The Future of International Leadership

As the century comes to a close, there is reason to worry about the disappearance of American leadership. For most of the postwar era, leadership in world politics was not in short supply. The United States and the Soviet Union were overwhelming (if not completely undisputed) leaders of large alliances of states. Both had the military power, material resources, and expansive ideology to effectively assert their leadership within far-flung regions of the world. Although Soviet hegemony was brutal and coercive, American leadership was largely welcomed in Western Europe and in parts of Asia. For many observers, the political solidarity and economic prosperity in the postwar Western world would not have been as great without American leadership. The United States took the lead in opening markets, protecting allies, and promoting the stability of the noncommunist world. Because of this great accomplishment, many people worry about the waning of American global leadership and the seeming unwillingness or inability of other states to step into the role. But is American leadership really on the wane? If it is, can other states help provide leadership in various areas of world politics? And if today's major states are not able to provide the heroic leadership of earlier eras, are the consequences as troubling as many people believe? This article argues that American leadership, properly understood, is not as scarce as many people believe. To be sure, its overall material capabilities and power position have declined significantly since the early postwar years. But the political institutions and structures of relations that were built under American sponsorship after World War II still provide channels and routines of cooperation. America will not (and probably cannot) play the leadership role it did a generation ago, but that leadership has been reinvented in the form of a dense set of intergovernmental and transnational linkages among the major industrial countries and regions of the world. Conflicts