Political scientists like to say that the U.S. has a special role as the sole remaining superpower to provide a certain level of public goods to the world at large. The word “goods” in this sense doesn’t relate so much to material goods as it relates to a particular role that only a great power of the highest order can provide. Like any great empire from ages past the U.S. has a responsibility to provide order in the international system and the maintenance of order and stability can take many forms, from resolving conflicts, enforcing the rules of the international community, and rebuffing challenges to the status quo. Lately a consensus has emerged that since the start of the global economic crisis the U.S. is unable to provide that kind of leadership in preserving the international economic system. As Ian Bremmer and Nouriel Roubini neatly summarized in a recent article in Foreign Affairs:
In the past, the global economy has relied on a hegemon — the United Kingdom in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the United States in the twentieth century — to create the security framework necessary for free markets, free trade, and capital mobility. But the combination of Washington’s declining international clout, on the one hand, and sharp policy disagreements, on the other – both between developed and developing states and between the United States and Europe – has created a vacuum of international leadership just at the moment when it is most needed.
In as much as this consensus about a diminished U.S. role is focused primarily on the provision of economic goods, it’s comforting to know that U.S. can still deliver the goods in matters of military security. The epic quest to locate and kill Osama bin Laden demonstrates the kind of steely determination, resolve, and skill that both reassures allies and gives pause to enemies. Even those countries that reacted in public with something less than enthusiasm to the raid know that an important victory was achieved that served their interests as well. Russia, for example, is fighting an Islamic insurgency in the North Caucuses and China is battling an insurgency in the northwestern territory of Xinjiang. They may grumble in public about our methods but they realize that after all these years the U.S. is still delivering the goods.
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