Against (Secret) Death Panels

This is well outside of my normal purview, but since the assassinations of Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan, both American citizens, I've been thinking a good bit -- not for the first time, thank you -- about the wide space between our conception of the checks and balances on the capricious exercise of government power, and the reality of it. People talked about this some during the Bush administration, but I'm now of the opinion that the primary difference between the Bush administration and others in recent history is the former's simple brazenness: Bush would come right and say "I'm the decider", and he'd have his lawyers so obviously butcher the tradition of law to rationalize his policies, and his Vice-President would declare himself a member of neither the executive nor legislative branches and therefore not subject to any oversight from anyone ever, and his ambassador to the UN openly advocated abolishing the UN... Bush just didn't give a damn. He'd practically dare anyone to do anything to slap his wrists. Every other president before or since has at least pretended to uphold the law. Bush said that wasn't necessary, since any action taken by the president was ipso facto permissible.

In other words, the difference between the Bush administration and other administration is that the former was brazen. But that may be the only difference. The Bush administration may have lied to get the US into a war -- or been selective in their disclosure of the known facts, depending on how charitable your interpretation is -- but the Reagan administration lied about the existence of a war. I'm not going to go down the list, but it's now indisputable that every presidential administration since World War II* has used the tools of war at their own discretion, with essentially no accountability. Alright, I know this is no new news.

But this is, to me at least. It seems that the Obama administration convenes a panel of NSC folks who determine who the US will attempt to assassinate. Without legal mandate or any oversight, of course. Here's how Reuters puts it:

There is no public record of the operations or decisions of the panel, which is a subset of the White House's National Security Council, several current and former officials said. Neither is there any law establishing its existence or setting out the rules by which it is supposed to operate.

This is, of course, completely obscene. There may be a case to be made that the president needs the authority to attack high-level targets at short notice, and use lethal force if that's the best or only option. I would hope that decisions involving the use of lethal force would be reviewable by some sort of oversight committee, but I could understand the argument in favor of such a policy. But as far as I can tell the president does not possess that power in any established legal sense. That makes this panel as it exists today no more than the District of Columbia's branch of Murder, Inc. but with the full resources of the United States government at their disposal. Legal immunity too.

I don't see how this is an acceptable state of affairs.

*And possibly before, although my knowledge of American history is murkier before then.

(Via @interfluidity)

Nye on European Power

Can't remember if I've already linked to this or not, but here's Nye (pre-Libya) on the continuing relevance of European power. Seems like he should incorporate network dynamics more explicitly into his analysis. "Network" only appears once in the article, and it's in a quote from a Newsweek reporter.

Who Doesn't Love a Grand Theory Debate?

Well, me. Nevertheless, Nexon on Caverley, Caverley responds.

No deep thoughts from me, as I haven't read the article under discussion, but it seems that Caverley is arguing that neocons support democratization at least in part because it would weaken their (our?) enemies. Nexon argues that no neocons actually say that, nor do they have good reason to think it given their reliance on both neoclassical realism and some forms of (non-Wilsonian) liberalism, neither of which make that case. From where I sit that sounds right enough, and yet... even if neocons don't make that case, perhaps they should.

Academic IR writes all the time about how democracy can enfeeble states. And also about how it can strengthen them. Democracies supposedly constrain leaders by both making it difficult for them to go to war, but then make them try like hell to win once they get in one. Democracies are supposedly better are imposing audience costs, but that's a double-edged sword. Etc.

If we buy any of this*, then a statement like "democratization will strengthen states in some ways and weaken them in others" that is followed by a statement like "from the perspective of the United States vis-a-vis new democracies, the latter will usually out-weigh the former" is not implausible on its face**. Was Japan strengthened by post-WWII democratization, along with the economic integration that followed from it? I think so. Was Japan strengthened in its bilateral relationship with the U.S. by that process? Arguably no. It became completely dependent on the U.S. for its security, and to a large degree its economic prosperity. Relative to China, Japan got stronger. Relative to the U.S., perhaps not.

To think about it in another way: the neocon goal of a "league of democracies" would certainly have the U.S. as the most central node. Network externalities being what they are, the effect would be to reinforce American power. (Somewhat perversely, this isn't too far from Ikenberry's view.) It can then make an offer to other states: democratize and you'll get the benefits of being in the network, but only as a peripheral node. Such an arrangement could simultaneously increase America's relative power while improving material conditions for the new democracy. Thomas Friedman (does he count as a neocon?) would call it the "Golden Security Straitjacket". Speaking of the devil, Friedman has written a bunch about the benefits of authoritarianism.

So perhaps Nexon is right that neocons don't believe in "democratic enfeeblement". But maybe they should. It could follow from their other beliefs.

*I'm not necessarily saying we should. I hope Phil Arena chimes in.

**To be clear, Nexon doesn't argue that it is; only that Caverley's paper doesn't establish the claim that neocons actually believe this, despite using strange readings of cherry-picked texts.

Nye on Power

Joe Nye, interviewed at decent length on AJE. Some of the questions aren't great and some of the answers are trite, but in general it's a pretty good overview of where Nye is at. Apparently there is no embed, so follow the link.

Future of power - Riz Khan - Al Jazeera English

Power Up

I haven't posted anything in-depth the past few days because I've been busy with real work, and also because my blogging time quota has been dedicated to the comments to this post from John Quiggin (in response to this post by me, which was in response to his comments on my first retort -- and Phil Arena's "Amen" -- to this post by Quiggin), where I've spilt several thousand words at least. I've said a lot in there, much too much to summarize simply, but I think/hope it aggregates into something coherent. Probably the closest thing to "my overall view of the world" that I've put down. So, um, if you're interested in that you can plow through those lengthy comments to see if I've made any sense. And the argument is ongoing, although it seems to be dying down, so if you want to chime in please do. This is how I learn.

Anyway, at long last (in blogotime) Drezner weighed in with a sanity post, as I hoped and expected he would. And, in typical fashion, he expropriated the only marketable bit from the argument -- the title "The End of Power" -- but also spoke some sense.

While I was obsessing about Egypt last week, I see that John Quiggin, William Winecoff and others have been having a rollicking debate about the status of American hegemony, the fungibility of military power, and Boeing/Airbus subsidies. OK, that last one is less interesting, but I strongly encourage readers to go through the comment thread to that blog post. [KW: Yes! Please do! That way it'll seem like I didn't waste a bunch of time on the internet]

Drezner quotes a representative bit of Quiggin in which he (Quiggin) completely misunderstands how power works::

There's something missing from this debate that is worth raising, however -- a proper definition of power. For example, in his first post, Quiggin noted that "[advanced industrialized countries] might be said to have declined in relative terms. But this doesn’t seem to me to constitute 'decline' in any important sense." This is heresy to an international relations scholar, in that power is viewed as a zero-sum commodity.

This cheesed off Winecoff and others into pointing out the myriad ways in which the U.S. power profile is a) still outsized; and b) largely shaped the current global order we live in; and c) allowed entities like the EU to focus on welfare maximization rather than security.

I actually think Drezner got the [] in the quote wrong. It was pretty clearly referring to the US in particular, and not advanced industrialized countries generally. Anyway, It didn't cheese me off so much as make me wonder how a cosmopolitan social scientist with interests in social science generally and political economy specifically has such a strange view of power and influence.

I had put it this way:

[A] decline in relative terms is exactly what most people mean when they talk about the rise or decline of states. There's a storied IR debate about whether states are concerned about absolute or relative gains (or both), but basically everyone agrees that when we're talking about power and influence -- as opposed to, say, affluence -- relative differentials is what is important. So Quiggin is not only wrong here, he's got it perfectly backwards.

Drezner agrees, and helpfully goes on to talk about the different between compellence power and deterrence power:

[I]t is useful to think about the power to deter change from the status quo vs, the power to compel change in the status quo. In a deterrence scenario, countries use their capabilities to ward off pressure from other actors, or from structural pressures. In a compellence scenario, a powerful government threatens to use statecraft to extract concessions from other actors, or use power to alter the rules of the global game.

This is helpful in one sense, but obfuscates in another. It's helpful because it is definitely true that capabilities in one sphere does not necessarily imply capabilities in the other. It's also helpful because it can help separate which dynamics are present in which contexts. "Power" is a somewhat clumsy concept -- notoriously so, in academic IR -- so adding precision and context is good and right.

On the other hand, I think it gives Quiggin an out that he doesn't deserve. His point, generally, is that the US's power has already valleyed out, full stop. I think every IR person that has read that argument has completely disagreed, but that's to miss an even more fundamental point: The status quo is the US's ideal point, or relatively close to it. Even if US power has declined, at least at once it was the predominate power, capable of shaping the global order to a substantial (but not infinite) way. If deterrence/compellence is defined relative to the status quo, and the status quo predominately reflects the interests of one particular state, and that state has greater deterrence capabilities than any other state, then... you can finish the sentence. Compellence power isn't even needed, only deterrence power is.

FWIW, I believe the US has greater compellence power than any other state as well, even after some relative decline (this is the Drezner position too, I think, as well as nearly all of the IR profession), but that's almost irrelevant. Once a great power becomes a status quo power, it takes extreme, out-sized compellence powers by another state to change the system. Like, say, winning a World War, and then a Cold War in succession. That clearly hasn't happened yet. Or, as Drezner put it:

[N]either U.S. deterrent power nor other countries' compellence power has changed all that much, even in the economic realm. The rest of the G-20 can scream as loud as they want, but quantitative easing is going to continue. China has tried to find ways to use its newly found financial muscle to force changes in the international system, to little avail. To be sure, Russia, China and others can compel countries on their immediate periphery, but even a glance at the 2008 Russian-Georgian war suggests that even modest efforts like these are expensive and messy.

Right, but the important fact is that the US is the status quo power. China and Russia aren't. And the US has been able to repel Russian and Chinese (and French and Brazilian, etc.) efforts to revise the system with ease. As in, it hasn't even been a conversation worth dwelling on.

Drezner calls this the "extinction of compellence power as we know it". I don't think so. I think it's a combination of a few things.

1. The overestimation of the US's compellence capabilities previously. It's frequently said that the limits of the US's power in the 21st century is demonstrated by the difficulty in pacifying Iraq and Afghanistan. But the US couldn't pacify Korea in the 1950s (when it was unquestionably the only global power), nor Vietnam in the 1960s-70s. In other words, a better lesson is that the capability to remove a regime is not the same as the power to reconstitute society in the wake. Power is always limited, even for the most powerful state. The US experience in Iraq is actually much better than the experience in Vietnam.

2. Selection bias. Drezner should be susceptible to this argument, since one of his best-known articles focused on the importance of unobserved events. Well, the lack of challenges (or feeble "challenges" that are mostly signaling to domestic audiences) to the order initiated by the US is evidence of the US' compellence power, just by way of carrots rather than sticks. Integration into the US's order gets you rich (Japan, Germany, China, etc.), segregation from it makes you poor (N. Korea, Cuba, etc.). This is the Ikenberry argument, although he never puts it quite that way.

I could go on, but this is long as it is, esp when combined with my previous posts and comments at Crooked Timber. But if something isn't making sense (this seems to happen a lot when non-IR people read what I write) I'd be happy to revise/revisit my claims.

The Atypicality of U.S. Power and Influence, con.

My previous post criticizing John Quiggin for his views on the decline of the US attracted responses from him both here and at Phil Arena's place. To a large degree I think the disagreement between Quiggin and I (plus the other academic IR folks who have responded to him, every single one of which -- that I've seen -- has disagreed with him) stems from the fact that we're speaking different languages and seeing different worlds. For example, Quiggin asserts that the US has more or less the same amount of power and influence that any developed state with a comparable population would have. Ignoring the question of how it secured that level of development, I might agree with him if he'd said instead that the US has more or less the same amount of power and influence that any developed state with a comparable population would have, that also had the same preferences as the US has had, and that emerged victorious from the two major conflicts of the past century (the European wars and the Cold War) would have. In other words, I'd agree with him if he'd said the actual US has the same level of power and influence that a hypothetical country that resembled the US in every significant way would have. But these qualifications explicitly exclude the EU, Japan, China, or any other state/group of states.

In his comment on my previous post he writes:

As regards your claim that "the system was largely created and maintained by the US", I think the British might have something to say about that, as well as about the fact that there is life after decline.

To anyone with a basic understanding of the power politics that got the US into the WWII, and the system it set up afterwards, this is patently absurd. Quiggin is an economist, so I'm assuming he's talking mostly about economics, but even there he's still thinking in a too-narrow, reductionist way. What would the British "life after decline" look like if the US had not created and maintained a credible postwar order? Would British standards of living be different if it faced constant security threats from Germany and Russia during the past 60 years without a US alliance? Has Britain not benefited greatly, in economic terms, from the special relationship? To ask these questions is to answer them. Previous imperial declines were not so comfortable.

For the best treatment on this I'll refer readers and Quiggin to Ikenberry (esp. chapter 6). Summarizing, the US always intended to drastically revise the British order following WWII, and it did so. This was obvious at least as early as the 1941 Atlantic Charter and the terms of the Lend-Lease agreement, a precondition for the end of US neutrality which demanded the dismantling of the imperial preference system (and thus the empires themselves) and an institution of a rules-based, multilateral, non-discriminatory order centered on economic openness and national self-determination. These principles were sometimes honored in the breach, but this was nevertheless in stark contrast to the imperial competitions that led to the European wars, and Churchill knew that he was selling the British empire in exchange for the end of America's neutrality (although he tried to walk it back later, until the US rebuffed him). Britons that wish to dispute this characterization can take it up with their Bulldog if they like. The resulting postwar institutions -- UN, GATT, IMF, -- were based on these principles, as well as rehabilitation of the defeated Axis and the establishment of anti-imperial norms. All of these were insisted on by the US, and none of them were possible without it.

In other words, the postwar order the US established was focused on accommodation and reciprocity. So Quiggin's next challenge -- "There isn't a single one of these examples where the US has in fact prevailed over the united opposition of the EU and Japan." -- is completely missing the point. Setting aside the fact that it is far too early to consider the EU as a unified political bloc, or that the existence of the EU itself is inconceivable without the US's security blanket for the past 60 years, the EU and Japan have never put up a united opposition to the US on any critical matters because the system the US built and maintains rewards cooperation rather than conflict. This is, again, a reversal of previous imperial systems. And it's created a cessation of major-power war, and a level of international cooperation that is unique to history.

The result of that history is the present, where it's easy to highlight data points indicating pervasive US influence: the US has significant military bases in all of the countries Quiggin highlights as its supposed peers, including the EU and Japan, and many besides. None of them have significant bases in the US or anywhere else outside their territory. Is there not a significant asymmetry here? Some of the US' rivals have regional economic or political influence -- Germany within the EU, e.g. -- but none have significant sway beyond their neighborhoods, and none have decisive political or military influence even within them. To illustrate: if the US announced tomorrow that it would slash its military budget, the result of which was the complete withdrawal of all troops and closing of all bases in Europe, and ceded its security role to Germany, France, the UK, and Russia, does Quiggin actually believe that European relations would not change dramatically? What happens when Germany controls EU monetary policy and has the biggest military in Western Europe? What happens when Serbia moves back in for Kosovo? Note that (I infer, from suggestive things he's written) Quiggin actually supports some version of this scenario.

How would Quiggin characterize Japan's international influence? Perhaps he could consider the recent Korean kerfluffle. The Japanese response was to strengthen ties with the US, and not much else. How about the EU's response to Russia/Georgia? Inconsequential, if not non-existent. Which countries in the EU or Asia have any substantial role in Egypt, or elsewhere in the Middle East? France, perhaps, but it's the US that gives the country a third of its military budget and other aid too. Why do that? To ease security dilemmas (and it works!). None of these countries have any presence or influence in the whole Western hemisphere, and most have no significant influence outside of former colonies, if that. Etc.

In some cases counterfactuals are easy. It used to be said that when the US sneezes the world catches a cold. Now it seems clear that when the US reaches for a kleenex the world catches pneumonia. When the US has a financial crisis the European monetary union is brought to its knees, global equity markets drop precipitously, global GDP drops off a cliff, etc. When Japan had a similar crisis in the 1990s, were the effects similar? Has the EU's ongoing debt crisis had the same global effects? This is not just a question of population size. The US is central to the global economic network in a way that the EU and Japan are not.

Quiggin asks for specifics. I had mentioned in passing: financial regulation, climate change, arms control/missile shield, invasion of Iraq, monetary policy/exchange rates, integration of China into the global economic community, Israel. I further noted "But the point is even broader than that. If the E.U. and Japan agree with the U.S. on many or most major issues, isn't that evidence that the U.S.'s influence is greater, not lesser?" He responded:

The concession at the end says it all. There isn't a single one of these examples where the US has in fact prevailed over the united opposition of the EU and Japan.

In most cases, I don't even know what you are claiming. Are you suggesting that
*the (disastrous) outcome of the various Basel rounds was dictated by the US?
*Or that the mess in Copenhagen counts as a success for US policy?
* Or that the missile shield was imposed over the objections of, say, the Poles
* Or that the EU and Japan opposed the Iraq war (Japan and about half the members of the EU sent troops)

etc. Feel free to spell out at least one of the examples, and I'll be happy to respond

It's not clear what Quiggin means when he says "prevail" against some hypothetical union of the US' best allies against it. In order to prevail there must first be conflict. If the US creates and maintains a system in which conflict is Pareto-inferior, then there will never be conflict. I'll probably regret this analogy (I've never been good with them), but if parents provide an environment for their children in which it is better to heed instruction than to rebel, are we really to say that the parents have lost influence because they aren't fighting with, then defeating, their kids? That would be absurd. So if the US created a postwar order in which recovering and developing states alike can thrive and grow, is it to the US' discredit that they do not rise up against it? Seems like a non sequitur.

Are there minor quibbles about technical language in trade agreements, etc.? Of course. Interests are not perfectly aligned and US power is not infinite. But can Quiggin point to a single example in which a major revision of status quo rules in the WTO, IMF, UN, or any other significant international interaction/institution has shifted in a way that is significantly disadvantageous to the US? Any major power military conflicts? Any large-scale reorganizations of global politics in ways that violated US interests? Well, there's a challenge for him. I can't think of one, although I can think of plenty of the opposite. Even the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan -- widely considered to be the height of American overreach -- have succeeded in their primary objectives of dismantling al Qaeda and removing Hussein. Did the US get everything it wanted at a cut-rate price? Nope. But to the US, are Iraq and Afghanistan in 2010 preferable to Iraq and Afghanistan in 2001? Perhaps it's cynical, but I think that that's obviously true.

Anyway, to go point by point on a few specifics so it doesn't look like I'm ducking:

1. Yes, although I wouldn't put it quite that way. As it happens I've blogged about Basel III a lot. I've argued that the Basel accords had little to do with what economists like Quiggin think they were about, which is preserving financial stability. Basel is about politics, not technocracy. Anyway, it's clear that the US was opposed by Germany and Japan in the creation of the rules, and the recent revision of them, and that the US got its way in both cases. This is the pattern of Basel negotiations. For more info, type "Basel" into the search bar in the top right. If you prefer your arguments to be peer-reviewed, see the Stigler-Peltzman model extended into an international context with power dynamics, using Basel I as a case study, here. When US interests butt up against German/Japanese interests, the US wins.

2. Yes. The EU and Japan have wanted a comprehensive global climate change agreement since at least Kyoto. The US has not. Which one has gotten its way?

3. Missile defense was probably not the best example, but after resistance towards ground-based missile defense from Europe, the US decided instead to just use warships. No other country in the world has the capability to make that choice, and no country in the world has the capability to prevent the US from making it.

4. The major powers that did oppose the Iraq invasion (Russia, China, Germany, France) did nothing more to stop it than give speeches and veto UN resolutions. Certainly none tried to do anything tangible to curtail the US' activity.

5. When the U.S. engages in a relatively conservative monetary expansion in the face of depressed, deflationary, and imbalanced economy, other countries shriek like they've been set on fire. The U.S. shrugs. Meanwhile, the nominal and real exchange rates of major export-biased economies are rising, which will likely end up forcing a realignment similar to that which occurred at the end of Bretton Woods. Which country (or group of countries) could force a similar adjustment from the US?

In my previous post I cited instances of demonstrative US influence in the IMF, World Bank, and UN. I cited peer-reviewed research in each case. I talked about its leverage over Egypt and other Middle Eastern states. I talked about the pacifying effect of the European and Asian security blankets, which is a common theme in IR theory. None of these have been rebutted.

I could go on, but either I've made my point by now or I haven't. Quiggin has argued that the US is not only in decline, it has already declined to the point that it is a typical power. In fact it is an exceptional power, with global reach in nearly every substantial issue area in global politics. The US has no peer. Normatively, that might be a bad thing. But positively it's practically inarguable.

None of this is to say that the US is omnipotent. Plenty of states and non-state actors do things that it doesn't like, and the US cannot force everyone to conform to its preferred behavior all the time. Perhaps its capabilities in this regard have deteriorated as other states have grown to rely less on the US for security and economic well-being. But to say that the influence of the US is typical -- even if its output-per-hour-worked or employment/population ratio is similar to other countries, to use Quiggin's examples -- is just wrong.

Power and Influence: The Atypicality of the U.S.

John Quiggin suggests that the uprising in Egypt is another data point suggesting the decline of the U.S.:

There was another round of the more-or-less endless debate about the decline of the US not long ago, focused on the weak employment growth that has characterized the current ‘recovery’. I expect that the obvious inability of the US to exert significant influence, in either direction, over the fate of client regimes in North Africa and the Middle East will provoke some more discussion among similar lines.

As a public service, I’d like to bring an end to this tiresome debate by observing that the decline of the US from its 1945 position of global pre-eminence has already happened. The US is now a fairly typical advanced/developed country, distinguished primarily by its large population. ...

In geopolitical terms, the US spends a lot more on its military than anyone else (in fact, more than everyone else put together) and (contrary to the beliefs of most Americans) hardly anything on development aid or other efforts at promoting global public goods. The amount of sustainable influence generated as a result appears pretty trivial. The number of places in the world where the US can directly determine, or even substantially influence, political outcomes is approximately zero – nothing like what might be associated with an old style Great Power, let alone a superpower or “hyperpower”.As I’ve observed before, Americans of all classes (except those directly connected to the military-industrial complex) get very little payoff for their military expenditure – trillions of dollars of expenditure has been unable to produce positive outcomes in a couple of relatively insignificant countries, or even to put paid to a bunch of pirates in the Indian Ocean. ...

fn2. As other countries catch up to the advanced group that includes the US, those in that group might be said to have declined in relative terms. But this doesn’t seem to me to constitute “decline” in any important sense.

Taking the last part first, a decline in relative terms is exactly what most people mean when they talk about the rise or decline of states. There's a storied IR debate about whether states are concerned about absolute or relative gains (or both), but basically everyone agrees that when we're talking about power and influence -- as opposed to, say, affluence -- relative differentials is what is important. So Quiggin is not only wrong here, he's got it perfectly backwards.

Also, there is no sense in which development aid is a public good. It is excludable, and it is rival. And it is certainly political. (Moreover, as a commenter points out, once private giving is included the U.S. is actually the world's leader in foreign aid.)

Moving back to the top, the claim that America is a "fairly typical" developed country is extraordinarily naive. Dan Nexon shows up in the comments to say:

I want to be clear that (1) I don’t think the US should be spending what it does on its military, (2) it is really easy to underestimate the degree to which US defense policy—through alliances, bases, partnerships, expenditures, presence, stab ops, nuclear umbrellas, LIC, etc.—structures the current international system. Whethe that impact is “good, “bad”, or more complicated is certainly up for debate. That it depresses many other states military expenditures is, I think, pretty clear.

A clear example of this actually involves the very client states in North Africa and the Middle East that Quiggin says the U.S. is unable to influence. Egypt, for example, spends about $4bn a year on its military. The U.S. provides $1.3bn of that in military aid. It also provides a good bit of economic aid. Does Quiggin (or anyone else) think that this does not give the U.S. significant leverage over the Mubarak regime? The U.S. said yesterday that it would revisit all military aid to Egypt in light of Mubarak's actions, and has now called for a transition of power. If Mubarak instead cracks down on protesters, presumably U.S. aid will dry up and the regime will be further weakened. And as I blogged yesterday, preliminary research by Phil Arena suggests U.S. aid to clients in N. Africa and the Middle East has a pacifying effect on the region by suppressing violence between Israel and its neighbors. So Quiggin has got this backwards as well.

We also know that U.S. influence shapes IMF lending and conditionality, and that other countries leverage their ties to the U.S. for their benefit. The same is true of the World Bank.

The U.S. security umbrella in Europe continues to heavily influence the region. What might the Baltics look like without the U.S./NATO interventions in the 1990s and continued security guarantee to Kosovo? How does Russia's strategic calculus change in Eurasia without the U.S. presence? What does the foreign policy of France or Germany look like if NATO was dissolved tomorrow? I think it's unquestionable that the removal of U.S. influence would lead to major shifts in the policies of nearly every country in Europe. The effects of a strong U.S. presence in East Asia are even more pronounced. I think it's also clear that no other state has anything approaching that level of influence, which puts paid the notion that the U.S.'s power is "typical".

It's true that some other advanced countries have some influence over some countries, mostly former colonies. But none except the U.S. have this level of influence in every region of the world. Or, really, in any region of the world.

Or consider this: Japan and the rest of Asia had major financial crises in the 1990s, yet the effect on the rest of the world was slight. Same with all of the major Latin American countries, Russia, and others. The U.S. had a financial crisis in 2007-8 and the result is utter chaos in Europe and elsewhere. If the U.S. and Japan were comparable powers this asymmetry shouldn't exist.

Quiggin argued in comments:

Certainly, I can’t think of many examples where the US has been able to prevail on a diplomatic issue where the EU, Japan etc disagreed.

Financial regulation, climate change, arms control/missile shield, invasion of Iraq, monetary policy/exchange rates, integration of China into the global economic community, Israel. For starters.

But the point is even broader than that. If the E.U. and Japan agree with the U.S. on many or most major issues, isn't that evidence that the U.S.'s influence is greater, not lesser? The system that the E.U. and Japan exist in was largely created and maintained by the U.S. If other major countries have been socialized into it, does that fact not demonstrate just how pervasive the U.S.'s influence is?

Two Pieces on Power

A couple things on power. First, Joseph Nye makes the case for European power in an excerpt from his new book:

The closest thing to an equal that the United States faces at the beginning of the 21st century is the European Union. ...

In military terms, Europe spends less than half of what the United States does on defense, but has more men under arms, and includes two countries that possess nuclear arsenals. In soft power, European cultures have long had a wide appeal in the rest of the world, and the sense of a Europe uniting around Brussels has had a strong attraction for its neighbors. Europeans have also been important pioneers and played central roles in international institutions. ...

The political scientist Andrew Moravcsik makes a similar argument that European nations, singly and collectively, are the only states other than the U.S. able to “exert global influence across the full spectrum from ‘hard’ to ‘soft’ power. Insofar as the term retains any meaning, the world is bipolar , and is likely to remain so over the foreseeable future.” ...

In terms of relative power, if the EU endeavored to become a global challenger to the United States in a traditional realist balance of power, these assets might counter American power. But if Europe and America remain loosely allied or even neutral, these resources could reinforce each other.

The future of European power depends on deepening European integration. Does that process appear healthy right now? I don't think you can even characterize Europe as a unified pole, so I disagree with Moravcsik that the world is bipolar. I actually expect Europe to continue to centralize political authority, but it will be a slow, murky, uneven process. I do agree that the realist expectation that the EU should be balancing the US -- and the obvious fact that it isn't -- drives the nail even deeper into that grand theory.

Elsewhere, Kevin Drum summarizes his view of American political economy:

I am, fundamentally, old fashioned about this stuff: I think of the world as largely a set of competing power centers. Economics matters, but power matters at least as much, and I think that students of political economy these days spend way too much time on the economy and way too little time on the political. This explains, for example, why I regret the demise of private sector labor unions. It's not because I don't recognize their many pathologies, or even the fact that sometimes they stand in the way of economic efficiency. I'm all in favor of trying to regulate the worst aspects of this. But large corporations have their pathologies too, and those pathologies are far worse because there's no longer any effective countervailing power to fight them. Unions used to provide that power. Today nobody does. ...

It's worth noting, by the way, that corporations and the rich know this perfectly well, even if lots of liberals have forgotten it. They know exactly what the biggest threat to their wealth is, and it's not high tax rates. This is why the steady erosion of labor rights has been, by far, their single biggest obsession since the end of World War II. Not taxes, unions. If, right now, you were to offer corporations and the rich a choice between (a) passage of EFCA or (b) a return to Clinton-era tax rates on high incomes, they wouldn't even blink. If you put a gun to their head and they had to choose between one or the other, they'd pay the higher taxes without a peep. That's because, on the level of raw power, they know how the world works.

I'm not convinced that unions are always, or even usually, a force for good or even on the side of "workers". Unions can also be cartels, and they can capture and distribute rents to relatively small numbers of people rather than the masses. They certainly put up barriers to entry. But I agree with the fundamental point that power is important but often ignored, and that the current American system is essentially corporatist.