Much to the annoyance of Moscow, the Clinton administration disavowed its predecessors promise that it would refrain from extending NATO any further east than Germany.61 Thucydides recognized that subordinates are never really reconciled to their status and are readily angered by treatment that reminds them of it.62 One glaring example of hegemonic self-aggrandizement can offset ten instances of self-restraint and sensitivity to allied needs and interests. At the beginning of a new century, it is probably no exaggeration to suggest that while the United States sees itself as a hegemonia, most of the rest of the world regards it as an arkhe.63 One telling example of this perceptual asymmetry is the belief by many Europeans that Washington prodded reluctant allies to intervene in the Gulf to demonstrate its military power. Theo Summer, editor of the inuential Die Zeit, described the Gulf War as the last, almost spastic twitching of US supremacy.64 American efforts to bring about NATO intervention in Bosnia were widely regarded in Europe as a crude attempt to shore up American inuence on the continent.65 There is little evidence to support this interpretation of American policy, but it is indicative of a well-documented psychological phenomenon: the extent to which people assimilate information to existing frames of reference.66 That segment of European opinion that denies the United States hegemonia and is resentful of its arkhe is not predisposed to see any American policy initiative as benign and seless. Like Cold War interpretations of Soviet behaviour, these Europeans are likely to accept the worst possible interpretation of American behaviour that appears supercially consistent with the facts of the case. Judgments once formed become conrmed tautologically and more deeply entrenched, as even the Athenians learned when their more benign imperial efforts of the fourth century failed.
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James M. Goldgeier, Not Whether But When: The US Decision to Enlarge NATO (Washington, DC: Brookings, 1999), pp. 1517 and passim. Thucydides, 1.76. Even Wohlforth, The Stability of a Unipolar World, pp. 347, sees this in the resistance of most other states to an acceptance of US hegemony. He spurns such ideological concerns arguing, unipolarity is a deeply embedded material condition of world politics that has the potential to last for many decades (p. 37). Anti-Americanism in Europe; From on High, Economist, 23 February 1991, p. 26. Sergei Karaganov, The Trouble with the US: Its Just too Darn Big, Newsweek (Atlantic edn.), 31 January, 2000, p. 26; Jeffrey Gedmin, The New EuropeMenace, Weekly Standard, 29 March 1999, p. 19; Suzanne Daley, More and More Europeans Find Fault with US, New York Times, 9 April 2000, pp. 1 and 8. Richard Nisbett and Lee Ross, Human Inference: Strategies and Shortcomings of Social Judgment (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1980); Daniel Kahneman, Paul Slovic and Amos Tversky, Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982); James Galambos, Robert Abelson and John Black (eds.), Knowledge Structures (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1986).

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To the extent the American press reports these European objections it tends to brush them off with headlines like Yank-Bashing is Getting Sillier and Sillier and The Superpower They Love to Hate.67 Everyone knows, as former Deputy Secretary of the Treasury Lawrence H. Summers put it, that the United States is the rst nonimperialist superpower.68 The Bush pre and Clinton administrations were equally oblivious to their image problem, and were often content to reap short-term gains with little regard for their possible long-term consequences. This may have been a function of smugness; the leader who performs an indispensable role can more or less do what it wants. But it is also a result of a foreign policy conducted without much reference to a broader vision of the national interest and related goals. In the absence of any guiding vision, there is a strong tendency to address foreign policy questions in a piecemeal manner without adequate consideration of their links and implications for other questions and issues or their consequences. Domestic politics are also likely to have more inuence in shaping policy than might otherwise be the case. The thematic drift of US foreign policy after the collapse of the New World Order in Somalia has been striking.69 In lieu of a vision and justication of US hegemony, simple interest has reasserted itself. The realist campaign rhetoric of Richard Cheney in the vice-presidential debates and Condoleezza Rice on Bosnia indicate that the new administration will continue with a crabbed focus on material interest and arkhe at the expense of hegemonia. The rise in defence spending and simultaneous foot-dragging on UN and foreign aid only reects the increased necessity to rely on force that such a shift away from hegemonia entails. The likely consequences of a foreign policy that not infrequently privileges shortterm gains over principles are the erosion of any residual hegemonia possessed by the United States, and thus further diminution of its ability to exercise international inuence. Washington has already travelled some distance down this road, and the loss, or at least substantial erosion, of its hegemonia may help explain the seeming paradox that the worlds most powerful state is nding it increasingly difcult to impose its will on other actors at a time when it is relatively more powerful by Wohlforths objective indicators of power.70 In the not too distant future, American leaders and public opinion may have to reconcile themselves to playing a less inuential role on the world stage or do so by relying more on rewards and coercion. The former would be a serious blow to the foreign policy establishment, and the latter is probably unacceptable to American and world opinion.71
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John Rossant, Yank Bashing is Getting Sillier and Sillier, Business Week, 13 March 2000, p. 56; Michael Elliot, The Superpower They Love to Hate, Newsweek, 31 January 2000, p. 39. Quoted in Huntington, The Lonely Superpower, p. 38. Muravchik, The Imperative of American Leadership, and former National Security Advisor Samuel Berger, American Power: Hegemony, Isolationism or Engagement, 21 October 1999 (available at http://www.cfr.org/public/pubs/SBergerPrepRemarks.html) argue similarly. American policymakers and academics widely accept the premise the United States is the rst global power in history that is not an imperial power (Berger). It goes without saying that much of the rest of the world does not. Cf. Walter LaFeber, The American Age: United States Foreign Policy at Home and Abroad, 2nd edn. (New York: W. W. Norton), 1994, ch. 20. US Uneasy with Role as Sole Superpower; It is Indispensable, But Resented and Unable to Get Its Way, Editorial, The Baltimore Sun, 2 March 1998, p. 1A. The same point has recently been made by Huntington, The Lonely Superpower; Gary Wills, Bully of the Free World, Foreign Affairs, 78 (March-April 1999), pp. 5059; Richard N. Haas, What to Do With American Primacy, 78 (September-October 1999), pp. 3749; Stephen M. Walt, Two Cheers for Clintons Foreign Policy, Foreign Affairs, 79 (March-April 2000), pp. 6379.

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