Someone who works in Downing Street gave me a copy of a speech that had really impressed him. It turned out to be Carl Bildt’s recent speech in Berlin. I used to know Bildt slightly when he was the smartass backroom boy of the Swedish Conservative party, making life difficult for the government over Russian submarines. His position was not harmed by the fact that he lived with the party leader’s daughter. I don’t think I have ever met anyone whose combination of self-assurance, intellectual power, and political skill was more immediately apparent. It’s none the less remarkable if he has become a guru to the British labour government.
In Swedish terms, he was always regarded as a hard-line right wing serf to Reaganite fascism and it’s true he was savage about the social democrats. What struck me about the Berlin speech was just how pessimistic about American power it is. He makes all the right, Garton Ash-ish noises about co-operation between Europe and America, but he does so without any Blairite optimism that this can reform the corrupt world. He is wondering whether our combined exertions will be enough to stave off truly disastrous change.
The United States today is spending more money on defence than nearly everyone else combined. It’s certainly a superpower – even a hyperpower – in relation to all other states.
But that’s of little relief in the world today. You might have dominance or even supremacy in outer space, but if you still can’t secure the road from the airport to the Green Zone in Baghdad that is not of much use.
The truth is that while the United States is a superpower in relation to all other powers, it is distinctly not one in relation to the challenges it and the rest of the world faces – be that in Mesopotamia, in Palestine, in Pakistan, in Congo, the Sudan or on the Korean peninsula.
While in the past we were threatened by the strong states and the strong armies, we are now far more endangered by the weak states and the shadowy structures that seek their home in them. And our security in the decades to come – on both sides of the Atlantic – will be determined far less by our ability to destroy strong states than by our ability to repair weak states and, in extreme cases, even build new ones.
State destruction is a relatively straightforward exercise. Some states even do it to themselves. And bombing is an easy business.
But state building – often in complex multi-ethnic areas – requires an abundance of policy, purse and patience – often more than our sometimes too impatient democracies can muster.
I believe that in much the same way as nuclear deterrence was the key function in the old international order, state building in difficult and demanding areas will be the key function in the era we have now entered.
And here – for all the heroic rhetoric – the appetite for unilateralism is likely to be limited in the extreme.
Not even Haiti is small enough for the United States alone to volunteer for this responsibility.
